Materials

Anything which is used to help to teach language learners. Materials can be in the form of a textbook, a workbook, a cassette, a CD-Rom, a video, a photocopied handout, a newspaper, a paragraph written on a whiteboard: anything which presents or informs about the language being learned.

Materials adaptation

Making changes to materials in order to improve them or to make them more suitable for a particular type of learner. Adaptation can include reducing, adding, omitting, modifying and supplementing. Most teachers adapt materials every time they use a textbook in order to maximise the value of the book for their particular learners.

Materials evaluation

The systematic appraisal of the value of materials in relation to their objectives and to the objectives of the learners using them. Evaluation can be pre-use and therefore focused on predictions of potential value. It can be whilst-use and therefore focused on awareness and description of what the learners are actually doing whilst the materials are being used. And it can also be post-use and therefore focused on analysis of what happened as a result of using the materials.

Meaning-focused tasks

These tasks focus on communication of meaning. Meaning-focused tasks do not provide practice activities which focus on individual linguistic components as a preliminary to engagement in communicative tasks. According to the meaning-focused approach, involvement in communicative tasks is all that is necessary to develop competence in a second language: See form-focused tasks.

Metacognitive strategy

Many L2 learners are able to think consciously about how they learn and how successfully they are learning. ~s involve planning learning, monitoring the process of learning, and evaluating how successful a particular strategy is.

Method

A method is an overall plan for systematic presentation of language – a set of procedures based on a selected approach.

Methodology

~ is the implementation of learning objectives through teaching procedures. It is based on principles deriving from theories of language description, language learning and language use. Methodology may focus on how teachers deal with the four main skills of speaking, writing, listening and reading or on specific aspects of language such as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.