Tut! Coursebooks with their PARSNIP policy. You’ve literally given me nothing this term – not even a shred of controversy.
materials development
Webinar notes: What about principles for materials development? (Brian Tomlinson)
Here is Brian Tomlinson’s recent webinar in written form: ‘What about principles for materials development?’ The session was delivered as part of the MaWSIG ‘What about…? Webinar series. It was full of take home points so this post is pretty… Read More ›
Developing into a materials writer
Here are a few general tips for skills to develop if you’d like to write for publishers or big teaching organisations. This is not a ‘How to become….’ post. You can find good tips about how to actually get into… Read More ›
The 8 stages of teaching my own materials
I sat down to plan a General English class for our adult learners to the other day. I say plan, more like adapt. We have an in-house set of lessons so there’s already a plan in place, but the lesson… Read More ›
Coursebook activities and SLA theory – do they match?
According to Tomlinson (2013:12-15), ‘it is generally accepted that [Second Language Acquisition] is facilitated by: a rich and meaningful exposure to language in use affective and cognitive engagement making use of mental resources typically used in L1 communication noticing how… Read More ›
Problems with images in ELT materials
Images in ELT coursebooks are often ambiguous. What might seem a fairly obvious depiction of an act or concept to us may be perceived as something completely different to our learners. In an interesting, small-scale study, Hewings (1991) asked a… Read More ›
Lesson idea: Tomlinson’s text-driven approach
In Developing Materials for Language Teaching (2013) Tomlinson introduces a text-driven approach to materials development. He goes into quite a bit of detail regarding text selection, offers a suggested framework for the approach and provides a practical example (pages 99-114)…. Read More ›
Metaphors for teaching materials
What are coursebooks to you? This question prompted plenty of discussion on our materials development course. We were given various metaphors to choose from – a springboard, a straitjacket, a recipe, a compass, etc. I opted for a crutch, as… Read More ›
The role of teaching materials – deficiency vs difference
I took a course on materials development recently. It was really good – plenty of input and ideas I could apply in my current context. Here’s a link to the course if you’re interested. The role of teaching materials (as… Read More ›
A rant about comprehension questions
On my module in materials development we’ve just looked at reading and listening tasks. We spoke about what makes good/bad comprehension questions. ‘Plain sense’ questions are seen as pretty ineffective, as they just test familiarity with sentence structure rather than… Read More ›
