Materials development for language learning and teaching

Materials development for language learning and teaching

1. Materials evaluation

   • evaluation instruments
     • set a series of questions about how suitable the activities are

2. Materials adaptation

   • adapt the materials to the context in which the teachers are using them.
     • in order to achieve a congruence between materials, methodology, learners, objectives, the target language and the teacher's personality and style. 
   • adding, deleting, modifying, simplifying and reordering.
   • involve learners in the process
     • written taking into account the learner adaptation.
     • aiming to be learner-centred, flexible, open-ended, relevant, universal and authentic.
       • giving choices to learners.

3. Materials production

   • influence by principles of language acquisition
   • focus on the creative, inspirational aspect of materials and on making use of prior experience of teaching

4. Materials exploitation

   • procedures to help teachers to humanise their coursebooks.
     • teachers adapt aspects of cultural content.
       • local institutional and classroom requirements.

5. Issues

   • value of textbooks
     • Agree: offer teachers the resources they need to base their lessons on.
     • Disagree: is inevitably superficial and reductionist in its coverage of language points and its provision of language experience.
   • Published Materials
     • over the years published materials have been replacen with home-made materials to achieve relevance and engagement.
   • pedagogic approaches
     • for the last 40 years PPP approaches have been used.
       • frequent use of low-level practice activities as listen and repeat, dialogue repetition, matching and filling in the blanks.
     • many writers have proposed more experiential approaches to using language-learning materials
       • language awareness approach: learners first experience a text holistically and then analyse it with a view to making discoveries for themselves about language use
   • texts and tasks
     • Agree: help the learners by focusing their processing energies on the target feature.
     • Disagree: overprotect learners and don't prepare them for reality of language use outside the classroom.
     • authenticity: in relation with the learner's culture.
   • Acceptability
     • related with taboos such as sex, racism or homosexualism.
   • humanising materials
     • the necessity of personalise, localise and make meaningful the learners experience in the target language.
       • need for materials to be effectively engaging and cater for all learning style preferences.
   • new technologies in language-learning materials
     • Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) materials facilitate learning depending on how the technology is implemented.
       • facilitate reading
         • by supporting comprehension with graphics, video and sound. 
       • facilitate writing
         • trough modelling the genre, demonstrating the process, facilitating brainstorming and research. 
       • oragnizational advantages
         • such as easy acces, convenient storage and retrieval and easy sharing. 
       • free source of authentic texts
       • collaborative problem solving activities inside and outside the classroom.