Nick Andon

Materials Development in TESOL is part of the Edinburgh Textbooks in TESOL series, which is intended for students on an MA in TESOL or similar programmes from advanced undergraduate to taught doctorate programmes. The series aims to provide ‘theory clearly related to practice’ and to present ‘ELT concepts and issues simply’. These are laudable aims given the vast amount of theory, research and published advice to teachers in our field, not enough of which filters down to teachers. Clarity and simplicity in relating theory to practice can provide an excellent foundation for exploring diverse views on complex professional issues in more detail, and would help teacher-educators and those who are responsible for designing curricula, assessments and (perhaps most importantly) teaching materials to mediate between theory and practice, between researchers and teachers. It is not the case, unfortunately, that...

From 1994, the South Korean government has implemented a series of innovations to change English language education from teaching about English to developing students’ communicative competence in English. This paper discusses the impact of a teacher certification scheme, one such innovation. The scheme is examined from three perspectives: its design, implementation, and perceived future impact. The discussion draws on documents from the certification scheme, lesson plans, video-recordings, and assessment results from assessed lessons for four candidates and interviews with these teachers. Analysis of this data shows that the scheme has the potential to make future classroom practice more communicative. However, there are a number of factors which seriously inhibit the impact of this scheme and which have implications for future innovations of this type. These include ineffective communication with teachers about the innovation, teachers’ perceptions of the relevance of the promoted practice, and the degree of compatibility between the innovation and its wider educational context.

Twenty years ago, when I started training teachers to write materials, there was very little literature to guide writers of language teaching materials (or those attempting to train them), although handbooks for teachers on how to teach different aspects of language provided useful starting points and examples of different types of activities, for example for teaching reading or vocabulary. Materials development was regarded as a practical area lacking in theory. Since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a steadily increasing stream of publications on principles for materials design and evaluation, a good proportion of them, like this book, edited by Brian Tomlinson (1998, 2003, 2008, 2011), with others including McGrath (2002, 2013), Mishan (2005), Harwood (2010), and Mishan and Chambers (2010). Given the universal importance of materials in language...

The benefits of embedding the teaching of writing into the curriculum have been advocated by educators and researchers. However, there is currently little evidence of embedded writing instruction in the UK’s higher education context. In this article, we present a case study in which we report the design, implementation and evaluation of an academic writing intervention with first-year undergraduate students in an applied linguistics programme. Our objectives were to try a combination of embedded instructional methods and provide an example that can be followed by lecturers across disciplines and institutions. Through the integration of in-class and online writing tasks and assessment feedback in a first-term module, we supported students’ writing development throughout the first term. We evaluated the effects of the intervention through the analysis of notes on classroom interaction, a student questionnaire and interviews, and a text analysis of students’ writing and the feedback comments over time. The evaluation findings provide insights into the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. The embedded writing instruction was perceived as useful by both students and teachers. The assessment feedback, whilst being the most work-intensive method for the teachers, was valued most by the students and led to substantial improvements in the writing of some. These findings suggest that embedded writing instruction could be usefully applied in other higher education contexts.

In this paper, task‐based language teaching (TBLT) and its relationship to task‐based learning is investigated by drawing on teachers' pedagogic principles and practices as they relate to adopting, adapting, or rejecting TBLT in their classrooms. In particular, the paper seeks to discover the relevance of TBLT‐related research and teacher education literature for experienced L2 teachers, the ways in which these published accounts are reflected in teachers' pedagogic principles, and how such principles and practices are combined with approaches other than TBLT. Four experienced UK‐based ESL teachers were interviewed and observed in their classrooms a number of times. Based on case studies of these teachers, four TBLT‐related pedagogical principles in their teaching are identified and discussed in the light of the interview and observational data.