The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Language Learning E-Book
Brian Tomlinson
40,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Language Learning provides undergraduate and graduate-level students in applied linguistics and TESOL, researchers, materials developers, and teachers with everything they need to know about the latest theory and practice of language learning materials development for all media. The past two decades have seen historic change in the field of language learning materials development. The four main drivers of that change include a shift in emphasis from materials for language teaching to language learning; evidenced-based development; the huge increase in digital delivery technologies; and the wedding of materials developed for the learning of English with those for other second or foreign languages. Timely, authoritative, and global in scope, this text represents the ideal resource for all those studying and working in the field of language learning.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 1021
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
The Complete Guide to theTheory and Practice of MaterialsDevelopment for Language Learning
Brian Tomlinson
University of LiverpoolUK
Hitomi Masuhara
University of LiverpoolUK
This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Brian Tomlinson and Hitomi Masuhara to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tomlinson, Brian, 1943-, author. | Masuhara, Hitomi, author.Title: The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning / Brian Tomlinson, Hitomi Masuhara.Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2017] | Includes index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2016058002 (print) | LCCN 2017017087 (ebook) |ISBN 9781119054788 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119054986 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119054764 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119054771 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages–Study and teaching. | Teaching–Aids and devices.Classification: LCC P53.15 (ebook) | LCC P53.15 .T76 2017 (print) | DDC 418.0071–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058002
Cover design by: Wiley
Contents
Preface
References
1 Materials Development So Far
Introduction
Commercial Publications
Materials Development Projects
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
References
2 Issues in Materials Development
Introduction
Textbooks
Pedagogic Approaches
The Topic Content of Language Learning Materials
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Notes
References
3 Materials Evaluation
Introduction
What the Early Literature Tells Us about Materials Evaluation
What the Current Literature Tells Us about Materials Evaluation
The Principles and Procedures of Materials Evaluation Which We Recommend
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Tasks
References
4 Materials Adaptation
Introduction
What the Literature Tells Us about Materials Adaptation
Adaptation—Practice and Theory
Minor Adaptation
The Principles and Procedures of Materials Adaptation that We Recommend
An Example of an Adaptation
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Tasks
Further Reading
References
5 The Development of Materials
Introduction
How Writers Write
Principled Development of Materials
Practical Guidance to Writers in the Literature
Recommendations for Developing Materials
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Task
Further Reading
References
6 The Process of Publishing Coursebooks
Introduction
Kinds of Textbooks
The Development Process of Coursebooks
Global Coursebooks
Local Coursebooks
Factors that We Believe will Help Successful Development of a Coursebook
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Task
Further Reading
References
7 Developing Digital Materials
Introduction
What Does Research Say about the Effectiveness of ICT in Language Education?
Diverse Levels of Digital Adoption in Education
Are Digital Materials Better at Facilitating Second-Language Acquisition?
What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of Digital Materials?
A Summary of the Potential Benefits and Problems of Using Digital Materials
Our Recommendations for Using and Developing Digital Materials
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Tasks
Further Reading
References
8 Developing Materials for the Acquisition of Language
Introduction
The Acquisition of Grammatical Competence
The Acquisition of Lexical Competence
The Acquisition of Pragmatic Competence
Tasks
Further Reading
References
9 Developing Materials for the Development of Skills
Introduction
Skills and Strategies
Towards Unification of Current Thinking in Different Strands of Disciplines for Developing Materials for the Four Skills
What the Literature Says About Materials for Skills Development
Our Recommendations on Developing Materials for the Four Modes of Communication
What Do You Think?
Tasks
Further Reading
References
10 Developing Materials for Young Learners
Introduction
The Literature
Our Recommendations for Developing and Using Materials for Young Learners
Conclusion
What do You Think?
Tasks
Further Reading
References
11 Developing Materials for Teenagers and Adults
Introduction
Teenagers
Some Recommended Principles and Approaches that are Likely to be Suitable for Teenagers
Materials for Young Adults and Adults
Our Recommendations for Developing and Using Materials for Young Adults and Adults
Conclusion
What do You Think?
Tasks
Further Reading
References
12 Developing Materials for Different Levels, Users, and Purposes
Introduction
Materials for Different Levels
Materials for Different Users
Materials for Different Purposes
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Tasks
References
13 Visuals, Layout, and Design
Introduction
Visuals
Layout
Design
Analyzing Visuals, Layout and Design—An Example
Some Issues in Using Visuals, Layout, and Design
The Principles and Procedures of Visuals, Layout and Design that we Recommend
Tasks
References
14 Writing Instructions for Language-Learning Activities
Introduction
Issues in Writing and Giving Instructions
Criteria for Writing and Giving Instructions
What Do You Think?
Tasks
References
15 Materials Development Research
Introduction
Recent Research
Areas of Research Referred to in this Volume
Proposed Areas of Research
Conclusion
What Do You Think?
