I previously posted about my intention to record what happened in my own classroom over the course of a week as a way of further exploring my relationship with and attitude to materials. Firstly, I must confess that I failed to meet the high target of recording every lesson taught. Unfortunately, time constraints made this impossible. However, the records (three out of a maximum six) I did make point to some interesting thoughts. The records in their entirety can be found here, here and here.

Whilst I acknowledge that these records only pertain to the most minimum time period and cannot be taken as representative of my teaching practice, what follows are my observations on the role of materials in my classroom.

I value materials that allow for responsiveness.

Especially for those classes which operate a system of continuous enrolment, the ability to adapt materials for the needs of a class which are forever in flux is paramount. I cannot reliably predict what my learners on any given day will have difficulty with, this being largely dependent on the composition of the class on the day in question. McGrath ¹ identifies three types of adaptation, two of which I can see examples of in my classroom reports.

Extemporisation is defined as ‘a spontaneous response on the part of the teacher to a problem or an opportunity’ ². The deviation from my planned lesson with my intermediate learners to correct errors using the past simple was an example of this. I had met half of these learners for the first time in that same lesson and could not have predicted their difficulties. However, the success of the rest of the lesson depended on their ability to recognise the difference between past and present time, hence my decision. Another example of this occurred the following day, when I noticed the opportunity to provide corrective feedback on the use of go.

By contrast, the definition given for exploitation is ‘the creative use of what is there to serve a purpose which is additional to that foreseen by the textbook’ ³. This creative use could be planned in advance and such was the case with my decision to expand on the phrase that must be + adj, for commenting on present situations so my learners would be able to apply this to past situations as that must have been + adj. My decision to have my academic studies students apply what they had learnt from the lesson extracted from Powell’s ‘Presenting in English’ to a critical evaluation of a TED talk could also be viewed as an example of exploitation.

I value visuals as a means of providing extra support, engagement and motivation.

The fact that visuals are useful in the classroom has always seemed to be a statement of the obvious to me and this is evident in the ways I have used materials in the lessons I described. For example, the addition of images to the lead in task on the topic of free time. This served to lift the activity from the pages of the course book, provide extra support to learners who needed it and, as Pit Corder ⁴ suggested, give all learners the chance, through engaging with the images, to produce more language. However, the universal utility of images in the classroom comes under question. Hill ⁵ makes the distinction between images which are used and those present only for decoration and claims that 34.1% photographs in the two course books he analysed are present for decorative purposes only. Canning ⁶ raises questions over the evidence for the widely held belief in the importance of visuals, claiming that empirical support is lacking.

Canning-Wilson ⁷ considers that the following three assumptions must be subscribed to by those who use visuals to facilitate language learning:

1. Imagery can facilitate learning.
2. Imagery (combined with the use of texts) make subjects more likely to think about the process of the language more fully.
3. Imagery may hinder language learning.

She gives the example of how imagery can interfere with performance during ‘concurrent visual tasks’ as an example of this hindrance. Whilst I still believe in the value of images in the classroom, it is certainly interesting to think more about what evidence there is for this and the occasions on which images might have an undesired effect.

I value involving my learners. 

This applies in two ways – firstly the giving of choices where appropriate; secondly the use of my students’ own work, experiences or projects as ‘materials’. In his chapter on resisting course books, Thornbury ⁸ advocates passing on responsibilities for text selection to learners. He cites an example of a ‘student-generated, experiential approach to course design’ described by Hall, which sounds similar in essentials to the activity I described in the report of my academic studies class, albeit carried out on a grander scale. Hall’s ⁹ outline syllabus is based on the pattern of ‘Plan, Do, Report Back, Evaluate, Plan Again’. He expands upon the term student-generated: ‘Except at very few place…texts (recorded interviews, journal articles, etc.) are found and brought to class by the students themselves, so that the course content is generated by students, not by teachers’. Although for my learners this was not a cyclical process, the sequence of activities my academic studies class followed would fit into the pattern Hall suggests: the learners planned a presentation, with guidance on good practice in doing so; delivered their presentations, first in class and then to their main subject tutors; they reported back, before explaining any changes they had made; evaluated their own and each others’ performances. I also gave my students freedom to select a TED talk of their choosing for the task of writing a critique. This handing over of control has been a guiding principle throughout my novice year teaching this type of class, which is composed of international students enrolled on either access or foundation year courses in diverse range of disciplines, as a means of encouraging motivation and attempting to achieve maximum relevance to each individual.

This short, self-research project has shed a light on my attitude to teaching materials. Overall, whilst I am relatively happy to go into a class with no physical materials, value responsiveness to emergent language and have built a strong repertoire over the years, published materials still play a strong role in my classroom. I’ve also realised that some of the assumptions I hold are open to question.