IMDE REVIEWER PDF

IMDE REVIEWER INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION Introduction to Instructional Design WHAT IS INSTRUCTION? Instruction is the intentional facilitation of learning toward identified learning goals. It is also defined as the deliberate arrangement of learning conditions to promote...

IMDE REVIEWER INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION Introduction to Instructional Design WHAT IS INSTRUCTION? Instruction is the intentional facilitation of learning toward identified learning goals. It is also defined as the deliberate arrangement of learning conditions to promote the attainment of some intended goals. In both definitions, instruction is an intentional arrangement of experiences, leading to learners’ acquisition of particular capabilities. These capabilities can vary qualitatively in form, from simple recall of knowledge to cognitive strategies that allow a learner to discover (and solve) new problems within a field of study. For example, an IT professor helps students to use a particular kind of computer software to solve certain problems. The instructional designer will develop materials and activities that are intended to prepare the learners to use the software effectively. Every experience that is developed is focused on one or more goals for learning. Aside from being effective, the instructions should also be efficient (requiring the least time and cost necessary) and appealing.Terms such as education, training, and teaching are often used interchangeably with instruction. But in our course (or as many people still call it, subject), we will clarify some distinctions among these terms through operational definitions. Consider Figure 1.1 which illustrates the relationships among education, training, teaching, and instruction. In this course, we define the term education very broadly as all experiences from which people learn. Many of these experiences are unplanned, incidental, and informal. For example, many people learn to drive a car in city traffic through a trial-and-error process. The driver learns, so these experiences can be considered part of general education. However, in such cases, no one has specifically arranged the learning experience so that one can learn well, quickly, and with the least possible danger and frustration. It is possible to create a series of particular experiences that would be specifically focused on preparing one to navigate city traffic easily, perhaps with the use of a booklet or video material. Now, the delivery of these FOCUSED EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES is what we call instruction. So, all instruction is part of education because all instruction consists of experiences leading to learning. But not all education is instruction because many experiences that lead to learning are not specifically developed and implemented to ensure effective, efficient, and appealing experiences leading toward specific learning goals. The term training is generally used to refer to those instructional experiences that are focused on individuals acquiring very specific skills that they will normally apply almost immediately. For example, many instructional experiences in call center companies are considered training. The applicants learn skills, specifically focused on job competencies that they will use almost immediately. Much instruction in business, military, and government settings can be termed training because the experiences are directed toward preparing learners with specific on-the-job skills. In addition, the instruction in certain special education classes is training because learning experiences have been developed to provide students with life skills such as Food and Beverage Services, Bread and Pastry Production, Cookery, and so much more. Side note: TESDA, or Technical Education and Skills Development Authority serves as the country’s Technical Vocational Education and Training authority. However, not all instruction can be considered training. For instance, in military programs, learners may be provided with some general instruction in math and reading. Such learning experiences can be termed instruction because the lessons were developed with some specific goals in mind, such as a certain level of proficiency in reading and mathematics. The goals are often not directed toward a specific job task, nor is there anticipation of immediate impact upon a specific job task. The influence on job performance is anticipated to be more diffuse throughout job responsibilities and outside job tasks. Training is distinguished from the other terms by the immediacy of application. Of the four terms, instruction and teaching may be the most used interchangeably. But in our course, we will use the term teaching to refer to those learning experiences that are facilitated by a human being – not a video material, textbook, or computer program. Going back to Figure 1.1, you can see that not all teaching is considered to be instruction. There are occasions in an educational environment in which a teacher does not focus learning experiences toward any particular learning goal. On such occasions, teachers may provide many learning activities from which learning goals may emerge. For instance, in preschool education, learners are provided with a variety of materials the can use to pursue many problems. Such pursuits might lead to various learning outcomes, not all of which have been anticipated by the teacher. Very specific example: Anticipated learning outcome – discovery of the primary colors. But some students combined two primary colors, resulting in secondary colors. At the end of the day, in our course, our focus is instruction. We will consider instruction to be a subset of education. The term training will be considered a subset of instruction. In some cases, teaching will be considered instruction, and sometimes it will fit the more general category of education because it may sometimes be devoid of what characterizes instruction. The focus of our course is the design, development, and evaluation of materials directed toward identified learning goals. WHAT IS INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN? Many fields use the term design as part of their title. Examples include interior design, architectural design, and industrial design. The term design implies systematic or intensive planning and ideation (formation of ideas or concepts) prior to the development of something. The foundation for instructional design was laid during World War II when hundreds of thousands needed to be taught very specific tasks in a short amount of time. Individual aspects of these complex tasks were broken down, so soldiers could better understand and comprehend each step of the process. This approach was later taken and built upon leading to the development of instructional design, a field of study that marries education, psychology and communications to create the most effective teaching plans for specific groups of students. This is vital because it ensures that students receive instructions in a form that is effective and meaningful to them, helping them better understand the topics and concepts being taught. Simply put, instructional design is the creation of instructional materials. Instructional materials, also known as teaching or learning materials, are designed to aid learning and development. Though instructional design is a field that goes beyond simply creating instructional materials, it carefully considers how students learn and what materials and methods will most effectively help individuals achieve their academic goals. The principles of instructional design consider how educational tools should be designed, created, and delivered to any learning group, from grade school students to adult employees across all industry sectors. WHAT IS AN INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER? An Instructional Designer is a learning specialist, and their role is to design and develop instructional materials and learning experiences. Instructional designers are experts in learning and teaching principles and can determine best practices for addressing learning needs and delivering positive learning outcomes. Some typical materials that an Instructional Designer might develop include academic instructional materials, manuals, face to face training programs, e-learning courses, and blended learning kits to name a few. ROLES OF AN INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER Instructional designers are often required to wear many hats and hold various responsibilities. This is often the case with smaller organizations. This requires a great deal of versatility and flexibility from instructional design professionals. Creator Instructional designers often create learning products including online courses, instructional manuals, instructional media, video tutorials, learning simulations, exams, and assessments. The Analyst Instructional designers often analyze learning needs and performance gaps and then suggest possible solutions. They also analyze and curate existing learning content. They may also do an audience analysis to better understand the desired learning experience. The Architect Instructional designers often architect (or design)the learning experience. This may include creating storyboards or mock-ups and designing course curriculum flow or structure. The Project Manager Instructional designers often plan and manage learning projects. This may include creating project plans, roadmaps, and implementation plans. The Evaluator Instructional designers often evaluate the effectiveness of learning products. This may include creating surveys or other evaluation instruments. It may also include creating a formative or summative evaluation plan. The Marketer Instructional designers often market learning products both internally and externally. This may include creating a communication plan or promotional materials. The Administrator Instructional designers often administer Learning Management Systems (LMS) and other learning platforms. Managing a learning platform may include enrolling new users to learning products, adding, and updating learning products and content, and reviewing and sharing learner results such completion rates and quiz scores. The Consultant Instructional designers often advise on learning products. This may include creating a needs analysis or an in-depth learning strategy. This may also include providing instruction on proper learning strategies, models, and methods. At the most basic level, the instructional designer’s job is to answer the following questions: 1. Where are we going? 2. How will we get there? 