Tasks
References
Conclusion
References
Resources Useful for Materials Developers
Associations with Materials Development Journals / Newsletters
Corpora
Journals with Relevance to Materials Development
Practical Guides to Materials Development
Recent Publications on Materials Development
Sources of Activities
Sources of Texts and Images
Reference
Index
Eula
List of Tables
Chapter 11
Table 11.1
Chapter 12
Table 12.1
Chapter 14
Table 14.1
Table 14.2
Table 14.3
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Pages
C1
iii
iv
vii
viii
ix
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
246
270
291
292
293
294
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
Preface
This book is a celebration of a journey that began officially in 1993 with our foundation of MATSDA (the Materials Development Association). Brian became the first Chair and Hitomi the first Secretary. Together we developed an association dedicated to bringing together researchers, writers, publishers and teachers to work towards the development of effective materials for L2 learners. At the same time Brian designed and delivered a dedicated MA in materials development at the University of Luton, and Hitomi (who was doing her PhD at the University of Luton at the time) started to contribute to it as a tutor. This MA was taken in reduced form to the National University of Singapore and then in its original full form to Leeds Metropolitan University when we moved there and started to deliver it together in 2000. It was also cloned (with permission) at IGSE (the International Graduate School of English) in Seoul. This MA, the MATSDA journal Folio, and the annual MATSDA workshops and conferences, as well as publications on materials development by us and by many others, have helped to create a situation in which students and teachers in training all over the world are now taking courses on materials development and many of them are devoting their postgraduate research to issues of relevance to it.
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. In 2004 we published a brief guide to materials development for teachers in Southeast Asia to use when writing or adapting materials (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2004) and in 2010 we edited and published a collection of chapters reporting research on materials development from all over the world. Our 2004 book has been republished in Brazil, China, and South Korea and copied all over Southeast Asia. We are told that it has helped thousands of new or unqualified teachers to gain the awareness and confidence needed to make materials their own. Our 2010 book is now being supplemented by other edited collections of research reports from all over the world (e.g. Masuhara, Mishan, & Tomlinson, 2017; Maley & Tomlinson, in press), and McGrath (2013), Garton & Graves (2014) and Harwood (2014) have recently published books containing reports of worldwide research on materials development.
In 1998 Brian stated that there was a growing interest in exploring issues related to “the writing and exploitation of materials' and yet ‘very few books have been published which investigate these issues” (Tomlinson, 1998: vii). Since then there has been an explosion of interest in materials development both as a field of academic study and as a practical undertaking, and fortunately there have been many resources developed to cater for this interest. In Tomlinson (1998) there is reference to the founding in 1993 of MATSDA as an association dedicated to the bringing together of researchers, writers, publishers, and teachers in a concerted effort to facilitate the development of effective materials (www.matsda.org). MATSDA is still going strong, Brian is now the President, and Hitomi is still the Secretary, and we have just organized with the University of Liverpool our thirtieth MATSDA conference. Other associations are also offering great support to students and practitioners of materials development (e.g. MAWSIG, the materials writing special interest group of IATEFL, as well as special interest groups of the American association TESOL and the Japanese association, JALT). There are now a number of journals dedicated to or focusing special issues on materials development (e.g. the MATSDA journal Folio, a new MAWSIG journal ELT Materials Review, the JALT newsletter Between the Keys, The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching). And there are many books focusing on both practical and theoretical issues in materials development (see Chapter 1).
At least four things have changed since Tomlinson (1998). One is the shift of emphasis from a focus on materials development for language teaching to a focus on materials development for language learning (e.g. Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2010). The second is an increased interest in research for materials development, with the emphasis not on achieving academic respectability but on evaluating the effectiveness of innovative interventions. The third is the massive increase in digital delivery of materials for language learning bringing with it numerous new affordances for language learning, but more a change so far we would argue in mode of delivery than in pedagogical approach (see Chapter 8). And the fourth is the coming together of materials development for the learning of English with materials development for the learning of other second or foreign languages. For example, we have had contributions to MATSDA conferences and to the MATSDA journal Folio relating to materials for the learning of Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, and we have both run materials development workshops for teachers of all those languages in countries around the world. In this book most of our references and examples relate directly to materials for the learning of English but all the principles and procedures we recommend are equally relevant to materials development for the learning of any second or foreign language. Also our references and examples in most chapters relate specifically to print materials, although we would argue that the principles that inform them apply equally to digital materials too. We have done this deliberately so as not to exclude those many teachers who as yet do not have easy and reliable access to the Internet (or even to conventional electronic materials) in their teaching environment, and we have devoted a sizeable chapter (Chapter 8) to the development and exploitation of digital materials.
What we have done in the Complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning is to combine the practicality and accessibility of our 2004 guide with the academic rigor of the 2010 reports on materials development in action. It has been our ambition for a long time to produce a book, which will be of value to all types of participants in what we find to be the exciting field of materials development. We want it to help teachers, researchers, students, publishers and writers to know, understand and be constructively critical of what has been achieved to date. We want it to help them to develop, adapt, use, publish, review and research materials for themselves. And we want the strong opinions and approaches we put forward in this book to inspire readers to think for themselves and to develop and apply strong opinions and approaches of their own.
References
Garton, S., & Graves, K. (Eds.). (2014).
International perspectives on materials in ELT
. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harwood, N. (Ed.). (2014).
English language teaching textbooks: Content, consumption, production.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maley, A., & Tomlinson, B. (Eds.). (in press).
Authenticity in materials development for language learning
. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Masuhara, H., Mishan, F., & Tomlinson, B. (Eds.). (2017).
Practice and theory for materials development in L2 learning.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
McGrath, I. (2013).
Teaching materials and the roles of EFL/ESL teachers: Practice and theory.
London: Bloomsbury.
Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). (1998).
Materials development in language teaching.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Tomlinson, B., & Masuhara, H. (2004).
Developing language course materials.
Singapore: RELC Portfolio Series.
Tomlinson, B., & Masuhara, H. (Eds.). (2010).
Research for materials development in language learning: evidence for best practice.
London: Continuum.
1Materials Development So Far
Introduction
Materials Development
The term “materials development” is used in this book to refer to all the different processes in the development and use of materials for language learning and teaching. “Such processes include materials evaluation, materials adaptation, materials design, materials production, materials exploitation and materials research.” All of these processes are important and should ideally “interact in the making of any materials designed to help learners to acquire a language” (Tomlinson, 2012, pp. 143–144).
As well as being the practical undertaking described above, materials development has also become, since the mid-1990s, a popular field of academic study that investigates the principles and procedures of the design, writing, implementation, and evaluation of materials. “Ideally these two aspects of materials development are interactive in that the theoretical studies inform, and are informed by, the actual development and use of learning materials” (Tomlinson, 2001, p. 66). This is true of many recent publications about materials development, for example Tomlinson (2008, 2010a, 2011, 2013a, 2013c, 2015, 2016a), Mukundan (2009), Harwood (2010a, 2014), Tomlinson and Masuhara (2010), McDonough, Shaw, and Masuhara (2013), McGrath (2013, 2016), Garton and Graves (2014), Mishan and Timmis (2015), Masuhara, Mishan, and Tomlinson (2017), and Maley and Tomlinson (in press). Nearly all the writers in these books are both practitioners and researchers and their focus is on the theoretical principles and the practical realizations of materials development. The interaction between theory and practice and between practice and theory is also a deliberately distinctive feature of The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning. Like the other writers referred to above, we have both worked on many coursebooks, supplementary books and web materials (for example, for Bulgaria, China, Ethiopia, Japan, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Singapore, Zambia and the global market), we have worked on many research projects, and we have published many articles and books on theoretical and practical aspects of materials development.
Materials
There are many different definitions of what language-learning materials are. For example, “any systematic description of the techniques and exercises to be used in classroom teaching” (Brown, 1995, p. 139). Many of these definitions focus on exercises for teaching (as Brown's definition does). We prefer to focus on materials for learning and the definition we are using for this book is that materials are anything that can be used by language learners to facilitate their learning of the target language. So materials could be a coursebook, a CD ROM, a story, a song, a video, a cartoon, a dictionary, a mobile phone interaction, a lecture, or even a photograph used to stimulate a discussion. They could also be an exercise, an activity, a task, a presentation, or even a project.
Materials can be informative (in that they inform the learner about the target language), instructional (in that they guide the learner to practice the language), experiential (in that they provide the learner with experience of the language in use), eliciting (in that they encourage the learner to use the language) or exploratory (in that they help the learner to make discoveries about the language). (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 143)
Since L2 language teaching began, the vast majority of institutions that have provided language learning classes have either bought materials for their learners or have required their learners to buy materials for themselves. Some experts question whether commercial materials are actually necessary (e.g. Thornbury & Meddings, 2001) and some institutions even forbid their use at certain levels. For example, the Berlitz schools actually forbid the use of reading and writing at the lower levels. Their classes do not have a coursebook and their classrooms do not have whiteboards. Instead, the learners have to rely on the teacher as the source of oral input and the model of the target language. Interestingly, a Berlitz teacher at a school in Germany tried to teach Brian beginner's German in this way. Brian just could not segment the flow of language he was being exposed to by the teacher and, in desperation, the teacher took out a cigarette packet and wrote his sentences on it—thus creating useful materials and facilitating learning of the German being taught.
Materials can also be in design, as designed, in action, or in reflection. Materials in design are those that are in the process of being developed; materials as designed are those that have been finalized and are in a form ready for use; materials in action are those that are actually in the process of being used, and materials in reflection are those that are represented when users of the materials recollect their use. In theory the more thorough and principled the design process is the more effective the materials as designed are likely to be both when in action and when in reflection. However, in reality, user factors such as teacher / student rapport, teacher impact, teacher beliefs and learner motivation can mean that principled design becomes ineffective use and vice versa. This means that, ideally, materials need to be evaluated in all four states. The first three states receive a lot of attention in this book but the concept of materials in reflection has only just occurred to us. This could be a fruitful area of enquiry as knowing how users represent the materials in their minds, which they have used, could be very informative. The four states mentioned above are not necessarily just progressive; they can be recursive and interactive too. For example, the perception of materials in reflection can influence the subsequent use of the materials and / or the redesign of the materials. See Chapter 3, 4, and 15 for discussion of pre-use, whilst-use and post-use evaluation, of adaptation and of use of materials, and Ellis (2016) for a distinction between materials as work plans and materials as work plans in implementation.
