Materials and Methods: Need they be in conflict?
paper presented by George Vassilakis at the TESOL Greece Saturday seminar on Material Choice and Development in the EFL Classroom (9th February 1997)
Introduction
If methods is the how of teaching and materials is the what, then to examine issues pertinent to their relationship would be tantamount to examining almost the whole of the language teaching complex. My principal concern, however, in this paper, is teaching materials, and, more specifically, published teaching materials and why they are less than satisfactory in most cases. Methods will only be referred to in so far as they determine, or, as I hope to prove, are determined by the materials in question.
The nature of coursebook materials
Coursebook materials are commercially available packages [1], which typically consist of a student's book, a teacher's book, and a number of the following components: a workbook or activity book, tests, additional reading material, cassettes for listening, cassettes for pronunciation, video, CALL materials, additional grammar practice material, and, in the Greek ELT context, a companion. The sheer number of components available suggests that the coursebook package is offered as a complete course that should not be in need of supplementation. The intention of providing all there is to provide is clear in the descriptions given in publishers' blurbs, which invariably contain adjectives such as integrated, comprehensive, complete, multi-skill and the like; it must also be the reason why most of the courses published in the last ten years include additional `resource' material in the form of photocopiable worksheets in the teacher's book.
Thus, coursebooks are what Prabhu [2] would describe as fully-specified materials: they are pre-constructed, and as such ensure a certain amount of uniformity in what takes place in different classrooms with different teachers and students, which serves the interests of accountability, but also makes them non-negotiable, and can prevent the teacher from identifying with classroom events by turning her into a transmitter of content. Very little decision-making is usually assigned to the teachers, apart from determining the overall goals of the language learning programme [3].
Coursebook materials are then, to a large extent, realisations of methods seen as theoretical constructs, but they are also determinants of methods if seen as pedagogic action. In other words, materials are the implementation of a method and classroom practice is the implementation of the materials. So what actually boils down to the learners is a version of the method which has been filtered through the materials as implemented by a teacher with decision making capacities which are increasingly undermined by the materials themselves.
The nature of methods
Looking at what the concept of method involves will help clarify the issues. According to a well-known model suggested by Richards and Rodgers [4], who adapt and elaborate on Anthony 's [5] original analysis of method, a method consists of three interdependent components: Approach, Design and Procedure. These components reflect the conceptualisations of a method regarding the areas shown below:
Materials as determinants of methods
In this model, materials feature as one of the sub-elements of Design, which, given the hierarchical structure of Richards and Rodgers' construct, is determined by the theoretical Approach and informs the final level of Procedure. It will be noticed, however, that, in practice, the role of the materials in question, namely commercially available coursebook packages, is in reality much further-reaching than that; more often than not, instructional materials provide the actual syllabus of the class they are intended for, specify the bulk of the learning and teaching activities used, delimit learner and teacher roles through instrumental texts [6] both in the student's and in the teacher's book, dictate techniques to be used, mainly in the teacher's guide, regulate the patterns of interaction, and even supply the means for evaluation of learning.
Evidently, then, instructional materials embrace five out of six sub-components on the level of Design as well as the bulk of the Procedure specification, so that the selection of a particular coursebook package entails selection of a particular method which may or may not be explicitly stated [7] but is clearly realised in that package [8]. The underlying approach and the overall objectives of the course are apparently left to the teacher to determine, and ideally, her choice of coursebook should reflect and be consistent with the approach and objectives agreed on. However, this presupposes on the one hand that the teacher has, indeed, formulated such an approach and determined such objectives, and that the coursebook package is also structured upon a similar theoretical base, as well as being characterised by an internal consistency which should validate the whole materials development process.
For the purposes of greater descriptive accuracy, I would propose that Richards and Rodgers' model be adjusted as shown in the way shown below, so that the role of the EFL coursebook package in determining the content of the method becomes clearer.
It will be noticed that even the elements which are not directly coursebook-bound are not completely independent of coursebooks. Thus, it is often the case that the objectives pursued in the coursebook do not coincide in their totality with those of the learners as identified by teachers - but the decision not to use coursebook material that may not serve the class's objectives is reluctantly made by teachers, who, as stated above, normally adopt the coursebook as a “package deal”. Teachers' behaviours are also very often not considered outside the scope of the coursebook, which, in the teacher's guide, often contains suggestions and recommendations that should not normally be the coursebook authors' concern [9].
