From International Coursebooks to TeacherProduced Materials

Daro Luis Banegas

Centre for Applied Linguistics

Approaches and materials in ELT

What

do I refer to by materials? and curriculum design contexts and syllabi

Coursebooks Coursebooks,

Coursebooks

as learning materials

Teachers are primary consumers of coursebooks and retain considerable power in determining the uses to which they are put in the classroom.
(Gray, 2010: 19)

What lies behind coursebooks

Key

role in shaping education Reasons for adopting a given coursebook Ideological tensions in the publishing business The authority of the coursebook over the teachers Teachers as passive consumers Teachers as active agents in MATDEV

The hope, of course, lies with local, noncommercial materials which are not driven by the profit imperative and which are driven rather by considerations of the need and wants of their target learners and by principles of language acquisition.

Tomlinson (2008: 9)

Teacher-developed materials. Principles

Flexibility Texts

to trigger language work through integrated skills Relevant content Natural language use Realisation of curriculum aims
Bell and Gower (1998: 116-129) and McGrath (2002)

Teacher-developed materials. Principles

Expose learners to language authentic in use Help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input Provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes Provide opportunities for outcome feedback Achieve impact in the sense that they arouse and sustain the learners curiosity and attention Stimulate intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involvement Tomlinson (2010: 83)

Teachers develop CLIL materials through AR:

1. 2. 3.

4.

Contextual features Motivations 2 Cycles: Coursebook evaluation Teachers develop materials Teachers teach with their materials Feedback and evaluation

Coursebook evaluation
Teachers

say: - Demotivating topics - Decontextualised contents

Students say: - Demotivating topics - Irrelevant contents - Childish listening input - Childish activities - Poor language recycling

opportunities

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Teachers develop C
Content Sources

selection collection and selection SAMPLE 1 SAMPLE 2 coursebook

Activities

Teacher-made Adaptations

in class

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Evaluation and feedback

From -

the students:

Good for authentic sources Excellent for being context-responsive Good for listening and speaking opportunities Good for groupwork activities Can we have a say in topic selection? Can you add grammar work? Can you add more audiovisual sources, more listening activities, and debates?

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Teachers develop new materials

Students

vote for topics; negotiation Fewer lessons Development of more flexible activities More audiovisual sources Inclusion of few grammar noticing exercises through content Debates

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What teachers feel

Time

consuming Great sense of achievement Professional development Need to know more about materials adaptations CLIL is good as a post PPP-approach

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Conclusions
Benefits Challenges

More

students feedback As I see materials development: a joint enterprise: (grammar) coursebooks + teacher-developed materials for engaging contents, topics, and skills development

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Thank you!!
dariobanegas@hotmail.com D.L.Banegas@warwick.ac.uk