At the beginning of this blog I was taken aback by how much potential the study of materials design, adaptation and evaluation had for me. I was left with a sense that this module could be much more relevant to my own future than I thought. I have since been struck by how important it is to have a grasp of this topic to develop as a teacher, and to forge a path in ELT instead of becoming a passenger. In the end, this process has produced results that even then I didn’t expect. I feel like I’ve been given the chance to take more control of what I do as a teacher, giving myself more input in how and what my students learn. I’ve become more personally invested in the classes I provide for learners, and better able to shape their learning experience to meet their needs. I’ve also become more informed about my teaching practices, and more capable of evaluating their validity, in the same way as one might evaluate a set of materials. This has made me able to adapt my teaching style more fluidly and appropriately, again, as one might adapt materials. A key theme of this journey has been the far-reaching impact and significance that materials can have, and the effect this module has had on my teaching is no different.

I’ll conclude it by revisiting my initial goals and describing the ways they’ve been addressed, and finally thinking about where I will go from here.

My goals at the beginning of this process

‘Confidence’ was a recurring word in my opening statement. I wanted the confidence to create more complex material from scratch, and the confidence to adapt materials on a ‘macro’ level – most of my goals were based on building confidence in my abilities to experiment and develop in new directions. As with many things, giving it a concerted effort was the first step. I’ve found out about better ways to employ and exploit types of materials which I used in fairly predictable ways before. The key to achieving this really was the confidence to be more adventurous and creative; not only confidence in myself, but confidence in the methods I wanted to try. This came from reading and seminars about approaches, media and techniques which I either didn’t use, or didn’t realise I used. What I was then able to do was apply principles, and evaluate an idea in such a way that I could rely on as aligning with my beliefs about teaching and learning. The combination of becoming more informed about different possibilities, and actually being able to make informed judgements about their application in my context, gave me the ability to experiment more. Once I had become comfortable with taking on and adapting the materials ideas of others, I then felt confident in creating more of my own ideas, and creating more nuanced materials – and it came from the same ability: pre-use, principled evaluation of materials. An understanding of the principles behind materials was the crux of everything which followed – evaluation, adaptation and design – and the basis on which I’ve developed during this module.

This was one of my specific goals at the outset:

-‘I would love to build my confidence in creating more structured material, which could be more closely tailored for specific contexts and the individual needs of students, and less ‘one-size-fits-all’.

I feel I have achieved this, as shown by the materials we created in the later weeks of this module, which were centred on the individual needs of a small group of learners. An appreciation of whether or not material meets particular needs, and evaluations we’ve done, helped me to target material at ‘specific contexts and the individual need of students’, and I’ve found the ability to do this routinely extremely valuable. However, more importantly, I’d like to expand this goal. The flexible, less closely tailored materials produced by other teachers really motivated me to explore this type of materials design; creating something that can be successfully tailored for a wide variety of individual learner needs. This could be closer to a genuine ‘one-size-fits-all’, or at least one-size-fits-many. Our introduction to flexi-materials was hugely significant in the realisation of this possibility, and the power that teacher-writers are given by this format will, I’m sure, be of great use to me as I continue creating and teaching materials.

Here is another:

– It would be incredibly gratifying to take away the ability to analytically, critically design a course over several weeks, and have the awareness and confidence to adapt not just the content, but also the progression and structure of coursebooks provided for the classes I teach.

I’ve learned that the cornerstones of any adaptation or creation of materials, whether one activity or a course, are learner needs and personal principles. I believe that the principled evaluation which now underlies any adaptation I make of published materials could support adaptation on any scale. As in the design of materials though, relevant and principled adaptation is based on the needs of the learners. Since this module has begun, I have made more alterations to the way my learners progress through the coursebooks we are obliged to use at my institution. These alterations have been founded in the needs of the learners, and also in my desire to implement particular SLA theories or methodologies. This module has given me the ability to adapt the published materials to fit learner needs, and to better embody the methodologies or language acquisition theories which accord with my principles.

My next steps

In my first post, and throughout this blog, I considered the urgency of the need to adapt to the changes edtech brings to ELT. I was really satisfied to be able to engage more with edtech’s potential during this module, and I was also pleased to be shown that, actually, I was already doing so. Like many teachers, my opinion of the way I engaged with digital materials was inconsistent with how I did in practice. The opportunity to explore their use in multiliteracies and constructivism, as well as through the use of video in language learning, has given me new perspective on their potential. I aim to continue developing in this area as a priority, and to remain motivated to bring the digital world into the classroom, and into language learning. I’m making this a habit now, and will keep exploring new avenues as they appear.

