Principles of Effective Materials Development
By Sandra Araya
When talking about materials development, there is much to discover. I definitely agree with this reading because, due to my current responsibilities, I must conduct research on this topic. In Costa Rica, a wide variety of materials have been used to support communicative approaches to language teaching, and they have the primary role of promoting communicative language use. In addition, sometimes materials come from the world of realia rather than from textbooks. The primary aim of materials is to promote comprehension and communication.
Using a variety of materials in the class provides Costa Rican learners with opportunities to discover new linguistic, social, and cultural options that will allow them to communicate what they really want.
The reading brought to my mind two workshops that I have attended. The first one was about Corpus-based material, and I understood the importance of real contextualized examples of written and spoken language. It ensures that learners will encounter the most useful and widely used words, phrases and grammar in everyday situations. The point is to help learners to communicate naturally and effectively, even at beginning levels. This idea is compatible with MEP’s (Ministry of Public Education ) idea about the way we apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences, but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. What I really like about Corpus is that it can be collected from a variety of sources. For example; newspaper, magazine, books, internet or from everyday conversations.
The second workshop I thought of was the importance of RE (Reusing-Recycling-Revising). It was about recycling of language items and features that can be useful for the learners to acquire. It stressed the importance of the elaboration that takes places when meeting a known word again and again in such a way that it will stretch its meaning for learners.
Finally, I really liked the idea I took from the reading about being emotionally involved in the learning process. I always say to my students that if they don’t enjoy the class, they won’t learn. They need to feel joy, pleasure, happiness, empathy, and excitement when exploring and using the target language. It is true that you need to select the material in a very careful way because it has a very important role in the process, but also I am quite certain that learning is all about motivation.
