It has become increasingly clear that two of the main factors in all aspects of materials creation, development and evaluation are the uniqueness of the learners’ needs and the teaching situation.The sequence and pacing of any lesson is unpredictable, and needs to be flexible. Globally published materials, however, have to treat these localised variables, to some degree, as the same. They de-skill teachers from implementing their own methods and approaches to ELT by employing pre-determined content, order and procedure of use. There are occasional ‘close fits’ for course books, but from my experience this occurs in more specialised learning environments such as examination classes. Most globally-published materials can rarely take into account the differences that can be found between individual students and teachers (Maley, 2011). Teacher differences may include, for example:

• Degree of language proficiency and confidence
• Personality
• Preferred teaching style

Besides creating individualised materials for their own context, the gap between published provision and local need leaves teachers with options of what to do with the materials/resources available to them. Graves (2000) discusses the need to adapt and supplement materials because a coursebook is a fixed material. On a day-to-day level, materials need to change according to the context of use. These changes may stem from the teacher’s approach, goals and objectives, learners’ needs, and the requirements of the context. Graves (2002) uses the analogy of a piano to explain this: a piano provides you with the means for producing music, but it cannot do it on its own. In a similar sense, materials are a instrument for teaching and learning, and the quality of the instrument affects the quality of the music. Graves admits that the analogy falls short because success in teaching with published materials depends on the students who use them and not the one performer playing it.

Maley (2011) highlights that the nature and economics of globally published materials equate to them being created with the intention of reaching, and being used by, the largest possible audience. This obviously poses questions about validity and reliability.

The larger the number of learners being catered for, the more:

• variables in type of learners who use them
• scope for differences
• constraint on teachers for any given pedagogical movement
• distance from some learners capacity
• distance from the teachers and learners sense of relevance

This visual representation, which I have crudely created, attempts to illustrate the issue of globally published materials being used for localised contexts. Published materials are circular solutions for square needs. There will always be an element, whether it is methodology, teaching beliefs, target language, objectives etc, in a ‘one size fits all’ culture of global material design, that will never be able to satisfy all educational demands.

Mcgrath (2002) sets out the options for teachers when presented with published materials:

• To use them as they are
• Refuse to use them completely
• Reject certain sections
• Extend or exploit sections
• Adjust components

It is not often that I will use materials as they are. It is common that I will select one activity or adjust it slightly from the pages of course books or online materials. Online materials are slightly easier to adapt and edit due to their format and will be my first port of call when putting together material for a lesson. Maley (2011) suggests that there are several options to consider when deciding to adapt or supplement materials. These are described as coping strategies.

The first is simple but not exactly helpful in some contexts. It is suggested to just ‘give it a rest’, in other words, to provide light relief by playing games, watching videos, listening to songs. This is referred to as cosmetic entertainment and are mostly used as warmers and coolers. I do subscribe to the use of  adapting materials into a fun and engaging activites but only those that have pedagogical aims. I would have to question the break aspect of Maley’s point. There are many online language games ready available, and video streaming sites such as YouTube are very content rich for materials that can be be supplemented or adapted.

The second is the main crux of this post, i.e. changing the materials in a way that makes them more appropriate for class contexts with regards to their language, level, content, procedure, and type of activity.

Materials can be changed in several different ways:

1. Omission – inappropriate, unproductive or even offensive materials.
2. Addition – of texts, activities etc in order to compensate for deficiencies.
3. Reduction or shorten activities – to give less weight or emphasis
4. Extension lengthen – e.g. additional vocab exercises or to add additional dimension
5. Rewriting/modification – make a task more communicative for example
6. Replacement – use another activity which may be more appropriate
7. Reordering – to scaffold in a more appropriate way.
8. Branching – to add options to the activity or switch to a more experiential route over an analytical one.

As a teacher becomes more experienced and understands their own beliefs and approaches the more adept they will become at noticing and applying changes to resources. It is also key for a teacher (and I am saying this to myself too) to remember that trialling and experimenting is a valid task to undertake. Adaptions and supplementing materials is not always going to work first time and may need a process of evalaution during and post task. In my post regarding principles and frameworks post I discuss how crucial it is that all materials become part of an evolving process.  Over the course of a term I am certain that I will, at some point, choose to use one of the 8 options highhlighted by Maley, and they will invariably be met with varying degrees of success.

Within my teaching context there isn’t a course book specifically given to accompany the curriculum, but there are a large amount of resources that I can select from. This eclectic collection of published material needs to be adapted and supplemented on a lesson to lesson basis. The unstructured approach (semi-materials according to Prahbu) that my institution employs has a knock-on-effect that the faculty feel trusted and encouraged to create, develop, and share their work.

