Introduction

In the original edition of this book Peter Donovan (Donovan 1998 ) looked exclusively at piloting as a way in which publishers evaluate material. Whilst this remains one of the ways in which materials are evaluated, it is no longer the main way that publishers do this. In this chapter I have tried to refl ect more broadly what the current practice is for evaluating materials and infl uencing their design for most ELT publishers. The comments contained within this chapter should be considered as my personal comments based on over 20 years in the world of ELT and ELT publishing. Whilst my recent experience is largely with Cambridge University Press, the comments may apply equally to other ELT publishers.

When the first edition of this book was published in 1998, the world of ELT and specifically ELT publishing was a very different place. We were just discovering the joys of task-based learning and using the relatively new teaching procedures offered by the communicative approach. To a certain extent the ELT panorama is more of a known landscape now, where teachers have had more exposure to different ideas, with the Internet providing access to more information and resources than ever before. Many teachers now know which method is effective in producing the desired outcomes for their teaching environment; this could be that a student can produce accurate or fl uent language in an appropriate register from a certain type of task, or internalises a grammatical rule better using language presented in a meaningful context. Teachers also know what sounds like a good idea but is actually unlikely to produce the desired outcomes with their class. Whilst it may well be true that there are still many inexperienced teachers who need basic guidance and more experienced teachers who need their convictions to be challenged, there is more information available to teachers than ever before; specialist magazines in ELT, professional conferences such as local IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language), TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and British Council conferences and ELT websites. These all offer information and an opportunity for teachers to discuss different ideas and approaches.

Introduction

If I had been asked what I wanted from coursebooks when I was teaching languages in Japan, England, Singapore and Oman in the last 30 years, my answer would have always been the same: ‘I want coursebooks that are so engaging, inspiring, fl exible and effective that I can just teach without much extra work.’ In reality, I had to adapt materials every time I used them. For example, the Ministry-approved coursebooks often seemed to me so constrained by a syllabus, by rigid methods and by exams, that I found it difficult to make use of them. Global coursebooks from English-speaking countries, on the other hand, seemed impressive, with more fashionable approaches promising success, but their contents seemed too alien to be imported directly into my classrooms. The only time that adaptation was minimal was when I had tailor-made the materials myself. My language-teaching colleagues in all the institutions I worked in often grumbled how language teachers have to work harder compared with other subject teachers, whose content and approaches seemed to remain consistent and who do not have to adapt materials or produce supplements. Even after all these years, my ideal materials only exist in my dreams and my lament seems to echo amongst my colleagues from all over the world. Surely teachers’ needs and wants should have been taken more seriously by now?

From the 1980s to the early 1990s learner variables attracted a lot of attention in the research (Ellis 1994 ; Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991 ). The increasing global need for English as a lingua franca also led to explorations of learner-centred curricula (Johnson 1989 ; Nunan 1988 ) and of needs analysis (Hutchinson and Waters 1987 ). Coursebooks refl ected this change and their blurbs often emphasised that their product was designed to satisfy learners’ needs and interests.

From the late 1990s to 2000s L2 learners’ profiles have become far more complex and learner variables have attracted even more attention (Doughty and Long 2003 ; Ellis 2008 ). The portraits of L2 users these days show incredible diversity (Cook 2002 ; Graddol 1997 , 2006 ). Some learners, for example, may be immigrants at various socioeconomic and linguistic levels, others may be young learners studying content subjects in a target language in their own countries, and others might need different levels of international communication skills in their professions.

Introduction

A major dilemma faced by all writers of materials, even those writing for small groups of learners with well-defined needs, is that all learners, all teachers and all teaching situations are uniquely different, yet published materials have to treat them as if they were, in some senses at least, the same. A further problem for materials writers is that, although they are well aware that the course, the direction and the pace of learning are largely unpredictable, they have to predetermine all these things.

Prabhu ( 2001 ), among others, has pointed out the constraining effects of materials on the freedom of action of teachers (see Andrew Littlejohn and Hitomi Masuhara’s chapters in this volume). In the interests of efficiency and quality (in one of its definitions at least), the writing of materials is generally delegated to a group of specialists, who produce centrally the materials to be used locally by another group: the teachers in their individual classrooms. (In a very few projects, local teachers at least contribute to the writing team, but this is very much the exception.) In this way, the materials can pre-empt all the important decisions which teachers themselves might otherwise be expected to make. The content is predetermined. The order of the content is predetermined. The rate of progression through the materials is predetermined. The procedures for using the content are also predetermined.

