Concepts and Terms

The material developers should diversify language instruction as much as possible based upon the variety of cognitive styles and the variety of affective attitudes found amongst a typical class of learners. For ways of doing this see page.19

Concepts and Terms

12) Materials should take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes Learners should have strong and consistent motivation and positive feelings towards the target language, their teachers, their fellow learners and the materials they are using in order to learn. However, learners differ in motivation, feeling towards the language, the teacher and the material. Actually it is difficult to cater for all these motivational, attitudinal and affective variables but materials writers should be aware of these differences.

Concepts and Terms

13) Materials should permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction It is extremely valuable to delay L2 speaking for beginners of a language until they have gained sufficient confidence in understanding it. This silent period can facilitate the development of an effective internalised grammar which can help learners to achieve proficiency when they eventually start to speak in L2. Premature speaking should not be forced by the materials. See p.20-21 for the ways of possibility of not speaking until they are ready: Activities which require comprehension rather than production should initially be introduced. (mimes, drawings etc)

Concepts and Terms

14) Materials should maximise learning potentials by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic and emotional involvement which stimulates both right and left brain activities. Mechanical drills, rule learning, simple transformation activities require very little cognitive processing and lead to shallow and ephemeral learning. However, a variety of analytic, creative, evaluative and rehearsal activities which stimulate mental and affective processing can lead to deeper, more durable learning.

Concepts and Terms

The activities should not be too simple and they should not be easily achieved without the learners making use of their previous experience and their brains. Developing materials which help the learners to make full use of their mental resources while learning and using L2 is very beneficial.

Concepts and Terms

15)Materials should not rely too much on controlled practice. Controlled practice appears to have long little long term effecton the accuracy with which new structures are performed, and has little effect on fluency. See p.2 Final paragraph.

Concepts and Terms

16) Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback Feedback which is focused on the effectiveness of the outcome rather than just on the accuracy of the output can lead to output becoming a profitable source of input. Therefore, if the language is evaluated in relation to the purpose for which it is used, that langauge can become a powerful and informative source of information about language use. (focus should be on communication, language use rather than correction; see example on page 23) It is very important for material developers to make sure that language production activities have intended outcomes other than just practising language.