DIY materials are (hopefully) going to be more:

• Localised
• Modern
• Individual
• Personalised
• Humanised
• Supportive of differentiation
• Greater variety

This leads me onto the second consideration for material design as advocated by Prabhu (2001) (as cited in Maley, 2011). Prabhu suggests that there does not need to be a decentralisation of published materials per se, but there does need to be a fundamental shift in the design of materials. The new direction should provide greater flexibility in the decisions about content, order, pace, and procedures.  Prabhu sets out three methods for creating those materials:

1. Skills Modules: Organise the materials into language skills. These are hard to harmonise because of the different skills needed for different modules.
2. Resource Options (more radical option): Use a whole range of resources to create tailor-made materials according to need. This option would be suited to small groups on intensive courses. Working in teams and sharing resources, ideas, materials and techniques would work well. Connectivity and technology has made this a more viable option compared to 2001 when Prahbu first mentioned it.
3. Process Option (even more radical): Eradicate pre-developed materials altogether and generate localised content and learning activities. Use project works, community language learning i.e. the learners decide what to learn at their own pace.

It is surprising to see my teaching situation described as ‘more radical’ because it is the status quo for the faculty. The second resource option works very well in my context for both teachers and learners, and has gone a long way to help my own development. The process option mentioned by Prabhu is difficult to imagine in a larger institution and would be more demanding on the faculties’ resources. Material writers should take into consideration the idea of incorporating choice into their design. This can enable those materials to to be adapted more easily for different contexts. This would need to be articulated for any evaluation to aid the understanding of purpose and use of those materials.

Prabhu’s proposal is for a radical rethinking of published materials, where the author passes on at least one of four aspects of control to the teachers:

1. Content (what)
2. Order (when)
3. Pace (how fast)
4. Procedure (how)

Prabhu’s proposal is that a range of inputs should be offered without an envisaged use in the classroom. Input for different levels of difficulty and different quantities would leave the teacher to make any final decisions on what to use, how, and for whom. These adapted principles and frameworks for material design can be categorised into two resource options:

Semi-materials

1. Single type: skills tasks e.g. listening comprehension, vocabulary development, role-plays possibly from published materials but used at own pace and order of presentation.
2. Collections of ‘raw’ input. Compile a collection of written, spoken or visual texts without specification of how they should be used. The teacher then decides what they would be most apporpriate for grammar awareness, vocabulary in context or comprehension questions etc.

Meta- materials

1. These are empty pedagogical procedures such as dictation, role-plays, gap-fills, summary writing and jigsaw listening. The teacher decides the nature of the input and applies the procedure to it, pace, order etc.

Personal Example of adaption

One of the modules in my own context asks the students to listen to a description of a process, make notes and then, in the genre of an academic essay, write about what they heard. Process coursework is aiming to teach and assess the students use of passive grammar, sequence phrases, cause and effect language, and academic receptive and production skills. There is a lot of ground to cover, so the target language and grammar points are normally scaffolded and practised as discrete langague items. This is built up and combined with the different skills needed to complete the task. There are plenty of resources available in my school, either in coursebooks for academic writing, vocabulary or from teacher created materials. The majority of the published material is dry and not engaging for the young adult learners that I am teaching.

Below is an example of the ‘raw’ material, usually printed on a plain white A4 paper, which students will analyse and then write a summary.

It depicts the manufacturing of orange juice. Looking at the suggestions by Prabhu I decided to change the procedure of how I wanted students to engage with this input.

In an attempt to make the input more engaging, I used an online programme called PimPamPum, which is essentially a storyboarding application. It uses Flickr’s archive of online images and allows speech/text bubbles to be added to those images, which lends itself very well to the features of a process description. This, I thought, made the presentation of input more engaging and allowed me to support some of the language features we had previously discussed. It also allowed for more contextualised input through the use of images aiding comprehension. One drawback is the limited visual scope of the whole process. One would have to go through the slides sequentially to get an overall perspective of the scale of the process. The adaption I chose was not only for the procedure of input. The final production task was not a written description, instead I ask my students to create their own PimPamPum storyboards for a different process. Then they would give a 2-3 minute presentation to their peers describing the process. This made the whole task more personalised and relevant to them, it also added a more communicative element.

The adaption of this particular piece of material is more in line with my own principles as articulated throughout this blog. It was an active and engaging task that was relevant to the learners’ needs. Researching and presenting are valuable skills for their studies outside of the classroom. Most importantly, it provided the students with a communicative purpose and an opportunity to practise the target language. Students did mention that Flickr does not always have the images they needed, but for the more creative among them this posed a challenge that they willingly embraced resulting in some interesting visual interpretations.

Overall, It is hard for me not to see adaption as an exciting part of the job in ELT, but this is purely based on my experience and beliefs. Improving my understanding of materials design is one of the reasons that I am on this course. Adaptation and supplementation are all part of the materials evolution and will develop and be redefined on a case by case basis. Ideally, I would like to have the time and resources to create my own materials, like the ones Prabhu describes. To be at a stage where I can use only meta-materials seems like a long-way off. Using published materials and adapting them in a semi-materials way is the position I am in. However, creating frameworks that allow for the evolution of materials that are not just specific for one context but are transferable and pedagogically robust would be advantegous. It is perhaps a cliched conclusion but what I see happening is not revolution against globally published materials.Technology and connectivity has evolved the way teachers look at adaption and supplimentation and is a massive step towards empowering both teachers and learners.

References

Graves, K. (2000) Designing language courses: a guide for teachers, London, Heinle & Heinle.

Maley, A. (2011) Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment. In: Tomlinson, B. (2011) Materials development in language teaching, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Mcgrath, I. (2002) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press