Applied Linguistics and Materials Development

Brian Tomlinson, Brian Tomlinson

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441133953
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Didattica nell'ambito linguistico e artistico

Focuses for the first time on materials development and applications of current research and theory for the main areas of applied linguistics (e.g. second language acquisition, pragmatics, vocabulary studies). There are many books on applied linguistic theory and research and there are now a number of books on the principled development of materials for language learning, but this book takes a new approach by connecting the two concerns. Each of its chapters first of all presents relevant theories and research conclusions for its area and then considers practical applications for materials development. The chapters achieve these applications by reporting and commenting on current theory and research, by analysing the match between current published materials and current theory and by suggesting and exemplifying applications of current theory to materials development. This will be an essential resource both for those studying or teaching materials development and for those studying or teaching applied linguistics.

1

Introduction:

Applied linguistics and materials
development

Brian Tomlinson

What is the relationship between applied linguistics and
materials development?

Theory and practice

For many years applied linguists have been lamenting the gap between applied linguistics theory and language teaching practice while at the same time predicting that it is about to be reduced. For example, Allwright and Bailey (1991, p. xv) admitted that many researchers ‘have given research a bad name’ by failing to demonstrate that they are concerned with ‘what works in the classroom’. They say, however, that there ‘are signs that a reconciliation between teachers and researchers is already taking place’ and they hope to ‘show that language classroom research can be directly relevant to teachers’. Tomlinson (1998, p. 343) stresses the need to bring together researchers, teachers, writers and publishers and says that, ‘Only by pooling resources will we ever be able to answer some of the questions we need to ask if we are to really increase the effectiveness of the materials which we produce’. Nunan (2005, p. 234) agrees with Carr and Kemmis (1985, p. 8) that a great deal of research ‘has little to do with [teachers’] everyday, practical concerns’ but sees promise in action research as a means of ‘bridging this gap between research and practice’. Ellis (2010, p. 34) refers to the many second language acquisition (SLA) researchers who have warned that SLA findings are not ‘sufficiently robust to warrant applications to language pedagogy’ but argues that, ‘Teachers . . . cannot wait until researchers have solved all their problems and ask only that they base their proposals on the best information available’. Tomlinson (2011) repeats his 1998 plea for researchers, teachers, writers and publishers to collaborate on projects applying research findings to practice and again offers MATSDA (the Materials Development Association) as an agent to facilitate such collaboration. MATSDA Conferences (and especially the 2012 MATSDA/University of Limerick Conference on ‘Applied Linguistics and Materials Development’) are one way being tried to bring research and practice closer together. But here I am again in 2012 worrying about the gap between what research tells us would probably facilitate L2 language acquisition and what is actually done in materials development to help learners achieve acquisition. This book is an attempt to find out what the gaps between theory and practice are in relation to materials development and to make suggestions as to how to reduce the gaps so as to help learners to learn in more efficient and effective ways.

If there are big gaps between applied linguistics theory and materials development practice it is useful to ask why. Some possible reasons are that applied linguistics theories:

•are often written about in language which is not easily accessible to practitioners;

•sometimes seem difficult to apply to materials development;

•do not seem to take into account such realities of classroom practice as large classes, unmotivated learners, lack of adequate time, lack of resources and the need for examination preparation;

•are unappealing to materials developers as their application would require innovations which might prove unacceptable to the users of their materials.

For a fuller discussion of possible reasons for disconnections between theory and practice see Chapter 2 of this book.

Principles of applied linguistics and procedures of materials development

It is very revealing to try to find out how materials developers actually go about designing materials. Do they consciously apply theory to their practice or are they driven by their instincts and the apparent results of previous practice?

Tomlinson (2012) reveals how reports of what materials writers actually do shows that they typically ‘rely heavily on retrieval from repertoire, cloning successful publications and spontaneous “inspiration”’ (p. 11). For example, in Hidalgo et al. (1995) materials writers in South-East Asia describe how they write materials. Some of them talk about applying theoretical principles to the development of their materials but ‘many report replicating previous materials, adapting activity types which . . . worked for them before and relying upon creative inspiration’ (p. 11). The writers in Prowse (1998, 2011) report similar pragmatic approaches to materials development and say that ideas come to them as they are writing or doing something else and that they rely both on inspiration and their willingness to write many drafts until they get the materials right. Obviously they are being driven by subconscious principles based on their knowledge of theory plus their experience of practice but none of them report developing principled criteria or frameworks before or while writing. This was true also in Johnson’s (2003) experiment in which he invited eight expert materials writers and eight novice writers to ‘design an activity involving the function of describing people’ (p. 4). He asked each writer to think aloud as they wrote their materials and then he analysed their ‘concurrent verbalisations’. He found that the experts, for example, designed in opportunistic ways, instantiated as they wrote, and used repertoire a lot.

There are some publications, however, which either report writers applying principles to practice or suggest ways of doing so. Tomlinson (2011) proposes principles for materials development which derive from SLA research and from his experience of classroom practice, and a number of other writers outline principled approaches to developing L2 materials in Tomlinson (2011). For example, Jolly and Bolitho (2011) advocate a principled, practical and dynamic framework for materials development and Bell and Gower (2011) articulate principles which they try to apply when writing materials. They also stress the need, however, to make compromises to meet the needs of teachers and learners and to match the objectives and constraints of the publishers. McGrath (2002) provides a review of the literature on principled advice for materials developers, Tomlinson ((ed.) 2003) and Harwood (2010a) contain many chapters either advocating or reporting the application of theory to practice in materials development, Harwood (2010b) reviews the literature on task design and concludes that language materials cannot only be shaped by research but need to suit the contexts in which they are used and Tomlinson and Masuhara (2010) contains research reports of the effects of applying theory to practice in materials innovation.

