COURSEBOOK EVALUATION

MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

According to Nunan, David (1991: 208), “Material development is basically dealing with selection, adaptation, and creation of teaching material”. In line with Nunan, Brown, James Dean (1995: 157) states that teacher sometimes cannot find a textbook that really matches with the classroom need. So, the teacher should develop material by three suggested strategies: adopting, developing or adapting the material. Meanwhile, Tomlinson (1998: 479) also has the opinion that material development refers to anything which is done by writers, teachers or learners to provide sources of language input in ways maximize the likelihood of intake. In the other words, it also relates to supply information about experience of language ways designed to promote language learning. Furthermore, Graves, Kathleen (2000: 149) states, “Material development is the planning process by which teacher creates units and lessons within those units to carry out the goals and objectives of the course. Material development takes place on a continuum of decision-making and creativity which ranges from being given textbook and a timetable in which to “cover it”.

There are two things to be elaborates about material development. It is both a filed study and a practical undertaking. As a field study, it studies the principle and procedure of the design, implementation, and evaluation teaching materials. As a practical undertaking, it involves the production, evaluation, and adaptation of language teaching materials, by the teachers for their own classrooms and by material writer foe sale distribution (Tomlinson, 2001: 66). Furthermore, Grave (2000: 156) said that an important aspect of material development is making choice. Teacher can’t target everything, so he should make choices based on what he wants the students learn according to the goal and objective”. 

principle of material development

Dick and Carey (2001: 254) state that there are three stages of instructional development that can be a guide for the developers. The stages are review the instructional strategy for each objective in each lesson, survey the literature and ask subject matter experts to determine what instructional material are already available, determined whether new material need to be designed, review your analysis of learning context and your assumptions, plan and write the instructional materials based on the instructional strategy in rough draft form, review each completed lesson or class session, using one complete instructional unit, write the accompanying instructions to guide the students through the activities, you may either develop materials for the instructors manual as you go along or you can take notes as you develop and revise the instructional presentations and activities.

Later, Corbel as quoted by Nunan states that materials are designed through a four stage procedure, as follows:

1)    Identify the learner’s area of interest in board thematic terms

2)    Identify a series of communication situations related to that theme and link them to form an action sequence

3)    Select or devise materials appropriate to the situations in action sequence

4)    Choose languahe points to focus on form the materials

According to Tomlinson, There are three stages of material development, they are:

1.     Material Evaluation

Materials evaluation is a procedure that involves measuring the value (or potential value) of a set of learning materials. It involves making judgments about the effect of the materials on the people using them and it tries to measure some or all of the following:

Ø the appeal of the materials to the learners

Ø the credibility of the materials to the learners, teachers and administrators.

Ø The validity of the materials

Ø The reliability of the materials

Ø The ability of the materials to interest and motivate learners and teachers.

Ø The value of the materials in terms of short-term learning (important, for example, for performance on tests and examinations).

Ø The value of the materials in terms of long-term learning.

Ø The learner’s and teacher’s perception of the value of the materials.

Ø The assistance given to teachers in terms of preparation, delivery and assessment.

Ø The flexibility of the materials.

Ø The contribution made by the materials to teacher development.

Ø The match with administrative requirements.

2.     Material Adaptation

3.     Material Writing