Evaluating material designed to support trainee English language teachers

Material used by pre-service English language teachers, such as those preparing for, or already on, courses such as the Cambridge English Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA), needs evaluating to accommodate our continually evolving understandings of learning teaching in a rapidly changing world. Materials evaluation exercises may rely too heavily, though, on the ‘armchair evaluation’ of experts who may never use the material themselves and indeed might have imperfect understandings of the needs of novice teachers. This article reports on an attempt to access CELTA-type trainees’ cognitions and practices through interviews, questionnaires, reading and reaction protocols, and the analysis of a lesson plan, with a view to this informing the materials evaluation and revision process. In our study, this combination of methods, with the research design evolving out of efforts to reduce the threat of researcher bias, generated useful insights, which then fed into the revision process. There are implications for how material used in other teacher education contexts is evaluated.