A book which focuses on the application of principles to practice is Tomlinson ((ed.) 2008). This provides principle-driven evaluations of ELT materials in use in different parts of the world and it also contains an introductory chapter on ‘Language acquisition and language-learning materials’, which proposes ways of applying commonly agreed theories of language acquisition to materials development. It also lists such principles as:

•the language experience needs to be contextualized and comprehensible;

•the language and discourse features available for potential acquisition need to be salient, meaningful and frequently encountered;

•the learner needs to achieve deep and multidimensional processing of the language (Tomlinson, 2008, p. 4).

A principle-driven chapter which has been applied to a number of materials development projects is Tomlinson (2003). This chapter proposes a principled text-driven framework which was developed on a project in Namibia for which 30 teachers came together and wrote the first draft of the coursebook On Target (1995) in 6 days. The framework was driven by such principles as:

•the learners’ need for a rich and meaningful exposure to language in use;

•the value of encouraging personal responses to experience of language in use;

•the importance of providing opportunities for genuine communication;

•the value of helping learners to make and apply discoveries about how the language is used.

Since the publication of this chapter the approach it advocates has been used on materials development projects in China, Ethiopia, Singapore and Turkey.

An area of applied linguistics which has made efforts to achieve a match between theory and practice in materials development is corpus linguistics. For example, O’Keefe et al. (2007) is concerned with how corpora can be used to inform and generate classroom activities and McCarten and McCarthy (2010) investigates ways in which coursebooks make use of corpora as well as describing an approach to ‘bridging the gap between corpus and coursebook’ (p. 11). Gilmore (2009) and Farr et al. (2010) suggest ways of using corpora as language resources and Willis (2011) exemplifies ways in which teachers and students can develop their own corpora.

The aims of applied linguistics and materials development

The main aim of this book is to investigate the match between applied linguistics theory and materials development practice. Cook (2008) has investigated what a language teacher can expect to gain from SLA theory and Tomlinson (2007, (ed.) 2008, 2010, 2011), Ellis (2010, 2011) and Harwood (2010a, b) have discussed the application of SLA research and theory to materials development for language learning. However I do not know of any publication which has explicitly tackled the topic of the application of applied linguistics research and theory to the development of materials for language learning. That is what this book sets out to do. It focuses on major areas of applied linguistics and for each one it reports the current theories of the area and investigates their application to materials development. In doing so it attempts to not only find out what is and what is not being applied but it aims also to give practitioners information about research findings and theories with the potential for useful application. It also makes suggestions for ways of applying them, not in order to be prescriptive but in order to stimulate thought, experiment and innovation.

In Chapter 9 of this book, Ben Fenton-Smith refers to Murray and Crichton’s (2010) survey of 39 Australian universities to determine what is actually meant by the term ‘applied linguistics’. He considers two of their conclusions to be particularly pertinent to his chapter: (i) discourse analysis is one of the seven core courses that appears in the majority of programmes; and (ii) language teaching ‘is arguably the context of application with the best developed career pathway and this has implications for enrolment numbers’ (p. 15.12). Fenton-Smith makes the point that ‘it is surprising how many books on discourse analysis pay little attention to its connection to language teaching’ and argues that those responsible for discourse analysis courses should ask ‘In what profession will my students be most likely to apply the principles of discourse analysis?’ His answer is ‘language teaching’. It is arguably true that this is the case for most of the modules on any applied linguistics course and yet there still seems to be a disconnection between applied linguistics theory and language teaching practice. In the 1980s we sent nearly 30 teacher trainers from the PKG Project in Indonesia (Tomlinson, 1990) to do postgraduate courses at a number of institutions in the United Kingdom. They came back saying that their courses were interesting but they could not see the connection between the modules they studied and their jobs in Indonesia as teacher trainers and materials developers. I hear similar complaints today about applied linguistics courses all over the world (with some exceptions, such as the MA in Materials Development at the International Graduate School in Seoul). It is to help both academics and practitioners to achieve greater connection between applied linguistics and language teaching that this book has been written. It is not saying that all theories should be applied to practice but it is saying that all theories should be communicated in ways which make them accessible to practitioners and that practitioners at all levels should keep in touch with relevant research findings and consider ways of applying potentially useful findings to their local context. I hope that this book will make not only a small contribution to helping practitioners to do this but will also help researchers to be more aware of the realities of practice and that it might inspire other publications which attempt to provide a direct link between theory and practice.

An appeal to the reader

Please read this book critically and constructively. It aims not just to inform and stimulate but to influence developments too. If you are a materials developer or a teacher please think of ways of applying to your practice those points whose value you are persuaded of by writers in this book. If you then modify your practice please research the effects of your modifications and write up your research as a potential chapter for a follow-up volume to this book. If you are an academic please consider modifications to your theories of language and language learning. Then apply one of your modified theories to an aspect of materials development, research the effects of this adaptation and write up your research as a potential chapter for a follow-up publication.

In 2016 I plan to put together a follow-up publication to this book which reports the effects of innovative approaches to m...