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.