Material development in elt current issues

Materials in ELT:
Current Issues
Sue Garton and Kathleen Graves
Present by:
Siti Solehatun
Herlyna Hutapea
Reny Kristina Malik

Overview
 Materials in ELT play a central role in language learning
and teaching.
 Richards (2001: 251) notes ‘Much of the language teaching
that occurs throughout the world today could not take
place without the extensive use of commercial materials.’
 Tomlinson (2012) identifies the early nineties as the
decade in which serious attention began to be shown
towards materials development.

Overview
 Two important things about the majority of these
publications, are:
1. the field is generally under-researched, many of the books
published are ‘how to’ books, with advice for teachers but
they are not based on research studies into materials.
2. the majority of previous publications focus primarily on
certain aspects of ELT materials. Thus we find books and
chapters on materials design and development.

The Course
Book
 Uses the term materials to include texts in all forms
(paper, audio, video) and language learning tasks, with the
expressed intention of including everything from teacher
handouts to global course-books.
 The course-book is still ubiquitous and plays a
fundamental role in ELT around the world.

The Global Coursebook
 The advantages:
1. It gives structure to lessons and to a course.
2. It saves time – teachers are too busy to prepare their own materials.
3. It gives a sense of security – teachers feel they know what they are
doing.
4. It promotes autonomy as learners can use and refer to it outside the
classroom.
5. It is reliable as it is written by experts and published by well-known
publishers.
6. It gives a sense of professionalism in the way it is presented.
7. It offers different perspectives as it focuses on different cultures and
different places.

The Global Coursebook
 The disadvantages:
1. It cannot meet the needs of a particular group of learners.
2. The language taught might not be appropriate.
3. It might not be culturally appropriate.
4. It is outdated.
5. It is not authentic.
6. It is not representative of the local context.
7. It takes away the teacher’s creativity.

The Global Course-book
 Different views of course-books were also noted by
McGrath (2006) in the metaphors that teachers use to
describe them, he categorized these metaphors into four
groups, are:
1. Guidance (map, compass)
2. Support (anchor, petrol)
3. Resource (convenience store, menu)
4. Constraint (millstone, straightjacket)

The Global Course-book
 According to Tomlinson, Dat, Masuhara and Rubdy (2001)
and Masuhara, Hann, Yi and Tomlinson, (2008) There are
less obvious issues with the global course-book, are:
1. They found that the coursebooks they reviewed did not
encourage adaptation or facilitate the tailoring of the
materials to learners’ needs or to local contexts.
2. They also found that topics were generally banal and that
there was a focus on politeness rather than conflict and
competition.

CRITICAL VIEWS
1. Tomlinson(2008) even goes so far as to assert that
coursebooks are at least partly to blame for the failure of
learners to learn in that they conform to the expectations
of stakeholders and the demands of the market rather
than to what we know about language acquisition and the
learning process.
2. Global coursebooks tend to be based on approaches
developed in western academic departments, exhibiting
what Prodromou and Mishen (2008: 194) call
‘methodological correctness’.

CRITICAL VIEWS
3. Gray (2012: 111) calls for alternative articulations of
English, a call that is reflected in alternative
approaches such as that outlined by Guiney Igielski
(Chapter 9) through the development of materials
that are based in culturally and linguistically
responsive pedagogy.

GLOBAL VS LOCAL
COURSEBOOK
1. Local coursebook
A local coursebook is one ‘specifically produced for a country
or region and draws on a national curriculum and on the
learners’ experiences by including references to local
personalities, places, etc.
2. Global coursebook
The international or global coursebook is defined by
Tomlinson (1998a: x) as a ‘coursebook which is not written for
learners from a particular culture

GLOBAL VS LOCAL
COURSEBOOK
Al Majthoob provides an excellent example of how a local version
of a coursebook can meet the needs of learners in a specific
context far more effectively than any global coursebook.
Interestingly, Chapelle (2009) points to US national guidelines that
state the focus of materials should be on contexts where language
is used. Given that, in the case of English, that now means
everywhere in the world, all materials should be taking an
awareness-raising approach to language and culture

MATERIALS AND
THEIR USERS
1. Edge and Garton (2009:55): the teacher’s purpose
is not to teach materials at all: the purpose is to
teach the learners and the materials are there to
serve that purpose.
2. Opoku-Amankwa (2010) identified a number of
factors that influenced students’ access to and use
of textbooks, including class size, seating
arrangements and teachers’ interpretation of
policy concerning student access to textbooks.

Materials Use and Change
A reason of the use of coursebooks
is to provide a clear set of activities
and guidelines that both teachers and
students can follow

Materials Use and Change
Hutchinson and Torres (1994), Masuhara
and Tomlinson (2008) maintain that
Materials can support novice teachers or
those who lack confidence

The change of curricula
1. While curricula may change, the books
used may not.
2. It may not be enough to give teachers a
new book and expect them to change
new how they teach

Teachers may need training to use the
new books, otherwise they continue to
employ previous method. While
multimedia packages may offer support
to teachers with low levels of English
proviciency

So, when government mandate the
change of curricula, the pragmatic
response from teachers is adapting the
new materials they are given rather than
changing the way they teach

Technology
• No overview of materials in ELT can ignore the enormous
impact that technology has had in recent years.
• Technology has been embraced by publishers who now use it to
accompany coursebook, producing not only CD-Roms and
DVDs but also companion websites and versions of their
materials for their Interactive Whiteboard (IWB)
• The use of technology can place the learners squarely at the
centre of materials in a way not always possible with traditional
materials.

Conclusion
Materials are fundamental to language
learning and teaching, but materials
cannot be viewed independently of their
users

Material development in elt current issues

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