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CHAPTER II SUPPORTING THEORIES

2.1 The Framework for The Selection of Material Material is the important part in teaching learning process. The success of teaching and learning is not only influenced by the quality of the teacher or the students, but also the appropriateness of material should be considered to get the best result. What aspects of materials we focus on in evaluating them will largely depend upon the purposes one has in looking at the materials. It is possible to describe materials in terms of the quality of the paper and binding, pricing, layout, size, typeface and so on, but more pedagogic focus rather than simply a pragmatic one, would lead one to examine those aspects materials that more directly aid the teaching-learning process and this is what will be aimed at here. According to Tomlinson (1998) In considering the selection of materials involves two stages of analysis, as conventional wisdom suggest, the first stage would consist of assessing the content of the book in relation to its professed aims. Thus, for example, if a coursebook/ material states as an underlying principle of its materials that students need to engage in authentic communication in order to develop 'real-life' communication skills, in the light of current refocusing of the question of the authenticity, where it is not primarily the materials themselves that have to be authentic, but rather the response to the materials, teachers will need to ask what the learners are required to do with these materials and whether this response is motivated by an authentic need to communicate, involving, say the addressing of content rather than form, at the very least, in assessing the validity of the claims made (Hall, 2001). The second stage analysis would involve assessing the effectiveness of materials in

terms of the specific need and context of the intended learners well as how well they serve the teaching learning process. The frameworks propose basically addresses in this stage of evaluation and consist of three broad categories, each assessing and potential validity of the materials in relation to: a. The learner's needs, goals and pedagogical requirements b. The teacher's skill, abilities, theories, and beliefs c. The thinking underlying the materials writer's presentation of the content and approach to teaching and learning respectively. Tomlinson (2003), also terms psychological validity, pedagogical validity, and process and content validity to provide wider explanation. 2.1.1 Psychological Validity The need for students-centeredness in recent years has made it necessary to conduct some sort of needs analysis, whether in the construction of a syllabus or a set of materials. It follows that a key question in choosing a coursebook would be, 'How does the book relate to the needs of the learners?' of course the need to communicate lies at the heart of all language learning. Since this involves not just communication within the classroom, but ultimately in the real world outside, the materials must also take into account students' longer-term goals. Taking this aspect of students-centeredness a step further, one might wish to find out to what extent the materials have the potential to foster self-directed, independent learning. As Tomlinson (1998) notes, the most significant role materials is to involve students in decision-making about their own learning. One way of doing this is to channel their energies towards making existing materials more relevant and motivating; another would be to involve them in generating other source materials out of the reading and listening texts provided, as well as other source materials, to suit their own 3

level and interest. Even where claims are made about fostering learner autonomy, the question to ask is whether learners are involved in making decisions about their own learning or do the materials encourage learner autonomy in a conservative sense only, which means learners do some study without teacher intervention but have self-directed goals and have not develop effective learning strategies. Do the learners have sufficient control over the meanings and interactions that are generated in the classroom using the materials? As Edge and Wharton (1998:296) point out, "if learners in classroom can initiate interaction patterns create the meanings they want to personally express, then there is more chance that they will be able to make use of such learning to exploit outside sources for learning when they find them." The following criteria mirror these issues: Rationale/ learners need What are the aims and objectives of materials? Have they been clearly spelt out? Do they cater to the needs, wants, interests and purposes of the learners? Are the material appropriate are they likely to be effective learners to acquire English? Do the materials make a positive contribution to heightening and sustaining learner motivation? Independence and Autonomy Is the learner a decision making or just a receiver of information? Do the materials encourage independent language learning? Do the materials encourage learners to guess, predict, discover, take risks, try out several alternatives? Do they give learners plenty of opportunities which suit their linguistic level, they

