Materials Development for Language Learning
teachers to write materials in workshops in, for example, Belgium, Botswana, Luxem- bourg, Mauritius, Malaysia, the Seychelles, Spain, Turkey, and Vietnam.
Hidalgo, Hall, and Jacobs (1995) published accounts of how a number of materials writers in Southeast Asia wrote materials for projects or publication. In their introduc- tion, the editors give a fascinating account of how their book was written and they reveal the guide that the 20 writers were given. Most of the 21 questions were about practical matters (e.g. “Did you use computers?” (p. xi)) but 21 included “What overall principles do you believe to be of the greatest relevance to authors in the Philippines or elsewhere in SE Asia?” (p. xi). In the revised guidelines written after the writers submitted their drafts, the writers were asked to highlight “Key principles which apply to a range of sit- uations and students” (xiii). Although (as we will reveal below) some of the writers, in their published accounts, refer to being influenced by principles of language acquisition, many of them focused more on decisions about the book syllabus and exercise types (e.g.
Richards, 1995), on developing objectives (e.g. Sundara Rajan, 1995), on deciding which pedagogic approach(es) to use (e.g. Pascasio, 1995), and on providing a detailed account of what the writers actually did from conception to publication of the materials. Many of them also reported how they replicated previous materials they had written, made use of activity types that had “worked” for them before and relied heavily upon creative inspiration at the time of writing.
The experienced materials writers invited to contribute accounts of how they typi- cally write their materials to Prowse (1998) report similar approaches to the writers in Hidalgo, Hall, and Jacobs (1995). They tend to focus on the creative process and stress, for example, the importance of thinking as you write, of how, “Ideas come to you at any time” during collaboration (p. 130), of thinking about their materials whilst doing some- thing else, of trying out ideas and writing many drafts and of being inspired. Some of the writers refer to prior planning and (as just like many of the writers in Hidalgo, Hall, and Jacobs, 1995) of thinking about objectives and of the target learners. However, none of them refers to developing a principled framework or establishing principled criteria before starting to write. It seems from the two publications about the process of writing materials referred to here that materials writers are very much influenced by existing conventions, by typical topics, by typical activity types, and by typical teaching points, and that not much thought is given to whether or not these accepted conventions are likely to facilitate language acquisition and development. Obviously, this is not true of all materials writers but we have experienced working on projects where full time materials writers have immediately thought about where they can insert a multiple-choice activ- ity or a fill in the blank activity or a sentence completion activity rather than thinking about whether these conventional activities are likely to lead to beneficial outcomes for the learners. Whilst we understand the importance of materials achieving face validity we have been critical of the overreliance on conventional coursebook activities (Tomlin- son, Dat, Masuhara, & Rubdy, 2001; Masuhara, Haan, Yi, & Tomlinson, 2008; Tomlin- son & Masuhara, 2013 and Tomlinson, 2016b) on the grounds that they lack theoretical and research justification. Tomlinson (2016b) proposes research projects to evaluate the contribution of such conventional activities as multiple choice, fill in the blank, sentence completion, sentence transformation and dialogue repetition to language acquisition and development.
Johnson (2003) focused on how expertise is manifested in task design. He studied the literature on task-based teaching but could find nothing that revealed the proce- dures which writers follow in actually writing a task. So he set up an experiment at the
5 The Development of Materials
University of Lancaster in which eight expert materials writers and eight novice mate- rials writers were asked to “design an activity involving the function of describing peo- ple” (p. 4). He asked the writers to think aloud as they were designing their task. Their
“concurrent verbalizations” were recorded and later analyzed. Not surprisingly, they revealed that the experts all wrote their materials in very different ways from the novices.
The experts, for example, envisaged possibilities in concrete detail (presumably through visualization as we do), were prepared to abandon tasks they had spent time developing (something we both find very difficult to do), designed in opportunistic ways (we like to believe we tend to design in principled ways but are prepared to be opportunistic too), instantiated as they wrote (as we do), showed learner / context sensitivity (as we hope we do), and used repertoire a lot (we are not sure if we do this as we try to repeat principled stages but manifest them in different ways). Interestingly there was no explicit reference by the experts to theory driven principles (something we do articulate explicitly before starting to write). This lack of reference to principles is true also of Prowse (2011), in which he revisits his report of how writers write from Prowse (1998) and adds the reflec- tions of a number of writers of recently published coursebooks on how they typically set about writing their materials. As in Hidalgo, Hall, and Jacobs (1995) and Prowse (1998) these writers also focus on the creative, inspirational, instantaneous aspect of materials writing (“coursebook writing is a creative rather than a mechanical process” (p. 173)) and on making considerable use of their prior experience of teaching and of writing.
Again, none of these writers refers to making use of principled frameworks or criteria.
Our own preference (which we will elaborate later in this chapter) is for “an approach to materials writing in which the ongoing evaluation of the developing materials is driven by a set of agreed principles, both universal principles applicable to any learning context anywhere and local criteria specific to the target learning context(s)” (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 153).
Hadfield (2014) provides a detailed account of how she wrote activities forMotivating Learning(Hadfield & Dornyei, 2013). First, though, she reviews the literature on how writers write (the same publications we have referred to above plus Sundara Rajan’s (1995) report of a five-stage procedure) and discovers a tension between the “recur- sive and messy process” (p. 323) reported by writers and the “orderly, linear progres- sion” “governed by a system of frameworks and principles” (p. 323) that seems to be advocated by the theorists. One theorist referred to by Hadfield though concludes that,
“Task design is a complex, highly recursive and often messy process” that does not “entail orderly progressions through checklists of guiding principles” (Samuda, 2005, p. 243).
We would consider ourselves both theorists and practitioners and when we write mate- rials we are guided by explicit task-specific principles and by a flexible framework but we also make full use of the resources of the word processor to jump backwards and for- wards, to delete, to modify, and to add. Because we typically follow a text-driven frame- work, most of our ideas are stimulated by the core text we are using to drive the unit rather than any predetermined activity types. So it is both a principled and an organic process.
In order to achieve a complete account of her writing process, Hadfield kept a log as she was writing the activities forMotivating Learning. On p. 334 she summarizes the processes recorded in the log in a table that is divided into sub-processes (e.g. “Gen- erating Ideas”) and micro-processes (e.g. “brainstorming”). The sub-processes she lists are “Generating Ideas,” “Dialoguing” (with herself as a teacher or a student), “Imagining Scenario” (i.e. visualizing the activity in action in the classroom), “Scoping Materials”
Materials Development for Language Learning
(i.e. sketching an outline), “Trying Out” (“on self or others”), “Writing Materials,” and
“Writing Rubrics.” Hadfield gives examples of these processes at work in developing her materials and then in her conclusion decides that her approach was usefully “chaotic”
but “ordered” too. She also emphasizes the need for “flexibility and responsiveness”
(p. 347), for constantly asking yourself questions (e.g. “Does this involve any issues and problems?” (p. 349) and in particular for making use of a “tacit framework of principles”
(p. 253) to inform decisions. The processes that Hadfield followed in developing her materials were obviously useful and would be worth replicating for novice writers.
However, you cannot teach materials writing. What we do on our courses is to raise awareness of the principles of language acquisition and of classroom learning, to help participants to both refine their tacit frameworks and to develop explicit principles, criteria, and frameworks. The messy, chaotic and inspirational processes are then enhanced by monitored experience of actually developing materials, an experience which also helps to modify both tacit and explicit principles. You can only eventually become an effective materials developer by actually developing materials and through reflection, self-evaluation and constructive criticism.