Materials development for language learning and teaching

In this article, 'materials for language learning' will be taken to be anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language, including coursebooks, videos, graded readers, flash cards, games, websites and mobile phone interactions, though, inevitably, much of the literature focuses on printed materials. Materials can be informative (informing the learner about the target language), instructional (guiding the learner in practising the language), experiential (providing the learner with experience of the language in use), eliciting (encouraging the learner to use the language) and exploratory (helping the learner to make discoveries about the language). As different learners learn in different ways (Oxford 2002) the ideal materials aim to provide all these ways of acquiring a language for the learners to experience and sometimes select from. However, the reality is that most commercially produced materials focus on informing their users about language features and on guiding them to practise these features, a fact that is highlighted by Richard’s (2001: 251) comment that ‘instructional materials generally serve as the basis of much of the language input that learners receive and the language practice that occurs in the classroom’. The same point is made byTomlinson et al.(2001) and Masuhara et al. (2008) in their reviews of currently used adult EFL coursebooks: both conclude that the emphasis in most coursebooks is on providing explicit teaching and practice.

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