In our travels around the classrooms of the world we have seen many examples of resourceful teachers creating useful homemade materials when effective commercial materials were not available. For example, a teacher in a Vanuatu primary school presented an English version of a local folk story by unrolling it across the cut-out “screen” of a make-believe cardboard television for the students to read, as well as getting puppets made by the pupils to act out dialogues. A different teacher in another Vanuatu primary school passed round a single photo of a Vietnamese girl running screaming down a road to stimulate groups to discuss the effects of war. There was a remarkably rich resource room full of wonderful homemade materials, which embarrassed the teachers in an Ethiopian primary school. And we both talked to three 7 year olds in a Guangzhou primary school who were the only pupils who could not only chant out rehearsed responses to the textbook drills but could hold a conversation with us in English. All three were dissatisfied with the teachers’ limited use of the coursebook and looked out for materials of their own. One surfed the web in English every night; one subscribed to a soccer magazine written for native-speaker adults, and one went to Foreigners’ Corner every weekend to talk to foreigners in English. Our point is that language learning materials can be produced commercially by professionals, they can be created by teachers, they can be found by learners, and they can even be created by learners (as when a class at one level writes stories for a class at a lower level). All four types of materials can facilitate language learning. And all four types can fail to facilitate language learning too. It all depends on the match between the materials and the needs, wants, and engagement of the learners using them (see Chapter 3).
For a discussion of whether or not commercial materials are typically necessary and useful, see Chapter 2 in this book. For suggestions about how the teacher can help learners to look for English outside the classroom see Barker (2010), Tomlinson (2014a) and Pinnard (2016).
Commercial Publications
Coursebooks
Although often under attack for inflexibility, shallowness, and lack of local relevance, the coursebook has been (and arguably still is) the main aid to learning a second or foreign language since language classes began. For example, when the learning of English first became popular in China in the early part of the nineteenth century many coursebooks were written by eminent Chinese scholars for teachers to use in their classrooms. In Daoyi and Zhaoyi (2015) there are accounts of the coursebooks used in 1920 and a reference to a general review of textbooks that listed over 200 English coursebooks published in China in the period 1912–1949.
A coursebook is usually written to contain the information, instruction, exposure, and activities that learners at a particular level need in order to increase their communicative competence in the target language. Of course, this is never enough and ideally even the best coursebook ever written needs supplementation. However, the reality for many learners and teachers is that the coursebook is all they have, and they just have to make do with it. This has been true for hundreds of years and is still true today in, for example, the schools and colleges in West Kalimantan that we visited recently and where we talked to Indonesian students who are learning English in state institutions with government-approved, locally published coursebooks or in private institutions using global coursebooks published in the United Kingdom for worldwide consumption.
The early twentieth-century coursebooks referred to in Daoyi and Zhaoyi (2015) “normally used a form of the grammar-translation method (GTM) with a focus on reading skills rather than spoken English” (p. 29). However, in the late 1920s a version of Harold Edward Palmer's direct method started to influence some of the coursebooks being published and similar oral methods were soon driving many of the coursebooks. The teacher and her learners were dominated by the one coursebook they used, which was obeyed as an edict rather than used as a resource. This excessive reverence for the coursebook continued (according to Daoyi & Zhaoyi, 2015) until the 1990s when the shift began from “teaching the textbook” to “teaching with the textbook” (p. 122) and supplementary materials became available too. By now there were many foreign publishing firms located in China and their global coursebooks exerted an influence. Teachers complained that coursebooks were either too conventional and restricting or “they adopted new approaches unsuitable for the pedagogical situation of the local areas where the textbooks” were being used. Every teacher, it seems, used a coursebook, but no teacher was happy with the book they were using. It seemed to have been accepted that this situation was inevitable and teachers were encouraged (but not helped very much) to adapt their coursebook to make it more suitable for the learners they were using it with (see Chapter 4 for discussion of ways of doing this).
It seems that what was true for China was largely true throughout the world (certainly in our experience in Austria, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Oman, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam). And it seems that it is still true to some extent today with, according to research done by the British Council (2008) and by Tomlinson (2010b), most teachers in many different countries saying that they use a textbook, that their textbook is chosen for them, and that they are not satisfied that it really helps their learners to acquire the target language.
Daoyi and Zhaoyi (2015, pp. 124–126) show how the early GTM and direct method were gradually supplemented in China (but not entirely replaced) by the structural approach, then the audio-lingual method, then functional / notional approaches, then communicative language teaching, then the eclectic method, and now by task-based language teaching. This “progress” can be observed by putting a line of textbooks in chronological order from the 1920s to today (as they do in the Textbook Museum in Beijing) not just in China but in most other countries around the world. What can be observed by visiting classrooms to see lessons in action (as we have done fairly recently in China, Ethiopia, Singapore, Spain and Turkey) is that the coursebook might have new buzzwords on the blurb but the way that the teacher uses it does not differ much from the way they used their previous textbook and all the ones before that too. The explicit teaching and testing of grammar still seems to dominate most classrooms (and many coursebooks too—e.g the very popular Headway series) and very little seems to have changed in the way that languages are typically taught and learned. There are exceptions of course (see Darici and Tomlinson, 2016, for an example of a text-driven classroom in Turkey) but most classrooms reflect what is reported in Thomas and Reinders (2015). This book reports on the introduction of task-based materials in countries and institutions in Asia and almost without exception the chapters report how the task-based approach was weakened in order to allow teachers to continue to pre-teach declarative knowledge of the grammar point to be “practiced” in the task. In other words, the much-discredited Presentation-Practice-Production procedure still prevails regardless of the pedagogical label on the coursebook, as we have demonstrated in our coursebook evaluations in Tomlinson, Dat, Masuhara, & Rubdy (2001), Masuhara, Haan, Yi, & Tomlinson (2008), and Tomlinson and Masuhara (2013).
