In the third session of ELT Materials, we broached the topic of materials evaluation. To some extent this is what we as teachers are required to do every day as we choose which materials (books, games, videos or whatever form they may come in) we’re going to use with our students. Often these are decisions based on intuition, which in turn is based on experience of using the materials or similar previously in our careers, recommendations from colleagues. Like many of my coursemates, and many other EFL teachers I am prescribed coursebooks by my institution. Although the coursebooks were produced by teachers and writers within the company and with our specific students in mind (which should mean that they are tailored to our students’ needs as well as those of the teachers), the feeling within the department is that they aren’t really fit for purpose. The topics covered sometimes  over-complicate the language point or skill being taught, and the teachers’ notes are frequently unhelpful. These books are used across the company and it seems that our department isn’t the only one that has doubts over their effectiveness. I don’t know if an in-house formal evaluation of the coursebooks has ever been done, but if not it’s a real shame. It is quite surprising when it seems so obvious to me that materials evaluation is a tremendously important part of teaching; a view that seems to be shared by many of my colleagues and coursemates.

This week, after researching the topic of materials evaluation and evaluation frameworks, Jade, Abdullah and I created our own, used it to evaluate English Unlimited B1+ Intermediate and presented our approach and findings to the class. Coming from vastly different teaching contexts, we decided to see how far a universal framework was possible. Although the research we read about suggested that a universal framework was not possible or useful, we were really interested in identifying evaluation criteria we all thought were important, independent of our different contexts. That is not to say that we failed to recognise the importance of context on such exercises. Our recognition of the importance of context is found in the formulation of the framework itself and its requirement for more qualitative responses from evaluators. Check out the presentation of our framework in the video below (2 parts).

References

Johnson, K., et al. (2008) A step forward: investigating expertise in materials evaluation. ELT Journal 62 (2): pp.157-163.

McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and Methods in ELT: a Teacher’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.

McGrath, I. (2013) Teaching Materials and the Roles of EFL/ESL Teachers: Practice and Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

Roberts, J. T. (1996) Demystifying materials evaluation. System 24 (3): pp. 375-389.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (02): pp. 143-179.

Tomlinson, B. (2013) Materials evaluation. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury. pp.21-48.