Clearly, what actually happens in classrooms using published materials is that there is a complex trade-off between the three major elements in the equation: the materials, the teacher and the learners.

In some cases there may be a relatively close fit between the three. This may occur when the materials have been designed for a relatively specific learning group. Even then, owing to individual differences amongst the learners and to teacher factors, there will never be a perfect fit. Such teacher factors include the teacher’s:

• • degree of language proficiency and confidence

• • previous personal learning experiences as learners rather than as Teachers

• • own personality (introvert/extrovert, open/closed, etc.)

• • preferred teaching style (directive/consultative, etc.)

• • cultural background.

The chapters in this section focus on the new possibilities offered to materials developers and teachers by such new technologies as blogs, chats, interactive whiteboards, Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube and wikis. I have seen these new technologies in impressive action in wellresourced institutions in Europe and in such places as Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. In many cases the use of such technologies was enhancing the learning experience of the students by offering increased exposure to language in use, increased engagement and increased interactivity between teacher and student, between student and student and between students and text. Perhaps the most productive feature of the use made of new technologies which I saw was the facility to provide a variety of relevant samples of English in face-to-face action and, in some cases, to involve the learners in such action themselves. However, in some cases the new technologies were just being used as expensive but fashionable ways of delivering old exercise types such as fill in the blank, listen and repeat and multiple choice. In such cases the new technologies can not only take away funds from potentially more useful resources, such as extensive readers, but they can also demotivate learners by promising much whilst delivering little and they can antagonise teachers who would prefer not to use new technologies.

I have also recently visited institutions where most of the new technologies are just not available because there are no available computers, or there is no access to the Internet or there just isn’t any electricity. In such places, however, most of the students do have mobile phones but are prevented from using them in class because of the understandable fear that they will distract the students. However, it seems obvious that, with a little training and stimulus, teachers and materials developers in these places could make very productive use of their own and their students’ mobile phones. Some possible mobile phone activities could be:

• • Students in a class form pairs/groups in which there is at least one mobile phone. They carry out a task together in relation to a text, photo or video posted by the teacher and then phone another pair/ group (possibly in another class or even school) to compare their task completions.

Introduction

Descriptions of the English language, and of English grammar in particular, have been largely based on written sources and on written examples. This is inevitable since examples of written English are easier to obtain. One consequence of this situation is, however, that ‘correct grammar’ has come to mean ‘correct grammar as represented by the written language’ and that many perfectly normal and regularly occurring utterances made by standard English speakers (of whatever variety – not just standard British English) have by omission come to be classified as ‘ungrammatical’.

The situation is changing, however, and a number of corpora of spoken English have now been assembled which have allowed more precise description of the properties of spoken English, thus enabling learners of English to become more aware of a wider range of forms and structures than hitherto. With reference to one such corpus this chapter seeks to outline ongoing work in the description of spoken English and to discuss some of the implications for English language teaching, and in particular materials development.

The corpus which will be referred to, the CANCODE corpus, is part of the one-billion-word Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) developed by Cambridge University Press between 1995 and 2010 . The CANCODE corpus was developed between 1995 and 2002 as part of a joint research project between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press (CANCODE stands for Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English). The CANCODE corpus totals five million words, which is, as far as spoken corpora go, a large corpus – although it is still small compared with many written corpora where 100 million words is a not uncommon size. The main aim, however, was always to construct a qualitative corpus and not simply a large quantitative corpus (for a fuller account of its structure and organisation, see McCarthy 1998). The way the CANCODE corpus is constructed allows very precise contextualised description of grammar, in particular, and its design allows a discourse-based view of language to prevail in descriptions (see Hughes and McCarthy 1998 ; McCarthy and Carter 1994).

