For the 2nd part of the seminar in week three the coursebook writer Theresa Clementson, who had written’English Unlimited’ (the coursebook we had just evaluated) shared her insights and approaches from her professional perspective.

She told us that she is usually invited to participate in new coursebook writing when the publishers ‘spot a gap in the market’ and commission accordingly. Cambridge for example, have a 10 year plan. Ultimately of course, materials need to be popular and  have universal appeal in order to be able to sell well and make a profit for the publisher.

The perceived ‘gap in the market’ or ‘need’ is translated into a brief from the publisher. For  ‘English Unlimited’ that brief was for:

• an adult orientated coursebook
• with an international flavour (no special focus on UK culture)
• using real English based on corpus – using English as lingua franca
• recognising teachability

We asked if she used a principled approach when setting about her writing task and how she implemented this and she observed that her approach to writing a book is similar to that of writing a lesson plan.  Her chief concern is for all her material to be interesting, and in relation to ‘English Unlimited’, interesting and cerebrally engaging for adult learners.

Further principles for her, based on her knowledge and experience in TESOL were:

• Using a text based approach based on real language in us
• Facilitating noticing
• Using proper communicative tasks
• Using lexical chunks
• Facilitating learner autonomy
• Ensuring cognitive challenge

It was interesting to compare her objectives to our own evaluative criteria and findings based on our principles.   We divided our criteria into teacher, student, language, and content categories.  The criteria she mentioned were mostly content and language related.  For instance, we gave her book a positive high rating of 5/6 for ‘helping students to notice grammar in use’  – which was one of our criteria and one of her stated objectives when writing.  We also  positively rated her use of ‘authentic texts’ in unit 4, for the stories and pictures based on real life ‘extreme weather events’.  Although time did not allow for her to go into all the principles she used and at no point did she refer to using any kind of checklist, it was clear that strongly held universal principles informed her writing and that because of her considerable experience these had become more implicit than explicit – in the way Hadfield (2014) had suggested (discussed in my previous blog entry ‘Principles and Frameworks for ELT design’).

On the subject of process, she commented that writing was both a collaborative and synthesising process whereby ongoing evaluation and redesigning takes place to produce the finished product which often looks nothing like its original conception.  And here, from the literature, Jolly and Bolitho’s (2011) ‘principled, practical and dynamic framework’ of a materials design process is reflected.  With reference to process she made a few comments about digital learning materials. While they are cheap to produce and cheap to adapt and update, her words of warning were that producing materials quickly affects their quality.  And from her experience the process is necessarily lengthy and highly evaluative. My own point of view on this is that, it doesn’t have to be that way.  Digital materials are quicker to produce and revise but if subject to the same rigorous principled design and evaluation criteria as printed material, there is no reason for them to be sub standard.  I’m thinking here of an analogy with TV advertising.  Some do the job impressively and effectively with regard for underlying ‘principles’.  Some are utter rubbish.  As teachers, one key role is to be highly discerning when using digital language learning materials.  

Finally, I was interested in her perspective on post-use evaluation.  When writing 2nd editions she explained that publishers seek and receive direct feedback from many sources – although she didn’t give details here due to time constraints, she encouraged us all to critically assess the coursebooks we use and contribute to the feedback loop using the platforms offered by publishers. I very mush appreciated listening to her perspective.