Clarity of instructions is a useful starting point in materials evaluation, often teachers books give supporting grammar advice but the real workings of materials lie in students’ instructions. Firstly activities and tasks need to be understandable, something that will be clear to learners. This moves onto the next most important and intertwined factor which is task achievability, if tasks in materials provided cannot be realised they need to be decisively removed. Tasks need to be evaluated for content, is it culturally acceptable? Are the materials practical, teachable or flexible? Do the Materials build confidence to achieve student independence? The following micro-evaluation is my own micro-compilation of daily questions to answer for course book materials being used:
microevalutation
The diagram below allows me as a teacher to follow another micro-evaluation for materials I choose for non-syllabus based general English classes where a course book is not provided, I must be able to answer all the questions positively.
Mishan and Timmis suggest that stand alone evaluation can be created, ad hoc, for exam classes and materials; using four or five questions about potential materials suitability for any given exam class. For example questions such as “does the activity display the exam format?“. Materials can be systematically evaluated to make daily teaching organised and rewarding. The process below suggests a route to follow on one’s daily teaching, preparation and evaluation.
[Beyond the language classroom]
The following framework is useful when choosing course books as it allows one to look at all the tasks within a unit and check if they are offering students a variety of tasks types, genres, inputs, outputs, skills and a variety of factors that add to the effectiveness of the unit’s content. It also acts as a reminder of all the useful devices in daily materials and teaching that aid language acquisition.
Course books can be evaluated as a whole, considering other factors such as cohesion of units and recycling of language to ascertain if a book would be a helpful addition to a school’s syllabus. A useful question in the evaluation process is to consider necessary and desirable features of proposed materials, desirable features should be classified as extremely desirable, very desirable and quite desirable. More general questions can be asked about the teaching context in which materials will be used. Other important factors in the evaluation process are the time available to students, age, student interests, students’ background, class size and student level.
Coursebooks offer “a coherent syllabus, satisfactory language control, motivating texts, audio, CDs and other accessories such as video DVD material, CD-ROMS and extra resource material.” Littlejohn makes an further interesting point about evaluation, that course books may be the “most powerful device” in relation to methodological innovations and revolutions in syllabus design. Choosing the right course book can therefore have countless rewarding effects in the classroom so implementing a thorough evaluation procedure is an important issue. Both Dauod and Celce Murcia [1979] and Williams [1983] evaluation frameworks cover wide-ranging questions to answer but Penny Ur offers a more easily accessible and current framework that can easily be used, with financial considerations and questions about level quality as additional extras, to add an exciting course book to any good English Language Teaching classroom.
Raizi proposes three different types of evaluation the most useful for me is for books already in use, to be able to “identify strengths and weaknesses” of any one set of materials. This evaluation should be made in conjunction with both Davidson’s [1975] and Dauod & Celce-Murcia’s [1979] (evaluation schemes) where the student’s language background plays an important role. Students can easily be actively involved in the evaluation process and get the most out of their materials by using a questionnaire such as below included in Hedge’s book, Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom:
The questionnaire above is of personal interest to me as it answers a question I am always a little unsure of, whether or not to ask students to complete writing tasks in class or independently, It also encourages students to take personal control of their course and to streamline their studies for their individual aims.
Cunningsworth, A. (1995) Choosing your Coursebook. Oxford: Heinemann ELT
Ellis, R. (2011) Macro-and micro-evaluation of task-based teaching
Harmer, J. (2015) The Practice of English Teaching. (5th ed) London Pearson.
Hedge, T. (2000) Teaching and Learning in the Language Classrooom. Oxford: Oxford University Press
McGrath,I. (2013) Teaching Materials and Roles of the EFL/ESL Teachers: Practice and Theory. London Bloomsbury. Chapter 3 he professional literate and chapter 5 How teachers evaluate coursebooks
LittleJohn, A (ed). The analysis of language teaching materials: inside the Trojan Horse. In Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge University Press. pp 179 – 211
Masuhara, H. (2011) What do teachers really want from coursebooks? In Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge University Press. pp 236 -266.
Mishan, F. & Timmis, I. (2015) Materials Developent for TESOL. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (Chapter 4 Materials evaluation and adaption).
Nuñez Pardo, A.& Téllez Téllez, M.F. (2009) ELT Materials: The Key to Fostering Effective Teaching and Learning Settings.
Riazi, A. M. (2003) What do textbook evaluation schemes tell us? A study of the textbook evaluation schemes of three decades. In: Renandya, W.A. (ed). Methodology and Materials Design in Language Teaching: Current Perceptions and Practices and their Implications. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre. pp.52-68.
Tomlinson,B. (2013 Materials Evaluation). In Tomlinson, B. (ed). Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury. pp. 21 -48
Ur,P. (2012) A Course in English Language Teaching 2nd edn Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
