Expanding the Discourse in ELT Materials Development Through Creativity and Innovation

Dat Bao

This chapter provides an overview of how ELT materials can be improved through creative mindsets and innovative efforts, as well as through materials personalisation and localisation. It is not, however, a review of current approaches to the ELT curriculum but mainly offers innovative insights to enrich current ways of developing course materials. It addresses the three main areas covered by this book, namely creativity, innovations and teacher–learner involvement in coursebook design.

One important obligation in the quest for successful English language education is to create and apply new experience in course materials. As the theme of this book indicates, materials writers are constantly challenged by the need to produce novel ideas (creativity) and implement them via coursebook design (innovation). Innovation in general refers to new procedure (Markee, 1992) and untried methodology (Hutchison & Torres, 1994) that bring about improvement (Nicholls, 1983).

Innovators are often defined as agents of change (Hall & Hewings, 2001) and for change to happen, materials developers need to understand the learning process. Although this book is about materials, it places the learner at the heart of much of the discussion. As Hae-ok Park highlights in Chapter 7, learners are active participants in research and in the practice of innovative problem solving. The implementation of creative elements, or innovation, can be understood in two ways. One is that materials themselves need to be creative in taking novel content from diverse resources such as literature, drama, poetry and multimedia resources. The second is that materials need to be innovatively employed through flexible tasks, original combinations and multiple options.

This introductory discussion is written to interact with the chapters in the book not only by capturing the essence of what is being raised but also by commenting on those issues. Although readers can interpret every topic in each chapter by themselves, the commentary below might provoke further thoughts and trigger more in-depth reflection. The key arguments in the contributing chapters somehow defy current practice in order to bring about positive transformation in materials development.

Part 1: Improving ELT Materials Through Creative Pedagogies

Part 1 identifies a number of pedagogical areas in second language materials which could be further enriched. Having problematised current practices, the contributors propose ways to improve them. Chapter 2 expresses dissatisfaction with a number of conventional activities as they offer little stimulus and low pedagogical value to the learner. Chapter 3 redefines the essence of creativity and suggests ways to implement it in task modification. Chapter 4 challenges common ways of understanding creativity via a constructivist lens and proposes strategies to enhance task quality Chapter 5 explores the discourse in children's creativity and based on such understanding builds a framework for creative activities at primary level. Chapter 6 plays with the effect of constraints on creativity and connects that understanding to learner autonomy.

By and large, the chapters are written to refresh certain areas of theorisation that have not been sufficiently deployed in L2 curriculum development. They share the recognition that learners' inspiration and optimal output are often restricted by the presence of many mundane, uncreative and inflexible pedagogies in current task design. In doing so, the chapters address the following questions:

• What is problematic with typical language tasks?

• What pedagogical choices accelerate creativity?

• Why do learners need more flexible materials?

• What types of task nurture creativity in young learners?

• Do constraints impede or facilitate the innovative mind?

I shall re-articulate the authors' insights below and interact with them as a way of keeping the dialogue open, bearing in mind that no answers to academic enquiry should be theoretically conclusive but need to stimulate further debate.

Rethinking typical language activities

To resist routine is to take one step towards creativity. Incompetent teachers treat all students alike, and ineffective textbooks tend to provide mostly typical tasks, assuming that all learners will accept them and will not ask for more. Typical activities, as a matter of fact, offer little room for learners' personalised participation. For tasks to be inspiring, they need to stimulate improvisation among students so that they become more active in applying what they are learning (Cakir, 2006). Unfortunately, such activities need to be thoughtfully designed rather than purely reliant on the availability of real-life resources. This is because not all authentic materials facilitate learning if the content seems too ordinary. ELT discourse has highlighted occasions on which the typical choice of natural, native-context texts might lead to boredom and unproductive learning, simply because there is nothing exciting that stimulates the desire to learn (see, for example, Timmis, 2005).

Brian Tomlinson in Chapter 2, based on his own research, cautions us against routine-oriented, demotivating materials that restrict input, reduce emotion, produce little learning and hinder authentic language use in the real world. From a creative point of view, being typical amounts to being average and short of uniqueness, which is unacceptable, or even humiliating, as it suggests a lack of achievement. When learners are exposed to typical materials, their curiosity switches off and their...