English Language Teaching Material Development

The goal of language programs is to utilize language for effective communication. Due to the needs, interests, and motivations of language learners, they may show individual differences in their lan- guage learning. Materials used in language programs can be instructional, experiential, elucidative, or exploratory in that they can inform learners about the language, provide experience of the lan- guage in use, and help learners to make discoveries about the language for themselves. Therefore, material development has been institutionalized in the last decades.
Material development is both a field of study and a practical undertaking. At the theoretical level, the principles of the design, implementation, and evaluation of ELT materials will be emphasized. At the practical level, the production, evaluation, and adaptation of ELT materials, by teachers or mate- rial writers would be taken in to account.
The present study investigated the goals of language teaching programs in some countries, and discussed the contextual factors affecting the processes of ELT material development explicitly. The discussion of the three phases of ELT material development; namely, the organization and analysis, evaluation, and adaptation of materials has been thoroughly elaborated throughout the present study. The ELT profession nowadays has a range of different types of syllabus available from which a choice should be made for a specific situation. Having analyzed the material available, the ELT ma- terial developers should evaluate them both externally and internally to select the most appropriate materials. Finally, materials should be adapted to different learners in different settings following some adaptation principles. To this end, a framework for adaptation has been introduced at the end.