MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

Mohammad AlipourIslamic Azad University, Ahvaz Branch

It has three aspects:

1. A field: it studies the principles & procedures of design,

implementation & evaluation of teaching materials.

2. A practical undertaking: it involves the production, evaluation, &

adaption of teaching materials by teachers for their classes & by

writers for sale or distribution.

Materials development

3. Teacher development: it involves the use of materials

development to facilitate & deepen the personal & professional

development. It ensures a match between the learners & the

materials. It is also one of the most effective ways of helping

teachers to understand & apply theories of language learning. It

helps them theorize their practice.

The needs & wants of the learners primarily. Also those of the

teachers. Concerns of administers for standardization & conformity.

The requirements of examinations & the language policies of a

government.

These needs can best be satisfied by localized projects which consult

learners, teachers, & administers before, during, & after the

materials writing process.

What should drive the materials?

In this process, the author is generally concerned to produce

innovative & creative materials to the teachers & relevant to

learner’s needs. The publisher is generally concerned with financial

success. There should be a compromise between these two.

Commercial materials are written by professional writers for a

publisher from an analysis of market needs. They very experienced

& familiar with realities & new technologies .

Only a small proportion of good teachers are good designers.

Who should develop them?

They are typically developed over a long period of time by a pair or

small group of writers.

It is better, however, to have a large team aiming at fast first draft

production by many people, followed by refinement by a smaller

group of experts.

How should materials be developed?

Advantages of building a materials development component into a program include:

Relevance: materials can be produced that are directly relevant to students’

and institutional needs and that reflect local content, issues, and concerns.

Develop expertise: developing materials can help develop expertise among

staff, giving them a greater understanding of the characteristics of effective

materials.

Advantages

Reputation: institutionally developed materials may enhance the reputation of

the institution by demonstrating its commitment to providing materials

developed specifically for its students.

Flexibility: materials produced within the institution can be revised or

adapted as needed, giving them greater flexibility than a commercial course

book.

Disadvantages also need to be considered before embarking on materials

development.

Cost: quality materials take time to produce and require staff time as well as

resources needed to be allocated to such a project.

Quality: teacher-made materials will not normally have the same standard of

design and production as commercial materials and hence may not present

the same image as commercial materials.

Disadvantages

Testing: to prepare teachers for materials writing projects, adequate training

should be provided. Materials writing is a specialized skill and potential

materials writers need the opportunity to develop the necessary skills.

Workshops can be developed for this purpose, as well as the creation of

writing teams that contain a balance of relevant expertise.

Good materials do many of the things that a teacher would normally do as part of his/her teaching. They should:

Arouse the learners’ interest Remind them of earlier learning Tell them what they will be learning next Explain new learning content to them Relate these ideas to learners’ previous learning Get learners to think about new content Help them get feedback on their learning Encourage them to practice Make sure they know what they are supposed to be doing Enable them to check their progress Help them to do better

Tomlinson (1998) suggested that good language teaching materials have the

following characteristics:

Should achieve impact

Should help learners feel at ease

Should help learners to develop confidence

Should be provided by learners as relevant and useful

Should require and facilitate learner’s self-investment

Should expose the learners to language in authentic use

Should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to

achieve communicative purposes

Should take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually

delayed

Should take into account that learners have different learning styles

Should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes

Should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction

Should maximize learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic,

and emotional involvement that stimulus both right and left brain activities

Should not rely too much on controlled practice

Should provide opportunities for outcome feedback

Learners must be ready to acquire the points being taught

The learners’ attention should be drown to linguistic features of the input

This may seem a somewhat cumbersome list to apply in actual practice. Any

developer of teaching materials will have to develop his/her set of working

principles that can be referred to in planning and assessing materials as they

are written.

There are some processes which must be followed:

Developing aims

Developing a syllabus

Organizing the course into units

Developing a structure for units

Sequencing units

Decisions in materials design

When the process of writing begins, further decisions need to be made.

These concern:

Choosing input and sources

Selecting exercise types

No matter what type of materials are being prepared decisions concerning

input are involved.

Input refers to anything that initiates the learning process and that students

respond to in some way in using the materials.

The following are examples of input questions in the design of different kinds

of materials:

Grammar materials: will the new grammar items be presented through the

medium of text, conversational extracts, or a corpus of utterances? How will

these be selected?

Choosing input and sources

Listening materials: will the source of listening be authentic

recordings taken from real-world sources, scripted materials on

different topics, or a mixture of both?

Reading materials: what kinds of texts will students read (such as

magazine articles, newspaper articles, extracts from books), and how

will these be chosen?

Writing materials: will students be shown examples of different

types of compositions? Will these be examples of real texts or will

they be specially written? Will examples of student writing also

be included? If so, how will these be chosen?

Speaking materials: what will the sources of speaking activities be?

Will dialogues, recordings, texts, topics, pictures, situations, and so

on be used, and how these will be selected?