Materials development for language teaching

Review
The advantages of course book:
a) they provide a clear framework which the teacher and the students know where they
are going and what is coming next,
b) mostly, they serve as a syllabus which includes a carefully planned and balanced
selection of language content if it is followed systematically,
c) they provide ready-made texts and tasks with possible appropriate level for most of
the class, which save time for the teacher.
d) they are the cheapest way of providing learning material for each student,
e) they are convenient packages whose components are bound in order,
f) They are useful guides, especially for inexperienced teachers who are occasionally
unsure of their language knowledge,
g) They provide autonomy that the students can use them to learn new material, review
and monitor progress in order to be less teacher-dependent.
Disadvantages:
a) They fail to present appropriate and realistic language models,
b) they propose subordinate learner roles,
c) they fail to contextualize language activities,
có một số sách giáo khoa hiện giờ thiếu mô tả ngữ cảnh, chỉ học thuộc lòng
d) they foster inadequate cultural understanding,
(in some text book, the writer emphasizes on western culture rather than Asian culture,
racist
e) they fail to address discourse competence,
f) they fail to teach idioms,
g) They have lack of equity in gender representation,

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 FINAL QUESTIONS
1. Authentic materials?  native language use for speaking, reading, writing. True
and natural. E.g. an interview, a speech of worker/famous people, ads on the
newspaper
2. How can activities be ordered in a unit?
3. How can steps in an activity be orders?
 Principles:
- Step A in simpler, and step B is more complex
e.g. Asking personal question, describing, presentation
- step A is more controlled, and step B is mor open-ended, and requires more initiative.
- step A (input/receptive) provides knowledge or skills required to do step B
- step A uses receptive skills (listening/reading), and step B uses productive skills
(speaking/listening) [or INPUT before ACTION]
- Step A uses productive skills to activate SCHEMA knowledge, and Step B uses
receptive skills to consolidate knowledge. Going from the other (another's viewpoint) to
self, the subjective (one's own viewpoint), or the steps could be reversed, from personal
experience to universal experience.
4. What is recycling? Why should we recycle the material?
Recycling is another important aspect of organizing and sequencing materials
Learners do not necessarily learn something the 1 st time they encounter it, so it is
important to present material more than once and in different ways in order to aid the
acquisition process
Recycling something using a different skill.
 Students listen to taped phone conversations prior to using oral skills in a
telephone role-play
It is recycling something in a different context
Students getting involved in some practice situations (input information) a real
situation (more challenging)

MIDTERM REVIEW
CONCEPTS
1. Define TEACHING POINTS

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It is the deliberate organization of student activities by a teacher or instructor
- Objectives for student learning
- Teaching/ learning activities (skills development)
- Strategies to check student understanding. (assessment)
2. Talk about ELEMENTS of MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT
 Principles and procedures of the design, implementation and evaluation of
language teaching materials,
 Evaluation, and adaption of language teaching materials, by teachers for their
own classrooms and by materials writers for sale or distribution
3. What is the main difference between ACTIVITY and EXERCISE?
ACTIVITY  the open-ended output
 Involves “the purposeful and active use of language where learners are required
to call upon their language resources to meet the needs of a given
communicative situation.”
EXERCISE  help the learners master specific aspects of communication in a more
controlled fashion
4. What is form-based grammar?
Form-based grammar  single sentence practice, random lexicalization,
transformation exercises, wordy and inaccurate ‘rules’, etc.
5. Grammar learning aims to help learner use the language naturally. How must the
activities be?
Activities for learners to produce language containing the target grammar will result in.
 Meaningful utterances
 Resemblance to utterances that the learners would be likely to want to
produce in their own, non-classroom discourse
6. What is receptive grammar?
Learners may need time to make sense of new language before they are asked to
make sense with it.
[This is an argument] for receptive tasks to be clearly distinct from production
tasks, and for the former to precede the latter. Batstone (1996, p.273)
7. Mention a few common listening activities that you find in English textbooks
SELECTIVE LISTENING the learners concentrate on specific pieces of information,
learning to attend selectively to what they hear.

