Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching

Ian McGrath has over 30 years’ experience as a materials writer and as a teacher and educator in the UK and overseas, most recently as a Visiting Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. He is now an educational consultant based in the UK.

The most distinctive contribution of this book is Chapter 8, which introduces ways to include learner-produced materials. This is new terrain for many applied linguists and teachers and has not received much attention in most of the literature. McGrath, however, offers interesting, diverse and practical ways in which learners can produce materials for themselves and each other … This book is a good resource that certainly offers a variety of helpful input, tips, and discussions for applied linguists and teachers. While the text is approached from an applied linguistics perspective, it is the appendix that may prove most valuable for teachers, providing as it does a rich variety of tables, examples and graphs, which serve as useful guidelines, especially for teachers under time pressure. The author is also to be commended for his emphasis on including the learner in materials design and evaluation processes, which for me represents the book’s greatest accomplishment.

• Introduction 1 Materials, courses, teachers 2 Choosing materials: first steps3 Choosing materials: close evaluation4 Coursebook-based teaching: selection and adaptation 5 Supplementation: exercises and worksheets 6 Using the real7 Systematising materials design8 Learner-produced materials9 Evaluating effects 10 Materials and ...Appendices; Tasks: Keys and Commentaries; References; Index