ABSTRACT
An innovation is something new which aims to be an improvement on what already exists. It also aims to be efficient, effective, popular and enduring. It is difficult to innovate successfully in materials development because innovations threaten the powerful status quo, they are not properly understood, they seem too demanding or they are not effectively promoted. Many teachers resist materials that do not have the face validity afforded by resemblance to the norm. This is what happened to an innovative coursebook in Japan, which looked like a ‘manga’ comic book, and to an innovative nonlinear coursebook in the UK, which did not use the conventional Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP) approach and which looked very different from other coursebooks (Shepherd et al. 1992).