3. How will we know when we have arrived? These three questions can be stated as major activities that an instructional designer completes during the design and development process: 1. Perform an instructional analysis to determine “where we are going” 2. Develop an instructional strategy to determine “how we’ll get there 3. Develop and conduct an evaluation to determine “how we’ll know when we’re there” “Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.” – C. William Pollard The problem-solving activities Analysis, Strategy, and Evaluation form the foundation of the general approach to instructional design. These are the most common components that can be found across dozens of Instructional Design Models in existence. Instructional models can vary widely. Some may focus on how to make the lesson plans and others focus on the delivery of the content itself. The Systems Approach Model (also known as Dick and Carey instructional design model) is one of the former. Despite the seemingly complicated diagrams that pop up when searching for an image (see below), the steps are often only connected as far as what they do to help you figure out what to teach and how to teach it. All ten steps are connected, and some influence others indirectly while they may influence others directly. Stage 1. Identify Instructional Goals The first step is to figure out the instructional goals. This means that you are able to, or will be able to, identify what it is the students need to learn. For example, if you were teaching a course on Shakespearean Literature, you probably wouldn’t teach a lesson on Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder plot from 1605. However, if you were teaching a class on English history, there has to be a lesson on the gunpowder plot. It all depends on what kind of material your overarching theme is covering. Stage 2. Instructional Analysis Instructional analysis is the second step. This means you are determining the skills that your students will need to learn and what you plan to teach them. Take for example Noli Me Tangere. Some may need to have a love of history instilled in them before they are willing to sit down and listen to the lesson. Others may simply need to be able to work on the lesson material at their own pace. Will they need to know some background about the story? Or will you be teaching an introduction to the writing style of that period and therefore giving that introductory lesson? Note that if you are teaching on the writing styles, you have to take into account what they may or may not have already learned. Stage 3. Identify Entry Behaviors and Learner Characteristics Next you have to assess which skills the students have out of those that you previously determined are needed for a certain lesson. For the Guy Fawkes example, if you determine that they should be able to remember the date he was caught – November 5, 1605 – and someone is not good with remembering dates, you may have to help them with it. Are they able to sit still long enough? Or do they have trouble talking? These skills will be crucial to the lesson’s success with each student. Stage 4. Performance Objectives Next, you must figure out specific goals and objectives for the lesson. This is the equivalent of the SWBAT – or Student Will Be Able To – which is a must in every lesson. These objectives must be detailed – such as “the student will be able to identify and describe the different roles of instructional designers”. Details will help you make sure you are teaching your students what matters most from the lesson, such as the many tasks that IDs actually do. Take note that you have not gotten to actually teaching, and these are the first four steps. Teaching begins at step eight, but this only gives a general outline for a suggestion on how to make the teaching effective. Stage 5. Criterion-Referenced Test Items The fifth thing you must do is to create a test (consistent with the performance objectives) that will reflect what you’re hoping to teach the students. Referring back to notes you have made will help you figure out what to test. These are meant to help the students understand what they have or have not mastered yet, and are a checkpoint for the parents or administrators. For example, again referring to a lesson on Noli Me Tangere, you could ask questions about Elias’ part in the plot, why did he burn down his own house, etc. If you asked them to read the books or watch video lessons and had them take notes, the information you hoped they’d gather from the materials could also be on the test. Stage 6. Instructional Strategy Sixth, you begin to outline your lesson plan. This means that you will be able to demonstrate what you want them to learn, add activities, and decide how each segment will be done. If you want to have group activities, now is the time to decide when and what materials will be covered by the activity. Referring back to Noli Me Tangere, a group activity could mean each group tries to use what they know to create a presentation for the class as a pre-test activity. Say a tableau or a group of models or motionless figures representing a scene from selected chapters. Stage 7. Instructional Materials Seventh, you make sure you have what you need ready for the lesson. However, it doesn’t extend to only materials and/or objects for the lesson. If you’re giving a test, make sure you have all the tests printed and ready to go. Stage 8. Formative Evaluation Next, you would have to evaluate how the lesson went. Were there some students who weren’t too thrilled with the group work? Did your groups not work well? Did some students sit back while others did all the work, expecting to ride along for a good grade? Which of your activities yield “success”? Stage 9. Summative Evaluation Ninth, you revise. If there’s one activity that no class has ever liked, it would be worth cutting it out and replacing it with something else. This step is all about making sure that when you restart the teaching process, it’ll work out. But remember, there will always be a grumbler (whiner) or two, but if it works out well most of the time, it’d be worth keeping. Finally, you simply look back at your entire experience using the model. Did it work out for you? Did you create a better lesson plan than you had before? Or did it work against you? Did you find yourself spending too much time on one area? Before completely beating yourself up over not spending time on one area, if you already know the answer for one area, it makes your job easier. It means you can more easily do the rest of the process – which simply shows how they are all connected, whether directly or indirectly. That right there is part of why it is considered a good model of learning. Materials Most people associate the term ‘language-learning materials’ with coursebooks because that has been their main experience of using materials. However, in this book the term is used to refer to anything which is used by teachers or learners to facilitate the learning of a language. Materials could obviously be videos, DVDs, emails, YouTube, dictionaries, grammar books, readers, workbooks or photocopied exercises. They could also be newspapers, food packages, photographs, live talks by invited native speakers, instructions given by a teacher, tasks written on cards or discussions between learners. In other words, they can be anything which is deliberately used to increase the learners’ knowledge and/or experience of the language. Keeping this pragmatic concept of materials in mind can help materials developers to utilize as many sources of input as possible and, even more importantly, can help teachers to realise that they are also materials developers and that they are ultimately responsible for the materials that their learners use. It can also be useful to keep in mind that materials ‘can be instructional in that they inform learners about the language, they can be experiential in that they provide exposure to the language in use, they can be elicitative in that they stimulate language use, or they can be exploratory in that they facilitate discoveries about language use’ (Tomlinson 2001: 66). Materials development Materials development is both a field of study and a practical undertaking. As a field it studies the principles and procedures of the design, implementation and evaluation of language teaching materials’ (Tomlinson 2001: 66). As a practical undertaking it refers to anything which is done by writers, teachers or learners to provide sources of language input, to exploit those sources in ways which maximise the likelihood of intake and to stimulate purposeful output: in other words the supplying of information about and/or experience of the language in ways designed to promote language learning. Ideally the ‘two aspects of materials development are interactive in that the theoretical studies inform and are informed by the development and use of classroom materials’ (Tomlinson 2001: 66). Materials developers might write textbooks, tell stories, bring advertisements into the classroom, express an opinion, provide samples of language use or read a poem aloud. Whatever they do to provide input, they do so ideally in principled ways related to what they know about how languages can be effectively learned. All the chapters in this book concentrate on the three vital questions of what should be provided for Materials evaluation This term refers to attempts to measure the value of materials. In many cases this is done impressionistically and consists of attempts to predict whether or not the materials will work, in the sense that the learners will be able to use them without too much difficulty and will enjoy the experience of doing so. A number of chapters in this book challenge this vague, subjective concept of evaluation and advocate more systematic and potentially revealing approaches. For example, Frances Amrani in Chapter 11 reports ways of reviewing materials prior to publication which can improve the quality of the materials, Andrew Littlejohn in Chapter 8 proposes a more objective, analytical approach to evaluation and Rod Ellis in Chapter 9 argues the need for whilst-use and post-use evaluation of materials in order to find out what the actual effects of the materials are. Other recent publications which propose systematic approaches to the evaluation of language-learning materials include McGrath (2002), McDonough, Shaw and Masuhara (2011), Rubdi (2003) and Tomlinson (2003a). All the chapters in this book implicitly accept the view that for materials to be valuable, the learning points should be potentially useful to the learners and that the learning procedures should maximise the likelihood of the learners actually learning what they want and need to learn. It is not necessarily enough that the learners enjoy and value the materials. Language teaching Most people think of teaching as the overt presentation of information by teachers to learners. In this book the term ‘teaching’ is used to refer to anything done by materials developers or teachers to facilitate the learning of the language. This could include the teacher standing at the front of the classroom explaining the conventions of direct speech in English, it could include a textbook providing samples of language use and guiding learners to make discoveries from them, it could include a textbook inviting learners to reflect on the way they have just read a passage or it could include the teacher providing the vocabulary a learner needs whilst participating in a challenging task. Teaching can be direct (in that it transmits information overtly to the learners) or it can be indirect (in that it helps the learners to discover things for themselves). It can also be pre-emptive (in that it aims to prevent problems), facilitative (in that it aims to help the learners do something), responsive (in that it responds to a need for language when it occurs) or remedial in that it aims to remedy problems. Most chapters in this book focus on indirect teaching as the most effective way of facilitating the learning of a language. For example, in Chapters 2 and 3 Randi Reppen and Jane Willis suggest ways in which learners can be helped to make discoveries about language use by analysing samples of language in use, in Chapter 16 Grethe Hooper Hansen looks at ways in which learners can be helped to learn from information which is actually peripheral to the task they are focusing on, and in Chapter 17 Brian Tomlinson proposes procedures which could enable self-access learners to learn for and about themselves. Language learning Learning is normally considered to be a conscious process which consists of the committing to memory of information relevant to what is being learned. Whilst such direct learning of, for example, spelling rules, conventions of greetings and vocabulary items can be useful to the language learner, it is arguable that much language learning consists of subconscious development of generalisations about how the language is used and of both conscious and subconscious development of skills and strategies which apply these generalisations to acts of communication. Language learning can be explicit (i.e. the learners are aware of when and what they are learning) or it can be implicit (i.e. the learners are not aware of when and what they are learning). Language learning can also be of declarative knowledge (i.e. knowledge about the language system) or of procedural knowledge (i.e. knowledge of how the language is used). Most of the chapters in this book take the position that communicative competence is primarily achieved as a result of implicit, procedural learning. But most of them also acknowledge that explicit learning of both declarative and procedural knowledge is of value in helping learners to pay attention to salient features of language input and in helping them to participate in planned discourse (i.e. situations such as giving a presentation or writing a story which allow time for planning and monitoring). Consequently many of the chapters view the main objectives of materials development as