Developing Materials for ELT Classrooms: A Brief Introduction

Materials development as a practical undertaking has been discussed in the English Language Teaching (ELT) literature on a number of occasions. However, since education continues to evolve in response to the ever-changing needs and demands of individuals and society, new perspectives on instructional materials, their place and role in the classroom, and their contribution to innovative teaching and sustainable learning in twenty-first century schools are welcomed. With this in mind, the current chapter begins by defining key concepts guiding this volume: materials, materials development, innovative teaching, and sustainable learning. It also describes teachers as materials developers and presents a principled approach to materials design, deriving from recent debates in the field. Such an approach offers a clear framework which helps language teachers as materials developers to understand their pedagogical practice better as they make a great effort to create innovative and sustainable classrooms which benefit all students and conform to systemic requirements. The individual principles in the framework also provide teachers as materials developers with a scaffold to move forward and respond to the anticipated and unanticipated challenges of teaching. The chapter concludes by clarifying the current book’s purpose, structure, and readership.