Materials development for language learning and teaching

Materials development for language learning and teaching

1. Anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language

   • All the processes made use of by practitioners who produce and/or use materials for language learning.

2. ·

   • History of publications on materials development
     • Madsen & Bowen (1978) and Swales (1980), who asserted that the good teacher is constantly adapting materials.
     • Articles on specific aspects of materials development in the seventies and eighties
     • Until the mid-nineties that more books on materials development started to appear
     • Publications in the early 2000s
       • Approaches to materials design in European coursebooks
       • Richards (2001) on curriculum development
       • (Tomlinson 2003a) materials development with a possible textbook, aspects of materials development, including such practical considerations as design and illustration.
         • evaluating the potential effects of language-learning materials in each major area of the world
     • Exploring the effects on the learners of different ways of using the same materials, actual communicative effectiveness.
   • Materials evaluation, criteria and developing evaluation instruments.
     • To help teachers to evaluate the effect of the materials they are using
     • Realistic set of criteria for all contexts.
     • To measure the potential or actual effects of the materials on their users.
     • The effectiveness of materials.
     • To personalise and humanise the coursebooks
     • Evaluating materials in production
   • . Materials exploitation
     • Tomlinson (2003d) proposes classroom procedures to help teachers to humanise their coursebooks.
     • Textbooks as resources rather than as scripts
     • The development of materials and teacher training in the classroom use of materials.

3. . Materials adaptation

   • congruence between materials, methodology, learners, objectives, the target language and the teacher’s personality and teaching style
     • Ability to use them
   • To take account of student feedback and suggestions.
   • adding real choice, catering for all learner styles, providing for learner autonomy

4. Materials production.

   • How writers write
     • Adapting activity types for creative inspiration.
     • Creative inspiration
     • Applicable to any learning context and local criteria specific to the target learning context(s).
   • Principled development of materials
     • Stress the need to design coursebooks for flexible use, decisions about content, order, pace and procedures’
     • Willis (2011), teachers and students can develop corpora of their own.
     • • the language experience needs to be contextualised and comprehensible • the learner needs to be motivated, relaxed, positive and engaged • the language and discourse features available for potential acquisition need to be salient, meaningful and frequently encountered • the learner needs to achieve deep and multi-dimensional processing of the language (Tomlinson 2008b: 4)
   • Practical guidance to writers
     • Ways of ensuring that materials are humanistic

5. Issues in materials development

   • The value of textbooks
     • Is the best medium for delivering language-learning materials?
     • To achieve course credibility, timetable lessons and standardise teaching.
     • I would like to see more localised textbooks and more global textbooks
   • The need for published materials
     • publications are significant, support a move away from reliance on textbooks
     • Teachers and students welcome published materials and can gain from them.
   • Pedagogic approaches
     • Communicative approach
     • language awareness approach
     • Multi-dimensional approaches
     • Task-based
     • Activities encourage articulation of personal responses
   • Acceptability
   • Humanising materials
   • Ideology in materials
   • The roles of new technologies in language-learning materials

6. Materials development projects

   • innovation in materials development
   • Task-based textbooks.
   • Taboo topics in text-driven .
   • ‘Written textual identities’

7. Research in materials development.

   • Extensive literature on research and materials development but regrettably little of it provides empirical evidence of the effects of materials on their users.

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