Some of these may be considered textbooks, while others would not, so the broader term "teaching and learning materials" will be used to refer to them collectively. This study will include most books and other materials created for a specific educational environment, as long they were created in a non-dominant language. Different combinations of materials are appropriate in different contexts, so including a wider variety of texts will also assist in finding a sufficient number of projects to study.
Materials Creation
This study will mostly use the term “creation” to describe the process of planning, drafting, editing, and approving textbooks. This word was chosen to differentiate this process from the related process of design, which may connote the narrower process that produces the visual elements of the textbook. As previously stated, this study will focus on particular types of textbook development teams that include both international and local members, and these will tend to occur outside of publishing houses
Educational Consultants
All of the textbook design projects encountered so far had input from a specific class of educators that consult on materials creation projects outside of their own culture. These people are not native speakers of the non-dominant language that is used in the textbooks, but may speak it as an additional language. They typically have a high level of education in fields such as curriculum development, literacy, or linguistics. They may come from the country where the materials are being created, or from elsewhere. The participants in this study are educational consultants who worked on teaching materials in non-dominant languages.
Local Educators
These are people who speak the non-dominant language used in the materials as a native language, and who also participate in the educational realm in some way, as teachers, supervisors, curriculum leaders or professors. Materials creation projects generally involve at least some local language educators because they have both knowledge of the language and experience in local classrooms that is needed to design appropriate textbooks.