A framework for materials creation

In Tomlinson’s Materials development in language teaching, Jolly and Bolitho (2011) provide teachers with a framework for writing materials. There are seven steps:

Step 1: Identification of a need or problem: This could be discovered by carrying out a needs analysis and knowing why your students are learning English. For example, if they need English for their work or studies. Alternatively, a language problem could present itself during the course of a lesson, which needs further practice.

Step 2: Exploration of the need or problem: Here the teacher explores the language point, function or need, identified in the first step. To do this, a teacher might consult a corpus or a grammar book, or in my case books such as Tricia Hedge’s Teaching and learning in the language classroom or Richards and Renandya’s Methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice.

Step 3: Contextual Realisation: Now the teacher chooses the context of the materials. In Developing Materials for Language Teaching, Tomlinson suggests a process for selecting texts which I will write about below. One of the main benefits of teachers writing their own materials, is that, teachers can choose the contexts that relate to their students in a way that a coursebook cannot.

Step 4: Pedagogical realisation: This is where the teacher plans the exercises and activities that meet the need identified in step one. This stage also includes careful planning of instructions. Here teachers may want to consult a typology of activities and tasks to ensure variety in the materials they create.

Step 5: Production of materials: The appearance of materials matters as well-presented materials can help learner motivation. At this point, a teacher may wish to use a desktop publishing programme.

Step 6 and 7: Use and Evaluation. Students use the materials in class and the teacher decides if the objectives identified in step one were met. Evaluation of the materials will decide if the materials can be used again unchanged, or after modification, or if they need to be discarded.

Tomlinson (2013) believes that frameworks should also be principled and driven by an understanding of how people learn a language. Principles suggested by Hall (cited by Tomlinson) include:

  • The need to communicate
  • The need for long-term goals
  • The need for authenticity
  • The need for student-centredness

Tomlinson goes on to outline a text-driven framework for materials development.

Text-driven framework

Step 1: Create a library of texts: First the teacher finds and/or creates a library of texts that have the potential to engage students affectively. He suggests it is easier to select a text and then decide the teaching point than vice versa.

Step 2: Select a text: At first, this should be done using a set of criteria until the process becomes intuitive.  His criteria are as follows:

  • Does the text engage you cognitively and affectively?
  • Is the text likely to engage most of your learners in the same way?
  • Does the text connect to your learners’ lives in some way?
  • Does the text connect to your learners’ schematic knowledge?
  • Will learners be able to make a mental representation of the text?
  • Is the text likely to evoke different responses from learners?
  • Does the text present an achievable linguistic challenge?
  • Does the text present an achievable cognitive challenge?
  • Is the emotional level suitable for your learners?
  • Is the text likely to add to the personal development of you learners?
  • Does the text help expose learners to a range of genres?
  • Does the text help expose learners to a range of text types?

Some of the principles that we used to evaluate coursebooks can be applied to texts:

  • Will learners find the texts engaging/ motivating?
  • Is the text authentic?
  • Is the text culturally sensitive? Does it help build intercultural awareness?
  • Is the text related to learners’ lives?
  • Is the topic up to date?
  • Is the text suitably challenging?

Tomlinson suggests giving each criteria marks out of five and not selecting any text that does not score four for each question. Finding suitable texts using Tomlinson criteria is quite challenging but not impossible. To make it easier, I might suggest answering each question yes or no and then using texts that score no less than ten out of twelve for Tomlinson’s criteria or five out of six for our criteria. Tomlinson concedes that it is unlikely a text will engage all the learners in a class, but the aim is to engage most of the learners in a lesson and all of the learners at some point over a course. He recommends using texts that relate to universal themes of birth, growing up, going to school, starting a career, falling in love, getting married and dying. However, he warns that dying is a taboo subject in some countries. I would also add that the theme of falling in love might not be appropriate if your learners’ culture favours arranged marriages.

Step 3: The teacher re-engages with the text in order to design the relevant activities which will help the learners engage with the text in the same way.

Step 4:  After re-engaging with the text the teacher creates ‘readiness activities’. These are similar to warmers and schema activating activities normally employed before introducing a text. The emphasis is on getting learners to think and include activities such as visualizing, drawing, miming, expressing opinions, telling anecdotes, sharing knowledge and making predictions. Interestingly, Tomlinson suggests lower-level groups can use their L1 for this stage.

Step 5: The teacher then thinks of experiential activities. These are activities the learners do while they are reading such as visualising, that do not require learners to write or talk. Alternatively, they could be activities that encourage learners to create a text such as making predictions and writing endings.

Step 6: Post-reading activities help learners to articulate their experience of the text in order to deepen their representations of it. They do not test their comprehension of the text.

Step 7: Learners use the text for language production based on their representation of the text and by connecting the text to their own lives and experience in some way.

Step 8: Revisiting the text and doing interpretation activities that develop critical and creative thinking skills or awareness tasks, where learners notice a particular linguistic feature of the text

As you can see, step three in Jolly and Bolitho’s framework corresponds to step two in Tomlinson’s framework, and steps three to eight in Tomlinson’s framework correspond to step four in Jolly and Bolitho’s framework. Tomlinson concedes that it isn’t necessary to include all of his steps, but he suggests the order of steps should remain unchanged. I think combining the two frameworks with our own criteria for evaluating materials will prove to be a useful resource.

Bibliography

Jolly, D., R, Bolitho (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nded) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tomlinson, B. (2013) Developing principled frameworks for materials development. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to toolbar