proffered learning styles, their level of involvement in the text and time available to them? Do materials involve the learner in thinking about the learning process and in experiencing a variety of different types of learning activities? Self-development Do the materials/texts engage the learners both cognitively and affectively? Do the materials credit learners with the capacity for rational thought and problemsolving? Do they also involve the learner's emotions in the learning process? Do the materials allow for the development of creative and critical thinking skills? Do the materials allow scope for the development of a desirable set of attitudes? Do the materials allow the individual to develop his or her talents as fully as possible? Creativity Do the materials exploit the learners' prior knowledge and experience and provide opportunities for further development? Do the materials allow sufficient opportunities for student inventiveness and 2.1.2 Pedagogical Validity Current trends in education, technological advances, information explosion and the communications revolution have all come together to cause new and diversified demands to be made on the teacher. So that, while tending to their learner's linguistic growth and development, teachers are themselves impelled continually to improve and develop their own skills and abilities and acquire new ones. This requires teachers not only to reflect on their practice (Schon, 1983; Richards, 1993) cited in Tomlinson (2003) but also calls for a certain attitude of openness to new possibilities and a desire to continue to learn. A commercial coursebook can play an important role in teacher 5

development if it offers teachers the opportunity to learn more about the language and about approaches to teaching in a way that allows them to integrate new ideas into their experiences of reflective practice to achieve a synthesis of a wide variety of teachingrelated schemata (Edge and Wharton, 1998) cited in Tomlinson (2003). In one sense, a coursebook by itself has little operational value until the teacher populates it with his/her own ideas and experiences and brings it to life. Yet the potential for materials to influence the way teachers operate is considerable. This is because coursebooks embody a whole lot of theoretical positions and principles. By providing practical guidance on how to deal with particular texts and activities, suggesting innovative methods and approaches and offering alternative plans and procedures to enable teachers to maintain student motivation in class, or generate productive interaction, coursebooks can act as powerful catalysts for consciousnessraising, particularly in the case of untrained or novice teachers Even for experienced teachers, seeking to excel their practice with new ideas course materials can hold the seeds for effecting such transformations. 2.1.3 Process and Content Validity The design of a coursebook and the way in which its authors intend it to be used is an essential part of its theoretical position. This set of criteria, therefore, relates to the overall view the coursebook writer holds, or wishes to project, about the nature of language, the nature of language learning and his educational philosophy in general. It also relates to the way in which these views are carried over into the tasks and activities that learners are required to perform and the nature of these activities in terms of their clarity and coherence of presentation, their sufficiency, accessibility and

appropriateness. The information gathered under this category thus relates to the

methodology, content, format, layout and design features of the materials as well as the theoretical assumptions about language and language learning that underpin them. 2.2 Developing Material and Language Teaching According to Jolly and Bolitho (1998: 97-8) cited in Tomlinson (2003) there are some procedures which is involved for developing framework materials: Identification of need lor materials Exploration of need Contextual realization of materials Pedagogical realization of materials Production of materials Student use of materials Other theory is stated by Penaflorida (1995: 172-9) who reports her use of the six principles of materials design identified by Nunan (1988) cited in Tomlisnon (2003): Materials should be clearly linked to the curriculum they serve Materials should be authentic in terms of text and task Materials should stimulate interaction Materials should allow learners to focus on formal aspects of the language Materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills, and skills in learning Materials should encourage learners to apply their developing skills to the world beyond the classroom Those theories are strengthened by Silvestri cited in certain website, in developing materials for language teaching, teacher should keep the things will assist the student to acquire and retain knowledge, vocabulary. For instance, a teacher could collect various