Learner needs and the coursebook package
All this suggests that coursebooks, in their modern form of course packages, are actually much more than just sources of material to be used by teachers as they see fit. They are in essence determinants of methods, realisations of approaches that are usually not explicitly stated and therefore cannot be agreed upon. Moreover, they are designed for immediate implementation, and as Widdowson [10] would put it, “to the extent that ....[they]... aim for general pedagogical effectiveness, they are prescriptions. They presuppose that the particularities of different classrooms are not determinants of teaching and learning, but are incidental.” Of course, it can be argued that the materials development process can take account of such factors as the “particularities of different classrooms” so that these particularities do in fact determine the content of teaching and learning as realised in the materials. And indeed, in models of such processes like the one proposed by Stern [11] (see Figure 3 below for an adapted version), both research and documentation and pilot testing and field trials seem to play an important role, but in reality this is not how coursebook packages are produced; many authors admit `simply typing and sending to their publishers' [12] and even when pilot testing takes place, this is usually small scale and does not entail representative samples of the teacher and student population envisaged, as even a cursory glance at the Acknowledgements section of most coursebooks would indicate.
CLT and the Coursebook Package: the Conflict
The conflict referred to in the title of this paper is thus becoming clearly delimited: if materials are, to a large extent, determinants of methods actually implemented, if they are prescriptions for classroom practice, then surely the classroom practice which they are supposed to enhance should be seriously taken into account in the materials development process. In fact, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which seems to be well established as the dominant theoretical model in the area of ELT methodology [13], stresses the importance of learner needs as a starting point in the syllabus design process [14] : these learner needs, however, cannot be taken into account if the target population is as diverse as the potential users of the coursebook packages produced for international use. Admittedly, certain other tenets of CLT are apparently observed, with the one most conspicuously making its appearance in coursebook pages being that which recommends the use of authentic materials. However, once more, the very nature of the coursebook package entails a de-authentication of such materials as their authenticity is constrained to their being genuine instances of language use, without being authentic to the learners for whom they are intended and therefore appropriate material for learning [15], as the identity of these learners can hardly be established.
The question of method awareness
There seems, therefore, to be a fundamental contradiction in the make-up of contemporary coursebook packages: on the one hand they claim to subscribe to the communicative approach, while on the other they disregard, almost by definition, such basic principles of Communicative Language Teaching as the primacy of learners' needs and the issue of authentication of materials for and by the learner [16]. In reality, CLT methodology is merely paid lip service to in many of these materials [17], and as a result, in many language teaching classrooms.
The fact that the approach the materials are based upon is rarely, if ever, made explicit by the materials writers, in conjunction with the fact that teachers, too, are often unaware of the principles underlying their classroom practices, suggests that materials will be selected and used and, consequently, methods will be implemented, which may not be pedagogically or educationally desirable, appropriate, or effective. For this reason, it is imperative that teachers develop a set of selection criteria which address the methodological relevance of coursebook packages.
The need for global appraisal
As far as criteria for detailed evaluation of coursebook content are concerned, there is no lack of guidance. Evaluation checklists abound, some of them very specific indeed [18], and application of the criteria included in them to the evaluation of coursebook materials can yield very good results in so far as the relative effectiveness of the various components of skills and systems practice is to be determined. The internal consistency of coursebooks, however, and their accountability to theoretical constructs of the nature of language and learning does not seem to be touched upon by such itemised checklists.
Perhaps what is needed is a tool for appraisal of the coursebook package as method in the sense described by Richards and Rodgers. But this presupposes that the same tool can be used for the discovery and appraisal of teachers' own perceptions of language and language learning, since it is against these that the instructional materials can be evaluated. At the same time, such a tool should make explicit reference to the specific learners the teacher has in mind, in order that the contradiction described above can be resolved.
