Materials Development for TESOL: Edinburgh textbooks in TESOL (2015)

Materials Development for TESOL: Edinburgh textbooks in TESOL  (2015)

1.     Introduction: Why Do We Need a Book about Materials Development?

2.     Principled Materials Development

·      The importance of Affective and Cognitive Change in LL Materials

·      Input and output in LL Materials

3.     Materials, Methods and Contexts

·      Pedagogy

4.     Materials, Evaluation and Adaptation

·      The need for principled evaluation

·      Materials adaptation

5.     Reconceptulising Materials for the Technological Environment

·      Materials as product vs. as process

·      Template

6.     Materials to develop reading and listening skills

7.     Materials to develop speaking and writing skills

8.     Materials for vocabulary and grammar

9.     Materials: from process to product

 “Why do we need a book about materials development”?

This first question we need to ask is, “why do we need an academic book, even a practice-oriented book, about materials development?” It could, after all, be argued that materials

 Thornbury (2000b) argues that the most important resources in the classroom are learners and teachers. He complains about teachers obsession with grammar and materials-driven lessons where the materials actually act as an obstacle between learns and teachers and bury the “inner life” of the learners.

The list of potential reasons for adaptation produced by Islam and Mares (2003) focuses heavily on learner factors:

·      To add real choice

·      To cater for all sensory learning styles

·      To provide for more learner autonomy

·      To encourage higher level cognitive skills

·      To make language input more accessible and engaging

·      Be up to date

·      Be appropriate to the learners’ level/offer an appropriate level of challenge

We want materials to

·      Arouse our learner’s interest

·      Be challenging enough

·      Make the students feel that they are having a properly planned class

·      Support and guide both the students and the teacher, and provide structure and progress (even if this is not explicit)

·      Provide a variety of experience in terms of texts

·      Be a resource that introduced and/or reinforces areas of lexis or grammar.

·      Teach new skills and strategies that our learners really need

·      Provide knowledge about other cultures

·      Guide learners to be more autonomous

·      Be flexible for other teachers to use

·      Provide teachers with sound teaching principles

Principled Materials Development

These include factors internal to the learner, within both the “affective domain” (concerned with emotions) and the “cognitive domain” (concerned with rationality). They also include external factors, of course’ the language input itself (the materials), the teacher and the learning environment.

It is important to flag here that we take “the back to SLA basics” approach, as we do not think materials development principles can be usefully informed by teaching methodologies (such as the communicative approach, task-based language teaching). This is because these methodologies are themselves “interpretations” into pedagogy of beliefs around SLA.

Motivation is a multi-faceted construct conceived as a spectrum covering affective as well as cognitive dimensions. Dornyei, one of the principal figures in the area, for characterizes it as an “engine” made up of efforts, will and attitude (1998)

For our purposes we will attempt to cut through the complexities of the theoretical debate to draw out core concepts that we see as relevant to the design of language learning materials. Thee first involve the conceptualizations of what “drives” motivation. Integrative motivation is driven by “a sincere and personal interest in the people and culture represented by the language group (Lamber 1974). This contrasts with instrumental motivation where language learning is considered “ a means to an end” in terms of learning to improved job or educational prospects and the like, or even just pleasing parents or family. Therse original terms made way (from the mid-1980s ) for the notions of intrinsic motivation- “behavior performaed for its own sake in order to experience pleasure and satisfaction such as the joy of doing a particular activity or satisfying one’s curiosity”- and extrinsic motivation, which like instrumental motivation, is driven by some external reward. These two apparent “poles” of motivational impulse were reconciled through Deci and Ryan’s notion of “self-determination (1985), where by motivation is seen as first and foremost a self-propelling act. In more recent research, motivation for L2 learning stretches into the real of psychology, being bound ever more tightly to the notion of developing an L2 “identify (for further reading on this, see Dornyei 2009), which links to the sociolinguistic aspects of language learning (Coupland 2001). Dornyei’s theories resonate with another concept on the SLA-psychology border, that of the permeable “language ego”: in lay terms, the often-reported sensation of being “ a different person” when speaking another language.

Affective aspects of motivation in language learning: language orientation questionnaire” by Zoltan Dornyei

These effective aspects of motivation bring us to the second area  we wish to explore. Although, as we have noted above, motivation involves aspects of both the affective and cognitive domains, what emerges from the literature is how vulnerable it is to affective factors- and ones which can be directly impacted/stimulated by the language materials used.

·      Intrinsic interest

·      (linguistic) self-confidence and self-esteem

·      Anxiety (see discussion of “affective filter” below)

·      Intrinsic value attributed to the activity i.e. its “worthiness”

What should we adapt?

1.     Language (the language of instructions, explanations, examples, the language in exercises and texts and the language learner are expected to produce)

2.     Process (forms of classroom management or interaction stated explicitly in the instructions for exercise, actives and tasks, but also the learning styles involved)

3.     Content (topic, contexts, cultural references)

4.     Level (linguistic and cognitive demands on the learner)