Tomlinson (1998, p.2) proposes several basic terms in which materials are defined as “anything which is used to help teach language learner. Materials can be in forms of a textbook, a workbook, a cassette, a CD, a photocopied handout, a newspaper, a paragraph written on a whiteboard, anything which represents or informs about the language being learned”.
Tomlinson (1998, p.2) also defines the term “supplementary materials” as follows: “materials designed to be used in addition to the core materials of a course.
They are usually related to the development of skills of reading, writing, listening or speaking rather than to the learning of language items”.
2.6.2 Criteria for selecting supplementary materials
It is obvious that materials play a crucial role in language teaching, so selection of criteria of extra materials should be considered carefully.
According to Nuttall (1996, p. 170), there are three major criteria influencing the selection of texts: suitability of the content, exploitability and readability. In his point of view, suitability of the content means the text‟s ability to address the student‟s needs and the course‟s objectives. Reading texts should interest the readers by providing new interesting information that suit the course‟s objectives. A text with interesting content makes the learners‟ task far more rewarding and the classroom more effective. This requires the teachers of English to find out what their students like reading and select text for classroom study. Some classroom texts should represent the kinds of materials students need to handle after they leave the foreign language class. It is better to begin on materials chosen chiefly for enjoyment.
Exploitability means facilitation of learning. When you exploit the text, you can make use of it to develop the students‟ competence as readers. A text which cannot be exploited is no use for teaching even if the students enjoy reading it.
Therefore, different kinds of tasks should be designed to best exploit the text so that the course‟s objectives could be obtained. Also, the focus in the reading lesson is
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neither language nor content, but the two together. An ideal reader would be able to extract the content from any text at all. If the reader exploits the text effectively, he/she will develop his/her strategies that can be applied to other texts.
Readability refers to the combination of structural and lexical difficulty. That means the text must be suitable with students‟ English proficiency levels in terms of vocabulary, syntax and style. The teacher must know what their students‟ language proficiencies are to find out what vocabulary and structures the students are familiar with so as to choose texts at the right level and balancing different level of proficiencies. If the students have varied backgrounds, a period of trial and error is unavoidable. However, a series of cloze tests can give you an idea of their level.
Once you know the students‟ vocabulary level, you can count the new lexical items (words or phrases) in a text, including new uses of familiar words and new idiomatic combinations. Then you have to decide what proportion of new items is acceptable. This partly depends on the purpose: if you only want students to get the gist of a text, they can skip unfamiliar words, on the other hand, for intensive reading which is slow and careful anyway. It may be acceptable to have quite a lot of new words. The nature of new items, and whether they are well spread out, is also relevant.
2.6.3 How to use supplementary materials Material adaptation
Material adaptation is considered as one of the two important issues in the process of materials development. As the materials have been evaluated, potential problem areas can be identified: What the materials offer cannot be exactly what our learners‟ need; the material methodology may not match our own; the general aims may not be suitable with the aims of the materials; the aims of a specific unit in the materials may not match our lesson. We have to select, make changes to materials so as to improve them to make them more suitable for a particular type of learners.
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There are five major ways of adapting materials:
Adding
The notion of addition is that materials are supplemented by putting more into them, while taking into account the practical effect on time allocation. First, we can certainly add in this quantitative way by the technique of extending “This means that the techniques are being applied within the methodological framework of the original materials: in other words, the model is not itself changed” (Mc Dough & Shaw, 1993, p. 89). We can do this in the following situation: A second reading passage parallel to the one provided is helpful in reinforcing the key linguistic features- tenses, sentence structures, vocabulary, cohesive devices – of the first text. Second, more far-reaching perspective on addition of materials can be termed expanding. This kind of addition is not just extension of an existing aspect of content. They go further than this by bringing about a qualitative as well as a quantitative change… This can be thought of as a change in the overall system”
(McDonough & Shaw, 1993, p. 90).
Deleting or Omitting
Deletion is clearly the apposite process to that of addition. As we saw in the previous section that materials can be added both quantitatively (extending) and qualitatively (expanding), the same point applies when a decision is taken to omit materials. The most straightforward aspect of reducing the length of materials is subtracting.
Addition and deletion often work together. Material may be taken out and then replaced with something else. The methodological change is greater when, for example, grammar practice is substituted after the omission of an inappropriate communicative function, or when a reading text is replaced by a listening passage.
Modifying
Modifying‟ can be sub-divided under two related headings. The first of these is rewriting, when some of the linguistic content needs modification, the second is restructuring, which applies to classroom management.
18 Simplifying
The technique of simplification is a type of modification, namely a “rewriting”
activity.
The elements of a language which can be simplified are: The instructions and explanations that accompany exercises and activities, and even the visual layout of materials so that it becomes easier to see how different part fit together. However, texts, most often reading passages are applied this technique. Usually, the emphasis has been on changing various sentences- bound elements to match the text more closely to the proficiency level of a particular group of learners.
Re-ordering
This procedure refers to the possibility of putting the parts of a course book in a different order. This may mean adjusting the sequence of presentation within a unit, or taking units in a different sequence from that originally intended.