Materials

A framework for materials writing.
we offer a practical idea of the different aspects of the process of materials writing by teachers for the classroom.
The starting point for this practical overview derives from the thoughts and feelings of those most involved with language materials: the comments below are the authentic voices of students and teachers of English as a foreign language. Each statement appears to have materials-writing implications.
The evening institute has identified a need for materials that practise making requests, but clearly the Croatian teacher feels that she does not know enough about the language of requests to teach it as effectively as she would like to do. Textbooks inevitably and necessarily make pedagogical selections of exponents used for specific language functions which do not
suit all learners or satisfy all teachers. This teacher will have to engage in some linguistic exploration of the functional area of ‘requests’ in order to produce more informative materials for her classes.
The implications of these three quotations are not linguistic; rather, they address the problem of appropriate contextual realisation for materials. For the teacher in the Ivory Coast, the materials offered on‘Processes’ would be outside the cultural experience of his students
(possibly even threatening) and thus effectively useless; conversely, for the Brazilian teacher, the choice of Brazilian settings and familiar mores would have clear advantages over distant foreign contexts as they are essentially more motivating.
in Developing Strategies by Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn which deals with degrees of uncer-
tainty. In it, the students are given an example of a man going shopping in a supermarket who, when he comes to pay, discovers he has lost his wallet. The students are asked to speculate on where he lost it.
Exercise 1 (Students in British language school classroom doing exercises in pairs as suggested; the focus here is on language use rather than on the content of the students’ utterances)
PAIR 1 A: His wallet must have fallen down the trolley ...
B: He must have forgotten it there ...

PAIR 2 C: Perhaps he left it on the shopping trolley...
D: Perhaps he left it on the car...
E: No, perhaps he drop it in the cleaner’s ...

In the exercise illustrated above the students are asked to make statements about the relative likelihood of events given the information. However, since no basis for any one hypothesis is stronger than any other basis, students doing the exercise end up making correctly formed but random statements.
The physical appearance and production of materials is important both for motivation and for classroom effectiveness. Teachers engaged in writing materials need to develop the same care and attention to presentation that one would expect of good publishers, though the first quote reveals that even very good publishers also fall down on the job.