19

Materials for Developing

Writing Skills
Ken Hyland

Introduction
It is difficult to imagine how we might teach students to develop their writing skills
without using materials of some kind. Defining materials broadly as anything that can
help facilitate the learning of language, we can see that they not only include paper
and electronic resources, but also audio and visual aids, real objects and performance.
Together with teaching methodologies, materials represent the interface between
teaching and learning, the point at which needs, objectives and syllabuses are made
tangible for both teachers and students. They provide most of the input and language
exposure that learners receive in the classroom and are indispensable to how teachers
stimulate, model and support writing. The choice of materials available to teachers is
almost infinite, ranging from YouTube clips to research articles, but their effectiveness
ultimately depends on the role that they are required to play in the instructional
process and on the extent they relate to the learning needs of students. This chapter
will consider both these issues and then go on to discuss using textbook and internet
materials and ways to develop materials.

The roles of writing materials

Materials are used to provide a stimulus to writing, to assist students towards
understanding the language they need to write effectively and to help teachers with
ideas for organizing lesson activities. In many contexts, moreover, language materials
may be the only opportunities students have to study target texts. Table 19.1 lists the
main roles of materials.
392 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

TABLE . The roles of materials in writing instruction (Hyland, 2003)

1. Models: Sample text exemplars of rhetorical forms and structures of target genres.

2. Language scaffolding: Sources of language examples for discussion, analysis,

exercises, etc.

3. Reference: Online or paper-based information, explanations and examples of relevant

grammatical, rhetorical or stylistic forms.

4. Stimulus: Sources which stimulate writing. Usually paper or internet texts, but can
include video, graphic or audio material or items of realia.

Models are used to present good examples of a genre and illustrate its particular
features. Representative samples of the target text can be analysed, compared and
manipulated in order to sensitize students to the way they are organized and the kind
of language that we typically find in them. Becoming familiar with good models can
encourage and guide learners to explore the key lexical, grammatical and rhetorical
features of a text and to use this knowledge to construct their own examples of the genre.
The key idea of using models, then, is that writing instruction will be more successful
if students are aware of what target texts look like, providing sufficient numbers of
exemplars to demonstrate possible variation and avoid mindless imitation.
Typically students examine several examples of a particular genre to identify its
structure and the ways meanings are expressed, and to explore the variations which
are possible. Materials used as models thus help teachers to increase students’
awareness of how texts are organized and how purposes are realized as they work
towards their independent creation of the genre. As far as possible the texts selected
should be both relevant to the students, representing the genres they will have to write
in their target contexts, and authentic, created to be used in real-world contexts rather
than in classrooms. So chemistry students, for example, would need to study reports
of actual lab experiments rather than articles in the New Scientist if they want to
eventually produce this genre successfully. Even fairly elementary learners can study
authentic texts and identify recurring features, then be taught to manipulate and then
reproduce these features themselves. An effective way of making models relevant to
learners is to distribute and analyse exemplary samples of student writing, collected
from previous courses.
Materials which scaffold learners’ understandings of language provide opportunities
for discussion, guided writing, analysis and manipulation of salient structures and
vocabulary. Ideally these materials should provide a variety of texts and sources to
involve students in thinking about and using the language while supporting their evolving
control of a particular genre. Materials which assist learners towards producing accurate
sentences and cohesive texts include familiar staples of the grammar class such as
sentence completion, text reorganization, parallel writing, gap-filling, jigsaw texts and
so on. This does not mean that writing materials are simply grammar materials in
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 393

disguise. Writing instruction necessarily means attending to grammar, but this is not
the traditional autonomous grammar – a system of rules independent of contexts and
users. The grammar taught in writing classes should be selected in a top-down way,
derived from the genre that students are learning to write.
Materials which develop an understanding of grammar thus concern how meanings
can be codified in distinct and recognizable ways, shifting writing from the implicit and
hidden to the conscious and explicit. It is an approach which:

first considers how a text is structured and organised at the level of the whole text
in relation to its purpose, audience and message. It then considers how all parts of
the text, such as paragraphs and sentences, are structured, organised and coded
so as to make the text effective as written communication. (Knapp and Watkins,
1994, p. 8)

