Developing Materials for Language Teaching

As foreign language teacher educators, we are often in search of materials that promote language learning.Depending on our teaching contexts, we are asked to adopt course textbooks or supplementary materials.Most language teachers might not necessarily be aware of principles that guide their language course material selection, adaptation, and evaluation.Brian Tomlinson's edited volume, titled Developing Materials for Language Teaching, provides key principles and conceptual frameworks for how to evaluate and adapt language materials and offers numerous practical tips for how to effectively and efficiently develop language materials that align with short-and long-term language-learning objectives.This edited volume is divided into 26 chapters that are neatly arranged into four parts.Chapters 1-3 (Part 1) comprise historical as well as current perspectives on material development in language teaching while highlighting the importance of principled methods regarding the development, adaptation, and evaluation of language materials.Chapters 4-11 (Part 2) include information about key principles and procedures of materials development and describe a (mis)match between language acquisition research findings and current practices in materials development.Chapters 12-16 (Part 3) focus on essentials for developing materials for target groups, while Chapters 17-26 (Part 4) offer recommendations for developing materials for specific types of skills.This volume includes Tomlinson's comments at the end of each part, in which he integrates ideas from specific chapters in one short essay that is organized around a central theme or question.The entire volume aims to debunk myths surrounding materials development for language teaching and provides frameworks for developing both coursebooks and supplementary classroom materials.In the introductory chapter, Tomlinson provides a general overview of the book and defines the two key terms, language materials and materials development.Tomlinson's views of what constitutes language materials is that they "could obviously be videos, DVDs, emails, YouTube, dictionaries, grammar books, readers, workbooks or photocopied exercises newspapers, food packages, photographs, live talks given by invited native speakers, instructions given by a teacher, tasks wriaen on cards or discussions between learners" (p.2).The term materials development refers to the "actual carrying out of the procedures of designing, developing, monitoring, revising, producing and using language teaching materials" (p. 1).Furthermore, Tomlinson presents a list of key questions (e.g., How should materials be evaluated?Who should develop materials?Should texts be authentic?etc.) that are pertinent to developing materials for foreign language teaching that help critically evaluate the validity and authenticity of language materials.The volume asserts that developing materials for language teaching involves mutual understanding and relationships among several agents: researchers, practitioners, material writers, administrators, teachers, and, most importantly, learners.In Chapter 21, Dat Bao states that "course authors and research scholars in L2 learning often do not communicate while a textbook is being created" (p.432).To reinvigorate productive communication within the language teaching materials sector, the contributing authors also recommend organizations such as the Materials Development Association (MATSDA) and Materials Writing Special Interest Groups (MAWSIG), which provide a forum for groups of professionals by organizing online and in-person sessions and offering several blog and video posts about principled

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