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. 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.
2. In the first 25 pages of another coursebook there are more
than 30 references to smoking and drinking
3. Task 1.2.
Materials and Ideology
 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”
 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
 “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
 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. 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
2. 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.
3. Task 2.1
Materials and methods
 Materials embody syllabus and content
and the method that is used to facilitate
the learning of that content.
 “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