The Complete Guide to Materials Development for Language Learning

Title: The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning / Brian Tomlinson, Hitomi Masuhara. Since 1993 we have continued our research and have published, separately and together, on issues relevant to the principles and procedures of materials development for language learning.

Materials Development So Far

Introduction

For example, the perception of materials in reﬂection can inﬂuence the subsequent use of the materials and / or the redesign of the materials. It all depends on the match between the materials and the needs, wants, and engagement of the learners using them (see Chapter 3).

Commercial Publications

Some of the papers from this conference on aspects of materials development were then published as Renandya (2003). The fact that books on materials development are now being published in revised editions is indicative of the growing demand in the ﬁeld for such publications.

Materials Development Projects

For the ﬁeld of materials development to become more credible it needs to become more empirical. Council and such institutions as NILE (the Norwich Institute for Language Education) are currently involved in materials development projects in such countries as Columbia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

Conclusion

What Do You Think?

Tomlinson (Ed.),English language teaching materials: A critical review. 1995).Principles of language learning and teaching(3rd ed.). 2016a).SLA research and materials development for language learning. 2016b).Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching (RILL) [Special issue on materials development],10(2).

Issues in Materials Development *

Textbooks

Our own view is that the debate about textbooks has been polarized in reviews of the literature. The curriculum is articulated retrospec- tively and it is likely to be much more relevant to the needs and wants of the learners.

Pedagogic Approaches

How- ever, most of the innovative core materials we know about have been on projects. There are, though, research indications of the eﬀectiveness of text-driven approaches in relation to student engagement, motivation and performance, such as Al-Busaidi and Tindle (2010); McCullugh (2010); Troncoso (2010); Heron Darici and Tomlinson (2016).

The Topic Content of Language Learning Materials

Tomlinson (Ed.),Materials development for language teaching (pp in press).Authenticity and materials development for language learning. Tomlinson (Ed.),Language acquisition and development: Studies of learners of ﬁrst and other languages(pp. 15−31).

Materials Evaluation

Do the materials look as though they are going to meet their needs and wants?). rThe validity of the materials. Is the learning they attempt to facilitate worth facilitating?). rThe reliability of the materials.

What the Early Literature Tells Us about Materials Evaluation

Unfortunately many of the checklists of evaluation criteria in the literature were speciﬁc to the context of learning and the purpose for evaluation that the writer had in mind. Most journal reviews are of speciﬁc textbooks or courses butELT Journal, for example, also publishes survey reviews of a number of current textbooks of the same subgenre.

What the Current Literature Tells Us about Materials Evaluation

In the ﬁnal chapter of the evaluation section of Tomlinson (2011), Amrani (2011) reports on current practice in publisher evaluation of materials. The evaluation of the ELT Textbook Evaluation Checklist by the three experts led to a number of suggestions for additions to the checklist.

The Principles and Procedures of Materials Evaluation Which We Recommend

Post-use (or retrospective) evaluation of the eﬀect of materials is the most revealing form of materials evaluation but it is also the least common. Do you agree that criteria need to be developed prior to the writing of materials and then used to drive the development of the materials and the evaluation of them during and after their development.

Tasks

Tomlinson (Ed.),Developing materials for language teaching(2nd ed., pp bc).Applied linguistics and materials development. Tomlinson (Ed.), Applied linguistics and materials development(pp SLA research and materials development for language learning.

Materials Adaptation

In this era of “world Englishes” (Kirkpatrick, 2010), the aura of the socio-economical, educational, cultural hegemony of the native speaker of English. The gaps between commercial coursebooks and the realities of learning EIL in various parts of the globe seem to be one of the major reasons compelling the teachers con- sciously or subconsciously to adapt and or supplement commercially published materials or develop their own materials.

What the Literature Tells Us about Materials Adaptation

Shawer (2010)—A Research Study Conducted in Colleges in the United States
Grammatosi and Harwood (2014)—A University in the United Kingdom
Guerrettaz and Johnston (2013)—A University in the United States
Bolster (2014 and 2015)—A Branch of a UK University in China
Tasseron (2017)—University in the Sultanate of Oman
Bosompem (2014)—A University in Ghana
Abdel Latif (2017)—Secondary Schools in Egypt
Loh and Renandya (2016)—Primary Schools in Singapore

How much and how often did the textbook provide genuine language acquisition and development opportunities (like Extract 4) in relation to grammar use and recogni- tion (i.e. the purpose of the grammar class). For example, three teachers respectively with 6.5 months, 2 years and more than 10 years of teaching experience said, “they never intentionally made changes to the content of the textbook.” The two teachers thought the textbook (written by Ghanaians and Nigerians) was appropriate and therefore needed no adaptation.

Adaptation—Practice and Theory

Bosompem (2014, p. 113) in Study 6 also reports, “‘the level of the students’ and ‘the standard of the learners’ are the basis for adapting textbooks for many teachers” (i.e. reason). What Kinds of Resources on Adaptation Are Available?—Teacher Education and Literature According to Graves and Garton (2014, p. 275), the contributors to their edited book pointed out “the paucity of courses in materials design and evaluation in teacher prepa- ration programmes.” Graves and Garton (2014) argue that such teacher professional development courses should weave analysis of coursebooks and how to use and adapt them into core areas such as second language acquisition, methodology and linguistics, an approach we would endorse and have advocated.

