The second seminar looked at how when professional material developers create materials the process is often chaotic, ad hoc and spontaneous. In his state-of-the-art article, Tomlinson (2012) mentions two studies that looked at how writers actually write materials. Many reported relying on creative inspiration and repertoire and made no reference to theory-driven principles. However, some writers do begin with a set of principles prior to developing materials and the purpose of this seminar was to establish our own principles, which will guide us as we create materials for this module. To begin the process, we organised ourselves into groups and wrote sentences on strips of paper that began ‘materials should be’. Afterwards, we had to narrow down our slips of paper to twelve. The outcome was an agreed set of universal principles applicable to any learning context. This is what we came up with:
Materials should …..
- be authentic and relevant to real life
- be motivating
- challenge students
- be well presented
- be meaningful and accessible
- encourage communication
- help learners achieve stated outcomes and goals
- appeal to different types of learners
- give multiple examples
- be adaptable
- be current
- be varied
Unsurprisingly, some principles were repeated. Here is a complete list of everything that was written and the number of times each one was mentioned:
Bibliography:
Tomlinson, B. (2012) Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (02): pp. 143-179