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Jose Luis Villate Castaño

20101165049

State-of-the-Art Article

1.

In this article, ‘materials for language

learning’ will be taken to be anything that can be used to facilitate the

learning of a language.

Materials can be informative (informing the learner

about the target language), instructional (guiding the learner in practising

the language), experiential(providing the learner with experience of the language in use),eliciting

(encouraging the learner to use the language) and exploratory (helping the

learner to make discoveries about the language).

2.

History of publications on materials

development

Tomlinson (2007a) is primarily a book about language acquisition but

many of its chapters include applications of theory to materials development.

Hardword (2010a) explores the issues involved in the principled design,

implementation and evaluation. It focuses less on selecting and more on

developing activities to practice and practice.

3.

Materials evaluation

3.1

Establishing criteria and developing evaluation instruments

Tomlinson

& Masuhara (2004: 7) proposed the following questions for evaluating

criteria:

a) Is

each question an evaluation question?

b) Does

each question only ask one question?

c) Is

each question answerable?

d) Is

each question free of dogma?

e) Is

each question reliable in the sense that other evaluators would interpret it in

the same way?

Mukundan & Ahour (2010) found that many of the

evaluation checklist were too demanding, too ambiguous and too confusing for

understanding. They conclude that a framework for generating clear, concise and

flexible

criteria would be more useful than detailed and inflexible

checklists. The main idea is to help teachers to evaluate their materials and

make modifications if is necessary. Local and global evaluation.

3.2 Reporting evaluations

Even if the main focus is the evaluation of the

materials already done, there some authors who have highlighted the importance

of an evaluation during the process; it gives opportunities to corrections and

changes that the material may nedd.

4. Materials adaptation

Teachers are always adapting materials but there are

no guidelines. There must be congruence between

materials, methodology, learners, objectives, the target language and the

teacher’s personality. Teacher chooses

a complete or just a section of the material adapted. Saraceni (2003) advocates providing an important

place to the learner for choosing materials.

5. Materials production

5.1 How writers write

The experts, for example, envisaged possibilities in

concrete detail and were prepared to abandon tasks they had spent time

developing, they focus on creative and inspirational aspect more than in recurrent

theories.

5.2 Principled development of materials

•

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.

6. Materials exploitation

Tomlinson (2003d) proposes classroom procedures to

help teachers to humanize their coursebooks. Masuhara (2011) suggests a record

of use as a means of uncovering data on teachers’ classroom use of materials.

7.

Issues in materials development

7.1

The value of textbooks

They help us to organize, systematize and guide our

classes, they also make feel security to the learners; however, they are just

guidelines and are not the main tool in teaching.

7.2 The need for published materials

Sometimes are very necessary because of the time and

they are also useful but just is they are well-adapted, in other way it will be

better and valuable the self-produced materials.

7.3 Pedagogic approaches

The main focus in current teaching has been the

communicative approach. However, the most popular approach at the moment seems

to be task-based, in which the learners are set tasks with non-linguistic outcomes

(e.g. arrangements for a trip). Text driven approach is also very useful

because it connects the texts with students’ life and background.

7.4 Authenticity of texts and tasks

It is necessary that the activities, texts and tasks

inside classroom use authentic language. This is because many activities inside

classroom are just effective in that context and is required that what the

learner can learn and practice in the classroom can be useful in real contexts.

7.5 Acceptability

Even if there are and there will ever be taboo topics

inside teaching, sometimes these kinds of topics have potential for affective

engagement. Depending on the cultures, ages and interest there are topics such

as sex, drugs or discrimination which can engage students and motivate them to

participate in tasks.

7.7 Ideology in materials

Materials: Their role in globalization and the importance

to adapt them according to socio-cultural factors.

7.8 The roles of new technologies in language-learning

materials

Facilitates reading, it has organizational advantages,

localized adaptation and collaborative problem solving activities.

8. Materials development projects

There are just a few of literatures based on this but

depending on the way they can be pretty useful for different teachers.

9. Research in materials development

It is pretty expensive and demanding to carry out a

research about materials, nevertheless, Chapelle (2008) argued that we need to

take materials evaluation forward into a more research-oriented framework,

which will enable us to make claims about the effects of materials on the basis

of evidence from research.

10. Conclusion

Nowadays materials development has focus their effort

in engage students and motivate practical over theoretical issues in order to

facilitate language acquisition. On the

other hand, materials development has the opportunity to considerably increase thanks

to new technologies and hyper media.