For a critical evaluation of the evolution of coursebook pedagogies see Mishan (2016); for a discussion about the value of coursebooks see Chapter 2 in this book, and for a summary of research reports of how teachers and learners actually use coursebooks see Chapters 5 and 15 in this book.
Digital Materials
In our experience, paper materials are still the main means in most countries of helping learners to acquire a language in the classroom. But there is no denying that digital materials are increasing almost every day in number, technological sophistication and quality of presentation. First, there came the desktop computer in the 1980s with forward-thinking language schools in the United Kingdom and the United States installing computer laboratories to impress, and hopefully help, their fee-paying students. Brian remembers how, as Director of Studies at a privileged language school in the United Kingdom, he spent a week in the shiny new lab with a group of teachers wondering what use they could put it to. Instead of asking the technician what the computers could do, they decided what they wanted the computers to do and then asked the technician to make sure that they could. As a result, the classes that were timetabled in the lab were actually popular and useful. A few years later Brian was a frequent visitor to schools in Indonesia where his meetings with principals were invariably held in unused computer labs because they were the only rooms with air conditioning and because the World Bank had provided the labs but not the training or spare parts that could make them effective. A few years after that, Hitomi was teaching in Singapore and was compelled to deliver 30% of her lessons through the computer regardless of its suitability for what she was helping students to learn. And today we received an e-mail referring us to a web article about the Tanzanian government's plan to link 2,000 primary schools to ICT facilities so that math and reading programs in particular can be delivered.
One big question about digital materials is whether or not they have provided the field with radical new modes of delivery of the same old pedagogy or whether they have stimulated new pedagogies too. Just as we were thinking about this question we received delivery of a new book published by the British Council (Kukulska-Hulme, Norris, and Donohue, 2015). Its title, Mobile pedagogy for English language teaching: A guide for teachers, suggests that its authors think that their pedagogy is as innovative as its delivery. A quick glance at a random pair of pages (pp. 20–21) reveals the following benefits of mobile pedagogy:
recording and documenting learning practices;
recording problems when they occur;
providing learner choice of task, text, medium, intended outcome, etc.;
recording critical reflection;
providing an audience;
producing multimedia texts;
finding and recording the target language outside the classroom;
sharing outputs with peers and other communities;
compiling a portfolio for continuous assessment.
All these benefits are valuable and are probably best provided by student use of their mobiles. However, none of these activities, or the many more described and exemplified throughout the book, actually represent a new pedagogy. What they do is to make use of the affordances of mobile technology to achieve creative exploitation of existing pedagogies. Unlike the activities in some digital materials that we have experienced, they are informed by language-learning principles and they provide a rich variety of new opportunities. We once worked as advisors and writers on a major online English-through-football course. We were initially excited by the creative potential of multimedia delivery but were eventually dismayed by being restricted by the software being used and by “learner expectations” to such stock activities as multiple choice, filling in the blanks, and sentence completion. And today one of our postgraduate students informed us of the apparent success of the online Middlebury Interactive Language program in increasing attendance and performance in schools in Hartford, United States. The innovative pedagogy seems to consist of so-called scaffolding interventions, which aid learner comprehension (e.g. difficult words in the reading texts have pop-up boxes with visual, audio and written definitions).
Brian was once invited by Microsoft to review the pedagogies of all the major existing computer-assisted language courses and to make use of this review to recommend the optimum pedagogy for such courses. Predictably most of the courses just reproduced, in more “glamorous” form, the stock activity types to be found in most paper-based courses. However, in his recommendations Brian was able to combine some of the more creative uses of pedagogy in the courses with principles and procedures he had already developed himself. We have no idea what happened to his recommendations as, like most research undertaken for publishers, his report was totally confidential and was never actually responded to. This issue of confidential research undertaken for publishers is taken up and developed in Chapter 15.
Although there have been radical developments in the use of new technologies to deliver language learning materials (both in stand-alone courses and as supplementary materials for print delivered coursebooks) there are very few books (or even articles) that focus on the pedagogical principles and development of these materials. Most of the publications on using new technologies to deliver language courses have focused, until very recently, on the technological innovations of the delivery (for a useful article on the technologies available to teachers see Levy, 2012) and on ways of exploiting the new affordances offered by these innovations. For example, the award-winning CALICO Journal (accessed September 30, 2016) lists only one article amongst its list of seminal articles that appears to relate computer-assisted language learning (CALL) to materials development. However, this article (Salaberry, 1996), although suggesting in its title a focus on pedagogical tasks, is actually an excellent article about the pedagogical affordances of computer-assisted language learning. This is true also of many other articles in this and other highly respected CALL journals (e.g. Language Learning and Technology, CALL and ReCALL). They provide very useful overviews of how technology can help teachers to apply the principles of second-language acquisition (SLA) theory to classroom practice in new and effective ways but have often little to offer on materials development (though see Chapter 8 for examples of publications, mainly chapters in books, which do suggest and report effective ways of developing principled digital materials).
