MODULE 1
Language and Literature Learning Materials Development
What are Materials?
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Anything used by teachers or learners to aid in the teaching and learning process (Tomlinson, 1998).
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Anything that provides a systematic overview of the procedures and exercises to be used in the classroom
(Brown, 1995).
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Any systematic explanation of the procedures and exercises to be used in classroom instruction; the key
to generating effective materials is to ensure that they are defined and organized well enough so that
teachers may utilize them without confusion and with the least amount of preparation time (Brown, 2007)
What is Material Development?
o
Material development is basically dealing with selection, adaptation, and creation of teaching
materials (Nunan, 1991). In practice, it focused on evaluation, adaptation of published materials
and creation (development of teaching materials by teacher in line with the existing syllabus)
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Materials development is both a field of study and a practical undertaking. As a field it studies the
principles and procedures of the design, implementation and evaluation of language teaching
materials’ (Tomlinson 2001).
o
It refers to anything done by materials developers or teachers to facilitate the learning of the
language (teaching) a conscious process which consists of the committing to memory of
information relevant to what is being learned (learning) anything which is done by writers, teachers
or learners to provide sources of language input and to exploit those sources in ways which
maximize the likelihood of intake the supplying of information about and/or experience of the
language in ways designed to promote language learning.
Who should develop the materials?
In developing materials, it is based on teacher’s beliefs, understanding and experience. It also depends on
teacher’s goal and objectives; the way teacher conceptualizes the content of the course; the way teacher organizes
and sequence the course and teacher’s understanding of student’s needs. Material developed by teacher must be
feasible and appropriate within the context. Students can also collaborate with the teacher in choosing and
developing material.
A good material may become the tipping point which decide the result of a learning. In order to better facilitate
students' learning teacher often have to develop their own material that will suit the students' needs. A good
teaching material will be able not only to facilitate students' learning process, but also provide enjoyment for the
students. To be able to produce a good material, the teacher should always start from the students.
The material should be able to capture students' need and, both present and future needs. Because material that
directly correspondent with said needs will automatically be useful and meaningful for the students. With
appropriate material the students will be prompted to learn well because they realize that they are learning not for
the sake of exams or grades, but more for the mastery of skills that they need in the first place.
Principles and Procedures of Materials Development Language Learning
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Learning is normally considered to be a conscious process which consists of the committing to memory
of information relevant to what is being learned.
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Spelling rules, conventions of greetings and vocabulary items can be useful to the language learner.
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Language learning consists of subconscious development of generalizations about how the language is
used and of both conscious and subconscious development of skills and strategies which apply these
generalizations to acts of communication
1. Explicit: The learners are aware if when and what they are learning
2. Implicit: Learners are not aware of when and what they are learning.
3. Declarative Knowledge: Knowledge about the language system.
4. Procedural Knowledge: Knowledge of how the language is used.
Explicit learning of both declarative and procedural knowledge is of value in helping learners to pay attention
to salient features of language input and helping them to participate in planned discourse. (e.g., giving
presentation, writing stories, etc.)
Systematic Evaluation of Materials
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Most of the well-known material writers follow their institutions rather than an over specification of
objectives, principles and procedures.
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Some textbook writers who sit down and identify the popular and successful features of their competitors
so that they can clone those features and they avoid the unpopular and unsuccessful features. But it has
drawbacks- needs time, controlling learner’s motivations, lack of “out-of-class” motivation and learnerteacher rapport.
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Longitudinal, systematic evaluations of popular materials can be undertaken by publishers, universities
and association like MATSDA. They provide validated information about actual effects of different types
of language learning materials.
Second language acquisition research and materials development
Second language acquisition report can provide guidelines for developing classroom materials. There are
some principles:
1.
Learners should be exposed to rich, meaningful and comprehensible input of language in use.
2.
Language learners who achieve positive affect are more likely to achieve communicative competence than
others.
3.
Language learners can be benefitted from noticing salient features of the input and from discovering how
they are used.
4.
Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes.
5.
Second language learners should use mental resources which they utilize when acquiring and using their
first language.
A. Materials should achieve impact through:
1.
Novelty: unusual topics, illustrations and activities.
2.
Variety: breaking up monotony of unit routine with unexpected activity. Such as-using different text types
from different sources, different instructor voices on a CD.
3.
Attractive presentation: by using attractive colors, using white space, using photographs.
4.
Appealing contents: topic of interest to the target learners, topics which offer the possibility to learn
something new, engaging stories, universal themes, local references.
