ELT materials – first session

Today’s first session seemed like an overview of the subject which appears to be massive. We were asked to explore some ideas about what we thought the module would be about. Prior to this we were required to read an article by B. Tomlinson (2012). This article generated many answers to many questions but also showed me there are many areas I need to explore to fully understand materials and their impact on learning and teaching.

Firstly, the concept of materials evaluation and design was completely unknown to me. As an ADOS I spend a lot of my time looking at new textbooks and materials for the school. Many times I have been looking at these textbooks and often wondered “how much research has been put in to this material?” “Have they piloted the books?” “Why don’t they let us have a sample copy of all the material to pilot it ourselves?” “Has anyone in the publishing company ever taken into consideration the company culture and classroom culture that schools have, to understand how well this material works in a variety of environments?”. Tomlinson (2012) did answer some of the questions by explaining the designing industry. However, I still have some doubts about the level of research as I begin this course and I hope as I continue my reading I will discover deeper answers to these questions.

One question I would like to explore is why all textbooks have the same activities? Is it because they are proven to work or is it because they are industry standard? Or is it because it’s the easiest way for a teacher to evaluate the students and check their understanding? The new materials I have been looking at recently now explicitly cover skills which I believe are fundamental to a learners development. Such as critical thinking and study skills. I feel they equip the learner with abilties to become more independent and offer deeper learning. But the materials still have the same repetitive activities such as gap filling, eliminating the wrong option, noticing chunks and completing sentences with their own words. These activities generally aren’t engaging for students and they fixate the student on knowing how many they got right rather than focusing them on the experimental practice of language learning which should empower them to test language in a more personal manner.

Secondly, I very often have to write course outlines for closed groups that come to the school during winter. These outlines have to be adapted to meet the requests of the agencies and on occasions I have had to write and create completely new material as the client wanted the lesson to be based on Harry Potter, for example. Also, as a teacher I often use online resources to gather materials which allows the students to continue practising the target language they have been studying in the textbook but with a different approach or style.

Using the online materials and ideas I have been able to create materials for these very specific courses but in the process have found myself critiquing the online materials very harshly. Tomlinson suggests that teachers are the naive material writers and this could be a reason why I have often found the materials to be unsatisfactory. However, I do not use criteria to evaluate them and I would consider myself as naive when creating materials. But I do strongly believe in piloting new material and whenever possible I have done so. Yet, again I come back to the issue of evaluation. I need more knowledge on how to evaluate and also, as Tomlinson sates, I need to look less on “the way we select materials and more on the application of theory to practice and practice to theory.” (Tomlinson 2012, p145). This is a completely new concept for me, which I hope to understand and apply in a mini project I am conducting for the school in which I have piloted a new textbook with my class for 1 week and hope to write a report on it with relevant academic reference to give an in-depth evaluation.

Finally, during the first seminar many of the teachers expressed ideas of what they would like to get out of the course. A couple of points made led me to explore the subject in a different direction. Such as, humanizing materials, this is something I always attempt to do with all my lessons but when the teacher pointed it out I realised that so many of the materials we use are the opposite of this or do not humanize nearly enough. It would be interesting to see it from the publishers’ perspectives and see if this is a priority when designing material. Another point made during the seminar was technology. For my undergraduate dissertation I explored computer assisted language learning within Spain and my results indicated that most students were ready to try the new ways to learn online but the academies were not ready to even consider the change in the learners’ needs and wants. This area of study is a particular passion of mine as I enjoy studying change in individual and institutional perceptions, as well as technology. Therefore, I hope to take this study further during this module.

References:
Tomlinson, B. (2012) State-of-the-Art Article: Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (2): pp.143-179.