Monday, November 1, 2010

Principles of effective materials development

By Licda. Cleopatra Noel Drummond

According to the author "Brian Tomlinson" the materials we are going to use is not to be taken from any random recreation nor crafty clones but it has to be creative and be coherent. 
The materials should be:


1. Expose the learners to language in authentic use.
2. Help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input.
3. Provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes.
4. Provide opportunities for outcome feedback.
5. Stimulate intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involvement.

The author also emphasizes the six principles of language acquisition and four principles of language teaching that is useful to give a lot more attention in materials development. Those principles of language acquisition are:

1. A prerequisite for language acquisition is that the learners are exposed to a rich, meaningful, and comprehensible input of language in use. In order to acquire the ability to use the language effectively, the learners need a lot of experience of the language. Make sure that the materials contain plentiful spoken and written texts. Make sure that the language the learners are exposed to is authentic in the sense that the language is contextualized. Make sure that the learners are exposed to sufficient samples of language in authentic use to provide natural recycling.

2. In order for the learners to maximize their exposure to language in use, they need to be engaged both effectively and cognitively in the language experience. If the learners do not think and feel while experience the language, they are unlikely to acquire any elements of it. Prioritize the potential for engagement. Make use of activities that make the learners think about what they are reading or listening to and respond to it personally.

3. Language learners who achieve positive affect are much more likely to achieve communicative competence than those who do not. Language learners need to be positive about the target language, about their learning environment, about their teachers, about their fellow learners, and about their learning materials. Make sure the texts and tasks are as interesting, relevant, and enjoyable.

4. Language learners can benefit from using those mental resources that they typically utilize when acquiring and using their L1. In particular, they can gain from multidimensional representation of both the language they experience they intend to produce. Make use of activities that encourage learners to visualize and or use inner speech before, during and after experiencing a written or spoken text.

5. Language learners can benefit from noticing salient features of the input. If learners notice for themselves how a particular language item or feature is used. Rather tan drawing the learners' attention to a particular feature of a text and then providing explicit information about its use, it is much more powerful to help the learners to make discoveries for themselves.

6. Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes. If they are participating in interaction, they are also being pushed to clarify and elaborate. Provide many opportunities for the learners to produce language in order to achieve intended outcomes. Try to ensure that opportunities for feedback are built into output activities and are provided for the learners afterwards.

The following are Principles of language teaching:

1. The teaching such be consisted with the objectives of the course and should meet the needs and wants of the learners. The materials need to be written in such a way that the teacher can make use of them as a resource, they must be built in flexibility to the course that helps the teachers and learners to make principled decisions.

2. The teaching should be designed to help learners to achieve language development and no just language acquisition. The activities should not be restricted to the practice of language forms and functions. The materials should help the teacher to assess the learners and to give constructive feedback in relation to achievement.

3. The teachers should provide the learners with learning opportunities to help them develop educationally. The material should be cross-curricular in that they relate to other subject areas and are not narrowly focused on language learning.

4. The teacher needs to be able to personalize and localize the materials and to relate them in different ways to the needs, wants, and learning-style preferences of individual learners. The materials should provide the teacher with ideas for localizing and personalizing generic activities.

It is necessary to have materials in our classroom to make the lesson more meaningful for students to learn by having fun.
http://www.3dlearner.com/Portals/40107/images//Writing(1)-resized-600.jpg

No comments:

Post a Comment