Comments on Part E

Summary

The chapters in this section offer very different views on materials development but have many things in common. One thing in particular that they have in common is their concern that different types of learners and different preferred styles of learning should be catered for in language-learning materials. An analysis of any current global coursebook will reveal that it favours the analytic learner rather than the experiential learner (Masuhara et al . 2008 ; Tomlinson et al . 2001 ), that it caters for the visual learner more than it does for the auditory learner and that hardly any provision is made for the tactile or kinaesthetic learner. Yet it seems that more learners are experiential than analytic and that the preferred mode for most learners is the kinaesthetic (Oxford and Anderson 1995 ). It is not difficult to work out why coursebook materials typically favour the analytic learner. The school cultures which the teachers, learners, publishers and textbook writers come from encourage and reward those who are primarily analytic. The learners who succeed in these cultures are those who can focus on discrete chunks of information, who can analyse and categorise, who can memorise and retrieve consciously, who are systematic and sequential in the ways that they learn. Most teachers, writers and publishers have been successful in such cultures; most learners expect to learn languages in the same analytical ways that they have been made to learn other subjects at school; and most parents and administrators want languages to be learned in an analytic way which rewards effort and application and teaches the values of order and conformity. And it does not help when language acquisition researchers categorise the good language learner as someone who uses the appropriate learning strategies effectively, who monitors themselves and others, who pays attention to form and to meaning, who practises the language and who is aware of the learning process (Ellis 1994 : 546–50). In other words, the good language learner is someone who is flexible but who learns the language primarily by focusing attention on aspects of it. And, of course, such a learner is identified as a good learner by teachers who are following a primarily analytic course and is rewarded by language examinations which feature tasks which are primarily analytic too.