LANGUAGE LEARNING

MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT
Learning
Materials
Language Learning Materials
•   anything
used by teachers and learners to facilitate the
learning of a language (Tomlinson, 2011). These are used
to increase the learners’ knowledge and/or experience of
the language. The defining characteristic of these
materials is that the material designer builds in a
pedagogic purpose. 
Learning Materials Vs. Teaching Materials
• Learning materials may focus on the materials used by
the students to hasten learning
• Teaching materials may focus on the materials used by
the teachers to carry out an efficient teaching
Learning Materials Development
• anything which is done by writers, teachers or learners to
provide sources of language input and to exploit those
sources in ways which maximize the likelihood of intake.
It is both a field of study and a practical undertaking
Instructional Materials Vs. Teaching Aids
• any device, method, or system that helps to teach can be
called a teaching aid. These devices can be traditional
items such as blackboards and flannel boards as well as
electronic devices such as tablets and projectors.
Scientific tools such as telescopes and microscopes
could also be used as teaching aids in a given context
• items that assist and describe the information aspect of
teaching. These could take the form of textbooks,
worksheets, 3D models, charts, infographics, etc.
• also include assessment and testing methods
Issues in Language Learning Materials
Development
1. What should drive the materials?
2. Who should develop the materials?
3. How should materials be developed?
4. How should materials be evaluated?
5. Should texts be authentic?
1. What should drive the materials?
• The obvious answer to this question is that the needs and
wants of the learners should drive the materials. But
teachers have needs and wants to be satisfied too
(Masuhara, 2011) and so do administrators, with their
concerns for standardization and conformity with, for
example, a syllabus, a theory of language learning, the
requirements of examinations and the language policies
of a government.  
2. Who should develop the materials?
• known authors and publishing companies?
• teachers?
3. How should materials be developed
• single authorship? Group?
• Product of research? Product of experience?
 4. How should materials be evaluated?
• Materials are often evaluated in an ad hoc, impressionistic way,
which tends to favour materials which have face validity (i.e. which
conform to people’s expectations of what materials should look like)
and which are visually appealing. In order to ensure that materials
are devised, revised, selected and adapted in reliable and valid
ways, we need to ensure that materials evaluation establishes
procedures which are thorough, rigorous, systematic and
principled. 
5. Should texts be authentic?
• Materials aiming at explicit learning usually contrive
examples of the language which focus on the feature
being taught. Usually these examples are presented in
short, easy, specially written or simplified texts or
dialogues, and it is argued that they help the learners by
focusing their attention on the target feature.
THANK YOU!