Scaffolding materials therefore recognize that grammar is a resource for producing

texts and are based on the principle that an awareness of texts facilitates writing
development. It is important to note then, that the most effective language exercises
focus on the features of the genre under consideration to help students create
meanings for particular readers and contexts. Thus a narrative would require students
to have some control of nouns and pronouns to identify people, animals or things and
of action verbs, past tense and conjunctions to sequence events. Explanations, on the
other hand, are usually written in the simple present tense using chronological and/or
casual conjunctions and ‘action’ verbs.
Reference materials, unlike those used for modelling and scaffolding, concern
knowledge rather than practice. This category includes grammars, dictionaries,
reference manuals and style guides, but they all function to support the learner’s
understanding of writing through explanations, examples and advice. This type of
support is particularly useful to learners engaged in self-study with little class contact.
A great deal of well-organized and self-explanatory information, particularly on the
conventions of academic writing can be found on the Online Writing Labs (OWLs)
of universities. Dictionaries such as the corpus-informed Cobuild Advanced (www.
mycobuild.com/free-search.aspx) and encyclopaedia like the ubiquitous Wikipedia
with over 4 million articles in English (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
are also useful resources. The advice in many reference books tends, however, to be
idiosyncratic, intuitive and prescriptive and should be treated with caution (Hyland,
1998). Many students rely heavily on bilingual dictionaries or electronic translators
and on the thesaurus, grammar checker and dictionary components of their word
processor. These may well provide what the student is looking for, but fail to give
sufficient information about grammatical context, appropriacy and connotation. Advice
and practice in how to use these tools can have enormous benefits for learners.
Finally, stimulus materials are commonly used to involve learners in thinking about
and using language by provoking ideas, encouraging connections and developing
topics in ways that allow them to articulate their thoughts. Such materials provide
394 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

content schemata and a reason to communicate, stimulating creativity, planning and

engagement with others. They include the full range of media and the internet is a rich
source, but generally, the more detailed and explicit the material, the greater support it
offers learners. So, a lecture recording or a flowchart can provide relatively unambiguous
and structured ways of stimulating language use. In contrast, material which is open
to numerous interpretations, such as a collection of divergent views on a topic, poems
or Lego bricks used to symbolize real objects, allows room for students to exercise
their creativity and imagination in their responses. The main sources of stimulus for
writing are texts themselves and teachers often select short stories, poems, magazine
articles, agony letters and so on as a way of introducing a topic for discussion and
brainstorming ideas for an essay on a similar theme.

Selecting writing materials

Any ELT course starts with two questions: ‘what is the proficiency of these students
and why are they learning English?’ and it is these questions which help focus the
course and make it relevant for learners. The first question ensures that we start where
the students are now and the second guides the direction we go in by taking the world
outside the language classroom into account. So while materials need to be at an
appropriate level, it is equally important that they look beyond instruction in general
aspects of grammar and vocabulary to prepare students for the texts they need to
write in their social, academic or workplace contexts. This means conducting a needs
analysis of both the present situation and the target situation (Dudley-Evans and St
John, 1998), gathering information about learners’ current proficiencies and ambitions
and the linguistic skills and knowledge they need to perform competently in the real
world.
It is this second aspect of needs that teachers may be less familiar with. Because
it relates to communication needs rather than learning needs it compels the language
teacher to understand not only their students but the texts they need to write. This
may not always be easy to identify for younger learners, but where it is possible, it
is important to ensure that the writing materials we provide students with help them
towards an understanding of those they will find in target contexts. This principally
means becoming familiar with the key features of those texts and the skills needed to
create them, and then translating these into appropriate materials.
Selecting relevant texts is a key consideration as materials need to assist learners
towards the ability to write in the genres that have been identified. Where students’
writing needs are related to particular genres used in specific target contexts, then
teachers need to find such texts as authentic models. Students typically do not have
to write newspaper articles, magazine features or textbook chapters and, while these
genres may offer excellent sources of stimulus and content, they provide poor target
models. We also need to consider how texts are related to other texts in order to plan
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 395

