The first session of the teaching materials module asked the question: What are materials?  According to Tomlinson (2012) materials are “anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language” such as coursebooks, videos, graded readers, flash cards, games, websites, and mobile phone interactions and can refer to both texts and tasks.

Next, we looked at issues such as; the advantages and disadvantages of using coursebooks, the relationship between teachers, the materials they use and students, the role of teachers in exploiting materials, the future of materials in ELT, and the benefits of creating your own materials.

We were also asked to jot down three aims that we would like to meet through studying the module. For me they are:

• To improve my own material creation.
• To develop my ability to adapt coursebooks.
• To have a clear rationale behind the selection of materials, because, at the moment, it’s based on intuition and a sense of what I think might ‘work’ and what I feel comfortable teaching.

The last part of the seminar took me rather by surprise. Each group was handed a set a Cuisenaire rods. For me, Cuisenaire rods were the stuff of EFL folklore. I didn’t really believe anyone actually used them. In seven years of teaching, I’d only once seen a teacher carry them into class, who as it happened looked rather like Father Christmas. It would appear that my view of the rods was misguided. Several of the other teachers reported using them and came up with various suggestions of how to exploit them. For example, you can use the rods to teach the passive, prepositions, timelines, morphemes, word stress and comparatives. You can even use the rods to tell a story. Intrigued by this revelation, I went back to Scrivener to rediscover what had obviously passed me by.

Scrivener (2005) in Learning Teaching concedes that the rods “have seemed to have acquired a semi-mystical status and to carry your box of rods into class is almost like wearing a sort of badge of EFL eliteness.”
The rods were originally used in primary maths teaching and were later used by Caleb Gattegno, a maths and language teacher, who created the Silent Way method in the 1960s. Scrivener describes the rods as an ‘excellent and versatile classroom tool’ and like a blackboard are a visual aid as well as being tangible. Therefore, they appeal to visual and kinesthetic learners. Scrivener lists a number of points regarding the rods:
1) As well as some of the ideas from the seminar I’ve already mentioned, the rods can represent things such as objects, intonation patterns, abstract ideas, and money graphs. The list is endless.
2) He sees the lack of decorative detail as one of their benefits as it allows them to be ‘turned into anything else’.
3) He then touches on probably what made me apprehensive about using them, which is that students may find them childish. However, again he sees the ‘slight hint of childhood toy’ as a good thing as it frees adults of the ‘adult behaviour expected of them’. It certainly helped break the ice in the seminar and gave us the impression that the seminars were going to be fun and interesting. Scrivener suggests that the rods are only childish if you do childish things with them, building towers should, therefore, be avoided!
So how should one go about using them if they’ve never used them before? Scrivener recommends just taking a box into class but without any plan to use them. At some point, if a student asks the meaning of a word, Scrivener suggests explaining the word using the rods rather than the board. Although these days many teachers use Goggle images to convey vocabulary items, the rods may still be useful for explaining concepts and not every classroom will have Google images set up on the interactive whiteboard and in some schools, the use of phones in class is forbidden.
I find the idea of using them as a visual accompaniment to a story as the most inventive. For example, you can use the rods to elicit a daily routine. The block represents a person. Then you lay the block on another block and elicit the word ‘bed’. Next, you show the block getting up, catching a bus and so on.
Scrivener also suggests a few exercises to experiment with in the classroom, such as building up ‘a complete rod picture’ to convey a lexical group such as kitchen words, street words, stations words or office words and making a short rod story to exemplify the use of ‘going to’. Some of his suggestions seem quite challenging. For instance, he suggests using the rods to teach the meaning of words such as annually, reliable, and comfortable. I think the best use for the rods would be to hand them over to the students and ask them to use the rods to describe something. For example, they could use the rods to illustrate a language item or something personal like their hometown, in which case, building towers shouldn’t be avoided!

Bibliography:

Scrivener, J. (2005) Learning Teaching. Oxford: Macmillian Education

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