Minor Adaptation

For example, the students act out a text from the coursebook as the teacher reads it aloud as dramatically as possible. After this dramatization of the text the teacher asks the true / false questions from the coursebook as personal questions to the brothers.

The Principles and Procedures of Materials Adaptation that We Recommend

An Example of an Adaptation

Revise your letter making use of the suggestions from 8 and what you’ve learned from the letter you looked at in 9. Conclusion . rAdaptation is an inevitable and necessary procedure to ensure a match between materials and learners. rCoherence needs to be achieved between curriculum development, materials development, assessment and teacher education. Do you agree that criteria need to be developed prior to the writing of materials and then used to drive the development of the materials and the adaptation of them during and after their development?.

How Writers Write

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. 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.

Principled Development of Materials

Interestingly, Douglas (2012) analyzed six popular global coursebooks, inter- viewed some of their writers and editors, and found very little evidence (with one notable exception) of publishers and materials writers making use of the information about the use of English currently provided in accessible corpora. Tomlinson (2008a) provides critical reviews of ELT materials in use in diﬀerent parts of the world and most of its chapters make use of principles and procedures of materials development as criteria in their evaluations.

Practical Guidance to Writers in the Literature

For example in volume8(1 / 2), Rinvolucri (2003) provides practical suggestions for creative materials design and Srini- vas (2003) describes a principled approach to involving teachers on a materials development project in India, and in volume16(2) Bolitho (2015) gives some principled and practical advice on writing coursebooks. A recently formed IATEFL special interest group does now provide practical advice to materials writers and teachers on aspects of materials development.

Recommendations for Developing Materials

Create a readiness activitythat could activate the learners’ minds in relation to the topic, theme, setting, etc., of the core text. A performance activity (e.g. the students act out their continuation of the story whilst the teacher adds an oral narrative in the target language).

Task

The Process of Publishing Coursebooks

Kinds of Textbooks

Adapted coursebooks are local versions of global coursebooks either adapted by the original international publisher to suit a particular market or adapted by local experts for a ministry, institution, or publisher with the permission of the international publisher. Only books that have been approved by evaluators from the Ministry of Education can be used in the schools (e.g. Japan, Korea; see Singapore Wala, 2003a, 2003b and 2003 for details of the approval process in Singapore).

The Development Process of Coursebooks

Planning

Establishing a Writing Team and Principles

Drafting and Feedback

Production

Post-production This stage may involve

Global Coursebooks

For example, if a coursebook is written to match the needs and wants of the widest possible users, then there is a risk of trying to please everyone and satisfying no one (e.g. the content may be perceived as safe, bland and irrelevant for speciﬁc users). Instead, what prevails seems to be the perceptions and opinions of experts, regional representatives, highly motivated teachers from regular piloting institutions (e.g. the British Coun- cil schools; customer schools for the local publisher’s representatives).

Local Coursebooks

Realistically, the majority of learners and teachers globally might beneﬁt more from teacher development pro- grams for adaptation (see Chapter 4 Adaptation and Tomlinson, in press, for how typi- cal coursebook closed exercises such as gap ﬁll can be turned into more communicative open activities that are potentially much more engaging). In 2006, a new national literacy reform program for primary level called Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading (STELLAR) was launched.

Factors that We Believe will Help Successful Development of a Coursebook

2010).The construction of English: Culture, consumerism and promotion in the ELT global coursebook. 2014).English language teaching textbooks—content, consumption, production. Anything goes” in task-based language teaching materials?—the need for principled materials evaluation, adaptation and development.The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL.

Developing Digital Materials

What Does Research Say about the Eﬀectiveness of ICT in Language Education?

Diverse Levels of Digital Adoption in Education

I remember as a ﬂedgling teacher in the British Council teaching centre in Hong Kong listening to the Director of Studies giving a welcome speech to teachers at the start of the new academic year. The Director of Studies was talking about the role of technology in the future of language learning and rather dramatically made his point by closing with the following epithet: “The British Council needs teachers who are conﬁdent with technology.

Are Digital Materials Better at Facilitating Second-Language Acquisition?

Opportunities for contextualized and purposeful communication in the L2” (Principle 5) and “Being encouraged to interact” (Principle 6). It also “makes use of those mental resources typically used in communication in the L1” and helps the learners “Notice how the L2 is used.” The relaxed but interesting discussions are thought provoking.

What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of Digital Materials?

In a face-to-face classrooms various interactions take place (e.g. spontaneous small talk; teacher talking with students; students talking in pairs or groups; students talking to the whole class in, for example, a presentation). Compared to the direct face-to-face classroom situation, digital communication tends to be indi- rect and diﬀerent.

A Summary of the Potential Beneﬁts and Problems of Using Digital Materials

This is an approach, originating in business learning, which is now being applied to language learning. Focusing on one learning point for a short time (usually no more than four minutes) through an engaging video is very appealing to learners but con- tradicts what we know about frequency and variety of input, prolonged engagement, opportunities for contextualized use and the delayed eﬀect of instruction.

Our Recommendations for Using and Developing Digital Materials

We fully endorse the developments that are taking place in the design and delivery of digital materials for language learning. It is noticeable that we have made very little reference to research into the eﬀectiveness of digital materials.