5.
Achievable Challenge: tasks which challenge the learners to think.
B. Materials should help learners to feel comfortable
1.
Make learners feel more comfortable with written materials with lots of white space that they do with
materials in which lots of different activities are crammed together on the same page.
2.
Are more ease with texts and illustrations that they can relate to their own culture than they are with those
which appear to be them to be culturally different.
3.
Are more relaxed with materials which are obviously trying to help them to learn than they are with
materials which are always testing them.
4.
Feeling at ease can also be achieved through a voice which is relaxed and supportive.
5.
Content and activities encourage the personal participation of the learners.
C. Materials should facilitate learner self-investment
1.
The role of the classroom and teaching material is to aid the learner to make efficient use of the resources
in order to facilitate self-discovery (Rutherford and Sharwood Smith,1988).
2.
Materials provide students with choices of focus and activity, by giving them topic control and by
engaging them in learner-centered discovery activities help the learners to discover their true self
3.
It also engages the learners in finding supplementary materials that which help them to develop their
decision-making ability to choose the appropriate materials/texts and finding out the techniques to use
them.
D. Interaction can be achieved through:
1. Information/opinion gap activities which require learners to communicate with each other or the teacher
in order to close the gap. (e.g., finding out food or drink people would like at the class party.
2. Post-listening and post-reading activities which require the learners to use information from the text to
achieve a communicative purpose (e.g., deciding the television program to watch, writing a review of a
book or film).
3. Creative writing and creative speaking activities such as writing a story or improvising drama.
4. Formal instruction given in the target language either on the language itself or on another subject.
E. Materials should focus on the different learning styles of students.
1. Visual: Some learners prefer to see the language written down.
2. Auditory: Some learners prefer to hear language.
3. Kinesthetic: Learners prefer to do something physical, such as following instruction for game.
4. Studial: Learners like to pay conscious attention to the linguistic features of the language and want to be
correct.
5. Experiential: Learners like to use the language and are more concerned with communication.
6. Analytic: Learners prefer to focus on discreet bits of the language and to learn them one by one.
7. Global: Learners are happy to respond to whole chunks of language at a time and to pick up from them
whatever language they can.
8. Dependent: Learners prefer to learn from a teacher and from book.
9. Independent: Learners learn from their own experience of the language and use autonomous learning
strategies.
F. Materials should permit a silence period at the beginning of instruction
1.
Starting a course with total physical response approach in which the learners respond physically to oral
instruction from a teacher or CD.
2.
Starting with a listening comprehension approach in which the learners listen to stories in the target
language, which are made accessible through sound effects, visual aids and dramatic movement by the
teacher.
3.
Permitting the learners to respond to target language questions by using their first language or through
drawings and gestures.
G. Materials should maximize learning potential by stimulating right and
left-brain activities
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Mechanical drills, rule learning, simple transformation activities stimulate mental processing.
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Analytic, creative, evaluative and rehearsal demands on processing capacity can lead to deeper and more
durable learning.
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The contents of the materials should stimulate the thoughts and feelings in the learners.
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Maximizing the recall-the learners receive information through different cerebral processes and in
different states of consciousness so that it’s stored in many different parts of the brain.
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Engaging the learners in variety of left and right brain activities- reciting a dialogue, singing a song,
writing story and so on.
Principles of Materials Development
1. Make sure that the materials contain a lot of spoken and written texts which provide extensive experience
of language being used in order to achieve outcomes in a variety of text types and genres in relation to
topics, themes, events, locations etc. likely to be meaningful to the target learners.
2. Make sure that the language the learners are exposed to is authentic in the sense that it represents how the
language is typically used. If the language is inauthentic because it has been written or reduced to
exemplify a particular language feature then the learners will not acquire the ability to use the language
typically or effectively. Much has been written on the issue of authenticity and some experts consider that
it is useful to focus attention on a feature of a language by removing distracting difficulties and
complexities from sample texts. My position is that such contrived focus might be of some value as an
additional aid to help the learner to focus on salient features but that prior and subsequent exposure to
those features in authentic use is essential.
3. Make sure that the language input is contextualized. Language use is determined and interpreted in relation
to its context of use. De-contextualized examples do not contain enough information about the user, the
addressee(s), the relationships between the interactants, the setting, the intentions or the outcomes for
them to be of value to the language learner. I can, for example, think of at least three different
interpretations of, “Give him the keys. Let him drive it.” But I do not know what it really means nor why
the speaker has used the imperative until I know who is saying it, who they are saying it to, what the
relationship between them is, where they are, what has happened before and what the objectives of the
conversation are. Only extended samples of language in contextualized use can provide learners with the
‘information’ they need to develop awareness of how the target language is actually used.