This would entail what Cunningsworth and Kusel (1991), in their article on evaluating teachers' guides, described as global appraisal, but would have to contain a methodology-awareness component. A simple questionnaire that would bring out basic methodological assumptions of teachers and coursebooks appears as below[19]. Similar instruments of a more analytical type could be developed, however, based on questionnaires developed to identify teachers' conceptions of [20] or attitudes towards [21] the Communicative Approach.
In addition to the identification of the teacher's preferred methodology and its comparison to the method implemented in the coursebook, measures need to be taken to constrain the function of the coursebook package by adapting, supplementing and omitting coursebook material in accordance with emerging learner needs and developing teacher attitudes. This then would entail a more profound awareness of the theoretical and pedagogical issues involved and result in an ad hoc materials development process which would replicate the first five stages in the process outlined in Figure 3. But such ad hoc processes, while being the ultimate aim of the exposition of the ideas in this paper, fall beyond its scope.
[1] See A Cunningsworth, Choosing your Coursebook, Oxford: Heinemann 1995, pp 25-28
[2] See N S Prabhu, Second Language Pedagogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987, pp. 94-95
[3] Even so, materials can contribute to, or even distort, the shape of these goals. See R L Allwright, What do we want teaching materials for? in English Language Teaching Journal 36, 1 (now in R Rossner and R Bolitho (eds) Currents of Change in English Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990, pp 131-147)
[4] See J C Richards and T S Rodgers (1986), Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. A description and analysis, Cambridge: Cambride University Press, pp 14-30
[5] See E M Anthony 1963, Approach, Method and Technique in English Language Teaching 17: pp 63-67
[6] as defined by Dendrinos (1992), who usefully distinguishes between instructional and instrumental texts in coursebooks; see B. Dendrinos, The EFL Textbook and Ideology, Athens: N C Grivas Publications, pp 29-30
[7] Cunningsworth and Kusel consider this to be a function of the teacher's book and suggest that the explicitness of the underlying approach should be a basic factor in evaluation. See A Cunningsworth and P Kusel (1991), Evaluating teachers' guides in English Language Teaching Journal 45/2, pp 128-139
[8] D Clarke (1990) in fact found that there was “some considerable dichotomy between what is theoretically recommended as desirable and what in fact gets published and used” in materials purporting to implement Communicative Language Teaching. See D Clarke Communicative Theory and its influence on materials production in Language Learning 25/1 1990, pp 73-86
[9] See A Cunningsworth and P Kusel, op. cit., pp 136-7
[10] See H G Widdowson (1990), Aspects of Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 63
[11] See H H Stern (1992), Issues and Options in Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 354
[12] As reported by C Brumfit (1980) in Seven last slogans in Modern English Teacher, 7/1 pp 30-31
[13] See G Thompson (1996), Some misconceptions about communicative language teaching in English Language Teaching Journal, 50/1, p 9
[14] See, for example, M P Breen, C Candlin and A Waters (1979), Communicative Materials Design: Some Basic Principles in RELC Journal, 10/2, pp 36-37, J Munby (1978), Communicative Syllabus Design, Cambride: Cambridge University Press, J Yalden (1984), The Communicative Syllabus: Evolution, Design and Implementation, Oxford: Pergamon
[15] See Brren M (1985), Authenticity in the Language Classroom in Applied Linguistics 6/1, H G Widdowson (1979), The authenticity of language data in Explorations in Applied Linguistics, pp 163 - 172, H G Widdowson (1996), Comment: authenticity and autonomy in ELT in English Language Teaching Journal 50/1, pp 67-68, and, most importantly, C Kramsch and P Sullivan (1996), Appropriate pedagogy in English Language Teaching Journal, 50/3
[16] See the relevant discussion in D F Clarke, op, cit., pp 78, 83-4
[17] See A Cunningsworth (1979), Evaluating course materials in Susan Holden (ed), Teacher Training, London: Modern English Publications, for discussion of this issue
[18] Such as the ones found in A Cunningsworth (1995), op. cit., which seem to me by far the most useful.
[19] This questionnaire is meant merely as an illustration. It purports to be consistent with CLT.
[20] See B Dendrinos, op. cit., pp 213-5
[21] See E Karavas-Doukas (1996), Using attitude scales to investigate teachers' attitudes to the communicative approach in English Language Teaching Journal, 50/3, pp 197-8