My main aim for the future is to keep being conscientious with my evaluation, adaptation and design of teaching material. Properly founded materials adaptations have enhanced the learning of my students, and improved my planning and in-class use of materials. The value of critically evaluating what you are using, and taking the time to do so, is huge. By using an evaluative process, a set of design principles and your own understanding of learners context and needs, you can create lessons which are as beneficial for them as any material could be. In light of this, I aim to remain committed to these procedures, to try to automatise and build on them.

 

 

 

In Week 9, I was excited by the opportunity to see the materials which had been produced by our coursemates, and to be able to evaluate them together and compare their potential uses and advantages to our own creation. Perhaps selfishly, I was probably more engaged by the prospect of critical evaluation of our own materials from our peers, and Paul and Theresa. However, as it turned out, being exposed to my peers’ design processes was at least equally valuable, if not more so. In this post I outline the key points of the evaluation framework I applied to the materials, according to the frameworks we read and synthesised in Week 3. I also discuss the points of interest and insights which emerged from the seminar through evaluations of our own and others’ created materials. Finally, I present some of the most significant realisations and ideas I took away from this part of the process – my own ‘learning outcomes’ – and how this has helped me to modify our materials. Attached below are the listening text, transcript, language analysis worksheet and information gap we created.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C72QPqjFk3Wjf2ueADy25ddX-iXwvNF8ahI1GiwE-WY/edit?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3XEXST_-zctSjdNcmpzME90OGUzcWF5QU9CVmZHNFdpdlpR

Evaluation framework

The framework which I used to evaluate of our own and others’ materials, and their creation processes, was drawn from the one we created in Week 3. This was a synthesis of existing evaluation frameworks and reflection on the topic (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2018; Johnson 2006; Mishan and Timmis 2015). The framework we made appears below. Here are some of the key points of my application and adaptation of the framework, based on reflections I made in Week 3:

‘In any future evaluation frameworks the initial root of the process will be a reiteration of principles for materials.’ (Mishan and Timmis 2015) – On the basis of this, my evaluation framework was based on assessing whether the materials in question met my own principles, in addition to the framework we created as a group in Week 3.

‘The category of psychological validity proposed by Rubdy (2003, cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015) appealed to me – my evaluation of materials would certainly include assessment of the possibilities for cognitive engagement, and learners themselves taking advantage of opportunities to develop their skills’ – Being a central personal principle, the development of in-class autonomy through demands on cognitive engagement was highly valued by my evaluation framework.

‘Tomlinson stresses the importance of a localised, contextually sensitive evaluative framework – rightly so, I believe, as an effective evaluation must be based on the learners and learning environment to which the materials will be applied‘ (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2018) – The context for which the materials were designed informed the framework’s evaluative criteria; it was created with my own context in mind, so certain criteria should be dropped or adapted depending on relevance to the materials’ context for use.

‘Surely, it is both acceptable and indeed desirable to take into account the impact of ‘dogma’ both on the context in which the material will be used, and on the principles that the evaluator holds’ – As discussed in Week 3, in opposition to Tomlinson I see no problem with the inclusion of criteria based on what might be called the ‘dogma’ of either the materials or the evaluator, if that ‘dogma’ constitutes critically examined principles.

Any evaluation framework ‘should definitely involve ‘whilst-use’ and ‘post-use’ evaluation (Mishan and Timmis 2015)’ – Although this was only possible second-hand with the material created by other teachers, as I haven’t yet had a chance to use them personally, it’s possible with our own materials, as I have used them with the learners whose needs informed them. Whilst-use evaluation is inevitable, and very productive in evaluating aspects such as potential for humanisation/localisation, flexibility and practicality, appeal and impact, achievement of pedagogical outcomes, clarity of task instructions… the list goes on.

The seminar

Seeing the materials created by our coursemates gave some valuable insights into how our own design process could have been improved. Roo and Laura’s menus were an excellent example of a materials design process driven by a non-linguistic, arguably non-specific need. They are essentially raw materials for which they had suggested a brilliant variety of procedures, echoing Prabhu’s ideas about semi-materials (Maley 2011). Louisa and Irene’s board game was accompanied by a set procedure, but also allowed for a plethora of other interpretations, allowing it to meet a similarly wide range of specific learner needs as Roo and Laura’s materials. I was initially stumped by what needs, if any, had driven the creation of the latter – several laminated menus, written by learners in their first languages – but Laura explained to me that they used the development of intercultural communicative competencies as a foundation for their creation process. I thought the materials they produced were wonderfully imaginative in how they provided opportunities for learners to develop skills in this area, and had the potential to favourably measure against every one of our evaluation criteria, depending on the procedure a teacher chose.

