Basic Principles of SLA Relevant to the Development of Materials for the Teaching of Languages

Seven principles from Tomlinson's Introduction were selected by me to paraphrase:

1. Materials should achieve impact:

The material selected by the teacher has to be interesting for the students and be useful for the purpose and objective established. This is why it is very important for teachers to receive ss' feedback and opinions. 

2. Materials should help learners to develop confidence:

The teacher has to select the material very carefully, not very hard and not very easy.  To achieve students' confidence while working in them.

3. What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful:

It is not only about selecting "fun" activities, they have to serve a purpose of learning English in this case.

4. Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes:

Students have to practice the skill learned during class time as much as they can, since it is the only period of time that they can do it.  In this step, monitoring is very important, the teacher has to walk through the classroom and listen for errors to give a small review which will help them correct at the end of the activity and which will also be the class wrap-up. 

5. Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction:

To be able to practice the skill being taught, students need to comprehend it.  This is why it is very important to have a silent period while the teacher is explaining the activity to understand it better.

6. Materials should not rely too much on controlled practices:

Activities should not be very controlled by the teacher, it is important to let students feel comfortable and have fun while learning.  However, it is important to take care of the time.

7. Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback:

Teachers should take into account students' comments towards the class and the activities; but the teacher also has to observe if they are enjoying them or not.  On the other hand, activities should let the teacher give students feedback from their language skills.

Task 1: Glossary

The following words were selected by me from the Brian Tomlinson's Glossary of basic terms for materials development in language teaching in his book "Materials Development in Language Teaching".  Some of them are new for me and some others just very important:

-Authentic text: A text which is nor written or spoken for language teaching purposes. A newspaper artichel, a rock song, a novel, a radio interview and a traditional fairy story are examples of authentic texts. 

-Communicative Approaches: Approaches to language teaching which aim to help learners to develop communicative competence. 

-Concordances: A list of authentic utterances each containing the same focused word or phrase. E.g. The bus driver still didn't have any change so he made me wait.

-Corpus: A bank of authentic texts collected in order to find out how language is actually used.  Usually a corpus is restricted to a particular type of language use, for example, a corpus of newspaper English, a corpus of legal documents or a corpus of informal spoken English.

-Pedagogic task: A task which does not replicate a real world task but which is designed to facilitate the learning of language or skills which would be useful in a real world task.  Completing one half of a dialogue, filling in the blanks in a story and working out the meaning of ten nonsense words from clues in a text would be examples of pedagogic tasks. 

A little about Myself

Hello! My name is Linda Barrientos, I am a 5th semester student from the B.A. of Applied Linguistics at UAT.  I love teaching English and meeting new people.  I consider myself as a very hardworking, good student and blessed person!  I hope you enjoy reading my posts from Materials, Evaluation and Design class.

Best!