4 Principles of Effective Materials Development

By Teacher Sylvia Johnson

This paper takes the position that language-leaning materials should ideally be driven by learning and teaching principles rather than be developed ad hoc or in imitation of the best-selling coursebooks.It reviews the literature which contributes positively toward the principled development of ELT materials and comments on its implications for materials writing.

In recent years there have been a  number of insightful publications which have concerned themselves with how authors typically write ELT materials.

There are present here, six principles of language acquisition and four principles of language teaching that the author thinks should be given a lot more attention in materials development.

This literature reveals that many experienced authors rely on their intuitions about what "works " and make frequent use of activities in their repertoire that seem to fit with their objectives.

.Expose the learners to language in authentic use.

.Help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input.

.Provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes.

.Provide opportunities for outcome feedback

.Achieve impact in the sense that they arouse and sustain the learners' curiosity and attention

.Stimulate intelectual,aesthetic, and emotional involvement

.Flexibility- so as to help teachers to make their own decisions.

.Moving from text to language ( focusing on the meaning of a text first before returning to it payattention to a language feature )

.Providing engaging content.

.Learner development ( in the sense of helping learners to further develop their skills as language learners through, for example, analyzing grammar for themselves and starting their own personalized vocabulary and grammar books )