Making materials use in language classrooms visible: Evidence from two university English teachers in China

Abstract

While the adaptive nature of classroom teaching among teachers, learners, and materials has been well noted, there is little literature on how to represent the activities where teachers selectively leverage material resources to design and enact instruction in language classrooms. This paper is mainly methodological and conceptual, which proposes an approach to analyzing materials use in language classrooms. Building on the instructional design arc model proposed by Remillard, we introduced the materials use arc (MUA) as a unit of analysis to represent one pedagogical episode of a lesson prompted by the teacher and defined by an identifiable pedagogical purpose. By drawing on observational and interview data from two English-as-a-foreign-language teachers in one university in China, teachers’ MUA maps were then portrayed as examples to visualize the episodic and emerging contours of the enacted instruction. This innovative analytical tool offered the methodological potential for comparing and contrasting materials use within and across individual teachers in various language education contexts. It is hoped that the findings of this study will advance our limited theoretical understanding of the on-the-spot materials use that prevails in language classrooms both locally and globally.