Materials And…: Taken From: Materials Evaluation And Design For Language Teaching( Ian Mc

Materials and… English Methodology II Mg .R. Correa Taken from: Materials Evaluation and Design for language Teaching( Ian Mc Grath, 2002) UCSC-2008

Materials and… Learning  Ideology  Culture  Syllabus  Method  Research 

Materials and Learning Learning from content  (1) content from another academic (school ) subject.  (2) student-contributed content( e.g student talking about themselves )  (3) the language itself (as an object of analysis)  (4) literature  (5) culture Cook ( 1983)

Materials and Learning Learning from process Learners learn from interaction with others and from the process of carrying out the task. Learning to learn Many coursebooks include specific sections designed to raise learners’awareness of what they can do to become more effective learners. Alternatively this “teaching” may be much less explicit and be woven into tasks.

Materials and Learning Attitudes and values: Some examples: 1.

2. 3.

A coursebok contains hundreds of photographs of people in different roles. Only 2 of them are of black people. One is a muscular athlete and the other a manual worker. In the first 25 pages of another coursebook there are more than 30 references to smoking and drinking Task 1.2.

Materials and Ideology 

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Ideology, like culture,can be built into materials by design. The following quotations indicate some of the concerns that have been expressed: “…EFL text books …will contain material whose purpose will be the linguistic acculturation of learners and therefore their sujugation to social conventions”

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Acculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first hand contact; the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct.

Materials and Ideology 

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“Themes, topics and titles units, and how these are articulated, are in themselves revealing in relation to the social reality to be constructed for textbook users.” “The selection of language functions to be transmitted and acquired is ideologically loaded”  Dendrinos’s ( 1992)

Materials and Culture 

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Materials do embody cultural content , and that knowledge of this content is essential if one is to understand the language. One argument against a bicultural approach is that, taken to an extreme, it may be seen as a form of cultural imperialism.(Alptekin and Alptekin 1984) In a world in which English has assumed a global importance, a multicultural approach would be more appropriate.

Materials and syllabus 1.

2.

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The syllabus determines if not the selection of material al least the way in which they will be exploited for teaching purposes. Syllabus-driven approach Materials are selected first ,for their intrinsic interest and general linguistic appropriateness, and a specific linguistic syllabus is then derived from. Concept driven-approach or Text driven approach. Task 2.1

Materials and methods 

Materials embody syllabus and content and the method that is used to facilitate the learning of that content.

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“There is a considerable dichotomy between what is theoretically recomended as desirable and what in fact gets published and used on a wide scale” (Clarke 1989)

Materials and methods There are two schools of thought concerning material selection:  1.One insisting on the real or authentic material.  2.Another arguing that the primary criterion should be appropriateness for the learners. 

Materials and research Questions to think about…  What kinds of research /theories appear to underpin the materials?  What research processes were involved in the writing of the materials?  What research has there been into materials selection and use and what remains to be done?  Task 3.4