Language Teaching Materials and the
(Very) Big Picture
LTM are cultural artefacts, no less rooted in a particular time and culture than any other instance of
human activity, and, as such, are shaped by the context in which they occur.
ELT materials: the 1950s to the 1980s
1950's a period reflecting the birth of modern-day
language teaching.
The late 1960s to the late
1970s
Humanistic methodologies. A
well-known book from this
time was Stevick’s (1976)
“Memory, Meaning and
Method,” which featured
methodologies such as
Gattegno’s Silent Way
(Gattegno, 1972) and Lozanov’s
Suggestopaedia (Lozanov,
1978).
The 1950s/60s and the Cold
War
The 1958 National Defense
(Foreign Language) Act was
swiftly ushered in, providing
massive funds for the
development of language
programmes.
“English Pattern Practice”
The 1970s to the mid
1980s
individual’s particular needs
through models such as those
proposed by Munby (1981)
.‘Special Purposes’ as a distinct
branch of syllabus design.
“The Good Language Learner” study
(1978) seemed to take up the
decade’s sentiment in showing how
language learning was a
person-centred activity, thereby
kick-starting a major new strand of
materials development: learner
training. A well-known example of
this is Ellis and Sinclair’s “Learning
to Learn English,”
New imperatives on materials design: the mid
1980s onwards
The variety of experimental and new approaches through the
1970s–1990s has now been superseded by a sameness throughout
commercial publishing.
McDonaldization
Materials are routinely packaged
into ‘chunks’ of two-page
workplans often known as ‘units,’
‘modules,’ ‘blocks,’ ‘themes’. ‘warm
up’ activities may be routinely
followed by some reading, which
may be followed by grammar
work, which may give way to
written practice, before ending
with some ‘freer work’ (the
traditional PPP model)
Neo-liberalism
relates to a much broader
analysis of the social
context in which language
teaching takes place, that
of the nature of society as a
whole
the commodification of
language knowledge is
showing extensive
development is in the
area of language
certification, e.g.
Cambridge University
The proliferation of
language examinations may
constitute a good example
of how neoliberalism and
the market is shaping
language teaching
materials, a much more
significant development
from within the language
teaching profession itself
The real danger we are facing is that centrally determined decisions, far
removed from the teachers and learners concerned, will attempt to
impose a uniformity on what happens in classrooms