The concept of language
learning materials has always been difficult to pin down within the context of
technological and digital media. This is partly because language teaching has
historically been rooted in print-based learning materials. Technology has by
now afforded a transcending of the authorship divide and a transition to
materials in different media, modalities and degrees of transience. These
changes have broadened the scope of what were formerly understood as materials,
but at the same time, have made for some ambiguity in the use of the term in
the literature. For some, materials are still artefacts produced using
technological applications (the wordprocessor, podcasting software and so on)
or sourced from the Web (YouTube videos and the like). For others, technology
has transformed materials from being products like this, to being processes -
of socialising, networking and collaborating (via tools such as social
networking sites, wikis, and so on). Given these disparities, it would now seem
time to reconcile these concepts of materials viz à viz
technology and to look at how they are realised within the blended language
learning (BLL) environments which increasingly characterise our educational
landscape. In this endeavour, this chapter looks firstly at how the concept of
materials has had to evolve in tune with the affordances of technology. It then
consults frameworks for blended learning (BL) in the literature, homing in on
the place of language materials within these, in order to evolve a conceptual
model for materials in blended language learning contexts. In the second part
of the chapter, this is operationalized via illustrative samples. The chapter
closes by using the devised model as a metric to critically evaluate current
parameters for blended language learning materials design.