Introduction

Nowadays a lot of self-access materials are available on the Web, as well as on computers and DVDs in self-access centres (see Chapters 12 and 13 of this volume). Some of these materials offer experience of language in authentic use and some set the learners authentic tasks. Nevertheless, the stereotypical image of self-access materials is still of practice exercises which enable the learners to work on what they need in their own time and at their own pace without reference to a teacher. Such materials attempt to achieve the desirable objective of learnercentred, learner-invested activity. Typically they are used to supplement (or even replace) classroom learning activities and usually they focus on providing practice in the use of specific language items or language skills which are problematic for the students. Thus, in an ELTJ article the authors asserted that:

The development of such materials and their attractive accessibility in learning centres or learning packages remains a positive feature of foreign language-learning pedagogy. However, the main strength of selfaccess materials has often been their main weakness too. In order to make sure that learners can work entirely on their own and still receive useful feedback, there has often been a limiting tendency to restrict the activities to those which can most easily be self-marked by the learners themselves. Thus, although there are notable exceptions, most selfaccess materials still consist of controlled or guided practice activities which use cloze, multiple choice, gap-filling, matching and transformation activities to facilitate self-marking and focused feedback. Such activities can usefully contribute to the development of explicit declarative knowledge (i.e. conscious knowledge of the forms, meanings and systems of the language). But their predominance has meant for many learners that their experience of self-access materials has been restricted to basically closed activities requiring a narrow left brain focus and little utilisation of prior personal experience, of the brain’s potential learning capacity or of individual attributes or inclinations.

Introduction

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) constitutes a strong form of communicative language teaching. It aims to develop learners’ knowledge of a second language (L2) and their ability to use this knowledge in communication by engaging them in a series of communicative tasks. It differs from other approaches in that it does not attempt to teach learners predetermined linguistic items (i.e. vocabulary and grammar). TBLT is based on a view of language learning that claims that an L2 is best learned through learners’ efforts to communicate with it. Central to an understanding of TBLT is the concept of ‘task’. Therefore, I will begin by a definition of this pedagogic construct .

Defining ‘task’

Various definitions of a ‘task’ have been provided (see Ellis 2003 : 4–5) but most of these indicate that for a language-teaching activity to be a ‘task’, it must satisfy the following criteria:

• 1. The primary focus should be on ‘meaning’ (by which is meant that learners should be mainly concerned with processing both the semantic and pragmatic meaning of utterances).

• 2. There should be some kind of ‘gap’ (i.e. a need to convey information, to express an opinion or to infer meaning).

• 3. Learners should largely have to rely on their own resources – linguistic and non-linguistic – in order to complete the activity (i.e. the task materials do not dictate what linguistic forms are to be used).

• 4. There is a clearly defined outcome other than the use of language (i.e. the language serves as the means for achieving the outcome, not as end in its own right).

On the basis of such criteria, a distinction can be made between a ‘task’ and ‘a situational grammar exercise’. Whereas the latter may satisfy criteria (2) and (3), it does not satisfy (1) as the learners know that the main purpose of the activity is to practise correct language rather than to process messages for meaning, nor does it satisfy (4) as the outcome is primarily the use of correct language. See Ellis ( 2010 ) for a detailed account and examples of the distinction between situational grammar exercises and tasks.

Introduction

One of my earliest memories as a once untrained, unqualified language teacher is of the principal of my first school proudly presenting me with my coursebook. It was, she explained, the ‘best book available’, with the most up-to-date method, that would guarantee excellent results. It had, what’s more, a major technological innovation – a piece of green card which students should use to cover the text whilst they looked at four pictures and listened to the reel-to-reel tape recordings. She showed me how it worked. The recording would say ‘It is half past nine. Deborah is having breakfast and listening to some music on the radio. The maid is carrying a tray with some more coffee on it.’ Then, I was to direct the students’ attention to the prompts printed next to the pictures, ‘(a) What time? (b) What/Deborah? (c) What/maid?’, and ask them to complete questions. I was to continue like that for each of the pictures and recordings. Next, the students were to remove the card, read the texts aloud and answer more questions, before we moved on to some substitution exercises on the grammar point. Finally, there was an instalment of a story which ran through the entire book. I could make up my own questions for that, or make slashed question prompts for the students to ask each other across the classroom. The next unit would be the same, and all units after that would be the same, until, at Unit 12, the book ended. There was a teacher’s book available, the principal told me, but I wouldn’t need it, apparently.

