Commentary on Article “ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING MATERIALS:THEORY AND PRACTICE” by Amos Paran

In this article titled “English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice the writer talks about the English language teaching materials. This article is the collection of 17 commissioned papers is invented for students, teachers, teachers trainer , and researchers in the field of ELT/TESOL with an interest in teaching materials. This paper wrote about the issues in materials evaluation and design, perspectives on materials, materials for the teaching syllabus and materials for Academic and specific purpose.

The writer wrote this paper based on the research in Second Language Acquisition research on the design of grammar materials and communitive tasked (Rod Ellis). The writer used very simple and clear language in his article. The content that he presented is very well decorated. His organization of that content is very good. He used very short sentences for easy to understand. The writer divides the whole article into four parts. In first part, the writer wrote about the issues in teaching materials. In the second part, he talks about the discussion on the whole content about the teaching materials. In the third part, the writer explain about the teaching of reading skills in the context of content-based instruction. One thing that I like most in his article that the writer makes that text complex gradually. He becomes very successful to connected the teaching materials with second language acquisition. The writer much care about the design process over text, formats. Instruction, item formation, organization, layout and the  interplay of factors that influence.

On the positive side, there are interesting discussion of approaches to need analysis of the construction of corpora, and the use of the internet-based materials. Thus article is beautifully present about how the second language teaching materials help on ESL and TESOL learners and readers.

In conclusion, this is a useful addition to the growing body of literature on materials. One of the main points made in both the preface and introduction to the volume is that materials writing  is still regarded in some quarters as an a theoretical activity. The collection is likely to be of most interested to experienced teachers of EAP, ESP and researchers. Teacher educator teaching more general post experience course in course design and materials development will probably wish to use it selectively.

                                                Reference

1.      Alexander, O. (ed.). 2007. New Approaches teaching Materials Development   forLanguageLearning ,oxford: peter lang 

2.      Paran.A(2010), http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/sessions/2010-04-10/elt-journal-debate- clilcontent-and-language-illusion .