the provision of the meaningful experience of language in use and of opportunities to reflect on this experience. This is the position taken by Ronald Carter, Rebecca Hughes and Michael McCarthy in Chapter 4, in which they argue for the need to expose learners to spoken English as it is actually used. It is also the position taken by Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 14 in which he proposes experiential ways of helping learners to transfer the high level skill of visualisation from their L1 reading process, by Grethe Hooper Hansen in Chapter 16 when she advocates multi-level experience of language in use and by Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 17 when he suggests an experiential approach to self-access learning of language. Systematic evaluation of materials In Chapter 7 Philip Prowse gets a number of well-known materials writers to reveal how they set about writing materials. The remarkable thing is that most of them follow their intuitions rather than an overt specification of objectives, principles and procedures. Obviously these intuitions are informed by experience of what is valuable to learners of a language and in many cases they lead to the development of valuable materials. But how useful it would be if we were able to carry out long-term, systematic evaluations of materials which are generally considered to be successful. I know of a number of famous textbook writers who do sit down and identify the popular and apparently successful features of their competitors so that they can clone these features and can avoid those features which appear to be unpopular and unsuccessful. Doing much more than this sort of adhoc impressionistic evaluation of materials would involve considerable time and expenditure and would create great problems in controlling such variables as learner motivation, out-of-class experience and learner–teacher rapport. But longitudinal, systematic evaluations of popular materials could be undertaken by consortia of publishers, universities and associations such as MATSDA, and they could certainly provide empirically validated information about the actual effects of different types of language-learning materials. Such research is carried out by publishers, but it tends to focus on what makes the materials popular rather than on what effect the materials have on language acquisition, and most of this research is understandably confidential (see Chapter 11 by Frances Amrani for information about this type of research). A number of chapters in this book try to push the profession forward towards using more systematic evaluation procedures as a means of informing materials development. In Chapter 8 Andrew Littlejohn exemplifies procedures for achieving thorough and informative analysis of what materials are actually doing, in Chapter 11 Frances Amrani reports on systematic evaluations of materials carried out by publishers prior to the publication of materials, and in Chapter 5 David Jolly and Rod Bolitho propose ways in which learner evaluations of materials feed into the development process. In Chapter 9 Rod Ellis insists that we should stop judging materials by their apparent appeal and start evaluating them by observing what the learners actually do when using the materials and by finding out what they seem to learn as a result of using them. Second language acquisition research and materials development It seems clear that researchers cannot at present agree upon a single view of the learning process which can safely be applied wholesale to language teaching. (Tarone and Yule 1989) no second language acquisition research can provide a definitive answer to the real problems of second language teaching at this point.... There is no predetermined correct theory of language teaching originating from second language acquisition research. (Cook 1996) The quotations above are still true today and it is also still true that we should not expect definitive answers from second language acquisition (SLA) research, nor should we expect one research-based model of lan-guage acquisition to triumph over all the others. We must therefore be careful not to prescribe applications of unsubstantiated theories. But this should not stop us from applying what we do know about second and foreign language learning to the development of materials designed to facilitate that process. What we do know about language learning is a result of thousands of years of reflective teaching and of at least a century of experimental and observational research. If we combined the convincing anecdotal and empirical evidence available to us, we could surely formulate criteria which could contribute to the development of successful materials. From the reports of many of the writers in this volume it would seem that they rely on their intuitions about language learning when they set out to write textbooks. This also seems to be true of many of the authors who have contributed reports on their processes for materials development to a book called Getting Started: Materials Writers on Materials Writing (Hidalgo, Hall and Jacobs 1995). The validity of their intuitions is demonstrated by the quality of their materials. But intuitions are only useful if they are informed by recent and relevant classroom experience and by knowledge of the findings of recent second language acquisition research. And all of us could benefit from more explicit guidelines when setting out to develop materials for the classroom. What I am arguing for is a compilation of learning principles and procedures which most teachers agree contribute to successful learning plus a compilation of principles and procedures recommended by most SLA researchers. A marriage of the two compilations could produce a list of principles and procedures which would provide a menu of potentially profitable options for materials developers from the classroom teacher adapting a coursebook unit to the author(s) setting out to develop a series of commercially published textbooks for the global market. Such a list should aim to be informative rather than prescriptive and should not give the impression that its recommendations are supported by conclusive evidence and by all teachers and researchers. And, of course, it needs to be supplemented by information about how the target language actually works (for ways of gaining such information, see, for example, Chapter 2 in this book by Randi Reppen, Chapter 3 by Jane Willis and Chapter 4 by Ronald Carter, Rebecca Hughes and Michael McCarthy). My own list of basic principles is as follows: 1. A prerequisite for language acquisition is that the learners are exposed to a rich, meaningful and comprehensible input of language in use. 2. In order for the learners to maximise their exposure to language in use, they need to be engaged both affectively and cognitively in the language experience. 3. Language learners who achieve positive affect are much more likely to achieve communicative competence than those who do not. 4. L2 language learners can benefit from using those mental resources which they typically utilise when acquiring and using their L1. 5. Language learners can benefit from noticing salient features of the input and from discovering how they are used. 6. Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes. For a justification of these principles and a discussion of ways of applying them to materials development see Tomlinson (2010). See also McGrath (2002), McDonough, Shaw and Masuhara (2011) and Tomlinson (2008) for discussion of the application of learning principles to materials development. Of course, one problem is that there is considerable disagreement amongst researchers about some of the main issues relevant to the teaching and learning of languages. Some argue that the main prerequisite for language acquisition is comprehensible input (i.e. being exposed to language you can understand); others argue that the main prerequisite is opportunity for output (i.e. situations in which you have to actually use the language). Some researchers argue that the best way to acquire a language is to do so naturally without formal lessons or conscious study of the language; others argue that conscious attention to distinctive features of the language is necessary for successful language learning. Try skimming through an overview of second language acquisition research (e.g. Ellis 2008) and you will soon become aware of some of the considerable (and, in my view, stimulating) disagreements amongst SLA researchers. Such disagreements are inevitable, given our limited access to the actual mental processes involved in the learning and using of languages, and often the intensity of the arguments provoke additional and illuminating research. However, I believe that there is now a sufficient consensus of opinion for SLA research to be used as an informative base for the formulation of criteria for the teaching of languages. The following is a summary of what I think many SLA researchers would agree to be some of the basic principles of second language acquisition relevant to the development of materials for the teaching of languages. 1.4.1 Materials should achieve impact Impact is achieved when materials have a noticeable effect on learners, that is when the learners’ curiosity, interest and attention are attracted. If this is achieved, there is a better chance that some of the language in the materials will be taken in for processing. Materials can achieve impact through: (a) novelty (e.g. unusual topics, illustrations and activities); (b) variety (e.g. breaking up the monotony of a unit routine with an unexpected activity; using many different text-types taken from many different types of sources; using a number of different instructor voices on a CD); (c) attractive presentation (e.g. use of attractive colours; lots of white space; use of photographs); (d) appealing content (e.g. topics of interest to the target learners; topics which offer the possibility of learning something new; engaging stories; universal themes; local references) (e) achievable challenge (e.g. tasks which challenge the learners to think). One obvious point is that impact is variable. What achieves impact with a class in Brazil might not achieve the same impact with a class in Austria. And what achieves impact with ten learners in a class might not achieve impact with the other five. In order to maximise the likelihood of achieving impact, the writer needs to know as much as possible about the target learners and about what is likely to attract their attention. In order to achieve impact with most of the learners, the writer also needs to offer choice. The more varied the choice of topics, texts and activities, the more likely is the achievement of impact. 