Standard Approaches to Material Evaluation

Standard Approaches to Material Evaluation
Many of the checklists and lists of criteria suggested in these publications
provide a useful starting point for anybody conducting an evaluation, but some of
them are impressionistic and biased. Some of the lists lack coverage, systematicity
and/or a principled base and some give the impression that they could be used in any
materials evaluation (there can be no one model framework for the evaluation of
materials, the framework used must be determined by the reasons, objective and
circumstances of the evaluation. Most of the lists of publications are to some extent
subjective as they list for pre-use evaluation and this involves selection and
prediction. However, we must start this report on our evaluation by acknowledging
that, to some extent, our results are still inevitable subjective. This is because, any
pre-use evaluation in subjective, both in this selection of criteria and in the judgments
made by the evaluators.
A useful exercise for anybody writing or evaluating language teaching
materials would be to evaluate the checklists and criteria lists from a sample of the
publications above against the following criteria:


1.  Is the list based on a coherent set of principles of language learning?
2. Are all the criteria actually evaluation criteria?
3. Are the criteria sufficient to help the evaluator to reach useful conclusions?
4. Are the criteria organized systematically?
5. Are the criteria sufficiently neutral to allow evaluators with different
ideologies to make use of them?
6. In the list sufficiently flexible to allow it be made use of by different
evaluators in different circumstances?

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