Creativity and Innovations in ELT Materials Development

Looking Beyond the Current Design

Dat Bao, Dat Bao

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781783099719
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Lingua inglese

This book brings together renowned scholars and new voices to challenge current practices in ELT materials design in order to work towards optimal learning conditions. It proposes ideas and principles to improve second language task design through novel resources such as drama, poetry, literature and online resources; and it maps out a number of unusual connections between theory and practice in the field of ELT materials development. The first section of the book discusses how innovative task-writing ideas can stretch materials beyond the current quality to make them more original and inspiring; the second part examines how different arts and technologies can drive innovation in coursebooks; the third section describes how teachers and learners can participate in materials writing and negotiate ways to personalize learning.

1	Expanding the Discourse in ELT Materials Development Through Creativity and Innovation
	Dat Bao

This chapter provides an overview of how ELT materials can be improved through creative mindsets and innovative efforts, as well as through materials personalisation and localisation. It is not, however, a review of current approaches to the ELT curriculum but mainly offers innovative insights to enrich current ways of developing course materials. It addresses the three main areas covered by this book, namely creativity, innovations and teacher–learner involvement in coursebook design.

One important obligation in the quest for successful English language education is to create and apply new experience in course materials. As the theme of this book indicates, materials writers are constantly challenged by the need to produce novel ideas (creativity) and implement them via coursebook design (innovation). Innovation in general refers to new procedure (Markee, 1992) and untried methodology (Hutchison & Torres, 1994) that bring about improvement (Nicholls, 1983).

Innovators are often defined as agents of change (Hall & Hewings, 2001) and for change to happen, materials developers need to understand the learning process. Although this book is about materials, it places the learner at the heart of much of the discussion. As Hae-ok Park highlights in Chapter 7, learners are active participants in research and in the practice of innovative problem solving. The implementation of creative elements, or innovation, can be understood in two ways. One is that materials themselves need to be creative in taking novel content from diverse resources such as literature, drama, poetry and multimedia resources. The second is that materials need to be innovatively employed through flexible tasks, original combinations and multiple options.

This introductory discussion is written to interact with the chapters in the book not only by capturing the essence of what is being raised but also by commenting on those issues. Although readers can interpret every topic in each chapter by themselves, the commentary below might provoke further thoughts and trigger more in-depth reflection. The key arguments in the contributing chapters somehow defy current practice in order to bring about positive transformation in materials development.

Part 1: Improving ELT Materials Through Creative Pedagogies

Part 1 identifies a number of pedagogical areas in second language materials which could be further enriched. Having problematised current practices, the contributors propose ways to improve them. Chapter 2 expresses dissatisfaction with a number of conventional activities as they offer little stimulus and low pedagogical value to the learner. Chapter 3 redefines the essence of creativity and suggests ways to implement it in task modification. Chapter 4 challenges common ways of understanding creativity via a constructivist lens and proposes strategies to enhance task quality. Chapter 5 explores the discourse in children's creativity and based on such understanding builds a framework for creative activities at primary level. Chapter 6 plays with the effect of constraints on creativity and connects that understanding to learner autonomy.

By and large, the chapters are written to refresh certain areas of theorisation that have not been sufficiently deployed in L2 curriculum development. They share the recognition that learners’ inspiration and optimal output are often restricted by the presence of many mundane, uncreative and inflexible pedagogies in current task design. In doing so, the chapters address the following questions:

• What is problematic with typical language tasks?

• What pedagogical choices accelerate creativity?

• Why do learners need more flexible materials?

• What types of task nurture creativity in young learners?

• Do constraints impede or facilitate the innovative mind?

I shall re-articulate the authors’ insights below and interact with them as a way of keeping the dialogue open, bearing in mind that no answers to academic enquiry should be theoretically conclusive but need to stimulate further debate.

Rethinking typical language activities

To resist routine is to take one step towards creativity. Incompetent teachers treat all students alike, and ineffective textbooks tend to provide mostly typical tasks, assuming that all learners will accept them and will not ask for more. Typical activities, as a matter of fact, offer little room for learners’ personalised participation. For tasks to be inspiring, they need to stimulate improvisation among students so that they become more active in applying what they are learning (Cakir, 2006). Unfortunately, such activities need to be thoughtfully designed rather than purely reliant on the availability of real-life resources. This is because not all authentic materials facilitate learning if the content seems too ordinary. ELT discourse has highlighted occasions on which the typical choice of natural, native-context texts might lead to boredom and unproductive learning, simply because there is nothing exciting that stimulates the desire to learn (see, for example, Timmis, 2005).

Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 2, based on his own research, cautions us against routine-oriented, demotivating materials that restrict input, reduce emotion, produce little learning and hinder authentic language use in the real world. From a creative point of view, being typical amounts to being average and short of uniqueness, which is unacceptable, or even humiliating, as it suggests a lack of achievement. When learners are exposed to typical materials, their curiosity switches off and their learning capacity is narrowed down. The author not only criticises typicality but more importantly proposes a range of strategies to improve on mediocrity and inspire learning. He also adds illuminating examples to assist those who wish to try fresh ways of adapting materials. The examples might look simplistic but are powerful in helping teachers escape boredom and routine practice, to move into enjoyment and real-world communication. Both Brian Tomlinson in that chapter and Alan Maley in Chapter 3 propose ways to make such transformation possible, and give personalised and stimulating demonstrations of how upgraded tasks produce a more novel learning impact.