a learning sequence of text types which scaffold learner progress, ensuring that novice
writers will move from what is easy to what is difficult and from what is known to what
is unknown. One way to proceed here is to determine the broad family of text-types
that students should work with, as this enables us to establish the kinds of language
and skills that students require to complete different assignments. Knowledge of these
kinds of differences allows teachers to see what students are able to do and what they
need to learn.
The six broad families of text-types in Table 19.2, adapted from the Australian
‘Certificate in Spoken and Written English’ ESL curriculum, can help to identify the
kinds of texts needed as input.
Examples of these text-types can be found in various genres. Appliance manuals
and documents accompanying self-assembly furniture provide good examples of
instructions and procedures, for example, while recounts and narratives may be found
in short stories, biographies, newspaper and magazines articles and literary sources.
Journalistic materials are also good sources for exposition and argument texts.
Another consideration is the authenticity of materials: how far teachers should
use unedited real-world language materials or texts which are simplified, modified or
otherwise created to exemplify particular features for teaching purposes. Clearly there
are important reasons for selecting authentic texts as genre models. The kinds of texts
that students will need to create in their target contexts cannot be easily imitated for
pedagogic purposes as simplifying a text. Altering its syntax and lexis is also likely to
distort features such as cohesion, coherence and rhetorical organization. Students may
then fail to see how the elements of a text work together to form text structure and
also miss the considerable information texts carry about those who write them, their
relationship to readers and the community in which they are written. It is also true,

TABLE . Families of text-types

Text types Main feature Sample written genre

Exchanges: Joint construction emails, internet chat, letters

Forms: Printed, with respondent spaces simple and complex formatted

texts

Procedures: Steps to achieve a goal instructions, procedures,

protocols

Information texts Provide news or data descriptions, explanations,

reports

Story texts Retell events and respond to them recounts, narratives

Persuasive texts Argue for/against a thesis expositions, discussions,

opinion texts
396 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

however, that many authentic texts make poor models, may be difficult to obtain or
may require considerable effort by the teacher before they can be exploited effectively
in the classroom. The problem is to ensure that students get good writing models with
material that is not so far beyond them that they become disheartened.
The issue of what students are asked to do with these authentic materials raises
the problem of authentic use, as selecting real texts does not guarantee that they
are used in ways that reflect their original communicative purpose. Once we begin to
study them for writing tasks, then poems, letters, memos, reports, editorials and so on
become artefacts of the classroom rather than communicative resources. As a result,
many teachers feel there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using created materials,
especially at lower levels of language proficiency where students need the guidance
and support of controlled input. In fact, many writing courses employ both authentic
and created materials and the choice largely depends on the pedagogic purpose
we want the materials to serve. What will students do with the materials? What do
we want them to learn? The need for authenticity is less pressing when we move
away from models to materials which will stimulate writing, practice language items,
introduce content, and highlight features of target texts, all of which may actually be
more effective than real texts. The bottom line is that our materials should not mislead
students about the nature of writing.

Textbooks as writing materials

A common source of materials for writing classes is from commercial textbooks.
Many teachers rely heavily on them as a source of ideas for course structure, practice
activities and language models – dipping into them even when they are not used as
set texts. They can also provide support for novice teachers, reassuring them that they
are at least covering what someone else thinks are the important aspects of writing
in a logical sequence and following tried and trusted principles of teaching. These are
considerable advantages, but textbooks also need to be treated with caution: teaching
writing is primarily a local and complex endeavour which defies being packaged into a
single textbook.
It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect textbook writers, constrained by their
publishers and the fact they are writing for a broad and amorphous market, to produce
materials exactly suited to our local requirements. Their authors have no idea of who
our students are, their difficulties and target needs, nor the peculiarities of our local
teaching context. But scrutiny of a dozen widely used writing textbooks on my shelf
reveals a number of common deficiencies. We find cultural and social biases in the
readings, ad hoc grammar explanations poorly related to particular genres, vagueness
about target users’ proficiencies or backgrounds, lack of specificity about target needs,
an over-reliance on writing themes addressing personal experience, obsession with a
single composing process, and invented and misleading text models. Most disturbingly,
there is often little recognition given to the teaching implications of current writing and
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 397

