EVOLUTION OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS DESIGN

USES OF TEXTBOOKS IN THE ENGLISH CLASS

Prof. Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro
cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

According to the Florida Department of Education (2008), effective materials must include features like instructional goals with adaptability to course requirements; accurate, relevant and relatively up-to-date information; appropriate reading level vocabulary and real-world applications or informational skills among others.
In regards to these materials, textbooks are known to be the most dominant tools when teaching English. Most of the time, such textbooks include teacher’s manuals to complement and enrich their use. Such manuals need to be practical, complete, content aligned, readable as well as possess accurate methods to apply, assessments and outlines to organize and manage lessons and classes
Sometimes, textbooks and other material to teach English could face problems related to controversies about how best to approach the specific subject areas, inaccurate contents which do not treat the subject matters the way they deserve or even contain factual errors which mislead content analysis in the sense that contents are not either complete or mistakenly treated.
Moreover, the presentation of the materials is an issue here. It is a must to take into account teachers’ and students’ resources, alignment of instructional component, organization, pacing and easy of use in order to apply them in class. Students’ resources have to be attractive but not too much to be misleading and reference aids such as index, glossaries and maps. On the other hand, teachers’ resources need to have materials easy to use and to support lesson planning, teaching and learning, suggestions for adaptation to special needs and guidelines to evaluate instruction. The alignment of instructional components of students and teachers’ materials plus their organization, content, format, objectives, unity, consistency, readability, language styles and typographical presentations are also of a prior importance when working with them.