Principles/Frameworks vs Spontaneity/Inspiration:

The topic of our last seminar was ‘Principles and Frameworks for ELT Materials Design’. To start with our discussion centred around the question whether ELT material designers do and/or should base their work on a set of underlying principles and follow a framework during the design process. Apparently a lot of experienced designers deny or are not aware of being guided in that way but instead believe that they use their inspiration and intuition (see Tomlinson, 212: 152/153). In our class we agreed with some findings by Johnson (2003 in Tomlinson, 2012: 153) which indicate that as a novice materials designer you might want to have some guidelines to follow and that it is therefore useful to study how designers move along the process of creating new materials. As we are all potential future designers of ELT materials, Paul thought it would be a good idea for us to reflect on our own personal beliefs about what we think makes for good teaching materials.

What are the principles that guide materials design?

To help us with the reflective process we were given an exercise which made us first list our own personal principles, then compare these with those of other members in our group as well as between groups. Finally we were given some statements by experts in the field of materials development to compare with the ones we had come up with as a class.

 

 

 

 

 

The exercise was interesting and thought-provoking. At first I thought that I had worked out my principles over the course of my studies on the MA so far and during the recent process of essay-writing. I suddenly found that my beliefs about effective teaching/materials had very much become coloured by my studies of SLA last year and the learning theories I had immersed myself in over the last few months. What struck me most was how much closer to the practice of teaching some of my colleagues’ principles were (especially those of the diploma students)! I particularly loved the straightforwardness of one of my colleague’s statements: ‘Materials should be teachable’. How simple and to the point! Obviously what is and isn’t ‘teachable’ is very subjective. But however much I might be in love with a particular theory or convinced by someone’s research findings, in the end effective materials are about whether I can teach with them in my particular class tomorrow.

 

When I first started the MA I was exasperated by how theoretical and removed from the classroom a lot of the research seemed and I spent a lot of time and effort ‘fighting’ theory. However, over the last few months I have completely fallen in love with theory and could endlessly keep reading, philosophising and thinking. It’s about time that te714 brought me back down to earth!

All this is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of agreement amongst all of our statements. Most of us seemed to think that materials should be engaging, interesting, learner-centred, flexible, varied, context-sensitive to name but a few.

 

 

I suppose the exercise showed us that even ‘principles’ are not as static as you might think. They are, of course, subjective but they can and need to be continuously reviewed first by ‘being brought to the surface’ of your own thinking and also by being discussed with other professionals.

‘Silent Period’

To finish I would like to reflect on one more thing. One of my principles did not make it into my group’s final selection: ‘Materials should encourage/leave space for a silent period’. Until the discussion last Thursday I hadn’t realised how important this is to me at the moment. When I first came across the notion of a ‘silent period’ in SLA last year I thought about it quite literally as in some learners needing a period of listening to a new language before they can start talking (this has been observed in particular with children and has been seen in connection with first language acquisition, which of course has an extensive ‘silent’ period before ‘proper’ language is produced starting from around age 1).

Reflecting on my own process of learning since the beginning of my course at uni I have started to think of it more as times when you do not directly engage with new learning material or even times when you are engaged in an activity that is completely unrelated to the subject you are learning about. I have found, for example, that over the course of last summer when I completely disconnected from anything to do with ELT, somehow everything had become much clearer and at a much deeper level at the start of my second year. It’s as if my brain by being ‘left to it’ made connections ‘independently’ of conscious thought. It seems I generally need a silent period at the start of learning something new/being exposed to something unfamiliar, some time to just listen to my tutor, my peers’ ideas, to ‘read, read, read’ or to walk away from it completely. I don’t like the pressure of having to create something while I haven’t got a grip on it/how it fits in yet. It’s as if my brain needs to put on a brake so that it can organise my thoughts, internalise new knowledge and make connections to what I already know. This has made me wonder whether I give my students time for that to happen…

References:

Johnson, K. (2003) Designing Language Teaching Tasks, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Tomlinson, B. (2011) Materials Development in Language Teaching, 2nd Ed, Cambridge Language Teaching Library, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) “Materials Development for Language Learning and Teaching”, Language Teaching, 45 (02) pp. 143-179.