INTRODUCTION

These questions, posed by a teacher looking for the first time at Words Will Travel (Clemens & Crawford, 1994), a set of integrated resources colleagues and I had just spent 3 years developing, set me thinking about the role of preplanned materials and why I have always been interested in resource production. It also recalled my concern, both as a teacher and as a teacher educator, about the incoherence of many language programs when teachers create their own materials or, as seems more frequently the case, pick and choose from a range of authentic and published materials and worksheets, often originally prepared for other classes.

This discussion is divided into two sections. The first looks at attitudes to teaching materials, including textbooks, and explores two opposing points of view. For some, commercial materials deskill teachers and rob them of their capacity to think professionally and respond to their students. They are also misleading in that the contrived language they contain has little to do with reality. For others, the role of teaching materials is potentially more positive. They can, for example, be a useful form of professional development for teachers, and foster autonomous learning strategies in students. Such arguments and the proliferation of teaching materials suggest that the issue is not so much whether teachers should use commercially prepared materials, but rather what form these should take so that the outcomes are positive for teachers and learners rather than restrictive.