1.4.2 Materials should help learners to feel at ease Research has shown... the effects of various forms of anxiety on acquisition: the less anxious the learner, the better language acquisition proceeds. Similarly, relaxed and comfortable students apparently can learn more in shorter periods of time. (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982) Although it is known that pressure can stimulate some types of language learners, I think that most researchers would agree that most language learners benefit from feeling at ease and that they lose opportunities for language learning when they feel anxious, uncomfortable or tense (see, for example, Oxford 1999). Some materials developers argue that it is the responsibility of the teacher to help the learners to feel at ease and that the materials themselves can do very little to help. I disagree. Materials can help learners to feel at ease in a number of ways. For example, I think that most learners: feel more comfortable with written materials with lots of white space than they do with materials in which lots of different activities are crammed together on the same page; are more at ease with texts and illustrations that they can relate to their own culture than they are with those which appear to them to be culturally alien; are more relaxed with materials which are obviously trying to help them to learn than they are with materials which are always testing them. Feeling at ease can also be achieved through a ‘voice’ which is relaxed and supportive, through content and activities which encourage the personal participation of the learners, through materials which relate the world of the book to the world of the learner and through the absence of activities which could threaten self-esteem and cause humiliation. To me the most important (and possibly least researched) factor is that of the ‘voice’ of the materials. Conventionally, language-learning materials are de-voiced and anonymous. They are usually written in a semi-formal style and reveal very little about the personality, interests and experiences of the writer. What I would like to see materials writers do is to chat to the learners casually in the same way that good teachers do and to try to achieve personal contact with them by revealing their own preferences, interests and opinions. I would also like to see them try to achieve a personal voice (Beck, McKeown and Worthy 1995) by ensuring that what they say to the learners contains such features of orality as: informal discourse features (e.g. contracted forms, informal lexis); the active rather than the passive voice; concreteness (e.g. examples, anecdotes); inclusiveness (e.g. not signalling intellectual, linguistic or cultural superiority over the learners)..4.3 Materials should help learners to develop confidence Relaxed and self-confident learners learn faster (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982). Most materials developers recognise the need to help learners to develop confidence, but many of them attempt to do so through a process of simplification. They try to help the learners to feel successful by asking them to use simple language to accomplish easy tasks such as completing substitution tables, writing simple sentences and filling in the blanks in dialogues. This approach is welcomed by many teachers and learners. But in my experience it often only succeeds in diminishing the learners. They become aware that the process is being simplified for them and that what they are doing bears little resemblance to actual language use. They also become aware that they are not really using their brains and that their apparent success is an illusion. And this awareness can even lead to a reduction in confidence. I prefer to attempt to build confidence through activities which try to ‘push’ learners slightly beyond their existing proficiency by engaging them in tasks which are stimulating, which are problematic, but which are achievable too. It can also help if the activities encourage learners to use and to develop their existing extra-linguistic skills, such as those which involve being imaginative, being creative or being analytical. Elementary-level learners can often gain greater confidence from making up a story, writing a short poem or making a grammatical discovery than they can from getting right a simple drill. For more discussion of the value of setting learners achievable challenges see de Andres (1999) and Tomlinson (2003b, 2006). The value of engaging the learners’ minds and utilising their exist- ing skills seems to be becoming increasingly realised in countries that have decided to produce their own materials through textbook projects rather than to rely on global coursebooks, which seem to underestimate the abilities of their learners. See Tomlinson (1995) for a report on such projects in Bulgaria, Morocco and Namibia, and Popovici and Bolitho (2003) for a report on a project in Romania. See Tomlinson et al. (2001) Introduction 11 and Masuhara et al. (2008) for evaluations of global coursebooks, and Tomlinson (in press) for a discussion of the importance of engagement. 1.4.4 What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful Most teachers recognise the need to make the learners aware of the potential relevance and utility of the language and skills they are teaching. And researchers have confirmed the importance of this need. For example, Stevick (1976) cites experiments which have shown the positive effecton learning and recall of items that are of personal significance to the learner. And Krashen (1982) and Wenden (1987) report research showing the importance of apparent relevance and utility in language acquisition. In ESP (English for specific purposes) materials it is relatively easy to convince the learners that the teaching points are relevant and useful by relating them to known learner interests and to ‘real-life’ tasks, which the learners need or might need to perform in the target language. In general English materials this is obviously more difficult; but it can be achieved by narrowing the target readership and/or by researching what the target learners are interested in and what they really want to learn the language for. An interesting example of such research was a questionnaire in Namibia which revealed that two of the most important reasons for secondary school students wanting to learn English were so they would be able to write love letters in English and so that they would be able to write letters of complaint for villagers to the village headman and from the village headman to local authorities. Perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching points to interesting and challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in ways which could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the learners. The ‘new’ learning points are not relevant and useful because they will help the learners to achieve long- term academic or career objectives, but because they could help the learn- ers to achieve short-term task objectives now. Of course, this only works if the tasks are begun first and the teaching is then provided in response to discovered needs. This is much more difficult for the materials writer than the conventional approach of teaching a predetermined point first and then getting the learners to practise and then produce it. But it can be much more valuable in creating relevance and utility for the teaching point; and it can be achieved by, for example, referring learners to ‘help pages’ before and/or after doing sub-tasks or by getting learners to make decisions about strategies they will use in a task and then referring them to ‘help pages’. So, for example, learners could be asked to choose from (or add to) a list of project tasks and then to decide on strategies for achieving their project targets. Those learners who decide to research local documents could be referred to a section in the book which provides advice on scanning, whereas those learners who decide to use questionnaires could be referred to a section which deals with writing questions. Obviously providing the learners with a choice of topic and task is important if you are trying to achieve perception of relevance and utility in a general English textbook. 1.4.5 Materials should require and facilitate learner self-investment Many researchers have written about the value of learning activities that require the learners to make discoveries for themselves. For example, Rutherford and Sharwood-Smith (1988) assert that the role of the classroom and of teaching materials is to aid the learner to make efficient use of the resources in order to facilitate self-discovery. Similar views are expressed by Bolitho and Tomlinson (1995); Bolitho et al. (2003), Tomlinson (1994a, 2007) and Wright and Bolitho (1993). It would seem that learners profit most if they invest interest, effort and attention in the learning activity. Materials can help them to achieve this by providing them with choices of focus and activity, by giving them topic control and by engaging them in learner-centred discovery activities. Again, this is not as easy as assuming that what is taught should be learned, but it is possible and extremely useful for textbooks to facilitate learner self-investment. In my experience, one of the most profitable ways of doing this is to get learners interested in a written or spoken text, to get them to respond to it globally and affectively and then to help them to analyse a particular linguistic feature of it in order to make discoveries for themselves (see Tomlinson 1994a for a specific example of this procedure). Other ways of achieving learner investment are involving the learners in mini-projects, involving them in finding supplementary materials for particular units in a book and giving them responsibility for making decisions about which texts to use and how to use them (an approach I saw used with great success in an Indonesian high school in which each group in a large class was given responsibility for selecting the texts and the tasks for one reading lesson per semester). 1.4.6 Learners must be ready to acquire the points being taught Certain structures are acquired only when learners are mentally ready for them. (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982) Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann (1981) have put forward the Multi dimensional Model in which learners must have achieved readiness in order to learn developmental features (i.e. those constrained by developing speech-processing mechanisms – e.g. word order) but can make themselves ready at any time to learn variational features (i.e. those which are free – e.g. the copula ‘be’). Pienemann (1985) claims that instruction can facilitate natural language acquisition processes if it coincides with learner readiness, and can lead to increased speed and frequency of rule application and to application of rules in a wider range of linguistic contexts. He also claims that premature instruction can be harmful because it can lead to the production of erroneous forms, to substitution by less complex forms and to avoidance. Pienemann’s theories have been criticised for the narrowness of their research and application (restricted mainly to syntax, according to Cook 1996), but I am sure most teachers would recognise the negative effects of premature instruction as reported by Pienemann. Krashen (1985) argues the need for roughly tuned input, which is comprehensible because it features what the learners are already familiar with, but which also contains the potential for acquiring other elements of the input which each learner might or might not be ready to learn (what Krashen refers to as i + 1 in which i represents what has already been learned and 1 represents what is available for learning). According to Krashen, each learner will only learn from the new input what he or she is ready to learn. Other discussions of the need for learner readiness can be found in Ellis (1990) (see especially pp. 152–8 for a discussion of variational and developmental features of readiness) and in Ellis (2008). Readiness can be achieved by materials which create situations requiring the use of variational features not previously taught, by materials which ensure that the learners have gained sufficient mastery over the developmental features of the previous stage before teaching a new one, and by materials which roughly tune the input so that it contains some features which are slightly above each learner’s current state of proficiency. It can also be achieved by materials which get learners to focus attention on features of the target language which they have not yet acquired so that they might be more attentive to these features in future input. But perhaps the most important lesson for materials developers from readiness research is that we cannot expect to select a particular point for teaching and assume that all the learners are ready and willing to learn it. It is important to remember that the learner is always in charge and that ‘in the final analysis we can never completely control what the learner does, for HE [sic] selects and organises, whatever the input’ (Kennedy 1973: 76). 