genre research and so textbooks often fail to reflect the ways writers actually use
language to communicate in real situations (Hyland, 2006).
If teachers choose (or are compelled) to use a textbook, it is important they are
clear about what they want it to do and to be realistic in what they expect it to offer.
The fact that publishers must target a mass audience to make a profit considerably
undermines the value of even the best books, but a textbook should not be rejected
simply because it does not meet all our specific instructional needs. Preparing new
materials from scratch for every course is an impractical ideal and it is far more time-
and cost-effective to be creative with what is available. Often a book may be useful if
we supplement omissions or adapt activities to suit our particular circumstances and
the process of reflecting on what gaps exist between what students need and what
the textbook offers can be productive in course design and materials development. We
can, in fact, identify five ways of adapting materials, although in practice they shade
into each other:

l Adding: supplementing what the textbook offers with extra readings,

tasks or exercises.
l Deleting: omitting repetitive, irrelevant, potentially unhelpful or difficult items.
l Modifying: rewriting rubrics, examples, activities or explanations to
improve relevance, impact or clarity.
l Simplifying: rewriting to reduce the difficulty of tasks, explanations or
instructions.
l Reordering: changing the sequence of units or activities to fit more
coherently with course goals.

Clearly, modifying textbooks to make them more useful materials in our classes is an
important skill for all writing teachers as it not only improves the resources available
to students but also acts as a form of professional development. Teaching is largely a
process of transforming content knowledge into pedagogically effective forms, and
this is most in evidence when teachers are considering both their learners and their
profession in modifying and creating materials.

The internet and writing materials

The internet has been credited with offering teachers a number of advantages (e.g.
Zhao, 2005), but perhaps among the most relevant for writing teachers are that it:

1 offers access to a massive supply of authentic print, image and video materials

2 provides opportunities for student written communication (with classmates

and beyond)
398 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

3 offers practice in new genres and writing processes

4 encourages collaborative research and writing projects

5 generates immediate automated feedback and evaluative comments

6 offers students as-you-write computer-based grammar and spell checkers
7 provides student with access to dictionaries, corpora and reference aids as
they write
8 enables teachers to manage learning websites and to collect activities and
readings together with blogs, assignments, etc. and to track and analyse
student errors and behaviours
9 Facilitates opportunities for students to publish their work to a wider audience.

The internet is obviously an excellent source of materials to develop writing skills and is
probably now used more by teachers than textbooks. Sites such as Dave’s Internet Café
(www.eslcafe.com) and BBC English (www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/)
have discussion groups and writing exercises for L2 students. While these sites
offer ideas for exercises, assignments and discussions and are places students can
be directed for out-of-class activities, materials for writing are more scarce online.
The internet, however, does extend the teacher’s source of advice beyond his or her
immediate colleagues through discussion lists and bulletin boards where teachers
(or students) can exchange ideas, get information, discuss problems with others by
simply registering and posting a message. Two active ones are Writing Centers’ Online
Discussion Community (lists.uwosh.edu/mailman/listinfo/wcenter) and WPA-L: Writing
Program Administration (www.wpacouncil.org/wpa-l).
There are also many sites specifically dedicated to writing. There are, for example,
several thousand On-Line writing Labs (OWLs) which offer exercises on grammar
and mechanics, teaching tips and advice on style, genre and writing processes. The
OWL at Purdue (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/) is one of the best and Angelfire offers
teachers useful resources for steps in the process of writing (www.angelfire.com/
wi/writingprocess/). The Online Resources for Writers site (http://webster.commnet.
edu/writing/writing.htm) provides a list of useful sites. Other sites support writing
in various ways, such as the Using English website (www.usingenglish.com/) which
allows students or teachers to upload a text and receive statistics about it, including
a count of the unique words, the average number of words per sentence, the lexical
density and the Gunning Fog readability index. ESL Gold (www.eslgold.com/writing.
html) provides lessons and ideas for teaching composing, organizing, revising and
editing essays from a process perspective.
The internet also provides a means for teachers to manage their materials and present
them together as a coherent sequence of linked readings and activities to support
students’ writing development. Many teachers use commercial course management
systems such as Blackboard or Moodle to create tasks and wikis, to display their course
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 399

