Unit 3 - Applying Effective Principles - TESL 0150

Applying Effective Principles for Adapting Resources Activity
Scenario 3
You are teaching a test preparation course. All your learners need to take the IELTS, which is an English language proficiency test and a university entry requirement. You are preparing a reading lesson to help students practice matching paragraph headings to the corresponding paragraph. You have the Reading Lesson 1: Matching Paragraph Headings resource available.
I chose the 7 principles of materials development below to assess this activity. I chose these principles because the context is a test preparation course. I tried to stay away from principles that detailed the student’s emotional engagement as, in this context, the emotional engagement will most likely not be very high. I ensured to use principles that detail outcome feedback as I believe this is necessary in a test preparation course. I also ensured that these principles included references to high level skills as students will require these skills in order to be successful in their IELTS.
  1. Make sure the texts and tasks are as interesting, relevant, and enjoyable as possible so as to exert a positive influence on the learners' attitudes to the language and to the process of learning it.

The IELTS reading practice would, most likely, not be interesting and enjoyable for the learners. It is however, relevant. It may not exert a positive influence on the learner’s attitudes. Some changes that I may make in order to increase the positive influence is firstly, altering the format of the resources. By making the resourcing look more visually appealing and adding some colour, it can help to make the materials more enjoyable to read through.

  1. Make sure that these output activities are designed so that the learners are using language rather than just practicing specified features of it.

The IELTS reading practice provides many opportunities to practice certain features of language however it does not provide a lot of opportunity to use the language. I would adapt these materials by having the students not only assigning paragraph headings but practicing identifying paragraph structure (topic sentence, supporting ideas, conclusions etc.) and reading through these paragraphs with partners. Reading and identifying with partners will allow the students to do language practice and not just practice a specified feature. We must consider that this is test preparation and their use of language in this class must be relevant to the test.

  1. Make sure that the output activities are fully contextualized in that the learners are responding to an authentic stimulus (e.g., a text, a need, a viewpoint, an event), that they have specific addressees, and that they have a clear intended outcome in mind.

The output activities in the context I have chosen uses mostly non-authentic stimuli. However, we must consider that an IELTS test would most likely not use authentic stimuli either. But, these materials could be altered. I would change the materials to start with paragraphs that are more specific to the students situations, for example, if they are an immigrant from china I may provide a paragraph on what it is like living in Canada as an immigrant. To ensure the needs of the course are still met, I would, over time, provide the students with paragraphs that progressively became less associated to their personal lives and more closely associated to paragraphs they would see in an IELTS test and specific to the addressees.

  1. Try to ensure that opportunities for feedback are built into output activities and are provided for the learners afterwards.
These materials have several opportunities for instant feedback. Feedback for matching the headings to the paragraphs is built into the output activity. It provides the students with a score. I don’t think that much needs to be adapted here. The score is presented to them in a formal test style, which is authentic use for this context. The feedback for the learners will be helpful and allow them to identify their mistakes. I would let the students try this in pairs, evaluate their feedback and then try again as individuals.
  1. The materials need to be written in such a way that the teacher can make use of them as a resource and not have to follow them as a script.

The IELTS reading practice activities are presented very much as a script and they provide little flexibility for teachers. I would adapt these materials to be less strict in their format. For example, in questions 1 to 6 in which the students have to match the paragraph headings, this could easily be adapted to a different paragraph with different answers. Or it could be adjusted so that students could research their own paragraphs. Either way, I believe that this section should be adapted to allow more flexibility for the teacher.

  1. The activities should, from the earliest levels onward, involve and encourage the use of such high-level skills as imaging, using inner speech, making connections, predicting, interpreting, evaluating, and applying

These materials involve and encourage some use of high-level skills. Some adaptations that I might make would be to encourage more predicting and making connections skills. For example, instead of providing the entire paragraph, I could provide the students with the topic sentences of the paragraphs and have them predict what the content will be about. Or the students could connect the topic sentences to the conclusions in order to help them draw accurate conclusions. I think these materials desperately require a longer, more deliberate introduction to the topic. These materials do not include enough background information, in their current state, to encourage the use of high-level skills.

  1. The materials should help the teacher to assess the learners and to give constructive feedback in relation to achievement of intended outcomes.

These materials provide some help to the teacher to assess the learners. However, the feedback may not be accurate due to the structure of the materials. In order to give constructive feedback that is related to the intended outcomes, the materials should be adapted. In order to ensure that the students have not just obtained ‘basic communicative competence’ (Richards, 2010), I would implement a group activity to identify topic sentences with feedback, followed by a pairs activity with peer to peer feedback, then finally an individual testing for feedback. This would provide a feedback for numerous purposes that would lead to the student being able to use the required language more fluently and effectively.

For this context, I would not include the students in the materials adaptation process. I think that this may happen inadvertently as the student’s strengths and weaknesses become more clear however, I would hope to adapt these materials prior to class with their test outcomes in mind. Since this is test preparation, it is very important that the students are able to practice their materials in authentic testing scenarios, I think this can be difficult for a student to replicate this process and I think that responsibility may fall on the teacher in this context. There could be some students that assist with the material adaptation to make the materials more flexible and less like a script. But overall, I think it would be best if the materials adaptation was left to the teacher in this context.

References
Matching Paragraph Headings. IELTS Buddy. Retrieved from https://www.ieltsbuddy.com/paragraph-headings.html
Richards, J. C. (2010). English Language Teaching Materials. Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). (2013). Developing materials for language teaching. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

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