Recent books on language materials development and analysis

Abstract

I come to this review with a mixed portfolio of professional experience related to materials use and development. I have been an untrained teacher using a textbook, a trained teacher developing my own materials, a textbook writer, a teacher educator who has taught courses in curriculum and materials development, and an applied linguist who has written about materials and curriculum. When teaching about the role of materials in curriculum planning, I discuss the idea that when teachers develop or choose materials for their course or programme, their focus shifts from the conceptual (e.g. defining principles, formulating goals) to the tangible. They begin to think in terms of the day-to-day of the classroom and the specifics of what and how students will learn. In a sense, materials ‘operationalize’ the curriculum. This is especially the case with textbooks, which encode what should be learned and how it should be learned. Materials can also be seen as tools that mediate learning, as they provide content and/or means for understanding and using language. At the same time, these two views of materials, as curriculum artefacts or learning tools, sometimes obscure the fact that when materials are used by learners and teachers, they will interpret, ignore, resist, or change the materials in ways that make sense to them at that particular moment in that particular context. In other words, curriculum enactment, with materials as a constraint or a resource, will happen in ways that we cannot predict. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that learners will understand and use language because of the materials.

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