PREPARING MATERIALS FOR A PROGRAM

preparing materials for a program

1.     Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages :

·        Relevance : materials can be produced that are directly relevant  to students and institutional needs and that reflect local content, issues, and concern.

·        Develop expertise : developing materials can help develop expertise among staff, giving them a greater understanding of the characteristics of effective materials.

·        Reputation : institutionally developed materials may enhance the reputation  of the institution by demonstrating its commitment to providing materials developed specifically for its students.

·        Flexibility : materials produced within the institution can be revised or adapted as needed, giving them greater flexibility than a commercial course book.

Disadvantages :

·        Cost : quality materials take time to produce and adequate staff time as well as resources need to be allocated to such a project.

·        Quality : teacher-made materials will not normally have the same standard of design and production as commercial materials and hence may not present the same image as commercial materials.

·        Training : to prepare teachers for materials writing projects, adequate training should be provided.

2.     The nature of materials development

Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998,173) observe that “only a small proportion of good teachers  are also good designers of course materials.” Preparing effective teaching materials is similar to the processes involved in planning and teaching a lesson. The goal is to create materials that can serve as resources for effective learning.

Shulman goes on to describe the transformation phase of this process as consisting of :

1.     Preparation : critical interpretation and analysis of text, structuring and segmentation.

2.     Representation : use of a representational repertoire that includes analogies and metaphors.

3.     Selection : choice from among an instructional repertoire that includes mode of teaching, organizing, managing and arranging.

4.     Adapting and tailoring to student characteristics : consideration of conceptions, preconceptions, misconceptions and difficulties.

Good materials based on Rowntree (1997.92) :

1.     Arouse the learners’ interest

2.     Remind them of earlier learning

3.     Tell them what they will be learning next

4.     Explain  new learning content to them

5.     Relate these ideas to learners’ previous learning

6.     Get learners to think about new content

7.     Help them get feedback on their learning

8.     Encourage them to practice

9.     Make sure they know what they are supposed to be doing

10.             Enable them to check their progress

11.             Help them to do better

The characteristic of good language teaching materials ( Tomlinson: 1998 ), materials should :

1.     Achieve impact

2.     Help learners feel at ease

3.     Help learners to develop confidence

4.     Perceived by learners as relevant and useful

5.     Require and facilitate learner self-investment

6.     Learners must be ready to acquire the points being taught

7.     Expose the learners to language in authentic use

8.     The learners’ attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input

9.     Provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes

10.             Take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually delayed

11.            Take into account that learners have different learning styles

12.             Take into account  that learners differ in affective attitudes

13.             Permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction

14.             Maximize learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involved

15.            Not rely too much on controlled practice

16.            Provide opportunities for outcome feedback

The list identifies the qualities each unit in the materials should reflect :

1.     Gives  learners something they can take away from the lesson

2.     Teaches something learners feel they can use

3.     Give learners a sense of achievement

4.     Practice learning items in an interesting and novel way

5.     Provides a pleasurable learning experience

6.     Provides opportunities for success

7.     Provides opportunities for individual practice

8.     Provides opportunities for personalization

9.     Provides  opportunities for self-assessment of learning

3.     Decision in material design

Processes of program design and materials design are :

1.     Developing aims

2.     Developing objectives

3.     Developing a syllabus

4.     Organizing the course into units

5.     Developing a structure for units

6.     Sequence units

4.     Choosing input and source

Input refers to anything that initiates the learning process and that students respond to in some way in using the materials. The following are examples of input questions in the design of different kinds of materials :

·        Grammar materials : will the new grammar  items be presented through the medium of text, conversational extracts, or a corpus of utterances?

·        Listening materials : will the source of listening be authentic recording taken from real word sources.

·        Reading materials : what kinds of texts will students read.

·        Writing materials : will students be shown examples of different types of compositions?

·        Speaking materials : what will the source of speaking activities be?

It is important, however, to realize that many of the sources for teaching materials that exist in the real world have been created by someone and that copyright permission may be required in order to use it as a source of teaching materials in  an institution or textbook, even if they are adapted or modified in some way.

5.     Selecting exercise types

In Richards (1990), for example, exercise types related to different types of listening skills are presented as follows :

1.     Exercises that develop “top-down” listening

·        Listen to part of a conversation and infer the topic of a conversation

·        Listen to conversations and identify the setting

·        Look at  pictures of people speaking and guess what they might be saying or doing; then listen to their actual conversations

·        Complete a story, then listen to how the story really ended

2.     Exercises that involve listening for interactional purpose

·        Listen to conversations and select suitable polite comments and other phatic responses

·        Listen to utterances containing complements or praise and choose suitable responses

·        Listen to conversation containing small talk and indicate when the speakers is preparing to introduce a real topic

·        Listen to conversation and rate them according to the degree of familiarity of the speakers.

Grellet (1981) contains an extensive taxonomy of exercises for teaching reading skills. Under the category “understanding meaning,” she illustrates exercises of the following types :

1.     Involving a nonlinguistic response to the text

·        Ordering a sequence of pictures

·        Comparing text and pictures

·        Matching

·        Using illustrations

·        Completing a document

·        Mapping it out

·        Using the information in a text

·        Jigsaw reading

2.     Involving a linguistic response to the text

·        Reorganizing the information: reordering events

·        Reorganizing the information: using grids

·        Comparing several text

·        Completing a document

·        Question types

·        Study skills : summarizing

·        Study skills : note taking