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16 Principles for ELT Material Design + 5 Principles I value

What principles will materials writers underpin the design of ELT materials?

What principles do materials writers take into account?

According to Tomlinson (2011), some material writers rely on their repertoire and inspiration, whereas others establish the principles first before they start designing the materials. What I am interested in the principles for the material development proposed by Tomlison is that he applies Second Language Acquisitions (SLA) research to outlining the principles.

Those principles based on SLA research include the notions:

• Exposing to a rich, meaningful and comprehensible input
• Engaging both effectively and cognitively
• Achieving communicative competence
• Being metal resources
• Benefiting from noticing salient features of the input and discovering
• Opportunities to use language for communicative purposes

(Tomlinson, 2011: 7)

From my experience learning English as Foreign Language (EFL) in Japan, I have used a lot of ELT books including published coursebooks in a school, grammar practice materials and vocabulary books. As a learner of English, my favourite materials were (and are still) always incorporating authentic input and intercultural differences between Japan and other counties. However, when I taught English in a secondary school, I realised that students’ preferences for materials vary. While some students were fond of deductive approach materials, others were fond of challenging materials. As a result of the fact, I think that flexibility plays an important role in the principles for materials design.

In the week-2 lecture, we looked at mainly the principles of ELT materials, which underpin the materials design. In the beginning of the lecture, there was interesting discussion in terms of experienced materials writers’ intuition as designing materials. One of my peers commented that what we have learnt in our lives teaches us what should be learnt and taught. This raised some questions; ‘Can experienced teacher make good materials?’ and ‘Dose materials writers need to work with teachers?’

I personally believe that experienced teachers can make effective materials as meeting their students’ needs. In my context, Okinawa, there is a supplemented English notebook designed by secondary English teachers in Okinawa along with the coursebook approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education. The supplemented notebook’s text sentences and illustration is contextualised to Okinawan culture so that students can not only feel familiarity with the material, but also get a sense of English use in their context.

In the seminar, we also made a group and came up with our own principles for materials design. First, we worked on alone to write down ‘Materials should be/ should not be…’. After that, we organised and selected 12 principles within the group. In addition to our 12 principles, each group took into consideration other principles proposed by researchers: 12 design principles from Tomlinson (2011), 11 from Bell & Gower (1998), 6 from Nunan (1988), 4 from Hall in: Hidalgo, A.C., Hall, D., et al. (eds), and 7 from Hutchinson & Waters (1987).

As the final selection, our group reduced the principles down to 16 design principles.

I personally value 5 principles most (4 from our group’s selection and 1 from other group’s selection).

1. Materials should help learners to develop confidence (Tomlinson, 2011)
2. Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use (Tomlinson, 2011)
3. Materials should be culturally relevance
4. Materials should stretch/challenge the learners
5. Materials should build intercultural awareness

The reason I value on these 5 principles stems from my experience learning and teaching English in Japan. As an EFL context, there are only a few opportunities that secondary school students interact with English speakers in authentic situation. Therefore, it is beneficial for students being exposed to authentic language use through materials in order to fill with rich input so that they could develop confidence using the language. As I mentioned above, flexibility is important to meet a variety of students’ needs. Furthermore, students could feel familiarity with culturally relevance and contextualised materials. They are also interested in other cultures. Thus, cultivating intercultural awareness in students through materials is crucial too.

In Japan, generally speaking, learning English is to pass university entrance examinations as the main priority. We, as secondary English teachers, tend to choose and make the materials according to what students should learn to pass the exams. However, I believe that materials based on the 5 principles I value can be beneficial for students when they encounter reality of English use. However, those are not the only possible principles of materials design. There are more that we need to take into account. In order to do so, collaboration work between teachers could be vital. By sharing our own ideas, we could come up with ideal principles for our students.

Manami

Reference

Bell, J. & Gower, R. (1998) Writing course materials for the world: a great compromise. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.116-129. (Taken from pgs: 107-8)

Hall in: Hidalgo, A.C., Hall, D., et al. (eds). Getting Started: Materials Writers on Materials Writing. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre. pp.172-86.

Hutchinson, T. & Waters, A. (1987) English for Specific Purposes: A Learning-centred Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jolly, D., & Bolitho, R. (2011) A framework for materials writing. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials development in language teaching (2nd ed., pp. 107– 134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nunan, D. (1988) Principles for designing language teaching materials. Guidelines 10 pp.1-24.

Tomlinson, B. (2011) Materials development in language teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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