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Ch.1 Issues in material development and design Author : Nigel Harwood -

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Ch.1 Issues in material development and design
Book Name: English Language Teaching Materials
The author: Nigel Harwood
Professor: Dr. Zoghi
Saeed Mojarradi PhD. Candidate T.2 Friday, April 27, 2018

Materials is a term used here to encompass both text and language learning tasks: texts
presented to the learner in a paper-based, audio, or visual form, and / or exercises and
activities built around such texts.
Speaking about materials development and design, we bring together theoretical and
practical / pedagogical perspectives, and the authors describe and justify materials
produced for a variety of local and international, commercial and noncommercial contexts.
Why talk about materials design?
Material designers draw on a variety of theories and frameworks. Some may question the
relevance of this collection to many of the teachers around the world who are restricted in
the amount of materials they can produce.
Time is short, teaching schedules are heavy, and practitioners are sometimes not permitted
to deviate from a rigid syllabus by introducing their own materials.
Dudley- Evans and St. John go on to suggest that a good
provider of materials will be able to:

1- Select appropriately from what is available.

2- Be creative with what is available.
3- Modify activities to suit learner's needs.
4- Supplement by providing extra activities (and extra input).
As Samuda (2005) puts it, teachers engage in "re-design" work, "tweaking, adjusting and
adapting materials to suit particular needs".
The problem is that, all teachers are equipped with this ability to redesign as part of their
"normal professional repertoire", it is seen as something "easily picked up, essentially
unproblematic.
A number of researchers agree with Samuda that materials design should be studied
and theorized, proposing that it be incorporated into pre-and in –service teacher education
programs.
Some, like Tamilson (2003) place more emphasize on getting teachers to design their own
materials, whereas others, liken Hutchinson and Torres (1994), are more concerned with
training teachers to become better consumers of textbooks.
Materials and TESOL curriculum
Using Richards and Rodgers's (2001) terminology, designers will need to determine their
approach, design, and procedure, which refer respectively:
1- Approach: the nature of language and of language teaching and learning
2- Design: the specification of content, and of the roles of teachers, learners and
materials.
3- Procedure: the variety of pedagogical activities that can be drawn on. Materials will
be shaped by these considerations.

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Materials writers will wish to consult the second –language acquision (SLA) literature,
especially when considering which language structures to focus on, and how and when to
present them.
Genre –specific computer corpora, that is, electronically stored data bases of authentic
spoken and / or written text will also be invaluable when specifying language content.
Although the pros and cons of using "authentic" texts and materials are much discussed,
it is fair to say that most materials writers nowadays would agree with Carter (1998) that both
authentic and inauthentic texts can inform the curriculum.
Carter (1998) argues that patently inauthentic as well as authentic texts are pedagogically
exploitable. He also points out that authentic dialogs can be modified somewhat to make them
more accessible to learners, while retaining some of the more intriguing features of naturally
occurring discourse.
However, just because materials are authentic, there is no guarantee learners will find them
interesting. There is much to be said, then, for producing materials on a local rather than a
global level, connecting them meaningfully with the context and with the learners own lives.
Materials writers will therefore need to consider their purposes and priorities carefully when
choosing texts and balancing the authentic against the inauthentic.
The content of curriculum generally, and of the resulting materials in particular is often seen
as governed by "needs" although the meaning of "needs" is far from straightforward. The
literature is replete with discussions about whose needs materials writers should take into
account and which instruments materials developers should use to conduct needs analysis.
Continuing to focus on teacher and learner’s roles, a number of researchers have
stressed the need to promote learner independence.
Clarke (1989) suggests that a learner –centered approach can be fostered by getting
learners to adopt materials for their own or other classes, even materials are imposed by some
official curriculum or institutional requirement.
Content analysis
As Pingel (1999) explains, quantitative content analysis of materials and textbooks involves
counting the number of references to a particular topic/ item, or identifying content categories
and calculating the percentage of space devoted to each category.
In contrast, qualitative content analysis is more overtly interpretive, seeking to uncover
meanings and value transmitted by the materials.
a) Linguistic content analyses
Researchers have wondered for some time how closely the language textbooks teach
matches the language speakers and writers use. Sheldon (1988) judged that
commercial materials writers selected and presented vocabulary without system and
without consulting sources like West's (1953) service list a closed circle was in
operation.

