Materials Design

How can the six principles of a contextual approach be applied to create classroom materials? In a contextual approach classroom, teachers remain on the sidelines. However, they have a major role in the selection and preparation of materials. To begin with, use criteria such as topic, duration, and informational content to select multimedia materials. Once selected, use structural features of the text to identify important informational content such as the title(s), the introduction, and topic sentences. After choosing the most important ideas, use criteria such as importance to the topic and content to select constructions. Apart from the very beginning of a course of study when learners will need to know what to do, how to do it, and why they are doing it, the value of pre-watching activities is questionable. The key while watching activities are transcript-, note- and summary completion, and content question activities. It is suggested that learners record vocabulary in the order that they encounter it. The main suggestions for post-watching activities are use of flashcards, content recounts, and knowledge integration activities. A contextual approach is recommended for intermediate learners and above in high resource situations.