items, each of which will trigger an autonomic response in the learner and have the learner and have the learner remember the vocabulary associated with that item. In the field of language teaching there are many materials that the experienced language teacher will develop during the practice of language education The terms that should be considered in developing material and language teaching are: 1. Course Texts This is also known as a text book and it will be one of the first materials that the teacher will become familiar with. If teachers have the opportunity to select their own text book then they should look for one with a balance of teacher directed exercises as well as self-directed learning opportunities. Collect concordance lines. These are lists of phrases or utterances in the target language which repeat certain words or group of words in slightly different situations. For example: I didn't have any money so I didn't go shopping, He didn't see any cars so he walked across the road. Language teachers should also use a corpus. This is a bank collected by the teacher which shows the different genres of writing in a language. Examples are newspapers, novels, scripts, Shakespearean plays, colloquialisms, and idioms. 2. Authentic Texts & Tasks Authentic text is any piece of writing which is used in everyday life. Examples are a newspaper, a book, or the script of a live news presentation. These are authentic texts and language teachers will often use these as examples of real language use. It is good to have a collection of authentic texts as part of materials in your repertoire. An authentic task is one that replicates the way it is performed in the real world. This could be buying a ticket for a train of bus, ordering a meal at a restaurant, or having a class 8

discussion about a real issue in which the students are involved. 3. Communicative Approaches A communicative approach involves a methodology called Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). This involves students devising their own speaking tasks in situations that they collaborate on and write together. The teacher would collect and list scenarios from which students would choose. Chunking is also communicative in that students acquire the language as it is used. The teacher collects a bank of phrases most commonly used in the target language and focuses on teaching these a complete chunks of language instead of individual words. A good method is to teach songs, chants, and idiomatic phrases. Jokes in a language are especially good as joke telling is especially difficult to master. 2.2.1 Guidelines for Designing Effective English Teaching Materials Guideline 1: English language teaching materials should be contextualized The materials should be contextualized to the curriculum they are intended to address (Nunan, 1988, pp. 12) cited in Howard (2007). It is essential during the design stages that the objectives of the curriculum, syllabus or scheme within the designers institution are kept to the fore. Guideline 2: Materials should stimulate interaction and be generative in terms of language Ideally, language-teaching materials should provide situations that demand the same; situations where learners need to interact with each other regularly in a manner that reflects the type of interactions they will engage in outside of the classroom. Guideline 3: English language teaching materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills and strategies. It is impossible for teachers to teach their learners all the language they need to know in 9

the short time that they are in the classroom. In addition to teaching valuable new language skills, it is essential that language teaching materials also teach their target learners how to learn, and that they help them to take advantage of language learning opportunities outside the classroom. Hall (1995) cited in Howard (2007) stresses the importance of providing learners with the confidence to persist in their attempts to find solutions when they have initial difficulties in communicating. To this end, strategies such as rewording and using facial expressions and body language effectively can be fine-tuned with well designed materials. Guideline 4: English language teaching materials should allow for a focus on form as well as function Frequently, the initial motivation for designing materials stems from practitioners desires to make activities more communicativeoften as an antidote to the profusion of skills-based activities and artificial language use pervasive in the field of ESL instruction (Demetrion, 1997, p. 5) cited in Howard (2007). The aim of Guideline 3 is to develop active, independent language learners. To help meet this goal, materials also need to encourage learners to take an analytical approach to the language in front of and around them, and to form and test their own hypotheses about how language works (Nunan, 1988). Well-designed materials can help considerably with this by alerting learners to underlying forms and by providing opportunities for regulated practice in addition to independent and creative expression. Guideline 5: English language teaching materials should offer opportunities for integrated language use. Language teaching materials can tend to focus on one particular skill in a somewhat unnatural manner. Ideally, materials produced should give learners opportunities to integrate all the language skills in an authentic manner and to become competent at