1.4.7 Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use Krashen (1985) makes the strong claim that comprehensible input in the target language is both necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of that language provided that learners are ‘affectively disposed to “let in” the input they comprehend’ (Ellis 1994: 273). Few researchers would agree with such a strong claim, but most would agree with a weaker claim that exposure to authentic use of the target language is necessary but not sufficient for the acquisition of that language. It is necessary in that learners need experience of how the language is typically used, but it is not sufficient because they also need to notice how it is used and to use it for communicative purposes themselves. Materials can provide exposure to authentic input through the advice they give, the instructions for their activities and the spoken and written texts they include. They can also stimulate exposure to authentic input through the activities they suggest (e.g. interviewing the teacher,doing a project in the local community, listening to the radio, etc.). In order to facilitate acquisition, the input must be comprehensible (i.e. understandable enough to achieve the purpose for responding to it). This means that there is no point in using long extracts from newspapers with beginners, but it does not mean that beginners cannot be exposed to authentic input. They can follow instructions intended to elicit physical responses, they can listen to dramatic renditions of sto ries, they can listen to songs, they can fill in forms. Ideally materials at all levels should provide frequent exposure to authentic input which is rich and varied. In other words the input should vary in style, mode, medium and purpose and should be rich in features which are characteristic of authentic discourse in the target language. And, if the learners want to be able to use the language for general communication, it is important that they are exposed to planned, semi-planned and unplanned discourse (e.g. a formal lecture, an informal radio interview and a spontaneous conversation). The materials should also stimulate learner interaction with the input rather than just passive reception of it. This does not necessarily mean that the learners should always produce language in response to the input; but it does mean that they should at least always do something mentally or physically in response to it. See in particular Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17 of this book for arguments in favour of exposing learners to authentic mater ials, and also see Gilmore (2007) and Mishan (2005). 1.4.8 The learners’ attention should be drawn to linguistic features of the input There seems to be an agreement amongst many researchers that helping learners to pay attention to linguistic features of authentic input can help them to eventually acquire some of those features. However, it is important to understand that this claim does not represent a back-to-grammar movement. It is different from previous grammar teaching approaches in a number of ways. In the first place the attention paid to the language can be either conscious or subconscious. For example, the learners might be paying conscious attention to working out the attitude of one of the characters in a story, but might be paying subconscious attention to the second conditionals which the character uses. Or they might be paying conscious attention to the second conditionals, having been asked to locate them and to make a generalisation about their function in the story. The important thing is that the learners become aware of a gap between a particular feature of their interlanguage (i.e. how they currently understand or use it) and the equivalent feature in the target language. Such noticing of the gap between output and input can act as an ‘acquisition facilitator’ (Seliger 1979). It does not do so by immediately changing the learner’s internalised grammar but by alerting the learner to subsequent instances of the same feature in future input. So there is no immediate change in the learners’ proficiency (as seems to be aimed at by such grammar teaching approaches as the conventional Presentation–Practice–Production approach). There is, however, an increased likelihood of eventual acquisition provided that the learners receive future relevant input. White (1990) argues that there are some features of the L2 which learners need to be focused on because the deceptively apparent similarities with L1 features make it impossible for the learners to otherwise notice certain points of mismatch between their interlanguage and the target language. And Schmidt (1992) puts forward a powerful argument for approaches which help learners to note the gap between their use of specific features of English and the way these features are used by native speakers. Inviting learners to compare their use of, say, indirect speech with the way it is used in a transcript of a native speaker conversation would be one such approach and could quite easily be built into coursebook materials. Randi Reppen in Chapter 2 of this book and Jane Willis in Chapter 3 exemplify ways of helping learners to pay attention to linguistic features of their input. Kasper and Roever (2005) and Schmidt (2001) also discuss the value of noticing how the language is actually used. 1.4.9 Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes Most researchers seem to agree that learners should be given opportun ities to use language for communication rather than just to practise it in situations controlled by the teacher and the materials. Using language for communication involves attempts to achieve a purpose in a situ ation in which the content, strategies and expression of the interaction are determined by the learners. Such attempts can enable the learners to ‘check’ the effectiveness of their internal hypotheses, especially if the activities stimulate them into ‘pushed output’ (Swain 1985) which is slightly above their current proficiency. They also help the learners to automatise their existing procedural knowledge (i.e. their knowledge of how the language is used) and to develop strategic competence (Canale and Swain 1980). This is especially so if the opportunities for use are interactive and encourage negotiation of meaning (Allwright 1984: 157). In addition, communicative interaction can provide opportunities for picking up language from the new input generated, as well as opportunities for learner output to become an informative source of input (Sharwood-Smith 1981). Ideally teaching materials should provide opportunities for such interaction in a variety of discourse modes ranging from planned to unplanned (Ellis 1990: 191). Interaction can be achieved through, for example:  information or opinion gap activities which require learners to communicate with each other and/or the teacher in order to close the gap (e.g. finding out what food and drink people would like at the class party); post-listening and post-reading activities which require the learners to use information from the text to achieve a communicative purpose (e.g. deciding what television programmes to watch, discussing who to vote for, writing a review of a book or film); creative writing and creative speaking activities such as writing a story or improvising a drama; formal instruction given in the target language either on the language itself or on another subject: We need to recognise that teaching intended as formal instruction also serves as interaction. Formal instruction does more than teach a specific item: it also exposes learners to features which are not the focus of the lesson. (Ellis 1990) The value of materials facilitating learner interaction is stressed in this book by Alan Maley in Chapter 15 and by Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 17. See Swain (2005) for an overview of the literature on the Output Hypothesis and its insistence that output is not just the product of language learning but part of the process of language learning too. 1.4.10 Materials should take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually delayed Research into the acquisition of language shows that it is a gradual rather than an instantaneous process and that this is equally true for instructed as well as informal acquisition. Acquisition results from the gradual and dynamic process of internal generalisation rather than from instant adjustments to the learner’s internal grammar. It follows that learners cannot be expected to learn a new feature and be able to use it effectively in the same lesson. They might be able to rehearse the feature, to retrieve it from short-term memory or to produce it when prompted by the teacher or the materials. But this does not mean that learning has already taken place. I am sure most of you are familiar with the situation in which learners get a new feature correct in the lesson in which it is taught but then get it wrong the following week. This is partly because they have not yet had enough time, instruction and exposure for learning to have taken place. The inevitable delayed effect of instruction suggests that no textbook can really succeed if it teaches features of the language one at a time and expects the learners to be able to use them straightaway. But this incremental approach is popular with many publishers, writers, teachers and learners as it can provide a reassuring illusion of system, simplicÂity and progress. Therefore, adaptation of existing approaches rather than replacement with radical new ones is the strategy most likely to succeed. So, for example, the conventional textbook approach of PPP (Presentation–Practice–Production) could be used to promote durable learning if the objective of the Production phase was seen as reinforcement rather than correct production and if this was followed in subsequent units by more exposure and more presentation relating to the same feature. Or the Production phase could be postponed to another unit which is placed after further exposure, instruction and practice have been provided. Or the initial Production phase could be used to provide output which would enable the learners to notice the mismatch between what they are doing and what proficient speakers typically do. In my view, in order to facilitate the gradual process of acquisition, it is important for materials to recycle instruction and to provide frequent and ample exposure to the instructed language features in communicative use. This is particularly true of vocabulary acquisition, which requires frequent, spaced and varied recycling in order to be successful (Nation 2003, 2005; Nation and Wang 1999). It is equally important that the learners are not forced into premature production of the instructed features (they will get them wrong) and that tests of proficiency are not conducted immediately after instruction (they will indicate failure or an illusion of success). /Ellis (1990) reports on research revealing the delayed effect of instruction and in Chapter 9 of this book he argues the need for post-use evaluation of materials to find out what learners have eventually learned as a result of using them. 1.4.11 Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning styles Different learners have different preferred learning styles. So, for example, those learners with a preference for studial learning are much more likely to gain from explicit grammar teaching than those who prefer experiential learning. And those who prefer experiential learning are more likely to gain from reading a story with a predominant grammatical feature (e.g. reported speech) than they are from being taught that feature explicitly. This means that activities should be variable and should ideally cater for all learning styles. An analysis of most current coursebooks will reveal a tendency to favour learners with a preference for studial learning and an apparent assumption that all learners are equally capable of benefiting from this style of learning. Likewise an analysis of the teaching and testing of foreign languages in formal education systems throughout the world will reveal that studial learners (who are actually in the minority) are at an advantage. Styles of learning which need to be catered for in language-learning materials include: visual (e.g. learners prefer to see the language written down); auditory (e.g. learners prefer to hear the language); kinaesthetic (e.g. learners prefer to do something physical, such as following instructions for a game); studial (e.g. learners like to pay conscious attention to the linguistic features of the language and want to be correct); experiential (e.g. learners like to use the language and are more concerned with communication than with correctness); analytic (e.g. learners prefer to focus on discrete bits of the language and to learn them one by one); global (e.g. learners are happy to respond to whole chunks of language at a time and to pick up from them whatever language they can); dependent (e.g. learners prefer to learn from a teacher and from a book); independent (e.g. learners are happy to learn from their own experience of the language and to use autonomous learning strategies). I think a learner’s preference for a particular learning style is variable and depends, for example, on what is being learned, where it is being learned, whom it is being learned with and what it is being learned for. For example, I am happy to be experiential, global and kinaesthetic when learning Japanese out of interest with a group of relaxed adult learners and with a teacher who does not keep correcting me. But I am more likely to be analytic and visual when learning French for examination purposes in a class of competitive students and with a teacher who keeps on correcting me. And, of course, learners can be helped to gain from learning styles other than their preferred style. The important point for materials developers is that they are aware of and cater for differences of preferred learning styles in their materials and that they do not assume that all learners can benefit from the same approaches as the ‘good language learner’ (see Ellis 1994: 546–50). See Oxford and Anderson (1995) for an overview of research into learning styles. See also Anderson (2005) and Oxford (2002). 