The document provides guidelines for producing self-access learning materials on a limited budget with time constraints. It describes utilizing authentic materials and exploiting them through various exercises targeting different skills and levels. Quality control is ensured through a multi-stage peer review process. Short, single-focused materials are recommended for ease of learner use within limited timespans. Guidelines include stating clear aims, providing feedback, and designing materials for attractiveness within budget limits.

1. Guidelines for the production
of in-house self-access
materials
Lum Yoke Lin and Ray Brown
This article describes some practical guidelines evolved by staff in a large-
scale self-access project in Malaysia. The guidelines concern the
production of self-access materials in a situation where staff are often very
hard-pressed, where both quantity and quality are required, and where
there is a felt need to give an in-house look to the materials. The writers
hope these guidelines may be of sufficient generality to interest those
developing self-access materials in other parts of the world.
The value of in- A self-access project could rely on using only commercially-published
house materials materials, and indeed many do. But there are problems in following this
road. Firstly, it is likely to be costly in financial terms, for if copyright laws
are to be respected, and you are going to cut up and paste materials onto
learner cards, you will normally need to purchase three copies of every
publication you use - two for the cutting and pasting and one as a
reference copy. Secondly, commercial materials, even when they are
advertised as ‘self-study’, do not generally offer the guidance and
presentational clarity required of self-instructional materials, so the
mediation of a teacher is often indispensable. And thirdly, most
commercial materials in ELT tend to be Euro-centred or America-centred
and do not contain themes that are culturally familiar to learners in, say, an
Asian or African environment. For reasons such as these, and to a greater
or lesser extent, many self-access centres produce in-house materials.
However, as already stated, though the final product may be useful and
appropriate, there are problems in producing such materials, and in the
project we have been working on we have had to face some major ones:
- lack of time (on the part of a busy staff) for the writing of materials.
- the need to evolve an ‘in-house look’ so that the materials would have a
recognizable identity.
- the task of ensuring both quantity and quality. This implies aiding staff
to manage their time effectively, to set objectives, and to monitor the
quality of the product.
Through dealing with these problems over an extended period of time we
believe we have learnt a few lessons about the kind of in-house materials
that can be successfully produced within existing constraints, as well as
ways of ensuring quality control of those materials. However simple and
humble they may be, we would like to share these lessons with readers of
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2. this article. We present them under the headings of the three major
problems outlined above.
Shortage of staff Although the Self-Access Project in Malaysia has been supported by central
time for materials educational authorities, it is the responsibility of teacher trainers in
writing individual colleges to produce their own self-access materials. These
teacher trainers, besides having their own often busy timetables, have to
perform many other duties, such as observing trainees in their teaching
practice, counselling, conducting extra-mural activities, preparing national
examinations and national syllabuses, and other non-academic duties.
Under such constraints the teacher trainer can produce only a limited
number of materials for the self-access centre and often, sad to say, his or her
full enthusiasm is not engaged in this work. The pull towards adapting
commercially-published materials is strong. Very seldom do writers have
the time to experiment with the exploitation of authentic materials.
However, authentic materials - a piece of written, audio, or video ‘text’ ,
a picture or a newspaper cutting - used as input for materials writing have
a great deal of potential. The secret lies in applying creativity and
ingenuity, and in finding time-saving ways of achieving that potential.
Source material can be exploited through a number of exercises of
different levels and types which develop different skills. This could save
time in the search for suitable source materials since the same piece is
‘recycled’ a number of times. Because such a system would guide the
writer towards developing a choice of exercises or activity types - a
typology - ‘pencil-chewing time’ could virtually be eliminated.
This approach is illustrated in Figure 1, which presents a wide range of
possibilities for the materials writer to refer to when he or she intends to
fully exploit a piece of authentic material.