materials, readings and messages in one place, to receive course assignments and to
encourage students to engage with each other through the site. Increasingly, however,
teachers are recognizing the value of supporting students to develop and publish their
own websites or manage their own blogs so they can develop online literacy skills
(Bloch, 2008). Here the internet furnishes its own learning materials in the form of the
specialized genres of the web and the particular writing skills they demand.
Much of the social online writing done by students is in chat rooms, emails and
blogs, some of which resemble written conversations, with different conventions and
constraints to more traditional kinds of academic writing. But online composing not
only involves working in new genres, but requires new process skills and new ways of
collaborating in writing. Writing is often no longer a matter of a single individual creating
a linear, print text and even when writing alone students are able to seek help through
the internet from their teacher, from their classmates and from unknown others in
far locations. The availability of aids such as online spell-checkers, grammar checkers
and thesauruses together with programmes that give rich feedback on the nature of
writing errors such as Correct Grammar, Grammatik and Right Writer, require training
and practice. This is also true of the ability to search effectively, select reliable sources
and use the graphics, sound and video clips of multimedia dictionaries. Being able
to recognize these affordances, handle these tools and craft these genres effectively
requires considerable practice, as does the ability to identify the pros and cons of
different semiotic modes and the skill to combine these in effective ways. Teachers can
use the internet as a material to develop these competencies.
Perhaps most importantly, the internet is a source of authentic text material and of
a growing number of free, searchable online corpora which can be used for exploring
actual uses of language and written genres. Authentic materials include audio
materials, such as podcasts of anything from short stories to political commentary,
radio broadcasts and plays; visual materials such as video clips, photographs, paintings,
etc.; and textual materials such as newspaper articles, movie reviews, sports reports,
obituary columns, tourist information brochures, etc.
There is a massive array of excellent free-to-view online newspapers (e.g. www.
guardian.co.uk/ and www.nytimes.com/), and magazines (e.g. www.economist.com.
hk/, www.newscientist.com/ and www.filmjournal.com/) which are a great source of
textual and visual stimulus material and genre examples. A reasonably comprehensive
list can be found at www.world-newspapers.com/. There is also an abundance of reports
of various kinds from coastal erosion (www.eurosion.org/reports-online/reports.html)
to police incidents (www.cityofmadison.com/incidentReports/) and good examples of
reviews (www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews and www.consumerreports.
org/cro/index.htm). These sources not only provide material for models and analysis,
but enable teachers to raise students awareness of their key features through various
noticing and consciousness-raising activities, a ‘top-down’ approach to understanding
language which encourages students to see grammatical features as ‘the on-line
processing component of discourse’ (Rutherford, 1987, p. 104).
400 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

Finally, corpora can be used as materials for developing students’ writing, particularly
at more advanced levels, by providing evidence of use and how a particular vocabulary
item regularly co-occurs with other items. Corpora can be treated as reference tools
to be consulted for examples when problems arise while writing. An example of this
is WordPilot, which allows students to call up a concordance of a word while they
are writing in their word-processor (Hyland, 2009). Alternatively, they can be used by
students as research tools to be systematically investigated as a means of gaining
greater awareness of a particular genre, searching for personal pronouns, hedges or
particular verb forms, for example. Research approaches presuppose considerable
motivation and a curiosity about language which is often lacking, so there is a danger
that some students will be bored by an over-exposure to concordance lines. Teachers
have therefore tended to guide student searches to features which are typical in target
genres using search tasks, gap fill and other methods (e.g. Flowerdew, 2012; Hyland,
2013). Examples of free, online searchable corpora are the VLC Webconcordancer
(http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance/) and Word Neighbours (http://wordneighbors.ust.
hk/). An excellent source of academic essays is the British Academic Written English
corpus (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/bawe/ ).
It is clear that the internet is able to contribute a great deal to the writing teacher’s
efforts to provide a range of materials to model, scaffold and stimulate writing as
well as offer advice and examples of language use and opportunities for students to
develop new skills.