Although aware of the obvious benefits brought to the field by digital delivery of language learning materials, some materials developers have warned against the control of language teachers and learners by technology. For example, Mukundan (2008b, p. 109) points out the danger of educationalists thinking that “multimedia can drive pedagogically sound methodology” and gives the example of Malaysia where he thinks teaching courseware “directs teaching in a prescriptive manner.” Maley (2011, p. 390) is positive about the ways in which IT can be used as a resource “for the freeing of teachers and learners alike from the constraints of the coursebook” and for providing “rapid and flexible access to unlimited information resources.” He also warns, though, how, as Wolf (2008) says, that the “multi-tasking, rapidly switching, superficial processing of information might … impair more reflective modes of thinking” (p. 392).
Although there are very few publications reporting research studies of the development and effects of materials for new technologies, some journals now have regular features reviewing new electronic materials (for example, ELT Journal) and some experts have written about the potential impact of such materials on language learning. For example, Chapelle (1998, 2001), Chapelle and Lui (2007) and Chapelle and Jamieson (2008) have written about the attitudinal and learning effects of CALL materials on learners. Eastment (1999), Derewianka (2003a, 2003b), Murray (2003), Blake (2008), Reinders and White (2010), Kervin and Derewianka (2011), Motteram (2011), Kiddle (2013), Mishan (2013), and Mishan and Timmis (2015) have written about the development and use of electronic materials for the teaching and / or learning of English. For detailed discussion about these and other publications as well as the principled development of materials for electronic delivery, see Chapter 8.
Perhaps the development that has received the most positive responses is the increase in courses that feature a blended learning approach. In these approaches decisions are made about whether to deliver each section of the course face-to-face or electronically, depending on such pragmatic criteria as cost, availability of expertise, availability of time and learner preference, as well as suitability of methodology (e.g. information is probably best delivered electronically and communicative competence is probably best developed through face-to-face interaction). There are many case studies of such courses in action in Tomlinson and Whittacker (2013), including a course for taxi drivers in Turkey in which the drivers followed up face-to-face classes on their mobile phones and received one-to-one tutorials whilst waiting for customers.
Supplementary Materials
Our early memories of materials for use in language classrooms are of coursebooks rather than supplementary materials (i.e. materials intended to provide additional language experience or instruction). Brian remembers using just a coursebook with his classes in Nigeria in 1966 and Hitomi remembers a similar experience with her classes in Nagoya in the 1980s. We were therefore rather surprised to find out from Daoyi and Zhaoyi (2015) that many series of supplementary readers were published and used in primary and secondary schools in China in the period from 1912–1949. On reflection, this was probably also true of many ESL countries where English was used as a medium of instruction. Brian now remembers that in Zambia, in 1969, senior forms in secondary schools studied English literature as well as English language and all classes had sets of extensive readers to supplement their coursebook.
Extensive readers were popular as supplementary materials in UK language schools in the 1970s and became even more so after the publication of a report on the successful impact on student's language growth of the Fiji book flood (Elley & Mangubhai, 1981). Other extensive reader experiments in the 1980s demonstrated positive effects too, for example in Singapore and in Cameroon (Davies, 1995), and many mainstream publishers developed their own series of graded readers. Brian remembers, at Bell College, Saffron Walden, in the late 1970s, not only using sets of EFL readers but of using a complete library of English literature books for the more advanced learners. In particular he remembers an Argentinian student who was inspired by a classroom activity to read a novel by Graham Green and then to read all his novels in the library. He remembers, too, an action research project in which he found that the only students who made progress in his intermediate level class were those who sought out English outside the classroom through interaction with other students and with local people and / or read English newspapers, magazines and books from the library. For powerful research-based arguments in favor of extensive reading see Day and Bamford (1998), Krashen (2004) and Maley (2008), and go to the Extensive Reading Foundation web site (www.erfoundation.org).
We think that what was beginning to happen at Bell College in the late 1970s and early 1980s with regard to supplementary materials reflected what was beginning to happen around the world. In addition to having a core coursebook, each class had access to other coursebooks, to a set of graded readers, to workbooks, to videos, to a library and to computer activities in the computer lab. In addition, at Bell College we were privileged to have access to a video studio (where Brian remembers his classes scripting, directing and producing videos of poems or stories they had responded to earlier in the week), we involved the students in projects and presentations, and we offered a program of special interest classes in which content rather than language drove the syllabus (e.g. English Through Pottery, English Through Local History, English Through Pub Architecture.). On reflection, students probably spent more time doing supplementary activities than they did using the core coursebook.
As we moved into the 1980s separate skills books became popular, to provide extra focused experience of reading, writing, listening, and speaking (e.g. the Oxford Supplementary Skills Series edited by Alan Maley in 1987 / 88) and a number of communicative activity books provided our students with enjoyable experience of communicating in order to complete a task and achieve a context dependent goal (e.g. Maley, Duff, and Grellet, 1981; Porter Ladousse, 1983). We also experimented with materials that we designed in house to implement such “eccentric” approaches as The Silent Way (Gattengo, 1963; Richards & Rodgers, 2001), Community Language Learning (Richards & Rodgers, 2001), and Suggestopedia (Hooper Hansen, 2011). Our students and those in other privileged language schools around the world certainly had a rich experience of language in use. Students in state schools and colleges had a narrower experience, which was still focused on the use of a core coursebook, but in China, for example, use was made of supporting “activity books, assessment books, skill development books, readers, flashcards and wall charts” as well as “cassette tapes and CDs” (Daoyi & Zhaoyi, 2015, p. 145). Brian remembers a book of communicative activities being written by teachers in Vanuatu for use in both primary classes and examinations (Tomlinson, 1981) and student made puppet theatres and big books being used to supplement the coursebook too. But Hitomi remembers in Japan at that time being still mainly restricted to a core coursebook.