Figure 1: Ways of Input Skill Level Exercise/activity
exploiting source
Source Listening Elementary 1 multiple choice
material
material (e.g. Speaking Intermediate 2 true/false
text, picture, Reading Advanced 3 yes/no
tape, etc.) Writing 4 gap-filling
Grammar 5 matching
Pronunciation 6 listing
(others) 7 sound discrimination
8 shadow reading
9 sequencing
10 cloze exercise
11 completion exercise
12 parallel writing
13 letter writing
14 report writing
15 composition writing
16 simplification
17 transformation exercise
18 summary
19 communicative activity
20 open-ended questions
(others)
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3. To illustrate how this framework can be used, a piece of authentic
material, a cartoon strip taken from a local newspaper (see Appendix),
was given to a group of materials writers to exploit during a self-access
materials writing workshop. The participants were asked to come up with
a number of exercises and activities using the table in Figure 1 as a
guideline. Although the input was a simple cartoon strip, numerous
exercises and activities were generated (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Exploiting a Input Skill Level Exercise/activity
cartoon strip for
Source Grammar Elementary 1 gap-filling (contractions, e.g. You’ve,
materials production
material Intermediate I’m)
(cartoon) Advanced 2 transformation from direct speech to
indirect speech
3 use of adjectives to describe
appearances
4 use of adverbs to describe action
5 error identification (punctuation)
1 practise intonation
2 identification of language form and
Speaking function
3 dialogue between:
- maid and friend
- maid and employer
- employer and husband
- officer and colleague
4 discussion - to predict outcome
5 description of facial expressions,
feelings, attitudes
1 dialogue between:
- maid and friend
- maid and employer
- employer and husband
Writing - officer and colleague
2 narrative of event
3 story completion
4 letters
5 filling in speech bubbles
However, we may also choose to produce materials on a smaller scale, by
concentrating on one particular skill. Using this more restricted approach
we managed to produce five pieces of self-access material based on one
skill-listening-and using one piece of input-a short story (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Exploiting a Input Skill Level Exercise/Activity
text for listening practice
Source Listening Elementary 1 listening for pleasure
material 2 shadowreading
3 dictation
4 listening for gist
Intermediate 1 true/false statements
2 listening for gist
3 summary writing
Advanced 1 open-ended questions
‘In-house’ look Apart from wanting our material to be attractive we also wanted it to have its
own style, to be recognized by others and by our own people as ‘our’
product. We felt that in a project where staff were working hard to generate
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4. materials it was important that the materials should be ‘theirs’. We found
eventually that four features combined to make our materials identifiable:
1 statement of aims
2 provision of feedback
3 a single focus for each piece of material
4 keeping material short.
Statement of aims The purpose of stating the aim at the beginning and at the top of the page is
to enable learners to see very quickly what the material contains, and
whether or not it may relate to their needs. The aim could be stated in a
formal way, e.g.
This unit helps you to identify present tenses and the contexts in
which they are normally used.
But more and more we came to prefer an informal style, e.g.
How good are you at making words? Try this material and find out
how good you are at forming words from base words.
Or:
Do you have problems with prepositions? Are you uncertain which
preposition to use sometimes? If so, this material should help you.
Learners can check the level of the material by referring to its
classification number.
Feedback Feedback is provided on the back of the last sheet of the material. No
serious difficulty has been encountered due to learners cribbing answers,
and though this could be a problem with younger learners it could be
easily overcome by having separate answer sheets. We were still faced
with a problem, however, when it was not possible to provide definite
answers, for example with open-ended activities. Our solution has been to
devise awareness-raising checklists, so that learners are encouraged to
reflect upon and assess their own performance. We see this as a potential
tool for developing greater learner responsibility, and also coincidentally
as a way of promoting the reflective practice they are encouraged to
develop as teachers. An example of a checklist for assessing a speaking
activity is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Speaking Feedback for individual work Feedback for pair work
assessment Listen to your recording. If there is no Listen to your recording. If there is no
recording, reflect on what you have recording, reflect on what your partner
said and answer the following said and answer the following
questions. questions.
1 Was it difficult to do the activity? 1 Could you understand what your
2 Could you keep talking without a lot partner said?
of pausing? 2 Did your partner pause a lot when
3 Did you have problems with talking?
pronunciation? 3 Was it difficult to understand your
4 Were there any words that you didn’t partner’s pronunciation?
understand? 4 Did your partner use the right
5 Can you remember any grammar words?
mistakes you made? 5 Did your partner make any grammar
mistakes?
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5. A single focus Usually each piece of material has just one focus. This enables a learner to
target a particular identifiable weakness. We are aware that there is a loss
of integration here and a loss of ‘communicative reality’, but self-access
work is only one means available to our learners and we do have other
materials, in the form of reading, audio, and video materials, which are
not discretely presented in this way: we remain convinced of the value of
single-focus material for self-access learners who have been trying to
identify their particular problems and who are keen to improve their
ability in specific points of language.