Creating writing materials

Designing new writing materials can be an extremely satisfying activity. It not
only offers students a more tailored learning experience but also demonstrates a
professional competence and perhaps fulfils a creative need in teachers. But materials
development is also typically an intensive and time-consuming process as producing
just 1 hour of good learning materials from authentic texts can consume at least 15
hours of a teacher’s time (Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998). This is a good reason to
lean heavily on existing materials as a source of ideas.
It is also a good reason to consider forming and participating in materials writing
teams, with two or three teachers sharing responsibilities for all aspects of the
project. As many others have noted (e.g. Tomlinson and Masuhara, 2010; Tomlinson,
2011), this kind of team-work can help teachers inspire each other with ideas, better
relate their materials to learners and suggest useful improvements to each other’s
materials. Team writing can involve individuals in creating separate units of work or in
collaborating on finding texts, developing language and content exercises and writing
tasks. This is particularly important if there is an absence of literature on which to
base genre descriptions and some text analyses needs to be done. The advantages
of working in teams can be considerable, not only because combining expertise
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 401

creates a greater potential for a more diverse and higher-quality final product, but also
because collaboration can reduce the amount of effort, time and frustration invested
in the process. This is particularly the case if teachers are creating online materials as
this can be extremely time-consuming and requires some expertise in the selection,
combination, organization, cross-referencing and hyper-linking of a number of textual,
visual and audio elements. Like many other internet documents, the collaboration
needed in materials design means there is no longer a clear sense of individual
authorship and ownership of texts.
The processes of creating new materials and modifying existing ones are very similar,
and here Hutchison and Waters (1987) framework for materials design is a useful guide
for teachers. This comprises four key components: input, content, language and a task,
and Table 19.3 shows what this looks like when considering writing materials.
This model reflects the instructional roles of materials for writing discussed in
section 1 and emphasizes the integration of key elements in materials design. It also
reflects the distinction originally made by Breen, Candlin, and Waters (1979) between
content materials as sources of information and data and process materials that act as
frameworks within which learners can use their communicative abilities. Materials lead
to a task, and the resources of language and content that students need to successfully
complete this task are supplied by the input. Input is crucial as students cannot learn
to communicate effectively in writing if they are simply given a topic and asked to
write. While they need to have something to write about, they also need to know how
to generate and draft ideas, and to have sufficient language and genre knowledge to
perform the task. The materials students are given must guide them towards this,

TABLE . A model of materials design

Input: Typically this is a paper or electronic text in the writing class, although it may be
a dialogue, video, picture or any communication data. This provides at least one of the
following:
| A stimulus for thought, discussion and writing
| New language items or the re-presentation of earlier items
| A context and a purpose for writing

| Genre models and exemplars of target texts

| Spur to the use of writing process skills such as pre-writing, drafting, editing, etc.

| Opportunities to process information

| Opportunities for learners to use and build on prior knowledge

Content Focus: topics, situations and information to generate meaningful

communication
Language Focus: Should involve opportunities for analyses of texts and for students to
integrate new knowledge into the writing task.
Task: Materials should lead towards a communicative task, in which learners use the
content and language of the unit, and ultimately to a writing assignment.

Source: Adapted from Hutchison and Waters (1987, pp. 108–9).

402 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

and as a result materials development, whether this means creating new materials or
adapting existing resources, is likely to begin by noticing the absence of one or more
of these elements.
Jolly and Bolitho (2011, p. 112) suggest that materials design begins by identifying
a gap, a need for materials because the existing coursebook fails to meet a learning
outcome of the course or because the students need further practice in a particular
aspect of writing. They then state that the teacher needs to explore this area to gain
a better understanding of the particular skill or feature involved, perhaps consulting
reference materials, corpora, colleagues, specialist informants, text models or other
sources. A suitable input source, such as a text or video clip, is then needed and tasks
developed to exploit this input in a meaningful way, ensuring that the activities are
realistic, that they work well with the text, that they relate to target needs and learner
interests, and that tasks are clearly explained. The materials then need to be produced
for student use and we should not underestimate the importance of their physical
appearance. Attractively presented materials demonstrate to students the interest the
teacher has invested in them and are likely to possess greater face validity, encouraging
students to engage with the activities. Following production, materials are then used in
class and finally evaluated for their success in meeting the identified need.
Having chosen a suitable input text, the teacher needs to decide how to best use it.
A naturally occurring text, for instance, might be presented as a model to highlight the
lexico-grammatical features and typical structure of a particular genre, beginning with
questions which encourage students to notice what they may have previously ignored.
For example:

l How is the text laid out? Are there headings, diagrams, etc.?
l How does the text open or close?
l What tense is it mainly written in?
l Does the writer refer to him or herself? How?
l What are the typical thematic patterns?

