What do I look for in teaching materials?

The first lesson of Language Teaching Materials has brought up so many different discussions on materials development, from evaluation, production, and adaptation of textbooks to wider issues regarding the education industry or the representation of the real world in these resources. However, not until looking back at all the in-class mind maps did I realise that my view of materials development was skewed considerably towards being “creative”. This might come from the fact that I was lucky enough to have the freedom to choose, combine, and adapt teaching materials at nearly every step of my career (except for the few hours of observed teaching practice within my six-month Teaching Pedagogy course in Vietnam).

Teaching privately, although under a language centre, provided me with the opportunity to build courses from the ground up and exchange ideas and opinions with other teachers. One of the tasks involved was choosing and adapting the materials for an upper-intermediate IELTS course. Of course, as IELTS course books are now readily available among a wide range of publishers, the quickest way for us was to follow a single book. However, for the sake of the centre being “original” and “marketable”, we were told to mix different sources and create something new and exciting. Whether or not that decision was appropriate is still debatable, for a classmate once told me that choosing a course book not designed by the publisher who created the test in the first place means “undermining the effort of your students”. Nevertheless, I believe that it is beneficial for teachers to experience first-hand the challenge of building your own teaching materials. As the topics of “creativity”, “authenticity”, and “adaptation” came up quite frequently in my group discussions, I am going to focus on those three points in this post.

Creativity

Tomlinson (2012: 152) mentioned how some researchers (Prowse 1998; Johnson 2003) claimed that the working process of many materials writer, even the more experienced ones, required “inspiration”. This focus on creativity was emphasised by Prowse (2011: 173, in Tomlinson 2012) as “coursebook writing is a creative rather than a mechanical process”. These studies on how materials writers work did not present any underlying principles or set of criteria based on which books are designed. However, according to Tomlinson, it would be more appropriate to have a principled framework for developing materials because those principles could guide the writing process and justify the application of the materials in certain contexts. Studies which have shown principles for materials development include Flores (1995), McGrath (2002), and Harwood (2010).

In retrospect, when creating (or adapting to be more precise) my own teaching materials, I did not follow any kind of rules for materials development. From my experience of using pre-designed coursebooks, I pick whatever texts or activities I personally found useful and arranged them in a logical way into the syllabus. Then, as time went by and the coursebooks being used in real classrooms, other teachers and I all found something wrong with certain parts of the materials and made changes accordingly. As a consequence, at that time, I believed that following a set of rules at the beginning for creating materials was pointless because almost all teachers would eventually modify the materials to their needs at some point. However, one thing I noticed was that it was extremely challenging to create the first version of the coursebook and also to agree on later changes because everyone only justified their choices based on anecdotal evidence. This made me question my own view on materials development and wonder whether what I did was right or not.

On a side note, I once participated in a Chinese calligraphy lesson and the teacher asked everyone in the classroom that day what they considered the most important thing in any art form – whether it is music, dance, or in this case calligraphy. Unsurprisingly, what the students came up with revolved around “creativity” and “inspiration”. Then, the teacher rejected all of those answers and told us that all arts need a starting point upon which the artists can build their piece – the “rules”. Personally, I consider any kind of work with a creative aspect to be “art” and also believe that enhancing the impact of one’s work without a good foundation can be potentially disastrous. However, on a spectrum of “creativity” on one side and “principles” on the other, I wonder where materials development could fit in.

Authenticity

From the discussion on “creativity”, my focus has shifted towards the issue of “authenticity” because this aspect of materials development can broaden or limit the extent to which teachers can be creative with their resources. According to Tomlinson (2012: 162), “authentic text” is built “in order to communicate rather than to teach” and “authentic task” requires learners to communicate to “achieve an outcome, rather than practice the language”. While this definition of authenticity might be different from that of other researchers, it removes the limitation of selecting only native-speaker-produced materials or challenging original texts. This means teachers will be allowed more freedom to create new materials or simplify the original content to suit the level of their students. I totally agree with Tomlinson’s view because arguing whether or not something is “original” or “authentic”, in the sense that it has not been modified, seems rather pointless. Take a reading text for example – as long as it was published, the text has probably been edited for a specific group of audience. Thus, what matters to me is how teachers and students use the information or the language content from the text to facilitate meaningful communication in the classroom.

Adaptation/ Localisation

Lastly, the point of developing materials is that teachers can adapt them to their own teaching context and create suitable lessons for their learners. This goal of materials development supports the trend of humanising language teaching materials, which aims “to help learners to personalise, localise and make meaningful their experience of the target language” (Tomlinson 2012: 163). However, from my learning experience in Vietnam, most of the time “localisation” was misunderstood or just used superficially to include some cultural points into the national textbooks. For example, these are the excerpts from Vietnam’s national English textbooks:

(English 10: 25, in Nguyen 2007)

(English 11: 140, in Nguyen 2007)

As can be seen, the activities or tasks presented in these “localised” textbooks were created by simply inserting some Vietnamese names or local events into the task descriptions. The nature of the tasks remained the same compared to older or original textbooks. As stated by Nguyen (2007: 31), such activities failed to “provide a chance for genuine exchange of information or opinions”. Therefore, in order to have a successful adaptation or localisation of teaching materials, I believe that it is important for teachers to understand the underlying principles and the true nature of their task. Otherwise, we will end up with what Vietnamese people called as “Bình mới rượu cũ” (Old wine in new bottles). This point is ever more relevant as some teachers might be adopting new technologies into their teaching for the sake of novelty without recognising the real potential of these advances.

In conclusion, the discussions on materials development has proved to be remarkably complicated with issues ranging from teachers’ creative decisions, authenticity in materials, to the adaptation of materials in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, it seems crucial that this process is based on frameworks and principles so that teachers and materials writers can work on a more grounded foundation.

Finally, I would like to end this post on a slightly unrelated note. The 84-year-old musician Quincy Jones, in a recent highly controversial interview, stated the following:

The song is the power; the singer is the messenger. The greatest singer in the world cannot save a bad song. I learned that 50 years ago, and it’s the single greatest lesson I ever learned as a producer. If you don’t have a great song, it doesn’t matter what else you put around it. (Marchese 2018)

If language teachers considered the task of producing materials as an art, could a detailed and helpful textbook elevate an inexperienced teacher to a higher level of performance? Vice versa, could an experienced teacher give a meaningful lesson if there was something fundamentally wrong with the materials in the first place? These are the questions I want to find answers for during and after this course.

References

Flores, M. M. (1995). Developing materials for tertiary level expository writing. In A. C. Hidalgo, D. Hall & G. M. Jacobs(eds.): 57–66.

Harwood, N. (ed.) (2010a). Materials in ELT: Theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, K. (2003). Designing language teaching tasks. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marchese, D. (2018) In Conversation: Quincy Jones. Vulture [online]. Available: <http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html> [Accessed Feb 10, 2018].

McGrath, I. (2002). Materials evaluation and design for language teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Nguyen T.T.M. (2007) Textbook evaluation: the case of English textbooks currently in use at Vietnam’s upper-secondary school. Unpublished research report. Singapore: RELC SEAMEO.

Prowse, P. (1998). How writers write: Testimony from authors. In B. Tomlinson(ed.): 130–145.

Prowse, P. (2011). How writers write: Testimony from authors. In B. Tomlinson(ed.): 151–173.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45(2): 143-179.