1. Language
A number of corpus-based studies have identified a linguistic gap between commercial
materials and actual language use. Carter (1998), Cullen and Kuo (2007) and Mc
Karthy and Carter (1995) show how corpora distinguish spoken and written grammar,
suggesting that standard grammars and materials that are not informed by corpus data

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 fail to account for some pervasive spoken discourse features such as ellipsis and
vague language.

2. Pragmatics
It is difficult for language learners to achieve pragma linguistic competence, as
Bardovi-Harlig et al. (1991) argue, because speech acts are not easily transferred from
one language to another, however speakers who do not use pragmatically appropriate
language run the risk of appearing uncooperative the least, or more seriously, rude or
insulting.

3. Genre
Several studies have compared text books language syllabi in specific genre with real
life data in the realms of academic and business discourse.
Williams (1988) and Chan (2009) contrast the language that features in textbooks with
that in real-life business meeting.

b) Cultural content analyses

As well as being carriers of linguistic content, materials have also been seen as cultural
artifacts because of their thematic content.
One example of a cultural content analysis was conducted by Shardakova and
Pavlenko (2004) who object to the construction of the target culture in two Russian
language textbooks.

c) The limitations of content analysis

Both quantitative and qualitative forms of content analysis have been critiqued.
The former is guilty of enabling breath at the expense of depth revealing which aspects
of language, culture, and content feature heavily in the materials, but telling us little
about how these aspects are presented.
The latter approach, unless conducted rigorously and systematically, suffers from
reliability issues.

For instance, it is noticeable that none of the writers such as Canagarajah (2004)
include any mention of inter-rater reliability testing of their analysis.
Qualitative content analysis may also be felt to lack generalizability, having limited
relevance to other materials beyond the scope of the investigation.

The challenge of materials writing: Authors, and publishers, accounts

The materials writers in Johnson, s (2003) investigation were asked to design a task that
focused on teaching learners how to describe people, with the informants thinking aloud about
what they were doing during the exercise.
Johnson found that experienced designers are more likely to complexity than the novices,
that is, the experienced materials writers spent far more time considering alternative ways of
designing the task, whereas the inexperienced designers tended to think of one configuration,
and immediately go with that.

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 Material writers are faced with a number of competing demands, then. they need to make
their materials suitable for a wide variety of teachers, who have different amounts of
experience, are more or less qualified, and who may have differing teaching styles and beliefs.
Textbooks writers need to make their materials easy enough to follow for the inexperienced
teacher by, for instance, making activities build upon one another in a transparent and
predictable sequence, or by providing detailed teachers notes, at the same time ensuring the
materials are flexible enough for the more experienced teacher to adapt in any number of
ways. They try to please all the people all the time.
Materials writers obviously need to bear in mind the needs of the context and their audience,
however, some of the challenges they face appear to derive from the fact that textbooks are
commercial artifacts, profit being the first priority in the eyes of the industry.
Future research, future challenges for materials design
a) Ethnographies of materials production
That is involving interviews with publishers and authors as a product unfolds in order
to gain an insight into the factors that shape the eventual form of the materials.
There are the needs for TESOL practitioners and researchers to understand the
condition in which materials and textbooks are produced.
What are publisher’s prairies?
In little john, s (1992) words, “why are ELT materials the way they are?
Accounts such as these will allow researchers to understand the pressures editors and
materials writers operate under, but will also enable researchers to interrogate and
critique the standard practices and assumptions of the industry, and to suggest
alternatives.
b) Ethnographies of materials use
As Kamlus (2004) and others argue although it is easy to critique materials using
content analysis, it is less easy to predict what effect these texts will have when they
are put to use in the classroom.

Friday, April 27, 2018

6:03:29 PM
Saeed Mojarradi

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