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PERCEPTION SKILLS → recognizing individual sounds, identifying reduced forms,
recognizing intonation patterns
USING KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD FOR LISTENING TASKS → connecting words
to non-linguistic features to get clues to meaning, using knowledge of topic.
SKILLS TO INTERACT WITH A SPEAKER → coping with speaker variations such as
speed and accent, recognizing speaker ntention, identifying speaker mood
INTERACTIVE LISTENING ACTIVITY → becoming active isteners by working in pairs
or small groups with information gap, problem-solving type activities.
8. How do learners learn vocabulary better? What are the principles of designing
activities?
ACTIVITIES 
a) Learning from meaning-focused input,
b) Learning from the meaning-focused output,
c) Deliberate language-focused learning, and
d) Fluency development.
9. What is vocabulary RETRIEVING condition? How is this created?
RETRIEVAL is encouraged through meaning-focused use of the four skills of
listening, speaking, reading, writing, through allowing learners time to retrieve, and
through activities like retelling, role-play, or problem-solving …
10. What is ELABORATION?
This requires the learner to adapt it or extend its application in some way.
For example, questions following a listening text pick up target vocabulary or the use
of target vocabulary from a text.
11. Writing materials can serve as a model for the learners. Explain.
(Writing có 4 loại: models, language scaffolding, reference, stimulus)
Writing models are used to present good examples of a genre and illustrate its features
They provide key lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features → students use this
knowledge to construct their own examples of the genre.
They scaffold learners' understandings of language and provide opportunities for →
staples of the grammar class such as sentence completion, text reorganization,
parallel writing, gap filling, jigsaw texts ... (top-down way)
12. Describe the Framework for writing materials design How many roles are there?

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  Instructional roles 
Materials lead to A TASK, and the resources of language and content that students
need to successfully complete this task are supplied by the INPUT
Input  {Content focus  Language focus}  task
13. What is “multidimensional syllabus”?
A multidimensional syllabus acknowledges the need to provide SYSTEMATIC
PRACTICE in the formal proprieties of the language.
14. What is meant by teaching dimension?
TEACHING DIMENSIONS  functions (Chức năng ngôn ngữ e.g. Cảm ơn, xin lỗi) and
notions, roles and skills, themes and situations.
Language teaching is full of choices and alternatives
 Interactive exchange of factual information
 Dynamic PROCESSING OF PERSONAL OPINIONS (PERSONAL FEELINGS
AND ATTITUDES
15. CONVERSATION STRATEGIES
Help students deal with INTERACTION PRESSURES → stealing and sustaining turns,
→ handling unrehearsed discourse,
→ controlling their LEVEL of diplomacy and courtesy, → choosing when to move on to a
new topic, → winding down a conversation,
→ recognizing signals when their partner wants to leave the conversation …
16. List of devices
(1) using less complex syntax,
(2) making do with short phrases and incomplete sentences,
(3) employing fixed conversational phrases,
(4) adding filler words to gain time to speak and
(5) correcting or improving what one has already said.
17. Describe the INTERNALIZATION ACTIVITIES/EXERCISES
(1) Activities (ranking exercises, brainstorming for keywords and expressions...) guides
learners towards readiness in both CONTENT and LANGUAGE for the communicative
topic.

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(2) The learners read several dialogues within the topic → giving conditions to discuss
characteristics of verbal communication
(3) Communication of meaning → coping with meanings and need purposes for using
language.
18. In speaking, what activities/exercises are used to promote ORAL
INTERACTION?
 Roles to play, assigning social tasks to be achieved, giving them motivating
 attractive reasons to communicate,
 utilizing gaps in learner knowledge, experiences, or attitudes to facilitate sincere
exchange,
 inventing conflicts that lead to personal debates,
 making up misunderstanding situations to be fixed,
 creating sticky situations to get out of and so forth.