English Language Teaching Materials for English as a Second or Other Language [ESOL] and English as a Foreign Language [EFL].
One of the best compiled books that I’ve used to date is produced by the British Council Paris aimed at young learners up to the age of eleven, please follow the link below;
British Council Paris: Tell it Again!
As I often work in schools that use student coursebooks I have found that adult courses need to be supplemented and tailored to meet learners’ needs: A Reading exercise that I adapted for FCE classes guides students through an FCE exam format without the formality of an official practice exercise: Please follow the link below;
fcematteroftaste
A sample learners’-needs questionnaires
Sara Ceni (2003) advocates that learners have an important role in adapting the materials they’re using. Ceni contends that materials should be made with student adaptation in mind, “aiming to be learner-centered, flexible, open-ended, relevant, universal and authentic, giving choices to learners“. “It enables you to learn English as it is used in our globalised world, using information rich topics. Fully integrated grammar, skills and lexical syllabus provide a balanced learning experience. There are a massive amount of supplementary materials available to support English Language Learning; Natural Grammar is an excellent support book for problematic grammatical and lexical items.
Each school or organisation has their own syllabus guidelines, in a school that I worked in for three years the European framework was used for every different level, A1, A2, B1 etc. Look at these guidelines in relation to communicative language teaching – what are the communicative objectives? Communicative language teaching is a major element of EFL and ESOL teaching and many good coursebooks. In relation to the coursebooks used, one can ask some very simple questions. What is the role of grammar in any one unit, what language skills are practiced? To what extent does the unit deal with (1) communicative functions as properties of language, (2) communicative behaviour and activities? There were further reports that lower level materials were too easy and do not engage the learner. Role Plays for Today (pictured below) provides excellent communicative lesson plans guiding students through activities with useful language and is a welcome break from syllabus based materials.
A major area of change in the traditional EFL/ESOL classroom is digital innovation to aid language acquisition. This is realised through digital literacy ‘the ability to employ a wide range of cognitive and emotional skills using digital technology’. Improving student’s language proficiency and developing their digital literacy too.
[Marriages of convenience? Teachers and coursebooks in the modern age]
The model above lays out three approaches to technology integration in the classroom. Coursebook-, topic– and digital literacy-driven approaches in English language teaching. My lessons are strengthened with the use of technology, which often takes a load off the students allowing for a more natural language education. The second approach is similar and a route I have followed over the last four years in non-coursebook lessons allowing technology to be integrated into daily content based lessons. Lessons without technology may well completely escape digitally literate students and lose them from the language acquisition process.
Allen, C. (2015) Marriages of convenience? Teachers and coursebooks in the digital age. ELT Journal 69 (3): pp. 249 – 263
Harmer, J. (2007) The Practice of English Language Teaching. (4th ed): Pearson Longman. (Part 5: The changing world of the classroom)
Harwood, N. (2010) Issues in material development and design. Harwood – English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.3-30
McDonough, J.,et al. (2013) Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher’s Guide. (3nd ed) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell
Masuhara, H. (2011) What do teachers really want from coursebooks? Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching
Sheen, R. (2003) Focus on Form – A Myth in the Making? ELT Journal 57 (3): pp.225 – 233. doi. 10. 1093/elt/57.3.225
Tomlinson, B. (ed) 2013 Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed). London Bloomsbury
This ‘Materials Now’ post is, as far as I can see, your first actual blog post. Please can your reread it to decide how accessible it is to anyone other than you reading it? You don’t provide an introduction, and it’s challenging to see how the different elements of your post link together as you don’t provide very little commentary or supporting discussion.
One further point, in the first seminar I asked everyone to write down what they wanted to get from the module. I didn’t ask you to share the points you wrote down but I think it would be useful to report here what you wrote down as it will help you to assess what you did or didn’t get from the module.