Littlejohn's Three-Level Analysis

Littlejohn's three-level framework analyses language-teaching materials at progressively deeper layers: what is there on the page, what is required of teacher and learner to use it, and what is implied about language, learning, and roles by the design as a whole. The framework's distinctive contribution to materials evaluation is that it surfaces the assumptions a coursebook encodes, separately from any sales pitch the publisher makes about it. The chapter title "Inside the Trojan Horse" captures the orientation: published materials carry pedagogic theory inside them whether or not the user notices.

The three levels

Level 1, what is there (objective description). A purely descriptive pass over the physical artefact: page count, section structure, distribution of activity types, presence and treatment of illustrations, the proportion of teacher-fronted versus learner-active material, the explicit topics, and the explicit grammar and vocabulary syllabus. The aim is to record observable features without inference, so that later levels build on a shared description rather than on competing impressions.

Level 2, what is required of users (subjective analysis). A task-by-task analysis of what teachers and learners actually have to do. Each task is unpacked along three axes: what process the learner performs (decode, repeat, transform, hypothesise, negotiate, create), what kind of participation is expected (individual, pair, group, whole class, with whom initiating), and what content is being worked on (linguistic form, propositional meaning, personal experience). Level 2 tests the publisher's claims against the design: a coursebook claiming to be communicative can be inspected task by task to see whether learners are actually required to make meaning or only to manipulate forms.

Level 3, what is implied (subjective inference). General conclusions drawn from Levels 1 and 2 about the materials' overall aims, principles of selection and sequencing, theory of language, theory of learning, role assigned to the teacher, role assigned to the learner, and the demands placed on each. Level 3 names the pedagogic theory the materials enact, which may or may not match the theory their front matter announces.

Where it sits in the evaluation literature

Cunningsworth's checklist and McGrath's framework both operate as criterion-driven evaluations: the analyst brings a list of desiderata and rates the material against them. Littlejohn's framework operates differently. It is descriptive and analytical before it is evaluative, asking what the materials do before asking whether what they do is good. The two orientations are complementary rather than competing. A full evaluation cycle will typically run a Littlejohn-style analysis first to understand the materials on their own terms, then apply criterion-driven checks to compare what is there against what is wanted.

Use in research and teacher development

The framework underpins a substantial body of textbook-analysis dissertations and journal studies, partly because its task-level granularity yields data that tolerate quantitative summary (counts of task types, participation patterns, process demands) while preserving qualitative depth at Level 3. Pre-service teacher-education programmes use a simplified version to train candidates to read coursebooks past the surface marketing, on the principle that a teacher who can name what a textbook assumes can also decide where to push back against it.

References

• Littlejohn, A. (2011). The analysis of language teaching materials: Inside the Trojan Horse. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials Development in Language Teaching (2nd ed., pp. 179–211). Cambridge University Press. http://www.andrewlittlejohn.net/website/docs/Littlejohn%20Materials%20The%20analysis%20of%20language%20teaching%20materials.pdf
• Littlejohn, A. (1998). The analysis of language teaching materials: Inside the Trojan Horse. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials Development in Language Teaching (1st ed., pp. 190–216). Cambridge University Press.
• Littlejohn, A. (2022). The analysis and evaluation of language teaching materials. In J. Norton & H. Buchanan (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching. Routledge.
• Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). (2011). Materials Development in Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.