Nowadays more supporting components than ever are being offered with coursebooks, although it is arguable that most of them simply provide additional information and practice rather than enrichening the students’ language experience as supplementary materials in the 1980s tended to do. Speakout (Parsons & Williams, 2011), for example, is accompanied by a teacher's resource book, which contains:
Detailed teaching notes …
An extensive bank of photocopiable activities covering grammar, vocabulary and functional language in communicative contexts.
Mid-course and end-of-course tests …
Also available are Active Teach (containing the student book in digital format, integrated whiteboard software and an answer reveal function) and MySpeakout Lab (including an online learning tool with personalized practice, an automatic gradebook and video podcasts with interactive activities). A number of publishers have expressed their concerns about the cost and inessentiality of all these add-on components and certainly in our travels around the classrooms of the world we rarely see any course add-on components in evidence. We feel quite strongly that the money invested by publishers and therefore by schools in these inessential add-ons could be better invested in providing more experience of the language in use through, for example, extensive readers, authentic videos, and access to newspapers and magazines (a popular resource made use of in China since the 1930s). In our recent review of adult global coursebooks (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2013) we complained that “there are even more and more expensive course components” (p. 248) since our equivalent reviews in 2001 and 2008. Currently, though, more and more add-ons are being made available “free” to coursebook users via the Internet. For example, the recently published fourth edition of the coursebook Headway intermediate (Soars & Soars, 2016) provides extra grammar practice, vocabulary practice, tests, games and dialogue practice on a freely available web site, https://elt.oup.com/student/headway/int/?cc=gb&selLanguage=en. The newly appointed chief product and marketing officer of a rival company has just announced an intention to focus even more on providing additional wrap around services to support their coursebook delivery. Interestingly the announcement also mentioned developing blended learning courses and international courses as other priorities.
Two methodologies have made a big impact recently in books about methodology, CLIL (content and language integrated learning) and TBLT (task-based language teaching). However, not only have they arguably had very little impact on what happens in mainstream coursebooks (despite claims on blurbs that they do) but they have led to the publication of very few supplementary materials either (one exception being Coyle, Hood, and Marsh, 2010). This is probably for the same reasons that one of our favorite approaches, total physical response (TPR) (see Tomlinson, 1994a) has rarely been implemented in supplementary materials for students. The activities are difficult to transfer to the page and, more importantly, they are best realized in teacher's resource books rather than student textbooks, thus selling only one copy per class rather than 40.
For extensive reviews of coursebooks used in different areas of the world see Tomlinson (2008).
Self-Access Materials
Students seem to have been learning other languages by themselves for as long as languages have been learned. In our experience the most effective way of quickly gaining basic communicative competence seems to be immersion in the target language through, for example, moving to a country where the language is spoken or joining (or forming) a community of speakers of the language. Barker (2010) gives a successful example of forming a community of language speakers at a university in Japan where some students from his classes formed a club whose members always spoke English to each other when they met either inside or outside the university. Brian advised agricultural students at a university in Addis Ababa to do something similar, and soon they went from being laughed at to being joined by students from many different courses.
Immersion involves studying subjects in an L2 and is a potentially successful way of quickly gaining communicative competence in the L2 because of the massive exposure to relevant input and the multiple opportunities for using the target language for communication. However, there is a danger that achieving communicative effect always takes priority over accuracy and that language errors start to fossilize. This is what happened on the Canadian Immersion Programme (Swain & Lapkin, 2005) when English-speaking students studied all their school subjects in French. The students gained the target knowledge in their subjects and made rapid progress in developing fluency and communicative effect in the L2. However, they continued to make basic grammatical errors until language-awareness classes were added to the curriculum. The same thing happened to Schmidt (2001) when he assumed that he would acquire Portuguese from immersion in the language but only really made progress when he realized that he needed to pay attention to language forms too. He used the term “noticing” to label this process of paying attention to language forms encountered during communication and argued persuasively for making use of it in self-access attempts to learn a language. Bolitho and Tomlinson had already come to a similar conclusion with regard to the improvement of accuracy and pragmatic effect at higher levels in their book, Discover English, which was first published in 1980 and is still in print today as Bolitho and Tomlinson (2005). This is an activity book intended primarily to help higher level learners to make their own discoveries about how English is used from focused exposure to it. It focuses mainly on sentence-level grammar but its authors have started discussions about supplementing it with Discover English Discourse. Unfortunately though, the publishers have resisted this move as the activities are considered to be too open-ended for teachers to accept (i.e. not usable for easy to mark tests and difficult to give feedback to).
