METHODOLOGY IN

LANGUAGE TEACHING
INSTRUCTED BY
MR. TEP SOPHENG

Tel: 012 359 576 1

E-mail: sopheng@yahoo.com
RULES

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LEARNING METHODS

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CHAPTER 8

THE ROLE OF MATERIALS

IN THE LANGUAGE
CLASSROOM: FINDING THE
BALANCE

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INTRODUCTION

 What about meeting learner needs?

 How can a course book meet the needs of a specific
group of students?
 This discussion is divided into two sections.
 The first looks at attitudes to teaching materials,
including textbooks, and explores two opposing
points of view.
 Commercial materials deskill teachers and rob them
of their capacity to think professionally and
respond to their students. 5
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PREPLANNED TEACHING
MATERIALS – HELPFUL
SCAFFOLD
OR DEBILITATING CRUTCH?
 Concern whether pre-prepared materials can meet
individual learner needs is part of the dilemma
teachers face in trying to implement learner-
centered language programs in a group setting.
 Textbooks nevertheless remain a contentious issue
for many teachers and researchers.
 Textbooks reduce the teacher’s role to one of
managing or overseeing preplanned events
(Hutchinson & Torres, 1994, p. 316).
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PREPLANNED TEACHING
MATERIALS – HELPFUL SCAFFOLD
OR DEBILITATING CRUTCH? (CON’T)
 Allwright (1981) suggests that there are two key
positions of textbooks in the language classroom.
 The first – the deficiency view: the role of
textbooks or published materials as being to
compensate for teachers’ deficiencies and ensure
that the syllabus is covered using well thought out
exercises.
 The difference view, on the other hand, sees
materials as carriers of decisions best made by
someone other than the teacher because of
differences in expertise.
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PREPLANNED TEACHING
MATERIALS – HELPFUL SCAFFOLD
OR DEBILITATING CRUTCH? (CON’T)
 Both the deficiency and difference views challenge
teachers’ professionalism and reduce them to
classroom managers, technicians or implementers
of others’ ideas.
 In other words, teachers and their experience have a
crucial role to play in materials production as well
as in their critical classroom use, and the best
writers are probably practising teachers.

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PREPLANNED TEACHING
MATERIALS – HELPFUL SCAFFOLD
OR DEBILITATING CRUTCH? (CON’T)
 Teachers’ guides may provide a helpful scaffold for
learning to think pedagogically about particular
content, considering the relationship between what
the teachers and students are doing and what
students are supposed to be learning (Loewenberg-
Ball & Feiman- Nemser, 1988, p. 421; emphasis
added).
 A textbook, from this perspective, does not
necessarily drive the teaching process, but it does
provide the structure and predictability that are
necessary to make the event socially tolerable to the
participants. 13
PREPLANNED TEACHING
MATERIALS – HELPFUL SCAFFOLD
OR DEBILITATING CRUTCH? (CON’T)
 Hutchinson and Torres (1994) suggest that this is important
because it (textbook) allows for:
1. Negotiation: The textbook can actually contribute by
providing something to negotiate about. This can include
teacher and learner roles as well as content and learning
strategies.
2. Accountability: The textbook shows all stakeholders
‘what is being done . . . in the closed and ephemeral world
of the classroom’ (Hutchinson and Torres, 1994).
3. Orientation: Teachers and learners need to know what is
happening elsewhere, what standards are expected, how
much work should be covered, and so on.
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EFFECTIVE TEACHING
MATERIALS
 Materials obviously reflect the writers’ views of
language and learning, and teachers (and students)
will respond according to how well these match
their own beliefs and expectations. If materials are
to be a helpful scaffold, these underlying principles
need to be made explicit and an object of
discussion for both students and teachers.
 Effective materials are likely to reflect the
following statements:

