Materials Development:

Tutorial Week 2- Principles for Materials Development

A) Watch Jeremy Short’s presentation on his take of materials development.

Please take note on the reasons he created the materials and the characteristics of his materials.

Which principles for materials development did Short apply when producing his materials?

Answer:

Jeremy created the materials after he found that his students feel that textbook is boring and also expensive. Later, he managed to create interesting, fun and engaging learning through visual and audio. Hence, he implements the story telling into narrative which known as the graphic novel textbooks. It is important to ensure that the learning materials are interesting in a way to attract learner’s interest and understanding.

When producing his materials, Short applies the principle of Materials Development which found in Tomlinson’s Principle. Short believes that materials should achieve impact in order to attract learner’s curiosity, interest and attention through novelty, variety, attractive presentation and appealing content. Materials are created to help learners to learn the language with texts and illustration that relates to their own culture.

 

 

B) Design and complete the following diagram.

 

 

The reason why we choose to draw our diagram in this manner is because we believe that these aspects are inter-related with each other. Country’s vision is placed on top of the diagram because it works as a mover in the society which leads the parents to set a goal in their children’s academic performance. Later, curriculum goal and objective are created to suit previous relation between parent’s goal and country’s vision. Learners are expected to be able to master all the learning skills such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary. Then, we can see the development of two principles which are the principles of teaching and learning and the principles of SLA. In the principles of teaching and learning, the styles of teaching and materials play an important role in ensuring the effectiveness of pedagogy and getting into effective language learning materials. Teachers can vary the learning materials according to curriculum requirements and learners’ interest. It is best to create fun and engaging materials such as via flashcards, videos and ICT. Connecting SLA research to materials development, there are principles in SLA that affect the designed materials. Moreover, teacher’s belief and rational should be based on the principles. From many perspectives, teachers believe that every student has different learning styles. Teacher sees the importance of creating effective materials to cope this problem. The rational is that teaching and learning process are influencing each other in a way that the teachers should be aware of learners’ proficiency level. The learners should be given tasks based on their proficiency level. 

 

Reflection…

After completing the discussion for tutorial week 2, I am now able know more and explore deeply about why teaching materials are created. In the video itself, Jeremy Short had includes some of the reason why he came up with learning material that he mentioned about, which is the graphic novel textbook. Based on my own understanding, we as a pre-service teacher needs to have a well-understanding regarding the preference of our future students in order to create a good learning process in our classroom. When I referred back to my own learning experience during my secondary school, our English teacher will ask the whole class on what types of learning method that we are comfortable with in regards to ensure that we will be able to learn gradually according to the flows. Despite, there are two types of learners in our classroom. That is why our teacher used two different learning approaches. I can now understand why she done that before. As a teacher, we cannot simply assume that all the students can understand and get what they have learnt in the class. Some might be yes but some might not. So, in the future, I will use implement the knowledge for the process of teaching and learning. Besides, I can also improve myself through developing the skills and the knowledge on creating the learning materials for my students.