approaches to material writing

APPROACHES TO MATERIALS WRITING

Principles and Procedure of Materials writing.

Most accounts of materials development describe processes which are spontaneous and which rely on an intuitive feel for activities which are likely to work.However, Bell and Gower (1998) start by articulating the principles which they want to guide their writing and Hall (1995:8) starts by articulating his theories to language learning and insisting that before starting to write we need to answer the question: “how do we think people learn language?”

A RECOMMENDED FRAMEWORK FOR MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT.

Preparing for materials development:

1.Text Collection.

Collect or create texts(written or spoken) with the potential for engagement.”such a representation can achieve the afective impact and the deep processing which can facilitate language acquisition.(Tomlinson,1999:62).

2.Text selection.

Select the text from your library of potentially engaging texts.

The most important critteria:

· Does the text still engage you cognitively and affectively?

· Is the text likely to engage most of the target learners cognitively and effectively?

· Are the target learners likely to be able to connect the text to their lives?

Developing the materials:

1.Experienting the text again.

Experience the selected text again (i.e. read or listen to it again experientiallly in order to re-engage with the text).

2.Devising Readiness activity.

Devise activity which could get the learners ready to experience the text in multi-dimensional ways.

3.devising experiential activities.

These are activities which are designed to help the learners to represent the text in their minds as they read it orlisten to it and to do so in mutidimensional ways which facilitate personal engagement.

4.devising intake response activities.

These are activities which help learners to develop and articulate what they have taken in form the text.

WHAT ARE THE TECHNIQUES FOR MATERIALS ADAPTATION?

The various techniques can be divided into 3 main categories in terms of quantity: Plus(+),minus(-) or zero (0).

Plus category:

· Teacher may add different texts or activities.

· Teacher may expand texts and/or activities by increasing the length,difficulty,depth,etc.

Minus category:

· Teacher may delete some texts and/or activities altogether.

· Teacher may decrease the number of sentences in a text or part of an activity.

· Teachers may reduce texts and activities by decreasing the lengths,difficulty,depth,etc.

Zero category:

· Teacher may make changes to instruction.

· Teachers may swap one activity with another.

· Teaher may change the position s of the text and illustrations.

· Teachers may change the sequence of the activities.

· Teachers may change the genre of a text or move the content from 1 medium to another.

CONDUCTING MATERIALS ADAPTATIONS

· The most effective way of conducting a materials adaptation is to:

· Have a bank of evaluation criteria that you can select from.

· Have a large bank of categorised materials that you can readily retrieve for adaptation .

· Have coleagues with whom you can share resources and who are willing to go through the adaptation process together.

· Have colleagues who are happy to give you feedback on your adapted materials.

· Be in an environment in which materials evaluation,adaptation and development are encouraged and teachers’ time and effort s are ackknowledged.

· Revisit adapted materials and improve them.

Conclusion:

Each teacher has to take on responsibility of materials adaptation in order to ensure an optimal match between the materials and the particular teaching context.

The systematic,rigorous and principled approach to materials adaptation suggested above can help you fulfil such a responsibility. Adapting materials can not only help you to critically appreciate existing materials but also help you to learn a lot about materials,about learning and teaching and about your self.

Most important of all is that adapting materials can help you produce materials that you want to teach because you enjoy teaching them.You may eventually realise that it is,posibly,much easier and more enjoyable to develop your own materials rather than being restricted by existing materials.The materials adaptation process is a great preparation for writing materials of your own.