Materials Evaluation and Design Carmen E.

Zuiga

Summary: Creative approaches to writing materials

Creativity is regarded as a desirable quality in many areas and domains that include music, arts, literature, science and even finances. ELT has also seen significant instances of creativity which are considered relevant for this field. Key components of the notion of creativity Newness: original, innovating, unusual, surprising. Immediacy: sudden, illumination, spontaneous. Respect: awe, admiration, delight. Experiment: exploration, curiosity, problem solving, play. Divine: intuition, insight, imagination, inspiration, mysterious, unconscious. Seeing relationships: connections, associations, analogies, combinations. Unpredictable: randomness, chance, coincidence, chaos. Acceptability: Recognition, relevance, significance, value.

Approaches to creativity Storr (1972) Creativity is approached through psychoanalysis, explaining that creative people have odd or different behaviors, and it is creativity itself what functions as therapeutic, keeping them sane. Csikszentimihaly (1988) Creativity as an interaction between talent operating in a particular area or discipline, being judged by experts in the same field. Both Koestler (1989) Presents the idea of creativity as a stage with four processes: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Boden (1990) Creativity is investigated from an Artificial intelligence approach, which considers the self-organizing properties of generative systems. Why do we need creativity? 1. It is inevitable for the nature of the human mind that is always predisposed to generate new ideas. 2. It is historical. Any domain has followed a process or pattern of development. 3. It is necessary for survival in the language teaching context, since it is in constant demand for evolution. 4. Creativity stimulates and motivated.

Materials Evaluation and Design Carmen E. Zuiga

The Stakeholders Materials writers should be interested in exercising creativity in different aspects such as the content, the managing and the publishing of the materials. Teachers should also pay attention to the framework used and the flexibility of it. Applications of creativity Do the opposite

John Fanselow (1987) It is a way of generating new ideas and possibilities for the use of materials in levels such as content, process or roles. It requires teachers to make radical changes in their practices, using techniques that differ from the ones they usually apply. Designer Methods

Stevick (1980) these are basically other creative applications of do the opposite. Suggestopedia

(Lozanov 1979; Saferis, 1978) Students dont have to make a conscious effort to learn and the atmosfer of the classroom should be relaxing for them. The use of music is also included. N. S. Prabhu Development of procedural, task-based syllabyses.

He suggests a time of semi-materials of single-type activities or collection of raw input. Maley (1994) Adapted this ideas for the development of flexi-materials, which include open-ended texts that can be used with certain number of activities. Humanistic contributions These are based on ideas where the individual characteristics and aspects of the learners should be valorized and considered relevant.