Considerations in Coursebook Creation and Professional Development: A Corpus-Assisted Self-Study

In EFL classrooms, materials have been influential in facilitating effective student learning. When given the opportunity to create an in-house coursebook on English for online content creation, I conducted this self-study as the first author and sole participant to examine my considerations and professional development throughout the materials writing process. The second researcher collaborated as a critical friend who provided feedback on the materials and consultations during data analysis. While developing a coursebook unit, I wrote 14 diary entries to record my reflection. Afterwards, the Diary corpus was constructed and the keyword analysis was applied. The analysis yielded 19 keywords, with “content”, “students”, and “reading” as the top three, representing the aboutness of my considerations. Then the qualitative analysis was applied for deeper insights. The findings revealed six major aspects of my considerations such as students’ proficiency and world knowledge, text selection and adaptation, and coursebook practicality. Four areas of professional development were identified; for example, developing materials helped a teacher “learn to apply language teaching principles more critically.” This study illustrates a methodological design combining a corpus-assisted keyword analysis with a self-study approach. Its findings offer an understanding of in-house materials writing as situated professional development for EFL teachers.