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integrating extra-linguistic factors also. Guideline 6: English language teaching materials should be authentic Authenticity in terms of the tasks which students are required to perform with them. Consideration of the types of real-world tasks specific groups of learners commonly need to perform will allow designers to generate materials where both the texts and the things learners are required to do with them reflect the language and behaviours required of them in the world outside the classroom. Guideline 7: English language teaching materials should be attractive Physical appearance: Initial impressions can be as important in the language classroom as they are in many other aspects of life. Put simply, language-teaching materials should be good to look at! User-friendliness: Materials should also be attractive in terms of their usability. Some simple examples: if the activity is a gap-fill exercise, is there enough space for learners to handwrite their responses? If an oral response is required during a tape or video exercise, is the silence long enough to allow for both thinking and responding? Durabilty: If materials need to be used more than once, or if they are to be used by many different students, consideration needs to be given to how they can be made robust enough to last the required distance. Ability to be reproduced: Language teaching institutions are not renowned for giving their staff unlimited access to colour copying facilities, yet many do-it-yourself materials designers continue to produce eye-catching multi-coloured originals, and suffer frustration and disappointment when what emerges from the photocopier is a class-set of grey blurs. Guideline 8: English language teaching materials should be flexible Prabhu (cited in Cook, c. 1998) suggests the materials designer may offer flexibility in

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terms of content by providing a range of possible inputs . . . [that] are not themselves organised into lesson units (cited in Maley, 1998, p. 284), and that teachers or, indeed, students, could then choose which of these to use and which procedure (e.g. comprehension exercise, grammar awareness exercise, role play, etc) to apply to them. It is essential the materials designer is informed about the culture-specific learning processes of the intended learners, and for many groups this may mean adjusting the intended balance of what teachers may regard as more enjoyable activities and those of a more serious nature. Materials should link explicitly to what the learners already know, to their first languages and cultures, and very importantly, should alert learners to any areas of significant cultural difference. 2.3 Materials for The Teaching Grammar The development of grammatical competence has an important role in second or foreign language learning. Related to that fact, the examination of materials for grammar in coursebooks and supplementary materials reveals that concern with grammatical form continues to take precedence over meaning considerations. However, Widdowson (1990) cited in Tomlinson (2003) argued that restricting attention to grammatical form is insufficient: "Learners need to realize the functions of the device [i.e. grammar] as a way of mediating between words and contexts, as a powerful resource for the purposeful achievement of meaning. A communicative approach, properly conceived, does not involve the rejection of grammar. On the contrary, it involves recognition of its central mediating role in the use and learning of language." (Widdowson 1990: 97/8) According to the theory above, it can be assumed that if one only looks at the majority of practice material offered to learners, such as: single sentence practice, random lexicalization, transformation exercises, wordy and inaccurate 'rules', etc. - it can be concluded that the realizations and recognitions to which Widdowson refers, as 12

to when and where the grammar practiced might actually be employed, are mostly left to the learners themselves to come to. As an example the common practice of teaching and practicing 'short forms' such as Yes I am /No I'm not as responses to open-ended questions and that of asking learners to transform sentences in active voice into passive voice (or vice versa). Of the latter, an example is the approach taken by Acevedo and Gower (1996:23)i, where learners are told that the Passive is used when "The agent is the new, important information. In English, new information often comes at or towards the end of the sentence', information which is then ignored when learners are subsequently asked to identify the subjects and objects in eight sentences, and then to 'rewrite the sentences in the passive voice [including] the agent only where necessary'. When it comes down to it, it is form that matters. Grammar of the language is taught through focusing on a sequence of individual and discrete grammatical items, to which Thornbury (2000) refers as the delivery of 'grammar Mcnuggets'. Long and Robinson (1998) and others argue that there is too much focus on individual language forms and propose a focus on form - in other words, an approach which asks learners to notice language forms as they occur in the data learners are exposed to, and to consider how the form(s) are used to establish particular meanings. In line with Willis, who proposed the theory of Task-Based Learning (TBL), the approach focuses on the innovative approach in using text for examination of language data and form. Furthermore, Tomlinson (2003), proposed a number of considerations to take into account. These include: a) the age level of the learners who will be using the materials;