She was right, of course – I didn’t need the teacher’s book. The book was so scripted and provided so little that it was not long before I discovered that I had to contribute a lot more if I and my students were to stay sane in the classroom. Through the process of personal involvement that this required, I actually became grateful to the book writer for allowing me such space to teach myself how to teach, whilst providing at least a backbone of something that was deemed ‘a course’, in contrast to the somewhat random nature of activities and texts with which I supplemented it.

Introduction

Since the mid 1990s, dictionaries based on corpora (collections of naturally occurring texts) have been widespread in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. These dictionaries, based on large collections of natural language, not only provide learners with information about word meanings, but also provide important information about word use. As a natural extension of using dictionaries based on corpora, teachers have become increasingly interested in using information from corpora to inform and create language-learning materials. In the 1990s resources such as Johns (1994) and Tribble and Jones (1997) provided teachers with some ideas and guidelines for ways to use corpus information in the classroom. Now, with more and more corpus-informed or corpus-based teaching resources becoming available (such as: Focus on Vocabulary (Schmitt and Schmitt 2005); the Touchstone series (McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford 2006/2006); and Real Grammar (Conrad and Biber 2009)), this interest has continued to grow and has even expanded to teachers themselves wanting to bring corpora into language classrooms. Using corpora in the language classroom can provide teachers and students with several advantages. Corpora can provide a rich source of authentic material, and, therefore, examples of the language students will encounter outside the language classroom. Corpora can also provide students with many examples of the target feature (e.g. a vocabulary item or grammatical structure) in a concentrated manner, to help them better understand the feature and its contexts and cotexts of use.

Before discussing some ways to bring corpora into a classroom, a word about corpora and corpus linguistics is in order. A corpus is a collection of naturally occurring texts that is usually stored on a computer (see Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998 for more on the characteristics of corpora). If the texts are stored on a computer, it is possible to search texts for particular features. A number of tools are available for searching corpora (e.g. AntConc, MonoConc, WordSmith – see the Appendix for more information). It is also important to note that the term ‘text’ is used to refer to either spoken or written discourse. The spoken texts are usually transcribed into a written version, and in most cases the audio files are not available.

The obvious link between the different chapters in Section 3 is their insistence on the need for more feedback (and for more systematic feedback) from materials users to materials producers. All too often major decisions are made about the content, approach, procedures and design of learning materials based on assumptions of user needs and wants and on impressions of what ‘works’ in the classroom. Often these assumptions and impressions are illusory, misinformed or unrepresentative and mistakes are made which contribute to dissatisfaction and failure. One of the things that always amazes me is that, as I travel around the world meeting teachers at conferences and workshops, the impression I am given is that most teachers are dissatisfied with the materials available to them. Yet publishers and ministries tell me that their impression is that the teachers are basically satisfied with these same materials. I suspect that both impressions are wrong because they are based on unrepresentative samples of teachers and because of the ways in which the impressions were gained. Many teachers who come to conferences and workshops are untypically knowledgeable, enthusiastic and discerning. If given a chance to express their views to somebody like me, who does not represent a publisher or authority and who is keen on the development of innovative materials, they are more likely to tell me what they do not like about their materials than what they do like. On the other hand, teachers, when being interviewed by publishers or officials (or even when responding to their questionnaires), are more likely to be polite and/or cautious and to incline more towards the positive in their responses (see Chapter 11 in this volume by Frances Amrani and Singapore Wala 2003a , 2003b ). Both my impressions and those of the ‘authorities’ are often not only misleading, but they are also too crude to be informative. What we need is fine-tuned information about the outcome of materials use in terms of what the teachers and learners actually did, what they felt about what they did and what the consequences were of what they did.

Introduction

Coursebook writers may set out to write materials they would want to use themselves if they were teaching in a particular situation, but their role has to be to collaborate in the publication of materials for others. They need to cater for a wide range of students, teachers and classroom contexts with which they have no personal acquaintance, even though they might be familiar with the general pedagogic situation for which the material is intended.

Writers have to try to anticipate the needs and interests of teachers and students and to modify any initial ideas they may have as a result of what they continue to learn about those needs and interests. The focus of this chapter is on that process of modification and whether the inevitability of compromise is a positive or negative force upon the writers’ pedagogic principles. We will use our own experience to illustrate, and assume that readers will, despite our conclusions, make up their own minds.

