‘Materials development’ refers to all the processes made use of by practitioners who produce and/or use materials for language learning, including materials evaluation, their adaptation,ĭesign, production, exploitation and research. (2008) in their reviews of currently used adult EFL coursebooks: both conclude that the emphasis in most coursebooks is on providing explicit teaching and practice. The same point is made by Tomlinson et al. However, the reality is that most commercially produced materials focus on informing their users about language features and on guiding them to practise these features, a fact that is highlighted by Richard’s (2001: 251) comment that ‘instructional materials generally serve as the basis of much of the language input that learners receive and the language practice that occurs in the classroom’. As different learners learn in different ways (Oxford 2002) the ideal materials aim to provide all these ways of acquiring a language for the learners to experience and sometimes select from. Materials can be informative (informing the learner about the target language), instructional (guiding the learner in practising the language), experiential (providing the learner with experience of the language in use), eliciting (encouraging the learner to use the language) and exploratory (helping the learner to make discoveries about the language). Introduction In this article, ‘materials for language learning’ will be taken to be anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language, including coursebooks, videos, graded readers, flash cards, games, websites and mobile phone interactions, though, inevitably, much of the literature focuses on printed materials.
Much of the literature focuses on materials for learning English but the same principles apply to materials for learning any L2, as has been acknowledged by some of the authors whose publications focus on materials for learning other languages.ġ.
It identifies gaps in the literature and makes proposals for future progress in materials development and in the research within the field. It also reviews the literature, first, on a number of controversial issues in the field, next, on electronic delivery of materials and, third, on research in materials development. It reports the origins and development of the field and then reviews the literature on the evaluation, adaptation, production and exploitation of learning materials. State-of-the-Art Article Materials development for language learning and teaching Brian Tomlinson Leeds Metropolitan University This article reviews the literature on the relatively new field of materials development for language learning and teaching.
0 kommentar(er)