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b) the extent to which any adopted methodology meets the expectations of learners, teachers, the educational culture where the learners and teachers work; c) the extent to which any contexts and co-texts which are employed in order to present the grammar area(s) will be of interest to learners; d) the nature of the grammatical areas to be dealt with, in terms of their form, their inherent meaning implications (if any), and how they are used in normally occurring spoken and / or written discourse; e) the extent to which any language offered to the learners for them to examine the grammar used represents realistic use of the language, and the extent to which activities for learners to produce language containing the target grammar will result in meaningful utterances, and ones which bear at least some resemblance to utterances which the learners would be likely to want to produce in their own, nonclassroom discourse; f) Any difficulties that learners can be expected to encounter when learning these areas of grammar, especially with regard to any similarities or differences in form, function, and form / function relationship, between the target language and their mother tongue. The first three listed of the considerations above are great importance for anyone working with or designing materials for classroom use. For the last three listed tends to consider the extent to which grammar materials accurately reflect the language and the learners' linguistic needs, and to which they encourage and allow learners to produce language which is of relevance to them, are factors whose absence may result in material which is interesting but of low pedagogic value. The criteria 'd' and 'e' might immediately consider the continuing tendency of materials to avoid normal ellipsis in practice activities which are intended to teach

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language that can be used conversationally, e.g. in Ur and Ribe (2000:4) cited in Tomlinson (2003) learners are presented with exchanges such as: "What's your name?" / "My name's Debora", "How old are you?" / "I'm fourteen", "When's your birthday?" / "My birthday's in September" (etc.). What is clear in such writing is that writers retain the view that the exemplification of grammatical form(s) is more important than the presentation of naturally occurring language. Another example given by Whitney (1998:136), cited in Tomlinson who includes the following practice of past simple: learners are asked to ask and answer with a partner, are given the prompt 'play - football - yesterday' and the example "Did you play football yesterday?" "Yes, I did / No I didn't", and then asked to produce further exchanges with prompts such as 'study - a lot - at the weekend' and 'watch - TV yesterday'. Getting learners to produce only these 'short answers' is presumably based on the belief that they do not have the linguistic armory to say more; however, their use as encouraged in such exercises could often, in conversational settings, result in learners coming across as brusque. On the other hand, Lewis (1993:154) points a possible way forward with a call for an emphasis on grammar as a receptive skill. This is echoed in many ways by Ellis, who argues for what he terms 'interpretative grammar tasks' which " ...focus learners' attention on a targeted structure in the input and [...] enable them to identify and comprehend the meaning(s) of this structure. This approach emphasizes input processing for comprehension rather than output processing for production ..." (Ellis 1995:88). The notion of 'grammar as a receptive skill' is also strengthened by Batstone (1996:273) who argues: "Learners may need time to make sense of new language before they are asked to make sense with it. [This is an argument] for receptive tasks to be clearly distinct from productive tasks, and for the former to precede the latter." 15

Learning the distinctions between aspects of the grammatical system is fundamental to extend grammar learning and control - distinctions between active and passive voice, or the use of 'will' or 'going to', are other examples of this. Quoting Willis (1990:115), talking about noun phrases but making a comment which is applicable to many other grammar areas: "... most of these exercises are consciousness raising activities. The complexity and unpredictability of [this language] are such that we can offer no prescriptions. All we can do is outline the elements, and encourage learners to examine their experience of the language. It is, however, most important that we do this." Tomlinson (2003) also stated that language includes grammar is frequently not a matter of correct or incorrect, possible or not possible. Asking learners to consider which is more likely or appropriate allows them to perceive that choices are available, and that there are subtle meaning differences between the choices. Moreover, he added that grammar materials sometimes fail learners when they give highly contrived examples of the language point in question. When practice activities or exercises are given to learners to practice a particular aspect of grammar, it would appear to be desirable that the utterances produced in doing the exercise be ones that a) are feasible language, and b) Bear some resemblance to language that the learners themselves might wish to utter. Grammar may be necessary - perhaps a necessary evil to some - but let it be seen and acted upon as part of language, not a separate feature to be learned for its own sake. The grammar materials writer needs to try to put into the hands of both teachers and learners materials which reflect grammar's "central mediating role in the use and learning of language".

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