Frameworks for materials development

There are exceptions to the focus on creativity reported above. A number of writers in the books
mentioned above focus on the need to establish and be driven by unit outlines or frameworks. For
example, Rozul reports a lesson format which includes the following key components: l Starter l Input l
General Information l Language Focus l Tasks

In Prowse one of the materials writers outlines ‘a not untypical writing process which involves
researching . . . gaps in the market/weaknesses of other materials’ prior to drafting a ‘basic rationale’
which includes ‘book and unit structure and a draft grammar syllabus’.
While I agree with the value of establishing a framework prior to writing, I would prefer my frameworks
to be more principled, coherent and flexible than many of the frameworks in the literature on materials
development, many of which provide no theoretical justification for their staging or sequencing one
notable exception being Ribe .

Principles in materials development

Most writers on the process of materials development focus on needs analysis as their starting
point . However, there are some writers who report starting by articulating their principles. For example
Bell and Gower started by articulating the following principles which they wanted to guide their writing: l
Flexibility l From text to language l Engaging content l Natural language l Analytic approaches l Emphasis
on review l Personalized practice l Integrated skills l Balance of approaches l Learning to learn l
Professional respect

1 Materials should be clearly linked to the curriculum they serve.

2 Materials should be authentic in terms of text and task.
3 Materials should stimulate interaction.
4 Materials should allow learners to focus on formal aspects of the language.
5 Materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills, and skills in learning.
6 Materials should encourage learners to apply their developing skills to the world beyond the
classroom.

Before planning or writing materials for language teaching, there is one crucial question we need to ask
ourselves. The question should be the first item on the agenda at the first planning meeting. The
question is this: How do we think people learn language?

Hall then goes on to discuss the following theoretical principles which he thinks should

More recently Ellis discusses how ‘second language acquisition research has informed language teaching
materials’ with particular reference to the design of tasks and Tomlinson develops thirty principles of
materials development from six principles of language acquisition and four principles of language
teaching. Tomlinson argues that second language acquisition is facilitated by: l A rich and meaningful
exposure to language in use.
l Affective and cognitive engagement.
l Making use of those mental resources typically used in communication in the L1.
l Noticing how the L2 is used.
l Being given opportunities for contextualized and purposeful communication in the L2.
l Being encouraged to interact.
l Being allowed to focus on meaning.
He makes use of these principles to develop criteria for the development and evaluation of materials and
then makes use of these criteria to evaluate six currently used global coursebooks. Similar principled
evaluations are reported in Tomlinson et al. , Masuhara et al. and Tomlinson and Masuhara and one
conclusion made by all of them is that coursebooks are not typically driven by principled frameworks but
by considerations of what is likely to sell.
What I am going to do in this chapter is to outline two frameworks for materials development which aim
to be principled, flexible and coherent, and which have developed from my answers to the question
about how we think people learn language. One is text-driven and ideal for developing coursebooks and
supplementary classroom materials. The other is task-driven and ideal for localizing and personalizing
classroom materials, and for autonomous learning.

The framework

This is a framework which I have used on materials writing workshops in

Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Singapore and Vietnam and on
textbook projects in China, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Oman, Singapore and Turkey . In all those countries
I found it helped writers not only to write principled and coherent materials quickly, effectively and
consistently but also to articulate and develop their own theories of language learning and language
teaching at the same time.
The framework follows the stages outlined below.

1 Text collection

You come across and/or create texts with the potential for engagement. By engagement, I mean a willing
investment of energy and attention in experiencing the text in such a way as to achieve interaction
between the text and the senses, feelings, views and intuitions of the reader/listener. Such texts can
help the reader/listener to achieve a personal multidimensional representation in which inner
speech, sensory images and affective stimuli combine to make the text meaningful . And sometimes they
can help the reader/ listener to achieve the sort of aesthetic response described by Rosenblatt in which
ultimately the reader enters the text and lives in it.
Such a representation can achieve the affective impact and the deep processing which can facilitate
language acquisition. It can also help the learners to develop the confidence and skills which can give
them access to valuable input outside and after their course .
Such texts are those which first of all engage ourselves in the ways described above and they can
come, for example, from literature, from songs, from newspapers and magazines, from non-fiction
books, from radio and television programmes and from films. Obviously, such texts cannot be easily
found and certainly cannot be found quickly in order to illustrate teaching points as Bell and Gower . It is
much easier and much more useful to build up a library of potentially engaging texts and then to let the
texts eventually selected for target levels determine the teaching points. And it is obviously much more
effective to teach language features which have first been experienced by the learners in engaging texts
than to impose ‘unengaging’ texts on learners just because they illustrate predetermined teaching
points. This library development stage is ongoing and context free. Its purpose is to create a resource
with the potential for subsequent matching to particular contexts of learning.

2 Text selection

In this stage you select from your library of potentially engaging texts . As the materials are going to be
driven by the text this stage is very important and should be criterion-referenced. Initially, it is a good
idea to apply the criteria explicitly; but eventually this can be done intuitively.

I would rate each text on a 5-point scale and would not select any text which did not achieve at least 4
on each of the criteria above.

Notes

1 Usefulness for teaching a particular language feature is a dangerous criterion as this can tempt writers
into the selection of texts which do not engage the learners and which, therefore, do not help them to
achieve durable learning of the teaching point.
2 Obviously many of the texts on an ESP or EAP course should relate to the target learners’ purposes for
doing the course but if all the texts do this explicitly there is a danger of tedium and, therefore, of lack of
engagement. This is a lesson I learned when a group of Saudi Arabian pilots complained that they were
bored with reading about aircraft and airports and, almost simultaneously, a group of Iraqi diplomats
complained that they were fed up with reading about politics and diplomacy. Both groups then
responded very enthusiastically to the inclusion of poetry on their courses. The important point is that
affect is vital for learning, even on courses with very specific purposes . Without it there is a danger that
language learning ‘can reduce the learner from an individual human being with views, attitudes and
emotions to a language learner whose brain is focused narrowly on the low level linguistic de-coding
which . . . prevents the learner from achieving multidimensional representation of the L2 world’ .