SUMMARY of an article Squaring the circle – reconciling materials

as constraint with materials as empowerment

Alan Maley

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.
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.
The materials may also be far from the learner’s capacity or sense of relevance at a
given point: what typically happens in these circumstances is that the teacher has to
bridge the gap between the materials and his /her sense of the learners needs at that
particular moment.
What is needed is ‘not just a decentralization of materials production, but a
fundamental change in the design of materials’ (Prabhu 2001) in the direction of
providing greater flexibility in decisions about content, order, pace and procedures
(see Hitomi Masuhara’s chapter in thus volume. However, many teachers do
manage to build such activities into their teaching in a principled way, for example
by using them as ‘warmers’ for the more extended activities which follow, or as
‘coolers’ to promote reflection on a previous activity.
Addition: where there seems to be inadequate coverage, teachers may decide to
add material, either in the form of texts or exercise material.
Replacement: texts or exercise material which is considered inadequate, for
whatever reason, may be replaced by more suitable material.
Resource option: this is a more radical option, in that teachers draw upon the whole
range of available resource materials to put together a course they feel is in
accordance with their student’s needs.
The materials available are now considerable and some publisher’s lists include
resource book series with banks of texts /activities, materials culled from existing
course books and skills collections.
The Process option: This is an even more radical alternative teachers may decide to
dispense with pre-developed materials altogether.
The Project work: In project work, the teacher simply sets up, or helps the learners
decide on, a project they will work upon for an agreed period of time.
Other possible projects include those based on global issues, where students
research a particular area of global concern, for example waste disposal, either in
its international aspects or in its local manifestations (Sampedro and Hillyard
2004).
Communicative Language Learning (CLL): In this approach (Richards and Rogers
2001) it is the learners who decide what they want to say.
Drama technique: Here, too, it is only the ‘empty’ shell of the technique which is
provided by the teacher.
Extensive reading: All the evidence points to the fact that reading extensively
(where learners read a lot, read fast, choose what to read, when to read and how to
read, and where there are no tests or exercises) is overwhelmingly the most
effective way to acquire, maintain and extend proficiency in the language (Day and
Bamford 1998, Krashen 2004).
Creative writing: The most radical experiments in creative writing have made the
writing of a novel the central principle of the language course over a complete
semester or year.
This extreme version of the creative writing option will rarely be feasible, but a
proportion of time spent on creative writing has proved effective.
Incorporating choice – what materials writers can do: The previous section
reviewed the options open to teachers for dealing with materials as they are or for
its incorporating various process options.
One of the main objectives of the proposal is to pass to teachers at least some of
the control over four major factors in the classroom: content (what), order (when),
pace (how fast), procedure (how).
Prabhu’s proposals: The approach to material production which Prabhu proposes
would: Provide a range of possible inputs, without envisaging that they will be
used in any one classroom or that all classrooms will use the same inputs…the
expectation is…that teachers will find it useful to draw on them in implementing
the decisions they themselves make as teachers, being as faithful as possible to
their own perceptions of learner states and learning processes (Prabhu 2001).
These can be of two kinds: single – type activities such as listening
comprehension, writing activities, reading skills exercises, vocabulary
development work, role play, and so on.
It is left to the teacher to decide which procedures (grammar awareness raising
activities, vocabulary in context, roleplay, comprehension questions, diagram
completion, etc.) it is appropriate to use with a particular class at a particular
moment.
Clearly the key idea of permutating text with procedure can be applied to pictorial
material, audio recordings and video as well as to printed text.
In the inputs – processes outcomes model shown raw inputs can be combined with
processes from the middle column (including the generative procedures described
above) to produce a set of outcomes of different kinds.
So far, however, there has been only modest development and exploitation of such
materials, which are attended by a new set of problems (Eastment 1994, Kramsch
1997, Kramsch, A’Ness and Lam 2000, Tenner 1996, Wolf 2008).
Space does not allow a detailed discussion of these issues, but it is clear that the
headlong rush into exponential growth has potentially negative consequences, if
only because constantly evolving super choice makes meaningful choice difficult,
and infoglut makes selection of useful material a time-consuming business. It is
symptomatic of the difficulty of implementing such resources that they change so
fast that almost any application is bound to be ephemeral. These technology
resources can be exploited for teaching/learning in four main ways:
1. Through the development of teaching sites which offer a variety of fairly
traditional activities and exercises in electronic form.
2. The internet provides virtually unlimited access to a full range of texts, for
example if a teacher/learner wishes to find examples of English proverbs, or
Minisags, or love poems, or jokes or even complete novels, all they need do
is to call up the pages on google or one of the other providers.
 3. The internet also gives access to an almost unlimited number of reference
sources: online dictionaries, thesauruses, grammars, corpora, encyclopedias,
and so on.
4. The use of email, texting, social networking sites such as Facebook and
Myspace, and self-regulated virtual environments such as second life, clearly
open up whole new areas for exploring communication between learners.

This kind of computer literacy training would have significant language

learning pay offs in addition to its general educational value.
Using content-based learning: Another radical alternative to the English language
textbook is to base all work on the content of another discipline history, geography,
physical education, chemistry, mathematics, or of a topic/skill that the learners are
really interested in (e.g. football, drama, rock music).
The teaching of other subjects through English has been a feature of international
schools worldwide for many years too, and the explosion of such situations, along
with the International Baccalaureate in the past two decades gives some credence
to the efficacy of the approach.
Proponents of CLIL make a distinction between earlier versions where English was
learned through the subject content of another discipline, and CLIL, which
advocates the learning of other subjects through English. Teaching a subject
through English (or English through a subject) does away with the need for an
English language textbook, but usually a subject textbook replaces the language
textbook.
And subject teachers required to teach their subject through English may also lack
proficiency in the English language (a major issue in Malaysia, for example) and in
language teaching routines and practices.
This would be accompanied by a cluster of optional modules at a number of levels,
focused on different aspects of the language. For example, any of the following
options could be chosen: skills modules (to develop writing, listening, reading,
speaking skills).