1.4.12 Materials should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes the learner’s motives, emotions, and attitudes screen what is presented in the language classroom... This affective screening is highly individual and results in different learning rates and results. (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982) Ideally language learners should have strong and consistent motivation and they should also have positive feelings towards the target language, their teachers, their fellow learners and the materials they are using. But, of course, ideal learners do not exist and even if they did exist one day, they would no longer be ideal learners the next day. Each class of learners using the same materials will differ from each other in terms of long- and short-term motivation and of feelings and attitudes about the language, their teachers, their fellow learners and their learning mater ials, and of attitudes towards the language, the teacher and the mater ials. Obviously no materials developer can cater for all these affective variables, but it is important for anybody who is writing learning mat erials to be aware of the inevitable attitudinal differences of the users of the materials. One obvious implication for the materials developer is ‘to diversify language instruction as much as possible based upon the variety of cognitive styles’ (Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991) and the variety of affect ive attitudes likely to be found amongst a typical class of learners. Ways of doing this include: providing choices of different types of text; providing choices of different types of activities; providing optional extras for the more positive and motivated learners; providing variety; including units in which the value of learning English is a topic for discussion; including activities which involve the learners in discussing their attitudes and feelings about the course and the materials; researching and catering for the diverse interests of the identified target learners; being aware of the cultural sensitivities of the target learners; giving general and specific advice in the teacher’s book on how to respond to negative learners (e.g. not forcing reluctant individuals to take part in group work). 1.4.13 Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning It has been shown that it can be extremely valuable to delay L2 speaking for beginners of a language until they have gained sufficient exposure to the target language and sufficient confidence in understanding it. This silent period can facilitate the development of an effective internalised grammar which can help learners to achieve proficiency when they eventually start to speak in the L2. There is some controversy about the actual value of the silent period and some learners seem to use the silence to avoid learning the language. However, I think most researchers would agree that forcing immediate production in the new language can damage the reluctant speaker affectively and linguistic ally and many would agree with Dulay, Burt and Krashen that: communication situations in which students are permitted to remain silent or respond in their first language may be the most effective approach for the early phases of language instruction. This approach approximates what language learners of all ages have been observed to do naturally, and it appears to be more effective than forcing full two-way communication from the very beginning of L2 acquisition. (1982: 25–6) The important point is that the materials should not force premature speaking in the target language and they should not force silence either. Ways of giving learners the possibility of not speaking until they are ready include:  starting the course with a Total Physical Response (TPR) approach in which the learners respond physically to oral instructions from a teacher or CD (see Asher 1977; Tomlinson 1994b, Tomlinson and Masuhara in press); starting with a listening comprehension approach in which the learners listen to stories in the target language, which are made accessible through the use of sound effects, visual aids and dramatic movement by the teacher; permitting the learners to respond to target language questions by using their first language or through drawings and gestures. A possible extension of the principle of permitting silence is to introduce most new language points (regardless of the learners’ level) through activities which initially require comprehension but not production. This is an approach which I call TPR Plus and which we used on the PKG Project in Indonesian secondary schools. It usually involved introducing new vocabulary or structures through stories which the learners responded to by drawing and/or using their first language, and through activities in which the whole class mimed stories by following oral instructions from the teacher (see Barnard 2007; Tomlinson 1990, 1994b). For discussion of research into the silent period see Ellis (2008); Krashen (1982); Saville-Troike (1988). 1.4.14 Materials should maximise learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic and emotional involvement which stimulates both right- and left-brain activities A narrowly focused series of activities which require very little cognitive processing (e.g. mechanical drills; rule learning; simple transformation activities) usually leads to shallow and ephemeral learning unless linked to other activities which stimulate mental and affective proces sing. However, a varied series of activities making, for example, analytic, creative, evaluative and rehearsal demands on processing capacity can lead to deeper and more durable learning. In order for this deeper learning to be facilitated, it is very important that the content of the materials is not trivial or banal and that it stimulates thoughts and feelings in the learners. It is also important that the activities are not too simple and that they cannot be too easily achieved without the learners making use of their previous experience and their brains. The maximisation of the brain’s learning potential is a fundamental principle of Lozanov’s Suggestopedia, in which ‘he enables the learner to receive the information through different cerebral processes and in different states of consciousness so that it is stored in many different parts of the brain, maximising recall’ (Hooper Hansen 1992). Suggestopedia does hrough engaging the learners in a variety of left- and right-brain activities in the same lesson (e.g. reciting a dialogue, dancing to instructions, singing a song, doing a substitution drill, writing a story). Whilst not everybody would accept the procedures of Suggestopedia, most researchers seem to agree on the value of maximising the brain’s capacity during language learning and the best textbooks already do contain within each unit a variety of different left- and right-brain activities. For an account of the principles of Suggestopedia see Lozanov (1978) and Chapter 16 in this volume by Grethe Hooper Hansen. See also Tomlinson (2003b) for a discussion of the need to humanise materials, Tomlinson and Avila (2007a, 2007b) for a discussion of the value of developing materials which help the learners to make full use of their mental resources whilst learning and using an L2, and Tomlinson (in press) for suggestions for ways of engaging L2 learners cognitively, affectively, aesthetically and kinaesthetically. 1.4.15 Materials should not rely too much on controlled practice It is interesting that there seems to be very little research which indicates that controlled practice activities are valuable. Sharwood-Smith (1981) does say that ‘it is clear and uncontroversial to say that most spontan eous performance is attained by dint of practice’, but he provides no evidence to support this very strong claim. Also Bialystok (1988) says that automaticity is achieved through practice but provides no evidence to support her claim. In the absence of any compelling evidence most researchers seem to agree with Ellis, who says that ‘controlled prac tice appears to have little long term effect on the accuracy with which new structures are performed’ (Ellis 1990: 192) and ‘has little effect on fluency’ (Ellis and Rathbone 1987). See De Keyser (2007) on language practice and also Ellis (2008). Yet controlled grammar practice activities still feature significantly in popular coursebooks and are considered to be useful by many teachers and by many learners. This is especially true of dialogue practice, which has been popular in many methodologies for the last 30 years without there being any substantial research evidence to support it (see Tomlinson 1995). In a recent analysis of new low-level coursebooks I found that nine out of ten of them contained many more opportunities for controlled practice than they did for language use. It is possible that right now all over the world learners are wasting their time doing drills and listening to and repeating dialogues. See Tomlinson et al. (2001) and Masuhara et al. (2008) for coursebook reviews which also report a continuing dominance of practice activities. 1.4.16 Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback Feedback which is focused first on the effectiveness of the outcome rather than just on the accuracy of the output can lead to output becoming a profitable source of input. Or in other words, if the language that the learner produces is evaluated in relation to the purpose for which it is used, that language can become a powerful and informative source of information about language use. Thus a learner who fails to achieve a particular communicative purpose (e.g. borrowing something, instructing someone how to play a game, persuading someone to do something) is more likely to gain from feedback on the effectiveness of their use of language than a learner whose language is corrected without reference to any non-linguistic outcome. It is very important, therefore, for mat erials developers to make sure that language production activities have intended outcomes other than just practising language. The value of outcome feedback is focused on by such writers on taskbased approaches as Willis and Willis (2007) and Rod Ellis in Chapter 9 in this volume. It is also stressed by Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 17 of this volume. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN MODELS ADDIE Model The acronym "ADDIE" stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. It was created by the Florida State University for the military in the 1970s and was meant as a guideline to create effective training and instructional materials. It is an instructional design model that has withstood the test of time and use. Though the model appears linear, it does not have to be followed rigidly or in a linear approach, especially if you already have course materials developed. ADDIE is an instructional design model that helps instructors, instructional designers, and training specialists plan and create instruction. Let’s take a closer look at the first phase, the ANALYSIS PHASE. A quality analysis helps identify learning goals and objectives. It also helps gather information about what your audience already knows and what they still need to learn. During this stage, instructional designers conduct a needs assessment to help them identify the learning gaps. Doing a thorough analysis before developing and implementing a course can save a lot of time and resources. The Analysis Phase generally consists of four subphases: instructional goals instructional analysis learner analysis learning objectives So let us talk about the first step of Analysis, developing Instructional Goals. Let’s say that your friend Rolly wants you to teach him how to cook pasta. To do this effectively, you would have to clearly define what the goal of this little training would be. Does Rolly want to know how to cook all types of pasta - from marinara to pesto to alfredo? Or does he just have a certain kind in mind? Finding out and making a clear instructional goal can save a lot of time and effort. In this case, you would simply have to talk to Rolly for he is your client. Once you have clearly defined what your instructional goals are, you will be better equipped to do the instructions. So let’s say that he wants to learn how to make a simple marinara sauce. That’s the instructional goal. Now, we can move on to the next part of the analysis phase: Instructional Analysis. During the Instructional Analysis, the ID defines and writes out all the steps necessary to carry out the instructional goals. Now, this phase is often not as simple as it seems. In our pasta sauce analogy, it sounds as easy enough at first. Just heat up the sauce pan, prepare the tomatoes, garlic and fresh herbs, and toss them in, right? Well, it’s actually a lot more complicated. Rolly has to know where to buy those ingredients and how much of those are needed. He needs to know what technique and tools that are required, from basic cutting techniques like chopping, dicing, mincing, or julienning, to the levels of heat needed for certain phases. These are basic steps but each step can have its own substance. A finished instructional analysis is a chart that looks something like this: It is very specific and outlines the goal steps learners need to have to achieve the instructional goals. Many instructional designers are continually adding to and refining their instructional analysis as they go through the other steps of designing training. The next part of the analysis phase is the Learner Analysis. This is when you find out what your learners already know about the subject at hand. When you have a specific set of learners, and in our example, just one guy, it’s a lot easier to do a learner analysis. All you need to do is talk to him. If your learning audience is bigger, say a class of freshmen as your Purposive Communication students, you may have to do more research and may even conduct interviews and surveys. Knowing where your learners stand regarding your subject helps you know how much and how little you need to teach them. Say, during your first meeting, you talked to your students and found out that they are well-versed with the Nature of Communication: from the definition of communication to its basic elements, and even its principles, purposes, and misconceptions about it. Well then you know you don’t have to go into much detail when talking to them about that major topic. If you hadn’t done a learner analysis and found that out, you could have wasted a lot of time and effort teaching them something they already knew about. Step four is creating Learning Objectives. Learning objectives are what students should be able to do when instruction is completed. They are usually in the forms of skills, attitudes, or knowledge. A good way to write a learning objective is to fill in the following sentence, “At the end of our course, students should be able to *blank*”. This is a time when we have to be very specific and use strong verbs that specifically defines student performance. In our earlier example, we know our instructional goal is to teach Rolly how to make a marinara sauce, but we need to be more specific with our learning objectives. Based on what we learned about instructional analysis and learner analysis, we can come up with some good learning objectives, like this: At the end of our course, students should be able to: DESCRIBE how to make marinara sauce from scratch DEMONSTRATE how to prepare each ingredients SHOW how to add the ingredients in exact order EXPLAIN at what temperature the sauce needs to be cooked and for how long Knowing what our learning objectives are is going to go a long way in helping us design our course. So that’s a basic overview of the analysis phase of the ADDIE model. Let us now proceed to the second stage, the Design Phase. The DESIGN PHASE of the ADDIE model is where we address any performance gaps identified in the Analysis phase. During the design phase, the curriculum developers deal with the following sub steps: designing assessments choosing a course format creating an instructional strategy Let’s talk about subphase 1, Assessment. It may seem counterintuitive to design the assessment of a course before creating a content, but it is actually very helpful to know how you are going to test your learners’ knowledge, attitude, and skills about your subject when you are creating your own instructional materials. To design effective assessments, you are going to use a lot of what you have learned during the previous ADDIE phase, the analysis phase. Dick, Carey and Carey point out that there are three key areas to consider when designing a good assessment, question, or task: the instructions’ goals, learner, and context. It is very important to consider the goals of your instructions as you design your assessment. Let’s say you are teaching a group of not-so-computer literate folks about how to use email. During the analysis phase, you would have created performance objectives or what the students would do to demonstrate that they learn the content. Now, you can use these performance objectives to help you create effective assessments. If one of your performance objectives was for students to demonstrate how to open a web browser and sign into a web-based email account, then, you should make sure to test that knowledge at the end of the course. As you write out this question or task, remember to keep in mind what you learned about your learners during the analysis phase. In our example, your learners aren’t very computer literate so you should avoid using unnecessarily obscure or complicated terms in your assessment. Whenever possible, you should assess skills like this in a context as close to the eventual performance setting as possible. Having them answer a multiple-choice question about how to sign into an email account won’t be nearly as effective as giving them a task to do so on a physical computer. And be sure to be thorough when you research your learners’ performance context. Also, avoid the temptation to trick learners by intentionally writing complicated or misleading questions. If your instructional goal is to help students learn to use email, then test them on that, not on how good they are at answering trick questions. Once you know how your learners are going to be tested, then you can go about choosing a Course Format. The course format also sometimes called the delivery system is the medium by which the course content is presented to learners. Courses can be taught in a traditional classroom setting, by correspondence, through a self-paced workbook, over the internet, or in a blended course that combines different methods. In our example, we know that your students are going to be tested using PC computers. It would be most effective then to choose a course format that would allow them to use PC computers when you teach them, like a computer lab. Now that you’ve designed your assessment and picked a course format, you can begin to create your instructional strategy. An instructional strategy is the collection of lectures, readings, discussions, projects, worksheets, assessments, and activities to help the students learn the course content. Dick, Carey and Carey have outlined five major learning components that are part of an over-all instructional strategy. They are the pre-instructional activities, content presentation, learner participation, assessment, and follow-through activities. 1. Pre-instructional activities: 3 factors - (1) Motivation, (2) Informing learner of what they will learn, and (3) Stimulating real or relevant knowledge and skills that they should already know. 1.1 Motivation John Keller ARCS: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction Attention: Initial attention can be gained by using emotional and personal information, asking questions, creating mental challenges, and humaninterest examples Relevance: Show how learning particular skills matches their personal goals (e.g. personal interests, planned progress, employment, success) Confidence: Convince learners who lack confidence that they have the background and ability to succeed. Also, demonstrate to overconfident learners that there remains much to be learned. Satisfaction: Use intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to ensure the learner derives satisfaction from the learning experience. Extrinsic rewards include free time, good grades, recognition etc. On the other hand, intrinsic rewards such as personally succeeding, building personal capabilities, and experiencing increased self-esteem is of greater importance. 1.2 Discuss Learning Objectives: helps the learner focus on the study strategies on the outcomes and determine the relevance of the instruction. 1.3 Stimulate Recall of Prerequisite Skills: inform learners of prerequisite skills required to begin instruction, this is a quick check to make sure the learner gets and initial view of the relationship between the new content and what is already known. 2. Content Presentation: determine exactly what information, concepts, rules, and principles must be presented to the learner. The two methods that may be used are: 2.1 A deductive approach to instruction is a more teacher-centered approach. This means that the teacher presents and explains a new concept, then give examples that the students will apply. 2.2 In inductive approach to instruction, the teacher presents many examples of a concept. The intent is for the students to “notice”, by way of the examples, how the concept works. The best teachers blend the two methods. 3. Learner Participation: includes practice (application) with feedback and is one of the most powerful components in the learning process. It is important for learners to be able to practice and be provided feedback or information about their performance. Embedding practice tests into the instruction is a good strategy to enhance the learning process. It provides feedback. Feedback is sometimes known as knowledge of results. 4. Assessment includes formal tests – the typical examinations. Attitude questions could also be included to determine the quality of the instruction. It enables the instructor to tailor instruction to the needs of the learners, evaluate the quality of the instructional materials, and to evaluate the progress of the learners. 