When I was a newly qualified teacher, fresh off my month-long CELTA course, my approach to materials was simple. I worked at a school which provided a weekly syllabus based around its textbook of choice but with heavy supplementation built in. By following it, I quickly became familiar with the mainstream course books of the day and the common-or-garden supplements available in teachers’ resources rooms everywhere. I kept a photocopy of everything I ever taught from, spent a lot of my tiny salary on those plastic fish wallets and periodically spent an afternoon maintaining my extensive filing system. My teaching experience being limited to just that one school, I failed to realise that staff rooms everywhere are, for the most part, similarly equipped.

Stage two in my career involved international travel. I worked in Libya, Colombia and Italy before eventually returning home. Travelling light never came naturally to me but the years when the tally of flights I took reached double figures did it. My new approach to teaching materials involved equal measures of scanning and laminating, the former for its portability and the latter in the belief that if some piece of paper was worth carrying around, it was worth taking the durable version, even if there was a high risk of said version being rendered useless on the loss of one crucial piece.

I eventually returned to Brighton to start my MA studies and whilst on that course I taught at two different language schools. Life was busy, I was always running from one establishment to the other, and a third phase in my personal approach to materials was ushered in. I was a more confident teacher with a good few years of classroom experience behind me, an increasingly solid theoretical understanding of what I was doing in the classroom and a growing realisation that the type of ‘materials’ that it’s worth carrying around are not the type you can file away or laminate but the ones that exist in your head. The activities, tasks, games, routines that you can pull out the bag at a second’s notice in response to something that’s happened in the classroom. That’s not to say I had no further need for published materials – just I no longer felt the need to ensure they were always to hand.

I imagine many teachers can identify similar stages in their own careers and that any teacher reading this would have a mental picture in their heads of what ‘materials’ means. But how is that term defined by those for whom materials design is a field of academic study as well as a practical activity? Harwood ¹ talks about texts and tasks: ‘texts presented to the learner in paper-based, audio or visual form and/or exercises and activities built around such texts’. In his state-of-the-art article, Tomlinson ² includes videos, games, websites and mobile phone interactions under the banner of ‘materials for language learning’ along with those which might more traditionally be placed there, such as course books, flash cards and graded readers. In his 2011 book, ³ he includes instructions given by the teacher and conversations between the learners. This prompts a question: what criteria are used when making this categorisation?

Tomlinson says ‘anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language’ qualifies, and it’s easy to see how this applies to printed materials. Both a course book and a magazine, whilst they differ in how the creators intended them to be used, can be similarly exploited by a teacher for the purpose of language instruction or made use of by a student without formal guidance. His definition does not always result in such clear boundaries though. Consider the case of cuisenaire rods. Are these materials, or do they only become materials when combined with the activities teachers plan to make use of them? Are they simply coloured wooden sticks without the teachers’ expertise?  Similarly, are conversations occurring between the learners always ‘material’ or are they only so when their contents are capitalised on by the teacher?

What does this mean for teachers who favour a materials-light approach? Scott Thornbury ⁴, in a blog post on dogme, explains this approach with this quote:

“We are looking for ways of exploiting the learning opportunities offered by the raw material of the classroom, that is the language that emerges from the needs, interests, concerns and desires of the people in the room”

If we take Tomlinson’s ‘conversations between the learners’ as being an example of ‘the raw material of the classroom’, this raises the issue of why some teachers feel the need to distinguish what they do in the classroom with the term ‘materials-light’ and whether the frameworks used to design and evaluate printed materials can be applied in the same way to these raw materials. Hopefully this blog will be a place for me to document the fourth stage of my relationship with English language teaching materials where I have the chance to become better able to answer these questions.

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