Principles and Procedures of Materials

Development
Source- Materials development in language teaching Edited
by Brian Tomlinson
Chapter- 1
Page-4

Prepared for Professor Dr. Sadrul Amin

Prepared by Saira S Kamal Tiba
English 577
 Materials should achieve impact through:
1) Novelty: unusual topics, illustrations and activities.
2) Variety: breaking up monotony of unit routine with
unexpected activity. Such as- using different text
types from different sources, different instructor
voices on a CD.
3) Attractive presentation: by using attractive colors,
using white space , using photographs.
4) Appealing contents: topic of interest to the target
learners, topics which offer the possibility to learn
something new, engaging stories, universal
themes, local references.
5) Achievable Challenge: tasks which challenge the
learners to think.
NOVELTY: unusual topics,
illustrations and activities
Variety: breaking up monotony of unit routine with
unexpected activity. Such as- using different text types from
different sources, different instructor voices
Attractive presentation: by using attractive colors,
using white space , using photographs.
Appealing contents: topic of interest to the target learners,
topics which offer the possibility to learn something new,
engaging stories, universal themes, local references.
Achievable Challenge: tasks which challenge
the learners to think.
Materials should help learners to feel comfortable
• Make learners feel more comfortable with written
materials with lots of white space than they do with
materials in which lots of different activities are crammed
together on the same page.
• Are more ease with texts and illustrations that they can
relate to their own culture than they are with those which
appear to be them to be culturally different.
• Are more relaxed with materials which are obviously trying
to help them to learn than they are with materials which
are always testing them.
• Feeling at ease can also be achieved through a voice which
is relaxed and supportive
• Content and activities encourage the personal
participation of the learners
• lots of white space
• texts and illustrations that they can relate
to their own culture
• materials which are obviously trying to help
them to learn
• Feeling at ease can also be achieved
through a voice which is relaxed and
supportive
• Content and activities encourage the
personal participation of the learners
 Materials should facilitate learner self-investment
•The role of the classroom and teaching material is to
aid the learner to make efficient use of the resources
in order to facilitate self-discovery. – Rutherford and
Sharwood Smith (1988)
•Materials provide students with choices of focus and
activity, by giving them topic control and by engaging
them in learner-centered discovery activities help the
learners to discover their true self.
•It also engages the learners in finding supplementary
materials that which help them to develop their
decision making ability to choose the appropriate
materials/texts and finding out the techniques to use
them.
See the following example:
• https://literacyideas.com/narrative-writing/
 Materials should provide opportunities to achieve communicative
purposes by using target language
• Interaction can be achieved through :
1) Information/opinion gap activities which require
learners to communicate with each other or the
teacher in order to close the gap. E.g. finding out food
or drink people would like at the class party.
2) Post-listening and post-reading activities which require
the learners to use information from the text to achieve
a communicative purpose. E.g. Deciding the television
program to watch, writing a review of a book or film.
3) Creative writing and creative speaking activities such
as writing a story or improvising drama.
4) Formal instruction given in the target language either
on the language itself or on another subject.
 Materials should focus on the different learning styles of students
1) Visual: Some learners prefer to see the language written down.
2) Auditory: some learners prefer to hear language.
3) Kinaesthetic: Learners prefer to do something physical, such as
following instruction for game.
4) Studial: learners like to pay conscious attention to the linguistics
features of the language and want to be correct.
5) Experiential: Learners like to use the language and are more
concerned and are more concerned with communication.
6) Analytic: Learners prefer to focus on discreet bits of the language
and to learn them one by one.
7) Global: Learners are happy to respond to whole chunks of language
at a time and to pick up from them whatever language they can.
8) Dependent: Learners prefer to learn from a teacher and from book.
9) Independent: Learners learn from their own experience of the
language and use autonomous learning strategies.
Visual, Studial, Experiential
Materials should have a silence period at the beginning of instruction
• Starting a course with total physical response
approach in which the learners respond
physically to oral instruction from a teacher or
Audio.
• Starting with a listening comprehension
approach in which the learners listen to
stories in the target language , which are
made accessible through sound effects, visual
aids and dramatic movement by the teacher.
• Permitting the learners to respond to target
language questions by using their first
language or through drawings and gestures.
 Materials should maximize learning potential by stimulating right and left brain
activities
• Mechanical drills, rule learning, simple transformation
activities stimulate mental processing.
• Analytic, creative, evaluative and rehearsal demands on
processing capacity can lead to deeper and more
durable learning.
• The contents of the materials should stimulate the
thoughts and feelings in the learners.
• Maximizing recall- the learners receive information
through different cerebral processes and in different
states of consciousness so that it’s stored in many
different parts of the brain.
• Engaging the learners in variety of left and right brain
activities- reciting a dialogue, singing a song, writing
story and so on.
LEFT BRAIN
Right Brain
THANK YOU