4. Make sure that the learners are exposed to sufficient samples of language in authentic use to provide
natural re-cycling of language items and features which might be useful for the learners to acquire.
Examples of Materials I use what I call task-free activities to help me to apply Principle of Language
Acquisition 1. This involves me at the beginning of every lesson reading a poem or story, or telling a joke
or anecdote. There are no questions or tasks after the listening, just written copies of the text for those
students who were engaged by it to take home, read and file away. The students are encouraged to ask me
questions about the texts at any time and to return to read the texts they have collected many times. I also
use extensive reading, extensive listening and extensive viewing to help to apply this principle and I use
a text-driven approach to developing units of material in which an extensive text drives the skills and
language activities of each unit.
5. Prioritize the potential for engagement by, for example, basing a unit on a text or a task which is likely to
achieve affective and cognitive engagement rather than on a teaching point selected from a syllabus.
6. Make use of activities which get the learners to think about what they are reading or listening to and to
respond to it personally.
7. Make use of activities which get learners to think and feel before during and after using the target language
for communication. Examples of Materials I use a text driven approach in which the starting point for
developing each unit is a potentially engaging spoken or written text. I first of all devise readiness activities
which help the learners to activate their minds prior to experiencing the text, I give the learners a holistic
focus to think about when experiencing the text and I invite them to articulate their personal responses to
the text before going on to use it to stimulate their own language production.
8. Make use of activities which get learners to visualize and/or use inner speech before during and after
experiencing a written or spoken text.
9. Make use of activities which get learners to visualize and/or use inner speech before during and after using
language themselves.
10. Make use of activities which help the learners to reflect on their mental activity during a task and then to
try to make more use of mental strategies in a similar task. Examples of Materials I build into all my
materials activities which encourage and help the students to visualize, to talk to themselves in inner
speech and to make connections with their lives. For example, before asking the students to read a poem
about a boy’s first day at school I asked the students to visualize their own first day at school and then to
talk to themselves about how they felt.
11. Use an experiential approach in which the learners are first of all provided with an experience which
engages them holistically. From this experience they learn implicitly without focusing conscious attention
on any particular features of the experience. Later they re-visit and reflect on the experience and pay
conscious attention to features of it in order to achieve explicit learning. This enables the learners to
apprehend before they comprehend and to intuit before they explore. And it means that when they focus
narrowly on a specific feature of the text, they are able to develop their discoveries in relation to their
awareness of the full context of use.
12. Rather than drawing the learners’ attention to a particular feature of a text and then providing explicit
information about its use it is much more powerful to help the learners (preferably in collaboration) to
make discoveries for themselves. Examples of Materials I use a lot of language awareness materials in
which the students experience a potentially engaging text, respond to it personally and then focus on a
particular feature of the text in order to make discoveries about it. For example, the students read about a
student whose parents gave him a graduation party. They then discussed the reasons why the parents gave
him the party and the reasons he was reluctant to attend it. Next one half of the class analyzed the father’s
use of the interrogative and the other half analyzed the son’s use of the imperative. They came together in
groups to share their discoveries and then they wrote a version of the text in which the mother (rather than
the father) tried to persuade the son to attend the party.
13. Provide many opportunities for the learners to produce language in order to achieve intended outcomes.
14. Make sure that these output activities are designed so that the learners are using language rather than just
practicing specified features of it.
15. Design output activities so that they help learners to develop their ability to communicate fluently,
accurately, appropriately and effectively.
16. Make sure that the output activities are fully contextualized in that the learners are responding to an
authentic stimulus (e.g., a text, a need, a viewpoint, an event), that they have specific addressees and that
they have a clear intended outcome in mind.
17. Try to ensure that opportunities for feedback are built into output activities and are provided for the
learners afterwards. Examples of Materials I develop a lot of material in which the students have to
produce a text which is a development from one they have just experienced. For example, in one unit the
students had to tell a circle story about part two of a story about strange creatures on a beach which they
had acted out from the teacher’s narration of the story. In another unit they had to re-locate a story set in
Liverpool in their own city. In another unit they had to design an improved version of a vehicle in a
newspaper advert and then to write a newspaper advert and perform a tv advert for their vehicle.