Some basic considerations a.The age and level of the learners who will be using the materials. b.The extent to which any adopted methodology meets the expectations of learners, teachers and educational culture within which teachers work. c.The extent to which any contexts and co-texts which are employed in order to present the grammar area(s) will be of interest to learners. General factors applying to all kinds of material design

Task design - Reading  Background knowledge and schemata (mental structures that store our knowledge are very important).  Successful reading involves identifying sound / symbol correspondences, using grammatical knowledge to recover meaning, skimming and scanning and relating text content to one’s background knowledge, as well as identifying the rhetorical or functional intention of individual sentences.

Reading activities Skimming vs scanning / Prediction, schemata activation  Matching texts to headlines or pictures (same or different number of tests / other items)  Ordering  Open questions  True or false  Multiple choice  Inserting sentences  Introducing grammar and / or vocabulary items  Jigsaw reading / puzzles / finding differences

Reading and listening - factors Activities can be graded according to the general cognitive demands they make  Recognizing  Making sense  Going beyond the information given  Transferring and generalizing

Grammar Widdowson: “A communicative approach, properly conceived, does not involve the rejection of grammar. On the contrary, it involves the recognition of its central mediating role in the use and learning of language”

Grammar – Considerations II d. The nature of the grammatical areas to be dealt with, in terms of their form, their inherent meaning implications (if any) and how they are used in normally- occurring spoken or written discourse. e. The extent to which any language offered to the learners represents realistic use of the language and the extent to which activities for learners to produce language containing the target grammar will result in meaningful utterances which the learners would be likely to want to produce in their own non-classroom discourse. f. Any similarities or differences in form, function and form/function relationship between the target language and their mother tongue.

Grammar – Inductive or deductive? A deductive approach starts with the presentation of a rule and is followed by examples in which the rule is applied An inductive approach starts with some examples from which a rule is inferred.

Pros and cons – Deductive approach AdvantagesDisadvantages Direct and efficient Good for analytical learners  Dull and de-motivating  Some kinds of learners react negatively. Truthful Limited Clear Simple Familiar Relevant

Pros and cons – Inductive approach AdvantagesDisadvantages Rules discovered by learners will be more memorable. Implies greater cognitive effort. More student involvement usually means more motivation. Allows for collaborative work and extra language practice. Conducive to learner autonomy.  Time-consuming.  Wrong hypotheses.  Careful lesson planning needed  Some language areas resist rule formulation.  It’s frustrating for impatient students.

Evaluating grammar activities Grammar presentation and practice activities should be evaluated according to:  How efficient they are. Efficiency depends on: economy, ease, efficacy.  How appropriate they are. Appropriacy takes into account learners’ needs, interests, attitudes and expectations

Integrating grammar activities Two models: PPP: presentation – practice – production  Language learnt in bits and steps  Fluency develops out of accuracy TTT: task – teach – task  Language is acquired in lumps and leaps  Accuracy develops after fluency

Making grammar exercises memorable

Speaking When a thought becomes an utterance: o Conceptualization o Formulation o Articulation o Self-monitoring o Fillers o Turn-taking o Paralinguistic factors

Speaking – helping learners  Raising learners’ awareness about features of speaking  Exposure to recorded or live samples of spoken language.  “Notice the gap” activities to compare themselves with skilled speakers.  Progressive reduction of support to encourage independence.

Criteria for speaking tasks Productivity Purposefulness Interactivity Challenge Safety Authenticity

Material design – Practical considerations  Layout and format  Source of pictures and other elements.  Key  Teacher’s Guide  Tags