5. Follow-through Activities is a review of the entire course strategy with an eye toward helping students internalize and apply the instruction after the class is over. It aims to determine whether learner memory and transfer needs have been addressed. Remember, the basic learning components are the same regardless of designing instruction for intellectual skill, verbal info, motor skills, or attitude. So that’s the basic overview of the design phase of the ADDIE model. Designing assessments, choosing the right course format, and carefully putting together an instructional strategy will make developing your course content a lot more easy and effective. Now, moving to the Development phase, this is where you create the content and the actual course. Each element is developed in this phase according to the specifications outlined in the Design phase. Creating a prototype helps in modeling what the experience will look like. This more detailed version allows you to collect feedback and approval before moving forward with a full development cycle. Guided by the prototype and storyboards, the instructional designer will begin to create every course element. This includes writing course content, designing questions, or creating multimedia. The Development phase focuses on developing and refining each element. It does not mean, however, that this phase isn’t subject to repetition. Remember, the whole ADDIE process is about continuous improvement. The ‘Development’ phase also includes running periodic quality assurance (QA) testing to make sure development meets the design specification and that a quality course is being developed. The Development Phase can be divided into four main components: Developing a prototype Creating the course Ensuring quality Performing a test run 1. Developing a Prototype. A prototype is used to solidify the vision and concept for the course. It is especially helpful for demonstrating the course to clients and internal stakeholders, such as decision-makers and approvers. As such, a prototype does not need to be detailed or comprehensive. An effective prototype may contain around three pages – one filled with illustration and a few text, another with tasks and sample tests, and the last with instructions and other text-heavy content. Those should be enough to show how the course would work and look. To supplement the prototype, instructional designers (IDs) should also create a brief overview of the course plan. This aims to show the approver a general idea for the course, and how it would run. It could also integrate some insights from the Analysis phase and a glimpse of the instructional strategy from the Design phase. 2. Creating the Course As the core of the Development phase, this component is all about the course’s actual development. To make this part as efficient as possible, the Design phase’s instructional strategy should feed into this component. Coupled with feedback from decision-makers on the prototype, creating the course should be an insight-based and purpose-driven process leveraging information about the target audience and strategies for meeting their learning objectives. When creating the course, keep these tips in mind: Make your material engaging by adding relevant media content. Pages of text could get boring fast, but videos, audio input, images, graphs and tables could address various learning styles and make it easier for learners to retain information. Ensure logical order of course materials. Build on previous modules to help learners advance to new topics quickly. Equip the target audience with essential knowledge and underlying concepts to prepare them for more advanced subject matters. Leverage on insights from the Analysis and Design phases to avoid creating course materials that are disconnected from learning objectives. Keep educational goals and participants in mind throughout the entire process of developing the course. 3. Ensuring Quality Quality assurance is a significant part of the Development phase. As the instructional designer, put yourself in the shoes of your target audiences – facilitators and participants. Break down the course into smaller modules and once each module is created, pass it on to a few sets of fresh eyes for QA and evaluation. Have an eagle eye on typos, grammatical, and technical errors. This can be done simultaneously as next modules are created. Gather feedback for each module and update the course materials accordingly. By doing so, this module-based quality assurance will make the process much more efficient. 4. Performing a Test Run This is an integral part of quality assurance. Engage a small group of learners for a test run. Collect feedback from potential users and incorporate them into the course. Make a few changes based on these pilot tests until all areas that need improvement are ironed out. Prior to finalizing the course, submit it to decision-makers for approval. By going through each phase of the ADDIE, creating a course would be a more efficient and productive process. Carefully and thoroughly performing the Analysis and Design stages should provide rich insights and data that would make the Development phase a much easier step. The four critical components of the Development phase: Developing a prototype, Creating the course, Ensuring quality, and Performing a test run, would ensure that the course is feedback-based and centered on the target audience’s learning objectives. Following these components would also help Instructional Designers avoid a back-and-forth process, proceeding to the Implementation phase with ease. Speaking of which, let’s take a closer look at the fourth phase, the implementation phase. Now, let’s take a closer look at the fourth phase, the Implementation Phase. The implementation phase entails the transformation of the plan into action. During this stage, the materials created during the development phase are introduced to the target audience and the learning process starts. Depending on the chosen format, the Implementation stage will likely include the following subphases: Training the Instructors Preparing the Learners Preparing the Environment Let us take a more in-depth look at all three steps. Training the Instructors It is not unusual for a person who is engaged with the development of an electronic course to be involved in its implementation and the delivery of knowledge to learners. However, it is by no means rare for the instructors to be uninvolved in the creation of the course he or she has to teach. In this event, it is necessary to adequately train the instructor and make sure that he or she has all the necessary information about the course before the learning process begins. In general, the instructor must have good understanding of the following: - goal/s of the course - course content - course activities - course tests Preparing the learners 1. Let Your Students Lead the Learning Learning takes place best in environments where students feel empowered to learn. Effective teachers are more like moderators, offering inspiration and guiding students to discover for themselves. Give students the opportunity to be self-learners, which guarantees lifelong learning. This brings us directly to the second point. 2. Create an Inquiry-Based Classroom Environment If students are to lead the way to learning, they need to be able to ask questions – and then find the means to answer them. Students (and teachers) need to “wonder out loud” as they encounter new information. A KWL chart (What do you Know? What do you Want to know? What have you Learned?) can guide students toward true self-motivated learning. 3. Encourage Collaboration “We are greater than the sum of our parts.” Herein is the heart of collaboration. A healthy, active classroom is a sharing classroom. Students are social beings, and even more so in a language class. Find every opportunity to allow students to form pairs and small groups. Not only does this encourage the development of speaking and listening skills, but it also teaches students how to effectively achieve goals together. 4. Develop Critical Thinking Skills Learning is more than memorizing and understanding. Critical thinking skills take students well beyond simple comprehension of information. Students use these skills to solve problems in new situations, make inferences and generalizations, combine information in new patterns, and make judgments based on evidence and criteria. 5. Encourage Creativity Encourage your students to be creative throughout each lesson. Creative activities allow students to express what they have learned in a new way. This synthesizing and personalizing of knowledge consolidate learning and creates an experience that remains with students long after the class is over. Preparing the environment What is the difference between a positive and negative learning environment? To dig into the differences of a positive and negative learning environment, let’s start with some positive learning environment examples: -Students feel safe to come to school without feeling like they have to act like someone else for acceptance -When students feel safe in their environment, they’re more willing to take risks in their learning without fear of failing– sometimes we learn best when we fail. -A true community exists. Students and staff members alike are more engaged and excited to interact with one another under positive circumstances. In a negative learning environment, you’re going to see more undesirable behaviors such as: -High levels of student frustration, likely leading to increased disciplinary rates. This could be mitigated by clear classroom management strategies. -A disconnect between members of the community (ie. staff, students, and parents/guardians), leading to tension and less involvement from parents/guardians in the school environment. High levels of parent involvement have a direct impact on positive learning environments. -High levels of stress for teachers and staff leading to burnout and anxiety. Practicing self-care techniques can be a great way to de-stress. Why is a positive learning environment important? Having a positive learning environment in place takes a great deal of thought and consideration, but there are major benefits that’ll pay off for the hard work that goes into it. For example: -Research has shown that academic performance is likely to increase -Students will be more likely to support other students -There will be an increase in positive interactions between students, staff, and parents/guardians -Stakeholders will appreciate that you take mental health just as seriously as you take student achievements -Students are more likely to take ownership of their learning experience (also known as self-regulated learning) You’ll set the tone for a great school year from the very first meeting as you build an environment conducive to student development. The last phase of ADDIE is the Evaluation phase where the course goes through in-depth review and testing. This stage allows the instructional designer (ID) to thoroughly evaluate each element of the course to ensure that learning outcomes are achieved. This stage measures the effectiveness of the course and identifies growth areas to improve the learners’ knowledge and skills. The main goals of Evaluation are to keep track of the learning objectives and confirm that they have been met. What would it take for the course to achieve these objectives? The Evaluation Phase comprise of two parts – Formative andSummative. As the initial assessment, Formative Evaluation takes place during creation, or the Development stage. In this stage, students and IDs determine whether the learning objectives are addressed, and how to improve the course. Summative Evaluation happens after the course has been implemented or when the program is finished for instructional improvement. Let’s dive deeper into these two parts. Formative Evaluation Formative Evaluation aims to measure the effectiveness of learning materials. Are they easy to consume? What is the general reception of the learners to the course? Formative Evaluation can be done in the following sequence: One-on-one evaluation Individual students preview the learning material to evaluate its effectiveness and assess the learner’s reception in terms of: Clarity - Is the message clear enough? Usefulness - Does it address learning objectives? - and -Relevance - Is it aligned to the entire course? Small (focused) group evaluation This type of formative evaluation determines how the course performs in a group setting. Pick a good sample from a variety of smaller learner groups to get a balanced representation. Determine whether the course: Allows engagement and fun interaction Is easy to understand in a group setting Is relevant vis-à-vis the entire course Has enough practical exercises conducive for a group setting After implementing the course in a well-represented group, a field trial should be conducted to assess how it will fare in a practical environment. This allows for any adjustment to be made to suit any specific real-life conditions. Summative Evaluation When the course is finished and completely rolled out to learners, Summative Evaluation enters the picture. The goal of Summative Evaluation is to determine the impact of the course to learners and how it can be improved for the next batch. The following guided questions may be used to assess how effective the course is based on implementation: Is continuing the learning program worthwhile? How can the learning program be improved? How can the effectiveness of instruction be improved? How to make sure that the instruction corresponds to the learning strategy? Another way to determine the impact o