This document outlines key principles for developing effective English language teaching (ELT) materials. ELT materials should make the learning process easier for students and reduce anxiety while improving confidence. They should expose learners to authentic language use, provide opportunities for communication and feedback, and stimulate intellectual and emotional involvement. Materials need to be relevant to learners' interests and lives while accounting for different learning styles. They should allow a silent period for beginners and encourage both linguistic and non-linguistic involvement to stimulate learning.

1. Initial: Step 1 - To Look into for
Designing Teaching Material
JOHNNY ALEXANDER PULIDO ESPINOSA
CODE: 80245233
GROUP: 6
TUTOR: JAIRO GUTIERREZ DE PIÑERES
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA-UNAD
LICENCIATURA EN INGLES COMO LENGUA EXTRANJERA
ESCUELA DE CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN
BOGOTÁ
FEBRUARY-2019

2. ¿What should English Language
Learning (ELT) materials have?
ELT materials should make easier the learning process on
students, also the activities within the materials should reduce
nervousness, improve the confidence of learners, improve the
creativity on teachers and give many advantages to make this
process more appeal .

3. FEATURES
• Expose the learners to language in authentic use
• Provide the students with opportunities to use the language
to achieve communication purposes
• Stimulate intellectual an emotional involment
• Provide opportunities for feedback

4. These materials should attend the needs, interests and
preferences of learners and promoting, enjoyment, motivation
and engagement.
On my personal experience as an English teacher I choose my
activities based on my students’ preferences, for example,
current students really like topics relate with sports, famous
actors or singers but It also is important choosing materials
relate with the real world, so in that case they will develop social
competences and at the same time learners will learn how to
use the new language on situations of daily life.

5. ¿Proposals for Principled
Approaches to the
Development of ELT Materials?
According with Tomlinson, Brian (1998) there are certain
principles on the ELT materials development.

6. Materials should achieve
impact
Materials have to be appeal to the students by catching their
attention, curiosity and interests.
To achieve this, material developers should know everything
they can about culture target in order to identify learners’
needs.
These materials can be presented in a creative way by using:
photographs, engaging stories, texts from different resources,
etc.

7. Materials should help
learners to feel at ease
Anxiety is one of the biggest problems learners face at the
moment of learning a second language. Normally, teachers help
to reduce these issues but they can do it through materials too.
Materials should help students by:
• Including media elements like: pictures, images or videos
relate to their own culture
• Including activities where they feel they are learning a not to
be tested

8. Materials should help learners to
develop confidence
Stimulating learner’s minds and make them to use their extra-
linguistics skills will develop and raise their confidence.
In the words of Tomlinson, Brian (1998), “I prefer to attempt to
build confidence through activities which try to ‘push’ learners
slightly beyond their existing proficiency by engaging them in
tasks which are stimulating, which are problematic, but which
are achievable too”.
Teachers can achieve this if they use activities where learners
can develop their imagination and creativity, for example
creating short stories.

9. What is being taught should be
perceived by learners as relevant and
useful
In simple words this means that materials should convince
learners that teaching points are useful whereby teachers need
to find what the learners are interested in.
Activities based and extracted from “real-life” will promote this
kind of response on learners.

10. Materials should expose the
learners to language in authentic
use
Materials should provide learners with advice and instructions
for their activities, spoken language and written text. These
materials should show learners how is used the second language
on the real world.
Interviewing the teacher, doing a project in the local community
or listening to the radio are some activities that can be useful.

11. Materialsshould providethelearnerswith
opportunitiestouse the
targetlanguagetoachievecommunicative
purposes
Students use the L2 to communicate themselves in situations
where they speak almost all the time about topics of their
interest. Following this, the control of the teacher on these
speaking session will be minimal to let learners develop their
proficiency.

12. Materials should take into
account that learners differ in
learning styles
In this case materials provide a variety of activities supporting all
learning styles, we have many of them: visual learners, auditory
learners, kinaesthetic learners, studial learners, experiential
learners, analytic learners, global learners, dependent learners
and Independent learners.

13. Materials should permit a silent
period at the beginning of
instruction
Forcing learners to speak if they are not ready can be really
negative, so it is better give them a time where they process the
grammar and gain confidence. Of course, this should be applied
on early stages (beginners). Materials give learners a time to be
on silent and a time to speak a little bit.

14. Materialsshouldmaximiselearningpotentialby
encouragingintellectual,
aestheticandemotionalinvolvementwhichstimulates
bothright-andleftbrain
activities
The activities shouldn’t be too simple or easy, they should
stimulate feeling and toughs in the learners. The point is to
stimulates the cerebral process when learners receive and
create information. Some activates related to this approach are:
reciting a dialogue, dancing to instructions, singing a song, doing
a substitution drill, writing a story, etc.

15. REFERENCES
Tomlinson, B. (2011). Material development in Language
Teaching (2nd Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Retrieved from
http://www.lenguasvivas.org/campus/files/0_47/Material%20d
evelopment-Tomlinson.pdf