Stages in Material

Development
Created: Ainun Nihayati R (BG31702)
Slide Title

Graves (2000:149) describes materials development as

the planning process by which a teacher can put the
objectives and goals of the course into units and tasks.
In designing materials, there should be a consideration
about the units which are carried out in the materials.
The unit normally consists of a number of activities
which represents the principles and beliefs in language
teaching.
Unit Design Development

Commonly, there are several considerations about the task

sequence, which task should come first and which the next.
Nunan (2004:31-33) proposes six steps of developing materials
which can be used as the basis underlain the unit design
development process.

1. Schema building
The first step is to develop a number of schema-building
exercises that will serve to introduce the topic, set the context
for the task, and introduce some of the key vocabulary and
expressions that the students will need in order to complete the
task.
2. Controlled practice
The next step is to provide students with controlled practice in
using the target language vocabulary, structures and functions.
One way of doing this would be to present learners with a brief
conversation between two people discussing accommodation
options relating to one of the advertisements that they studied
in the previous step.  
3. Aunthentic listening practice
The next step involves learners in intensive listening practice.
The listening texts could involve a number of native speakers
inquiring about accommodation options, and the task for the
learner would be to match the conversations with the
advertisements from step 1. This step would expose them to
authentic or simulated conversation, which could incorporate
but extend the language from the model conversation in step 2.
4. Focus on linguistic elements
The exercises of this stage focus on one or more linguistic elements, such as the
intonation (if the tasks are listening) or spelling, punctuation and other language
mechanics if the tasks are reading or writing ones, and so on. It helps the students
to see the relationship between communicative meaning and linguistic form.
5. Provide freer practice
The students have been working within the constraints of language models
provided by the teacher and the materials. At this point, it is time for the students
to engage in freer practice, where they move beyond simple manipulation.
Task Design Development
Candlin (1987) in Nunan (2004) suggests that that tasks should contain input, roles,
settings, actions, monitoring, outcomes and feedback. Different from Wright (1987a) in
Nunan (2004), he argues that, minimally, tasks need to contain only two elements. These
are input data, which may be provided by materials, teachers or learners, and an
initiating question, which instructs learners on what to do with the data. While Nunan
(2004), proposes six components of task. They are described below.
1. Goals
Goals are the vague, general intentions behind any learning task. They provide a link
between the task and the broader curriculum. Goals may relate to a range of general
outcomes (communicative, affective or cognitive) or may directly describe teacher or
learner’s behavior. Another point worth noting is that goals may not always be explicitly
stated, although they can usually be inferred from the task itself.
 Additionally, there is not always a simple one-to-one relationship between
goals and tasks. In the same cases, a complex task such as a simulation
with several steps and sub-tasks may have more than one underlying goal.

2. Input
Input refers to the spoken, written and visual data that learners work with
in the course of completing a task. Data can be provided by a teacher, a
textbook or some other source. Alternatively, it can be generated by the
learners themselves. Input can come from a wide range of sources. The
inclusion as input of such material raises the question of authenticity.
Nunan (2004: 49) argues that it is not a matter of whether or not authentic
materials should be used, but what combination of authentic, simulated
and specially written materials provide learners with optimal learning
opportunities.
3. Procedures
Procedures specify what learners will actually do with the input that
forms the point of departure for the learning task. In considering
criteria for task selection (and, in the next section, we will look at what
research has to say on this matter), some issues arise similar to those
as we encountered when considering input.

4. Teacher and learner roles

It refers to the parts that teachers and students are expected to play in
carrying out learning tasks as well as the social and interpersonal
relationships between the participants. Teacher roles and learner roles
are two sides of a coin. Giving the learners a more active role in the
classroom requires the teacher to adopt a different role.
 According to Breen and Candlin (1980) in Nunan (2004), the teacher
has three main roles in the communicative classroom. The first is to
act as a facilitator of the communicative process, the second is to act
as a participant, and the third is to act as an observer and learner. The
teacher may need to strike a balance between the roles that she feels
appropriate and those demanded by the students.

5. Setting
Settings refer to the classroom arrangements specified or implied in
the task. It also requires consideration of whether the task is to be
carried out wholly or partly outside the classroom. Wright (1987: 15)
in Nunan (2004) suggests the different ways in which learners might
be grouped physically within the classroom as follows.
 To create meaningful tasks, there are some principles to follow (Nunan, 2004). Those
principles are:
1. Scaffolding
Lessons and materials should provide supporting frameworks within which the learning
takes place. At the beginning of the learning process, learners should not be expected to
produce language that has not been introduced either explicitly or implicitly.
2. Task dependency
Within a lesson, one task should grow out of, and build upon, the ones that have gone
before.
3. Recycling
Recycling language maximizes opportunities for learning and activates the ‘organic’
learning principle.
4. Active learning
A key principle behind this concept is that learners learn best through doing – through
actively constructing their own knowledge rather than having it transmitted to them by
the teacher.
5. Integration
Learners should be taught in ways that make clear the relationships between linguistic
form, communicative function and semantic meaning.
6. Reproduction to creation
In reproductive tasks, learners reproduce language models
provided by the teacher, the textbook or the tape. These tasks are
designed to give learners mastery of form, meaning and function,
and are intended to provide a basis for creative tasks. In creative
tasks, learners are recombining familiar elements in novel ways.
This principle can be deployed not only with students who are at
intermediate levels and above but also with beginners if the
instructional process is carefully sequenced.

7. Reflection
Learners should be given opportunities to reflect on what they
have learned and how well they are doing.
Material Evaluation
Materials evaluation is defined as a means to measure whether the materials meet the
learners’ need or not. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) state evaluation is basically a
matching process among the needs and possible solutions. It means that considerations
in evaluating English learning materials should be based on the students’ needs.

Skierso in Tomlinson (1998:221) proposes three steps of materials evaluation, which are:
a. Identification of relevant contextual information relating to the students, the teacher,
the course syllabus and the institution,
b. Analysis of the features of the textbook followed by overall rating of the text, and
c. The actual judging of the acceptability of the textbook, involving both the rating and
weighting of specific evaluative criteria.
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