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LANGUAGE IS FUNCTIONAL
AND MUST BE
CONTEXTUALISED
 Language is as it is because of the purposes we put it to.
 For this reason, materials must contextualize the language
they present.
 Language, whether it is input or learner output, should
emerge from the context in which it occurs.
 One possible way to build a shared context for learners and
their teachers is to use video drama.
 The context helps make the language encountered
meaningful, and also extends the content of the course
beyond that other rich source of contextualized language
use, the classroom itself.
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LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
REQUIRES LEARNER ENGAGEMENT
IN PURPOSEFUL USE OF LANGUAGE
 The focus of input and output materials should be on
whole texts, language in use.
 This does not mean that there should be no focus on
form, but rather that form normally comes out of whole
texts which have already been processed for meaning.
 Study of grammar looks at how such texts use the
system to express meaning and achieve certain
purposes.
 Depending on the background and goals of their
learners, teachers can decide whether to enhance or
reduce this focus on form and the language used.
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THE LANGUAGE USED
SHOULD BE REALISTIC AND
AUTHENTIC
 An outcome of our understanding that language is a social
practice has been an increased call for the use of ‘authentic’
materials, rather than the more contrived and artificial
language often found in traditional textbooks (Grant, 1987).
 The quality of the materials is, nevertheless, important
because of its impact on learners and their motivation.
 Hi-tech visual images are a pervasive feature of young
people’s lives.
 Text- books, worksheets and overheads are a poor match for
these other, more complex, instantaneous and sometimes
spectacular forms of experience and learning.
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CLASSROOM MATERIALS WILL
USUALLY SEEK TO INCLUDE AN
AUDIO VISUAL COMPONENT
 This statement is true not only because we live in
an increasingly multimedia world in which
advances in technology allow for expanding
flexibility in delivery, but also because such
materials can create a learning environment that is
rich in linguistic and cultural information about the
target language.
 Materials such as video and multimedia allow
teachers and learners to explore the nonverbal and
cultural aspects of language as well as the verbal.
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IN OUR MODERN, TECHNOLOGICALLY
COMPLEX WORLD, SECOND
LANGUAGE LEARNERS NEED TO
DEVELOP THE ABILITY TO DEAL WITH
WRITTEN AS WELL AS SPOKEN
GENRES
 Reading materials will normally need to cover a range
of genres, possibly including computer literacy.
 Writing in a second language is sometimes daunting for
L2 learners, especially because, as native speakers
know, we tend to be less forgiving of grammatical and
other inaccuracies.
 Materials can incorporate learning cycles which allow
learners to explore choices and options and choose the
most appropriate to their purpose before they begin
working on their own.
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EFFECTIVE TEACHING
MATERIALS FOSTER
LEARNER AUTONOMY
 The activities and materials proposed must be
flexible, designed to develop skills and strategies
which can be transferred to other texts in other
contexts.
 The materials writer can also suggest follow-up
activities to encourage this process and to provide
additional practice for those who need it.
 One of the advantages of talking about language as
proposed here is that such discussion contributes to
the development of skills for continued
autonomous learning (Borg, 1994)
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MATERIALS NEED TO BE FLEXIBLE
ENOUGH TO CATER TO INDIVIDUAL
AND CONTEXTUAL DIFFERENCES
 Learning a language is largely an individual
process as learners seek to integrate newly
perceived information into their existing language
system.
 It is essential for teachers to recognize the different
backgrounds, experiences and learning styles that
students bring to the language classroom.
 In other words, it is to a large extent the learners,
not the teachers, who control what is learnt since it
is they who selectively organize the sensory input
into meaningful wholes. 26
LEARNING NEEDS TO ENGAGE
LEARNERS BOTH AFFECTIVELY
AND COGNITIVELY
 The language classroom involves an encounter of
identities and cultures, and it needs to be recognized
that language learning requires the active participation
of the whole learner.
 The integration of new knowledge into the learner’s
existing language system occurs with certainty only
when the language is used spontaneously in a
communicative (purposeful) situation to express the
learner’s own meaning.
 Textbooks can at best provide only a base or a core of
materials. They are a jumping-off point for teacher and
class. They should not aim to be more than that.
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CONCLUSION
 The roles preplanned teaching materials can play,
and argued that their contribution need not be
debilitating to teachers and learners; they can
scaffold the work of both teachers and learners and
even serve as agents of change, provided they act as
guides and negotiating points, rather than
straitjackets.
 Selection of integrated activities can actually assist
teachers to be more responsive, both by leaving
them time to cater to individual needs and by
expanding their teaching repertoire.
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REFERENCE

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THE END!

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