MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR

ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Learning Outcomes

Discuss your understanding of the terms

used in materials development.
 
Discuss Tomlinson’s article on materials
development for language learning and
teaching.
 MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Glossary of Basic Terms for Materials

Development in Language Teaching

Authentic task Corpus

Authentic text Coursebook
CLIL Discovery activity
Communicative approaches ELF
Communicative competence
Concordances Experiential learning
 MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Foreign language
Global coursebook
Language awareness approaches
Language data
Language practice
Language use
Learning styles
Lexical approaches
Lexical chunks
L2
 MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Materials

Materials adaptation

Materials evaluation

Multimedia materials
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

New technologies

Pedagogic task

PPP

Second language

Self-access materials
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Simplified texts

SLA

Supplementary materials

Tasks

Task-based approaches
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Text

Text-based approaches

Workbook

World English
 MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Tomlinson & Masuhara (2004: 7) proposed the

following questions for evaluating criteria:

a) Is each question an evaluation question?

b) Does each question only ask one question?
c) Is each question answerable?
d) Is each question free of dogma?
e) Is each question reliable in the sense that
other evaluators would interpret it in the same
way?
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ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

Very few of the lists of criteria proposed in the literature satisfy

these conditions, and most of them are not generalisable or
transferable. For example:
a) ‘Are there any materials for testing?’ (Cunningsworth 1984) is
an analysis question in the same checklist as evaluation questions
such as ‘Are the learning activities in the course material likely to
appeal to the learners. . .?’

b) ‘Is it attractive? Given the average age of your students, would

they enjoy using it?’ (Grant1987: 122) combines two questions in
one criterion.

c) ‘Does the writer use current everyday language, and sentence

structures that follow
normal word order?’ (Daoud & Celce-Murcia 1979: 304) contains
two questions and both are unanswerable without a data analysis
of both a corpus of current language and the complete script of the
materials. ‘To what extent is the level of abstractness
appropriate?’ (Skierso 1991: 446) is another example of a criterion
which is too broad and vague to be answerable.
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ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

d) ‘Are the various stages in a teaching unit

(what you would probably call presentation,
practice and production) adequately
developed?’ (Mariani 1983: 29) is dogmatic in
insisting on the use of a Presentation Practice
Production (PPP) approach.

e) ‘Is it foolproof (i.e. sufficiently methodical to

guide the inexperienced teacher through a
lesson)?’ (Dougill 1987: 32) is unreliable in that
it can be interpreted in different ways by
different evaluators.
MATERIALS AND RESOURCES FOR
ESL CLASSROOMS
WEEK 1

THANK YOU