In our view many self-access materials still focus on information about and practice in specific language items or language skills which are problematic for the learners and often do not include enough exposure to authentic language in use, enough opportunities for communication, enough experience in making discoveries from authentic encounters with the language or enough material designed to engage the learners affectively and cognitively. This is partly because of the restrictions inherent in self-access study (e.g. nobody to interact with; nobody to monitor production; the perceived need for a marking key) and partly because a focus on forms is what many self-access learners believe is necessary. For a critique of forms-focused self-access materials, a suggested list of principles to humanize self-access materials, and an extended example of “access-self materials” see Tomlinson (2011c). See also Cooker (2008, 2010) who insists that criteria for evaluating self-access materials should be based on such core principles as “the ability to interest and engage learners, to be meaningful and challenging and to have a sustained positive impact” (Cooker, 2008, pp. 128–129). This is echoed and extended by Tomlinson (2010c, pp. 73–81), who proposes that criteria for developing and evaluating self-access materials should be driven by five universal principles of acquisition (e.g. “In order for the learners to maximize their exposure to language in use they need to be engaged both affectively and cognitively in the language experience”), five principles of self-access materials development (e.g. “Provide many opportunities for the learners to produce language in order to achieve intended outcomes rather than to just practice specified features of the language”) and seven principles of delivery (e.g. “The materials should aim to help the students to become truly independent so that they can continue to learn the language forever by seeking further contact with it”). He also insists that local criteria should be developed to take into account such factors specific to the learning context as:
age;
gender;
levels;
purposes for learning the language;
amount of class learning time;
estimated time available for self-access;
previous experience of using self-access materials;
attitudes to self-access;
learning-style preferences;
learner needs;
learner wants.
We believe that exposure to the language in use, opportunity to use the language, and experience of making self-discoveries can and should be built into self-access programs together with texts and activities that stimulate affective and cognitive engagement. This can be achieved by, for example:
using a text-driven approach (Tomlinson, 2013b) in which students select a potentially engaging text, respond to it personally, develop their own text (e.g. by answering a letter), make discoveries about a linguistic or pragmatic feature of the core text and then revise their development text making use of their discoveries;
providing access to an extensive reading / listening / viewing library and offering a menu of postexperience creative tasks to those students who want to do them (Fenton-Smith, 2010);
stimulating students to look out for English outside the classroom and then to interact with whatever language experience interests them—e.g. joining a Philosophy in Pubs group (Tomlinson, 2014a). See Cooker (2008, 2010) and Tomlinson (2010c, 2011c) for detailed examples of such humanistic self-access activities.
Many institutions now have self-access centers and one that we both think sets a very good example is in Kanda University in Japan. This center provides a very rich access to books, films, television programs, digital materials, skills-based task materials and language focused activity materials, as well as providing such facilities as a proficient speaker available for advice or conversation and advertisements for local places and events in which English will be used.
Publications about Materials Development
As recently as the 1970s and 1980s there were very few publications on materials development. There were a few books on methodology, which contained sections on, or at least reference to, materials (e.g. Moskowitch, 1978; Richards, 1978) but the phrase “materials development” was not used. The process of producing language-learning materials tended to be referred to as materials writing and there was very little discussion of the principles that did or should inform it.
There were a few books and papers at that time on what we now refer to as materials development. Madsen and Bowen (1978) focused on teachers adapting materials and asserted that good teachers are constantly adapting the materials that are available to them. Candlin and Breen (1980) focused on the principles and procedures of evaluating and designing materials. And Cunningsworth (1984) devoted a complete book to the evaluation and selection of materials. However, most references to materials writing / design came in books and articles on language teaching methodology, which illustrated pedagogic methods and approaches with extracts from coursebooks (as Cunningsworth, 1984, does). This was the norm throughout the 1980s, with very few books taking the lead from Cunningsworth's breakthrough (Dubin and Olshtain's, 1986, book on designing language courses; Grant's, 1987, book on making the most of your textbook and Sheldon's, 1987, book on the problems of textbook evaluation and design being conspicuous exceptions). There were some articles on particular aspects of materials development published in the 1970s and 1980s in such professional journals as ELT Journal and Modern English Teacher but we had to wait until the mid-1990s for further dedicated books on materials development to appear. Both the articles and the books tended to focus on materials development as a practical undertaking. For example, in the United States Byrd (1995) published a book that provided a practical guide for materials writers, in England Cunningsworth (1995) continued his focus on evaluation by publishing a book on how to choose your coursebook and Graves (1996) published a book on teachers in the role of course developers. Tomlinson (1998) marked an important development by discussing the principles and procedures of a number of the important processes of materials development (although Hall, 1995, had already published a chapter on the theory and practice of materials production in Hidalgo, Hall, and Jacobs, 1995, a book focusing on materials writing in Southeast Asia). In Tomlinson (1998) there were chapters on data collection, the process of evaluation, the process of materials writing, the process of materials publication and, perhaps for the first time, there were chapters explicitly concerned with the effective application of theory to practice. This book was published by Cambridge University Press as a collection of papers by presenters at Materials Development Association (MATSDA) conferences and workshops on different aspects of materials development for language learning, events that also stimulated many articles on materials development in various established journals and in the MATSDA journal, Folio. The book has now been brought up to date and added to as Tomlinson (2011).
In the 1990s, books on language teaching methodology also gave more attention to applications of methodology to materials development and illustrated the approaches outlined with samples of published materials. A good example of such a book is McDonough and Shaw (2003), which has substantial sections on approaches to materials, on materials adaptation, and on materials evaluation. This book has been brought up to date and expanded with numerous illustrations from contemporary published materials as McDonough, Shaw, and Masuhara (2013).
In 2000, Fenner and Newby published a book on the approaches to materials design currently being implemented in European coursebooks, in 2001 Richards published a book that focused on curriculum development but made frequent reference to materials development and in 2002 McGrath published an important volume on
