User blog:Nimwalimu/Factors to Consider when designing materials

Material Design: Preliminaries

Knowledge on how people learn at different stages of their life development is crucial for designing and adapting material for learning and teaching English. For instance, research has established that babies learn differently by observing every movement and communicative move that their parents, siblings and people around make. Soon or later, they begin to imitate what they hear and observe in a bubbling stage of their communication. Nursery and elementary school level pupils also learn differently and are generally open to new information. The stage is marked up by young people full of energy and are ready to try out new things including learning a foreign language. Teachers can easily channel this energy capital among these young learners to introduce different language contents in ways that befit their learning styles.

In the same way, material design and adaptation has to take into account the young people ́s preferred learning styles. Hence, material design has to follow certain principles1 as briefly presented below:
 * The coherence principle in which there is focus on essential material eliminating extraneous material that could distractive (p.5).
 * The signaling principle in which there are clear cues added to the document to highlight its organization.
 * The Redundant Principle in which there is use of graphics and narration to present a given contents.
 * The Spatial Continuity Principle in printed words have to be used next to the topic being presented e.g. an animation about lightning in which printed words are placed next to the lighting system as opposed to placing such words at the bottom as a caption.
 * The Temporal Continuity Principle in which corresponding graphics and narration are presented simultaneously rather successfully.

1 Based on Mayer, R. (2009). Research-Based Principles for Designing Multimedia Instruction. University of California, Santa Barbara.
 * The Segmenting Principle in which a multimedia message is presented in learner- paced segments rather than as a continuous unit as segmenting allows people to fully process one step in the process before having to move onto the next one.
 * The Pre-training Principle – people learn more deeply from a multimedia message when they have learnt the names and characteristics of the main concepts – there is a room for causal connections in the multimedia.
 * The Modality Principle in which words are spoken rather than printed – it allows off- loading some of the processing in visual channel onto verbal channel.
 * The Personalization Principle in which people learn more deeply when the words in multimedia presentation are in a conversation style rather than formal style – conversational style can prime a sense of social presence in the learner and is engaging.
 * The Voice Quality in which people learn more deeply when the words in a multimedia message are spoken in a human voice rather than in a machine voice – social presence in the learners.
 * The Embodiment Principle in people learn more deeply when onscreen agents display human-like gesturing, movement, eye-contact, and facial expression – creates a sense of social presence with the instructor.
 * The Image Principle – the instructor ́s image doesn’t need to be on screen so as to promote learning.

It is also important to take into account the wide array of English language teaching methodologies in place in our days: communicative language teaching, audio-lingual, task-based language learning, content-based learning and teaching, cognitive and language integrated learning, the direct method, the structural approach, suggestopedia, total physical response, the silent way, community language learning, immersion, the natural approach, etc.

The next reflection is why design materials? The common English textbooks approved for use in class have been developed elsewhere without any cultural base of the students who will use them. I think the relevance and culture issues motivate the creation and adaptation of material to be used in English classes. And this is what I urge novice teachers to uphold in their training.