This was an essential question addressed in week one of TE714. We were invited to read the following texts to kick start out thoughts, fuel our discussions and inform our subsequent reflections for this blog.

• ‘Materials development for language learning and teaching’ by Brian Tomlinson,
• ‘What do teachers really want from coursebooks?’ by Hitomi Masuhara,
• ‘Marriage of convenience? Teachers and coursebooks in the digital age’ by Christopher Allen.

The first of these articles started by charting the history of materials development and its reactive position vis a vis the changing faces of methodology over the last 40 or so years, which in turn reflected developments in SLA research.  Just imagine delivering a classic PPP lesson, a task based lesson and a dogme lesson and it’s easy to notice the diversity in what we consider to be ‘materials’ and how they came to be produced.   Even while dogme is materials light in its approach and considered conversation-driven, we could perhaps consider those ‘conversations’ to be ‘materials’.  It’s a bit of a philosophical point, but it seems a bit odd to me that if you capture utterances and reproduce them in print or sound, they’re materials, but if you don’t, if you use the conversations generated in a classroom as your ‘resource’ just once – they’re not.  Tomlinson says materials are “anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language”.  As we discussed what we believed to constitute materials in the seminar, most teachers seemed to prefer a broad view of the term, with for example realia being included.  But again, if you take that a step further and go for a lexical walk with students, using your surroundings as your teaching resource, is that not material too?  A more useful term might be ‘resource’ for all of these things.  To be considered ‘materials’, perhaps there is also some sense of something having been produced, sourced or assembled with ELT in mind and retained or reproduce-able for further ELT purposes. This certainly seems to be the feature that makes us view ELT coursebooks as materials.  We were given cuisenaire rods to ‘play’ with and come up with ideas of how we might use these in lessons.  We all agreed these to be materials too.

Some of the teachers shared their teaching materials record log with the group. In these, a broad diversity of materials were seen to be used, many of which were technology based. They also revealed some reliance on coursebooks as the backbone for this diversity, historically the dominant type of ELT material. Personally, I had not been teaching the week before the seminar, so had no log to share but much of what I saw reflected the type of material I usually use.  That is, a course book as the mainstay, particularly with general english classes; off the shelf worksheets and practice material – either connected to the coursebook via the teachers book or work book, or stand alone worksheets and activities aimed at practicing particular elements of grammar, lexis or skill taken from source books and websites such as One stop english; and enriching input such as video clips, music tracks, pictures (mostly from google) and to a lesser extent realia.

At this beginning stage of this module, I’ve been looking through the module outline and schedule for the coming weeks and it strikes me as a varied, interesting and packed agenda with plenty of reading and lots of tasks:

In this module students investigate how language learning materials are used, supplemented, adapted and designed.

 

In terms of what I want to achieve from this module that fits this agenda,here are my thoughts:

• I want to be better able to review and select material fit for purpose, so it’s best suited to students’ needs and me as a teacher.
• I want to be able to adapt and supplement material more effectively for the same reasons.
• I want to gain practical skills using different forms of digital technology and examine ways of using it in the classroom. I  particularly want to learn how to exploit video.
• I would like some insight into the design process when creating materials, to inform evaluation and selection and enable self-created supplementation.

There is one particular issues in the readings and seminar in this 1st week that interests me particularly.  Tomlinson, in the article mentioned above, notes some of the authors who’ve provided guidance on adaptation. Islam and Mares (2003), he reports, set out evaluating criteria to include the objectives:

adding real choice, catering for all learner styles, providing for learner autonomy, developing high level cognitive skills, and making the input both more accessible and more engaging.

This is is one of the key areas I’m looking to develop in so that I can more confidently more away from the coursebook to meet the specific needs of students.  Given that we’re in a materials rich, post-method ‘methodology’ era, where teachers need to evaluate and adapt more than ever before, this issue seems highly relevant to me  (and I note, it’s up for discussion in seminars 3 and 4).