(Alvin)

LESSON 1: ESSENCE OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS

What are Materials?

Materials are anything that facilitates the learning of language.

What are materials? ‘materials’ ‘include anything which can be used to facilitate the learning of a
language. They can be linguistic, visual, auditory or kinesthetic, and they can be presented in
print, through live performance or display, or on cassette, CD-ROM, DVD or the internet’
(Tomlinson, 2001).

They can be instructional, experiential, eliminative or exploratory, in that they can inform
learners about the language, they can provide experience of the language in use, they can
stimulate language use or they can help learners to make discoveries about the language for
themselves.

Who should develop the materials?

These days most commercial materials are written by professional materials writers writing to a
brief determined by the publishers from an analysis of market needs (see Amrani, 2011).

Teachers also need an experience, training and support to become materials writers who can
produce imaginative materials of relevance and appeal to their learners.

What is Instructional Material?

Instructional Materials serve as the heart of active engagement of students in language
learning. In the development of instructional materials for language learning, it is fundamental to
enrich your understanding on the following important concepts as shared by experts of IMs
development and how these would foster meaningful learning the language.

Instructional materials refer to those alternative channels of communication, which a classroom

teacher can use to concretize a concept during teaching and learning process. An instructional
material is any systematic description of the techniques and exercises to be used in the
classroom teaching (Brown,1995)

They are didactic material things which are supposed to make learning and teaching possible.
(Obanya,1989).

They are human and non-human materials and facilities that can be used to ease, encourage,
improve and promote teaching and support instruction, such as textbooks, tasks and
supplementary materials.” (Remilliard and Heck 2014)

Teaching Aids are objects (such as a book, picture or map) or devices (such as DVD or
computer) used by a teacher to enhance or enliven classroom instruction.(Shukla, 2018).

The role or materials (particularly textbook) in in language teaching as a resource – for

presentation materials; activities for learners’ practice and communicative interaction; for
learners on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation stimulation and ideas for classroom activities; a
support for less experienced teachers. (Cunningsworth as cited in Richards, 2003).