Redefining creative materials

Alan Maley in Chapter 3 refreshes our conceptualisation of creativeness by looking into whom creativity serves and the quality of learning it might bring. In other words, creativity itself does not have value in materials design unless it makes a change, by fostering creativity in teaching and learning. Thus, we are invited to problematise the construct creativity in ELT materials design. First of all, scholars’ appeal for creativity has been so frequent that it risks becoming commonplace; moreover, when one attempts to be different without being able to enhance learning by much, creativity turns into a tedious responsibility. Secondly, creativity often means freedom, but whose freedom, and what for, are questions we must consider. Suppose textbook writers utilise freedom to develop original tasks that learners do not find useful for learning: such activities look fancy but turn out to be useless. The fundamental argument here is that trying to be creative and trying to be effective may not denote the same pedagogical intention.

Based on this understanding, the most important aspect of creativity in language instruction, as implied in the chapter, is the need for it to be well associated with positive learning impact. In reading the chapter, we are provoked to reassess the significance of creative effort: it is only worthwhile if we look into what a task eventually does for the learner rather than what it looks like to the reader.

One example of effective creativity in materials is the introduction of a variety of ways to perform the same task and allow learners to make their own choices of what suits them best. Another example is the ‘marvel effect’, as suggested by Schmidhuber (2006), which taps into learners’ curiosity and inspiration for learning. Along these lines, Alan Maley offers a range of ideas to guide creative efforts in materials development, in order to produce a social effect on learners and enable them to connect, engage, control, enjoy and interact in their own optimal ways.

The appeal for materials to be more flexible

A coursebook to some extent should represent its immediate users rather than stay outside of their world and tell them what to learn. It is therefore important to raise the awareness that teachers and students can take control of material content through negotiation with it. Dat Bao in Chapter 4 argues that creativity does not grow in the independent mind but interacts with facilitating resources, a process which leads to the point where both coursebook users and the coursebook itself co-construct learning. To make this possible, the author appeals for materials to take on qualities such as novelty, openness to multiple responses, and challenge to learners’ cognition and emotion, as well as to provide conditions for adaptation, contextualisation, choice and respect for cultural diversity.

The chapter provides an example of a flexible task that allows learners to give a positive, non-biased interpretation of events, reduce over-simplification of non-English-speaking cultures, share cultural information and lessen stereotypes imposed on them. Such negotiation with material content is important, in view of research into cultural values in ELT materials that has indicated that many coursebooks are filled with cultural stereotyping that distorts reality (Ndura, 2004), simplifies many cultures (Skopinskaja, 2003) and marginalises less privileged social groups (Sherlock, 2016).

Types of task that nurture children's creativity

There is presently a strong tendency for children to start learning English at an earlier age than ever before, which has come as the result of education reform around the world. Because of this, the teaching of English to young learners is becoming a field of study in its own right. While there is little SLA evidence that supports the superiority of an early start, when it comes to creativity or creative learning, educators and scholars in early childhood education tend to agree that the earlier the better. The flexibility of the young mind, which applies to learning in any field, needs a foundation of early learning for children to continue being creative when growing into adulthood.

Unlike many adults, children come into the learning environment with a great deal of inherent curiosity, physical vitality, the passion to play and a sense of resistance to formal learning. The dynamic of such a disposition suggests that the resources for capturing children's interest and attention also differ from what inspires adult learners. Young learners need more individualised attention, social guidance, toys, games, props, fantasy, kinaesthetic play and the conditions for exploring the world, which is still fresh to them. With this understanding, Chapter 5, by Dat Bao and Ranran Liu, provides some ideas for the construction of tasks taht will tap into the learners’ creative responses. These ideas, which come from a discussion of literature related to both L2 learning and children's creative development, are presented in a framework of references/criteria to assist ELT materials writers in designing English language tasks that simultaneously meet children's learning needs and allow for pleasurable play.

How constraints impede or promote creativity

Although creativity is often defined as freedom from control, Tan Bee Tin in Chapter 6 provokes readers’ thinking by restating that creativity can be promoted by decreasing freedom. She argues that when there is less freedom, the constraint will recondition learners’ thinking mechanisms, to produce unpredictable outputs. This phenomenon, in my experience, is sometimes known as the psychology of limitation or the energy of despair. According to Wortman (2016), legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote the six-word story below, which is an excellent example of how limitation is capable of generating a masterpiece:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Tan Bee Tin also connects autonomy with creativity by arguing that learner autonomy can be promoted through creative tasks. In her observation, some learners faced with excessive freedom might avoid exercising autonomy but tend to rely on external resources, and one way to save them from such dependency is to provide constraints. Here, readers might come up with a counter-argument: in many cases, constraints might serve as guidance, which does not really promote autonomy. For example, when a teacher asks students to write about themselves and they are at a loss, the teacher might recondition the requirement and suggest that students write about what they have done in the past three days that they hated. This task then becomes easy. Would we regard the revised instruction as a constraint or as guidance? One might say it is constraint, which helps students exercise autonomy and write creatively. Another might suggest that it is guidance, which supports students in their writing output but in this case creativity and autonomy are not really involved. These scenarios suggest that constraints might need to be examined more qualitatively to be richly understood.

Materials writers in their task design might like to vary instructions for the same activity by suggesting different constraints and letting coursebook users decide which to try. In a research study on the effect of constraint on creativity, Joyce (2009) manipulated constraints along a continuum from low to high for stimulating learner creativity; moderate constraints tended to be more productive than high or low levels of constraint. The study also concluded that constraints can be either limiting or directing. For instance, when the degree of challenge seems too high, learners may experience a threatening emotion that restricts creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). In addition, it is believed that both absolute freedom and heavy constraint can be damaging to creative effort (...