The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

MMaterials Development

BRIAN TOMLINSON

Introduction

If you wanted to learn a foreign language, how would you do it? Whichever means of learning you chose you would almost certainly need to use materials to help you. These could be artifacts especially designed to facilitate language learning (e.g., textbooks, dictionaries, or computer games) or they could be authentic sources of “information” and experience (e.g., films, manuals, novels, mobile phones). They could be informative in providing information about the language, they could be instructional in teaching language points, they could be experiential in providing experience of the language in use, they could be elicitative in stimulating use of language, or they could be exploratory in encouraging learners to make discoveries about the language for themselves.

Given how important materials are, it is amazing how little attention they had been given by applied linguists until recently. It was not until the mid‐1990s that materials development began to be treated seriously by academics. Before then it tended to be dismissed as something which practitioners did, or treated as a subsection of methodology in which “materials were usually introduced as examples of methods in action rather than as a means to explore the principles and procedures of their development” (Tomlinson, 2001, p. 66). There were some books and articles in the 1980s which focused on such issues as materials evaluation and selection (e.g., Cunningsworth, ...