This week we looked at the principles of developing materials. In this post I will look at the approaches and methods of the experts. Then I will analyse the top 5 principles of teaching and learning that I arrived at during our seminar discussion.

Firstly, let me address the term materials development. Pardo and Téllez (2009) offer a definition (for materials development) that they say is most apt due to its inclusivity. “It includes adaption, creation of learning and teaching exercises, a task, an activity, a lesson, a unit, or a module composed of several units.” They support this with a quote from Low (1989) who says:

“Designing appropriate materials is not a science: it is a strange mixture of imagination, insight and analytical reasoning.”

During our seminar presentation materials development was described as a field of study and a practical undertaking. As a field, it studies the principles and procedures of the design, implementation, and evaluation of language teaching materials. As a practical undertaking it is anything where writers or learners provide sources of language input, and exploit it in ways that maximise the likelihood of intake and stimulates output.

What I comprehend from these descriptions is that material development is a process guided by rules and responsibilities, but the criteria and parameters are self-constructed. This is allows the teacher to promote their values and beliefs in whichever creative, or pragmatic way they wish.

How do experts author their materials?

In Tomlinson’s (2012) State-of-the Art article, he describes experienced writers as those who use their instincts and prior-knowledge as the main influence on their process. Repertoire and creative inspiration are terms that are utilised, but principles and frameworks are referred to less so. This may be because experienced authors have ingrained principles and are intuitively considered.  Tomlinson (2012) mentions that experts plan and draft their materials, while also waiting for inspiration. What really jumped out at me in his description was: “experts have clear and well-supported concepts, while designing in opportunistic ways that always consider the students’ needs first”. Once again it is the need that is the jumping off point for material design.

As mentioned in my ‘Materials Now’ post, one of the other ingredients for principled materials development seems to be experience. To be able to differentiate and pre-empt possible needs and learner difficulties can only come with an understanding of Second Language Acquisition. Awareness of these potential issues from the inception of the materials development process are a real advantage. Tomlinson (2012) expresses his preference for materials development as an on-going process of evaluation driven by a set of agreed principles. Both universal ones applicable to any type of learning context and then local criteria specific to the target language context.

Tomlinson (as cited in Harwood, 2010) advocates a principled development of materials through coherent applications of:

1. Theories of language acquisition and development.
2. Principles of teaching.
3. Current knowledge of how target language is actually used.
4. Results of systemic observation and evaluation of materials in use.

These applications would come under the universal criteria. Each application opens up a series of questions. Tomlinson (2012) expands on this by saying that materials should stem from SLA theory, leading to universal principles that in conjunction act as tools for development and evaluation.

Based on Tomlinson’s four decades of experience of teaching English he offers his proposed principles for ELT materials:

1. A prerequisite for language acquisition is that learners are exposed to a rich, meaningful, and comprehensible input of language use.

● Plentiful of spoken and written texts providing language useage from a variety of text types and genres relating to different topics, themes, events, locations, targeted to learners

2. To maximise learner exposure to language in use, they need to be engaged both affectively and cognitively in the language experience.

● Thinking while experiencing language helps deeper processing for effective durable learning plus higher-level skills e.g. predicting, connecting, interpreting, and evaluating second language use.

3. Learners who achieve positive effects are much more likely to achieve communicative competence than those who don’t.

● Texts and tasks must be interesting relevant, and enjoyable

4. Learners using materials resources typically that are also utilized when acquiring first language.

● Help learners reflect on their mental activity during a task, and then make use of mental strategies in similar tasks.

5. Learners can benefit from noticing salient features of input.

● Apprehend before comprehend and intuit before explore. Using an experiential approach, where a student is engaged holistically and they learn implicitly. Later they revisit and reflect paying conscious attention to features in order to explicitly learn.

6. Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes.

● Learners produce language in order to achieve intended outcomes

Hall (1995) as cited in Tomlinson’s chapter on Principles of Effective Materials Development (2010) insists the crucial question is: How do we think that people learn languages? He lists the principles that he believes underpins everything we do in planning and writing of materials:

● Need to communicate
● Need for long-term goals
● Need for authenticity
● Need for student-centeredness

There is a magnitude of literature that proposes beliefs and principles and the lists could go on. The examples I have put on the post thus far are not by any means conclusive. That is in some respects is an impossible job without consideration of the learners’ need, the learners’ background, the timing and the teachers’ beliefs.

However, as mentioned at the top of the post I will discuss my five beliefs of ELT. The method to which I came to finalise these principles was through discovery, rather than a prolonged and agonising internal debate. A detailed and fruitful exercise that my peers and I participated in enabled us to reveal our five core beliefs for the learning and teaching language.

The sentence head for the tasks was:

Materials should…………

From there we wrote down our ideas. These declarations were then incorporated with other professional examples from other authors in the field. After deliberation and peer discussion, we whittled our way down to a personalised final list. Therefore, there may be some reliability issue due to the influence of others, but in general I would say that it does reflect a lot of who I am as a teacher and what I want as a learner too.

Eventually, my final five read like this:

Materials should:

● Engage students
● Encourage leaners to apply their developing skills to the world beyond the classroom.
● Be perceived by learners as relevant and useful
● Provide opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purpose.
● Take a balance of approaches in the way things are covered, inductive, deductive, and affective approaches to grammar, fluency and accuracy work.

 

On the whole, I am fairly satisfied with the results of this exercise as it does support my sociocultural and constructivist hypothesis for learning language. These theories apply themselves to idea that learning is about communication and using the language for a purpose. It is exposure to the language through doing that allows acquisition to take place. Relevance and use are connected heavily to a communicative purpose. If a learner has a goal they will be engaged in the process of achieving that goal. They will practice and recycle their language and expose themselves to as much of that language as they can to achieve that aim. This in turn will allow for an eclectic approach that is concerned with achievement and not just accuracy.

References

Pardo, A. N. & María Fernanda Téllez, T. (2009) ELT Materials: The Key to Fostering Effective Teaching and Learning Settings Materiales para la enseñanza del inglés: la clave para promover ambientes efectivos de enseñanza y aprendizaje. Profile Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 11, 171-186.

Tomlinson, B. (2010) Principles for effective materials development. In (Ed) Harwood, N. (2010) English language teaching materials: theory and practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials Development for Language Learning and Teaching. Language Teaching, 45 (2), 143-179.