Coursebooks in general: confronting the issues

For some years now there has been debate about the desirability of using coursebooks – indeed many of the issues have been raised by authors in this book. The debate has tended to be polarised between those who object to coursebooks in principle, whether they see them as instruments of institutional control supported by a range of commercial interests or as implicitly prescriptive and destroyers of teacher and learner creativity, and those who argue that coursebooks provide teachers and learners with a range of professionally developed materials within tried-and-tested syllabus structures, thereby allowing teachers to spend their valuable time more on facilitating learning than materials production. The arguments in favour of coursebooks are often made by those with vested interests – writers, publishers and distributors – and are therefore open to the accusation of special pleading. Their cause is not helped by the too-frequent adoption of coursebooks in situations for which they were not originally intended – for example, adult/young adult global coursebooks in a lower secondary school or even in junior summer schools in the UK. This is often because of misguided management, but it is too frequently encouraged by marketing teams and distributors who want to make sure their products get into as many schools as possible, no matter how suitable they are for the context.

The basic message which comes across from the three chapters in Part A is that many L2 learners have been disadvantaged because, until very recently, textbooks have been typically based on idealised data about the language they are teaching. Some have taught a prescriptive model of how their authors think the learners should use the target language, many have been based on the authors’ intuitions about how the target language is used, most have been informed by a model of the target language based on information from reference books rather than from actual data, and nearly all have taught learners to speak written grammar. None of this is too surprising, given that until very recently textbook writers had no access to comprehensive and representative data of authentic language use. They had to make use of reference books based on rules and constructed examples rather than on instances of language use. Or they based their books on their own abstract awareness of how they, as typical educated users of the language, expressed themselves in the target language. Such awareness was inevitably biased towards the norms of planned discourse (e.g. essays, lectures) as it is difficult to be aware of how we use language in unplanned discourse (e.g. spontaneous informal conversation) in which by definition we do not plan what to say and are not usually aware of exactly what we have said. So we had, for example, the ridiculous situation of writers insisting that learners use complete sentences in their conversations when the writers rarely did so themselves. Now we have no excuse. We have access to data which tells us how the target language is typically written and spoken and we know for a fact that language use is variable and depends on the context in which it is being used. We know that the grammar of the spoken language is distinctively different from that of the written language, that the degree of intimacy and of shared experience between the participants are crucial determinants of the lexis and the structures used in discourse, that all language use is subjective, attitudinal, purposeful and strategic, and that the purposes of a communication will exert a strong influence on the language which is actually used.

This is a book of original chapters on current issues in materials development written by well-known contributors to the fields of applied linguistics and TEFL, most of whom have made presentations at MATSDA conferences.

MATSDA (The Materials Development Association) is an international materials development association founded in 1993 by Brian Tomlinson to contribute to the development of quality materials for learners of second and foreign languages. It aims to bring together teachers, researchers, materials writers and publishers in a joint endeavour to stimulate and support principled research, innovation and development. It does this by holding conferences, running workshops, providing consultants, publishing a journal (Folio) and stimulating books like this one.

For further information about MATSDA and for application forms for membership contact Brian Tomlinson, President of MATSDA, brianjohntomlinson@gmail.com, or go to the MATSDA website at www.matsda.org.uk . The main aim of this book is to further the work of MATSDA in providing information, ideas and stimulus which will facilitate the application of current thinking and research to the practical realities of developing and exploiting classroom materials. It also aims to stimulate further experimentation and innovation and thus to contribute to the continuing development of quality materials.

More and more applied linguistics and teacher development courses are including components on materials development (there are even MA courses focusing on L2 materials development at the International Graduate School of English in Seoul and at Leeds Metropolitan University), and more and more presentations at ELT conferences are focusing on issues related to the writing and exploitation of materials. And yet until 1998 few books had been published which investigated these issues. Materials Development for Language Teaching filled this gap by providing an opportunity for researchers, teachers, writers and publishers to communicate their informed views and suggestions to an audience seeking to gain new insights into the principles and procedures which were informing the current writing and exploitation of L2 materials. This revised edition of Materials Development for Language Teaching aims to retain the insights of the 1998 edition whilst adding new ideas and information related to developments since its initial publication.