Stages in Material

Development
 Graves (2000:149) describes materials development
as the planning process by which a teacher can put the
objectives and goals of the course into units and tasks.
In designing materials, there should be a
consideration about the units which are carried out in the
materials. The unit normally consists of a number of
activities which represents the principles and beliefs in
language teaching.
Unit Design Development

Commonly, there are several considerations about

the task sequence, which task should come first and which
the next. Nunan (2004:31-33) proposes six steps of
developing materials which can be used as the basis
underlain the unit design development process.

1. Schema building
The first step is to develop a number of schema-
building exercises that will serve to introduce the topic, set
the context for the task, and introduce some of the key
vocabulary and expressions that the students will need in
order to complete the task.
2. Controlled practice
The next step is to provide students with controlled
practice in using the target language vocabulary, structures and
functions. One way of doing this would be to present learners
with a brief conversation between two people discussing
accommodation options relating to one of the advertisements
that they studied in the previous step.
3. Aunthentic listening practice
The next step involves learners in intensive listening
practice. The listening texts could involve a number of native
speakers inquiring about accommodation options, and the task
for the learner would be to match the conversations with the
advertisements from step 1. This step would expose them to
authentic or simulated conversation, which could incorporate
but extend the language from the model conversation in step 2.
4. Focus on linguistic elements
The exercises of this stage focus on one or more
linguistic elements, such as the intonation (if the tasks are
listening) or spelling, punctuation and other language
mechanics if the tasks are reading or writing ones, and so
on. It helps the students to see the relationship between
communicative meaning and linguistic form.
5. Provide freer practice
The students have been working within the
constraints of language models provided by the teacher
and the materials. At this point, it is time for the students
to engage in freer practice, where they move beyond
simple manipulation.
Task Design Development
Candlin (1987) in Nunan (2004) suggests that that tasks should contain input, roles,
settings, actions, monitoring, outcomes and feedback. Different from Wright (1987a) in
Nunan (2004), he argues that, minimally, tasks need to contain only two elements.
These are input data, which may be provided by materials, teachers or learners, and an
initiating question, which instructs learners on what to do with the data. While Nunan
(2004), proposes six components of task. They are described below.
1. Goals
Goals are the vague, general intentions behind any learning task. They provide a link
between the task and the broader curriculum. Goals may relate to a range of general
outcomes (communicative, affective or cognitive) or may directly describe teacher or
learner’s behavior. Another point worth noting is that goals may not always be explicitly
stated, although they can usually be inferred from the task itself.
 Additionally, there is not always a simple one-to-one relationship
between goals and tasks. In the same cases, a complex task such as a
simulation with several steps and sub-tasks may have more than one
underlying goal.

2. Input
Input refers to the spoken, written and visual data that learners work
with in the course of completing a task. Data can be provided by a
teacher, a textbook or some other source. Alternatively, it can be
generated by the learners themselves. Input can come from a wide
range of sources. The inclusion as input of such material raises the
question of authenticity. Nunan (2004: 49) argues that it is not a matter
of whether or not authentic materials should be used, but what
combination of authentic, simulated and specially written materials
provide learners with optimal learning opportunities.
3. Procedures
Procedures specify what learners will actually do with the
input that forms the point of departure for the learning task. In
considering criteria for task selection (and, in the next section, we
will look at what research has to say on this matter), some issues
arise similar to those as we encountered when considering input.

4. Teacher and learner roles

It refers to the parts that teachers and students are expected
to play in carrying out learning tasks as well as the social and
interpersonal relationships between the participants. Teacher roles
and learner roles are two sides of a coin. Giving the learners a more
active role in the classroom requires the teacher to adopt a different
role.
 According to Breen and Candlin (1980) in Nunan (2004), the teacher
has three main roles in the communicative classroom. The first is to
act as a facilitator of the communicative process, the second is to
act as a participant, and the third is to act as an observer and
learner. The teacher may need to strike a balance between the roles
that she feels appropriate and those demanded by the students.

5. Setting
Settings refer to the classroom arrangements specified or implied in
the task. It also requires consideration of whether the task is to be
carried out wholly or partly outside the classroom. Wright (1987:
15) in Nunan (2004) suggests the different ways in which learners
might be grouped physically within the classroom as follows.
6. Reproduction to creation
In reproductive tasks, learners reproduce language
models provided by the teacher, the textbook or the
tape. These tasks are designed to give learners mastery of
form, meaning and function, and are intended to provide
a basis for creative tasks. In creative tasks, learners are
recombining familiar elements in novel ways. This
principle can be deployed not only with students who are
at intermediate levels and above but also with beginners
if the instructional process is carefully sequenced.

7. Reflection
Learners should be given opportunities to reflect
on what they have learned and how well they are doing.
To create meaningful tasks, there are some principles to follow (Nunan, 2004). Those principles
are:
Scaffolding
Lessons and materials should provide supporting frameworks within which the learning takes
place. At the beginning of the learning process, learners should not be expected to produce
language that has not been introduced either explicitly or implicitly.

Task dependency
Within a lesson, one task should grow out of, and build upon, the ones that have gone before.

Recycling
Recycling language maximizes opportunities for learning and activates the ‘organic’ learning
principle.

Active learning
A key principle behind this concept is that learners learn best through doing – through actively
constructing their own knowledge rather than having it transmitted to them by the teacher.

Integration
Learners should be taught in ways that make clear the relationships between linguistic form,
communicative function and semantic meaning.
Material Evaluation
Materials evaluation is defined as a means to measure whether the materials meet
the learners’ need or not. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) state evaluation is basically a
matching process among the needs and possible solutions. It means that considerations in
evaluating English learning materials should be based on the students’ needs.

Skierso in Tomlinson (1998:221) proposes three steps of materials evaluation, which

are:
a. Identification of relevant contextual information relating to the students, the teacher,
the course syllabus and the institution,
b. Analysis of the features of the textbook followed by overall rating of the text, and
c. The actual judging of the acceptability of the textbook, involving both the rating and
weighting of specific evaluative criteria.
THANK YOU