Writing Materials for Publication: Questions Raised and Lessons Learned

Summary

This chapter discusses the process of writing materials for publication, with a particular emphasis on what happens when the principles of the materials writer conflict in some respects with the views and wishes of other stakeholders in the process, such as publishers and education authorities. The chapter describes a particular instance of this process, outlining the key methodological principles of the materials writer and the difficulty of applying these principles in the light of feedback from the publishers. Specific examples are given of potentially problematic feedback from the publishers, along with examples of how the problems were negotiated. The main issue of the chapter is how far and on what basis we should attenuate principles we have drawn from language teaching research in response to the traditions, expectations, wishes, and constraints of a particular educational context. The chapter argues that in a discipline such as applied linguistics the views of practitioners and other stakeholders are a part of the theoretical equation and that some kind of compromise between research-based principles and local realities is, therefore, not only necessary but also desirable. For such compromise to be principled and constructive, however, we need a set of principles to help us to mediate between theory and practice in materials design. The chapter concludes by proposing some principles which might help us to achieve principled compromise rather than compromised principles.