Alternatively the teacher might want students to explore the context of the text:

l Who is the text written for?

l Why was it written?
l What is the tone? (Formal or informal? Personal or impersonal? Etc.)
l What is the relationship between the writer and the intended reader?
l What other texts does it assume you have a knowledge of?

On the other hand, the input material might be better suited to building content
schemata and initiating writing through extensive reading and group discussion. Here
 MATERIALS FOR DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS 403

the teacher is more likely to develop questions to aid comprehension of the passage
and reflection on its personal meaning to the students. The objective is to encourage
reflection and engagement so that students might see the texts as relevant to their
own lives and to unlock the desire to express this relevance. Some initial questions
might focus on the following aspects of the text:

l What is the text about?

l Who can write such a text? To whom?
l What knowledge does it assume?
l Have you had a personal experience similar to this?
l Have you seen a text like this before? Where? Have you written such a
text?
l What shared understandings are implied in the text?

While exploiting texts is important, materials are likely to be needed for language
exercises, to give students more information about a language point or to furnish data
for a research project.
Following the discussion and deconstruction of a representative model, scaffolding
materials are needed to develop students’ understanding of a genre and their ability to
construct texts of their own. Materials here offer students guided, teacher-supported
practice in the genre through tasks which focus on particular stages or features of
the text. One popular method is to provide students with a set of jumbled paragraphs
which they have to reconstruct into a text by identifying the salient move structures.
The Problem-Solution pattern is an excellent candidate for this kind of activity, or
helping students construct a literature review by ordering material from general to
specific (Flowerdew, 2000). Materials which encourage students to compare different
texts are also often helpful for raising awareness of language features (e.g. Hyland,
2008), looking at how events are discussed in recounts and reports, for example, or
using students’ own writings as materials in mixed genre portfolios where students
collect together the texts they have written in different genres over a course with a
commentary on each one which addresses their differences and similarities (Johns,
1997).

Conclusion
This chapter has provided a practical introduction to the role and sources of materials in
the writing class and some steps in designing them. I have emphasized the importance
of matching materials to the proficiency and target needs of learners and the value of
providing students with varied material from a range of sources. Essentially, materials
404 DEVELOPING MATERIALS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

should contribute towards students’ understanding of a target genre (its purpose,

context, structure and main features) or provide opportunities to practice one or more
aspects of the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing). In other
words, the activities that are devised from a selected text should be carefully planned
to lead to the syllabus goals.
The main points of this chapter can be summarized as follows:

l Teachers need to be aware of the different roles that materials play in

writing instruction in order to make the best choice and use of them.
l Authentic materials are important when used as models of target texts,
but teachers should not be tyrannized by the ‘authenticity imperative’
when selecting materials to scaffold writing.
l Learners must have adequate prior knowledge of a genre to allow them
to write it effectively and materials can be used to model and scaffold this
learning, particularly in the early stages of learning a new genre.
l The choice of input texts requires consideration of both the language
demands it will make on learners and the opportunities it provides for
developing content and rhetorical schemata.
l General principles of context, learning, orientation and student
characteristics can help us assess and modify textbooks for local use.
l The internet provides a rich source of materials for developing process,
genre and structure knowledge as well as opportunities to practise their
skills in a range of new electronic contexts.

Perhaps the central idea in this chapter is that teaching writing skills can never simply
involve giving students a topic and asking them to write about it. Materials are a key
element of what it means to teach writing and their choice and design must always be
sensitive to local conditions and to the professional expertise of teachers. I hope the
principles and suggestions I have discussed here will be useful guides to teachers in
this process.

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