Length and Our material is generally short: two or three pages. This is to allow our
timespan trainees some discretion about the time they spend in the self-access
centre. Even if they only spend fifteen minutes, they can nevertheless do
something. Also, we believe that shorter material is better assimilated, as
it makes fewer demands on the student’s concentration span.
Attractiveness To enhance the appearance of our materials while still working within the
constraints of our budgets we have made use of:
- paper of different colours for different language areas, or for different
levels
- bold lettering and varying typefaces, when available
- careful layout
- simple hand-done highlighting devices, e.g.
It seems to us that the need for attractiveness in materials is in inverse
proportion to the closeness of the producer (or teacher) to the learner. In a
situation where the teacher produces self-access materials for his or her
own class the material can be much more informal, and may even benefit
from being ‘unpackaged’. In the case of a large project, however,
packaging is important. And this is closely bound up with quality control.
Quantity and We required quantity because a self-access centre serving a whole college
quality needs a considerable amount of material to be effective in catering for
every learner’s needs. But we also required quality. Some of our earlier
materials were found to contain defects, and concerted efforts had to be
made to maintain quality. Quality-related problems were evident in
pedagogical content and in presentation.
As a general strategy to ensure quality in the project we gradually
developed a modified system of total quality control. What was essential
was to get quality control as far back into the early stages of the process as
possible. Too often we had seen material go through conception,
composition, and final draft, only to discover serious defects at the very
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6. end of the process - many of them having crept in at the early stages. So
the answer was to have quality control at different stages of the production
process, starting from the very beginning. We found that, in general,
materials production followed this route:
1 choice of source material
2 decision about what to use material for
3 manipulation of material to suit intent
4 writing and re-writing
5 final presentation
6 proof-reading
We realized that quality control had to be implemented at each of these
stages, initially by the writer and his or her peers, and later by a central
quality control group. In our residential materials production workshops
we now have a system of:
1 Peer-group quality control in which peers from the same writing group
vet material at stages 1 to 5.
2 Inter-group quality control to monitor stages 1 to 5 already controlled
by the peer-group.
3 Final quality control by a limited and experienced group, followed by
proof-reading: a very important but sometimes underestimated task.
The material might be returned to the writer at any of these stages but
hopefully and in practice, that tends to happen at the peer-group quality
control stage. In this way, as a general rule, only good material reaches the
final quality control stage. Time is saved; face is saved.
To have good quality control we need to train the quality controllers. In
the early stages there was a tendency to concentrate on trivia and offer
alternatives that were no better than the original. This was time-wasting.
So we saw a need to train the vetters which, in effect, meant everybody
involved in the peer-groups. They were trained to see the writer’s point of
view and not only their own, to be tolerant of styles and approaches that
might not be to their own taste, while at the same time seeing every piece
of material through the learner’s eyes to check that it was:
- clear (aim and content)
- appropriate (to priorities, needs, levels)
- correct (in terms of explanations and answers)
- well-presented (all possibilities for attractiveness exploited)
Concluding Each self-access centre is unique. It is not possible to reproduce a number
remarks of self-access centres according to a set model or template. Thus, in the
project that we have been working on, all twenty-eight centres have their
unique local problems and preferences, and this gives them their
individual characters. What we have tried to convey in this article are
guidelines of a generally applicable nature, which we hope will apply to
other centres as well.
Received April 1992
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7. Acknowledgement self-access learning materials. She did her first degree
The authors and publishers are grateful for at the University of Malaya and spent a period
permission to reproduce the cartoon ‘New deadline training at the College of Saint Mark and Saint John,
for illegal maids’ by Reggie Lee, from the Malay Plymouth, UK.
Mail, 12 November 1991.
The authors Ray Brown is an English Language Teaching Officer
Lum Yoke Lin lectures in TESL methodology and working for The British Council/ODA as Consultant
language proficiency at Gaya Teacher Training for the Self-Access Project in Malaysia. He has
College, Sabah, East Malaysia. She has been previously worked in Egypt, Sri Lanka, Mali,
involved in the Self-Access Project in Malaysia since Algeria, and the UK. His professional interests are in
its inception in 1989 and is particularly interested in teacher training and in self-directed learning.
Appendix
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