Principles of Effective Materials Development

By Prof. B.A.Mey Reynolds Panton

e-mail  meymrlimon@gmail.com

According to Brian Tomlinson, who wrote Principles of Effective Materials Development, teachers base their lessons on intuitions about what "works" and use the same materials for different groups. They assume that if something works  for one group it should work for the others. Tomlinson stated that materials should not be randon recreations from repertoire nor crafty clones of previously successful materials. Instead they should be coherent and principled applications of: theories of language acquisition and development, principles of teaching, our current knowledge of how the target language is actually used, and the results of systematic observation and evaluation of materials in use.

Tomlinson said that English Language Teaching materials should stimulate interaction, material should expose learners to language in authentic use, help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input, provide the learners with opportunities to use the targe language to achieve communicative purposes,provide opportunities fo outcome feedback, achieve impact, stimulate intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involvement.

I agree with Tomlinson because teachers base their classes on experiences and intuition, if something works in one group, they take it to another one, and so on, taking for granted that it will works. It is important to remember we are not following a recipe, people have different learning styles so they can not assume that a specific material will work for everyone.

Teachers should be creative, starting from simple things for example writing sentences or questions on their own when designing a test instead of copying them from a book. This will help us grow not only as teachers but as learners, since we learn day by day.