MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION

MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION

Introduction: are materials developing?

What is materials development?

Materials development is both a field of study and a practical undertaking. As a field it studies the principles and procedures of the design, implementation and evaluation of language teaching materials. As an undertaking it involves the production, evaluation, and adaptation of language teaching materials, by teacher for their own classrooms and by materials writers for sale or distribution. Ideally these two aspects of materials development are interactive in that theoretical studies inform and are informed by the development and use of classroom materials (Tomlinson, 2001:66).

What are materials?

Materials include anything which can be used to facilitate the learning of a language. They can be linguistic, visual, auditory, of kinesthetic, and they are can be presented in print, through performance or display, or on cassette, CD-ROM, DVD or the internet’ (Tomlinson, 2001: 66).

The materials

-          Can be instructional, experiential, elucidative, or exploratory,

-          Can inform learners about the language,

-          Can provide experience of the language use,

-          Can stimulate language use or

-          Help learners to make discoveries about the language for themselves.

What are the issues in materials development?

·         What should drive the materials?

-          The material should contain the needs and wants of learners

·         Who should develop the materials?

-          The materials should published by professional materials writers

-          A good teacher is also a good designer of course materials’

·         How should materials be developed?

The teachers managed to inspire each other with ideas, to maintain creative energy, to relate their materials to the actual learners who are going to use them and to suggest useful improvements to each other’s materials

·         How should materials be evaluated?

Materials are often evaluated in an ad hoc, impressive way, which tends to favour materials which have face validity (e.g. which comfort to people’s expectations of what materials should look like) and which are visually appealing.

·         Should text be authentic?

Materials aiming at explicit learning usually contrive examples of the language which focus on the future being taught. The material can be authentic or created.

What are the Current Trends in Materials Development?

·         Positive trends

-          There are more materials requiring investment by learners

-          There are more materials making use of corpus data reflecting actual language use

-          There more interactive language learning packages which make use of different media

-          There are more extensive reader series being produced with fewer linguistic constraints and more provoke content

-          There is an increase in attempts to personalize the learning process

-          There is an increase in attempts to gain the effective engagement of learners

-          There is an increasing use of the internet as a source of current, relevant, appalling text

-          There is some evidence of a movement away from spoken practice of written grammar

-          There is an increase in the number of ministries

·         Negative trends

-          There is a return to the central place of grammar in the language curriculum

-          There is a far greater prominence given in course books to  listening and speaking than other

-          There is an assumption that learners do not want and gain from intellectually demanding activities

-          There is a neglect of literature in course-books

-          There is containing predominance of analytical activities and neglect of activities

-          There is an absence of controversial issues to stimulate thought

-          There is a tendency to underestimate learner linguistically, intellectually, emotionally.  

What is the future of materials development?

The reality is that publishers will probably still play safe and stick to what they know they can sell:

-          Greater personalize and localization of materials

-          Greater flexibility and creativity of use

-          More respect for the learners

-          More effectively engaging content

-          A greater emphasis on multicultural perspective and awareness

-          More opportunities for learners with experiential

-          More attempt mad to engage the learner in the language learning process as an experienced

-          More attempts made to use multidimensional approaches to language learning.

MATSDA

MATSDA (the materials development Association) is an association founded in 1993 by Brian Tomlinson, which dedicated to improving the future for materials development.

Evaluation and adaptation of materials

Materials evaluation

What is materials evaluation?

Materials evaluation is a procedure that involves measuring the value (or potential value) of set of learning materials. It involves making judgments about the effect of the materials on the people using them and it tries to measure some or all of the following:

·         The appeal  of the materials to the learners

·         The creditability of the materials to learner, teacher and administrator

·         The validity of the materials

·         The reliability of the materials

·         The ability of the materials to interest the learners and the teacher

·         The ability of the materials to motivate the learners

·         The value of the materials in term of short-term and long-term learning

·         The learners’ and The teachers’ perceptions of the value of materials

·         The assistance given to the teachers in terms of preparation

·         The flexibility of the materials

·         The contribution made by the materials to teacher development

·         The match with administrative requirement.

The sequence of action model that use to prior evaluation

-          Analysis of the target situation of use

-          Materials analysis

-          Match and evaluation (determine the appropriacy of the materials to the target situation of use )

-          Action

Principle of materials evaluation

·         The evaluator’s theory of learning and teaching

All teacher develop the theories of learning and teaching which they apply in their classroom (even though they are often unaware of doing so)

·         Learning theory

·         Second language acquisition research (SLA)

Types of materials evaluation

-          Pre-use evaluation; involves making predictions about the potential value of materials for their users

-          Whilst-use evaluation; involves measuring the value of materials whilst using them or whilst observing them being used

-          Post-evaluation; probably the most valuable (but least administered) type of evaluation as it can be measure the actual effects of the, materials on the users.

Standard approaches to materials evaluation

·         Is the list based on a coherent set of principles of language learning?

·         Are all the criteria actually evaluation criteria?

·         Are the criteria sufficient to help the evaluator to reach useful conclusion?

·         Are the criteria organized systematically?

·         Are the criteria sufficiently neutral to allow validators with different ideologies to make use of them?

·         Is the list sufficiently flexible to allow it be made use of by different evaluators in different circumstances?

Developing criteria for materials evaluation

One way of developing a set of criteria

·         Brainstorm a list of universal criteria

·         Subdivide some of criteria;

·         Monitor and revise the list of universal criteria;

·         Categorize the list

·         Develop media-specific criteria

·         Develop content-specific criteria

·         Develop age-specific criteria

·         Develop local criteria

·         Develop other criteria

·         Trial the criteria 

-    Conducting the evaluation

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