It drew my attention to our reliance on linguistic needs in order to feel comfortable and grounded in our own creation process; something more easily quantifiable and measurable in our minds. The way that other groups eschewed a language focus in favour of valuable and contextually appropriate communicative competencies reminded me of a thought from Week 5:

‘Karasthati’s call (2016) to re-examine and adapt our constructs of communicative competencies struck a chord with me. Kress (2006) made a point which built on this; ‘TESOL professionals continue to act as though language fully represented the meanings they wish to communicate’. As language teachers, whose expertise is founded in how to decode and encode meaning in language, perhaps we’re a little too enamoured with language itself’ – Week 5

Discussing other groups’ identification of learner needs made me realise that we could perhaps have improved our materials design by opening ourselves up more readily to non language-based learner needs as a touchstone for our process. I believe it was a desire to stay within our comfort zone – being ‘a little too enamoured with language itself’ – that led us to do this, and I’m grateful for being reminded that this is not the only way.

Another train of thought which began in this seminar concerns the nature of flexi-materials, semi-materials and meta-materials, and the implications – benefits and caveats – their creation could have for teachers and learners. Theresa made the point that different procedures could be applied to the listening text we created, a two-person dialogue in a networking context, in order to meet different learner needs. She evaluated the listening as being localised and humanised, as it aligns with my learners’ personal needs and contexts. It’s use of non-native speakers also was brought up as a realistic reflection of English as a global language. Having created the text specifically for our purpose of language analysis, other possible learning opportunities it offered didn’t immediately occur to us. It is true though that it could be exploited in many ways and, mirroring Prabhu’s semi-materials (Maley 2011), by adapting the procedure it could be used at different levels, altering the cognitive load on learners. So Young assessed the level of language in our text as B1 and was surprised to hear it was targeted at A2 learners; my response was that the tasks required of the learners didn’t mean they had to engage with all of the language presented, and the cyclical nature of our procedure allowed opportunities for learners to notice and contextualise our target language. However, it wasn’t until Theresa made the above suggestion that I realised the implications of this fully – it was the procedure we created, not just the text, which made the text applicable to our learners’ needs. We had already considered the possibility of supplementing, abridging or extending our procedure to provide further scaffolding, move the focus away from language analysis and onto communicative use, or adapt the material into a week-long project. It was very useful to be reminded, though, that we could exploit our text for completely different learner needs at a variety of levels by using the text with flexi-materials. This also satisfactorily met our evaluation criterion concerning adaptability.

A possible caveat attached to the use and design of flexi-materials was also revealed in the seminar. Our procedure, compared to the procedures attached to the texts in Roo, Laura, Irene and Louisa’s materials, was quite stringent. It wasn’t particularly creative or original. It was constructionist, and composed of inductive grammar analysis, followed by focus on form then freer personalised use, before creating a language-based end product relevant to learners real-world needs. It reflected the way that we as a group would have approached the text we created in order to exploit it for our identified learner need. I think we used the materials design process framework in Jolly and Bolitho (2011) more strictly than we thought we were, sticking to our pedagogical realisation quite rigidly. Some great materials produced by our peers were not designed in that way, but featured room for a huge variety of contextual and pedagogical realisation to meet multiple learner needs. The advantage of our defined procedure, though, was its ‘pick-up-and-go’ potential for relatively inexperienced teachers. This raises the question, who are we designing materials for? Raw texts which can be exploited with a rich variety of procedures are extremely valuable to an experienced teacher, able to identify learner needs and reliably discern between possible realisations of the material to get the best results. For an inexperienced teacher, they would need to be accompanied by a set of procedures targeted at fulfilling particular learner needs; this would be the caveat, then, to creating materials to which many procedures can be applied: To be successfully used by teachers in different contexts and with different skill sets and levels of experience, they need to be accompanied by skeleton procedures – perhaps of the type provided by meta-materials. This interacts interestingly with our evaluative criterion of clearly staged lessons – our procedure was clearly staged, and not overly complex. That evaluative point, though, is moot if the materials have no set procedure, which makes me think I should adapt my evaluative framework in this case.

On the other hand, the sheer flexibility of raw texts, especially ones with the intercultural, pragmatic and sociolinguistic potential of Roo and Laura’s menus, could be very upskilling for teachers, meeting another of our evaluation criteria. As we decided in Week 2, materials…

…should introduce teachers to new techniques

…ought to be easy to use, and not dominate the lesson/the planning but faciliate them

Raw texts which are open to wide adaptation is a great way to achieve these. It demands teachers to cognitively engage with the learning potential of a text, and the learning taking place in the classroom. This creates the potential for adopting new techniques, and training teachers to use other raw texts more effectively. It could also remove complicated procedures from the equation, as the teacher is forced to think about what learners are doing with the text, not whether they are following a prescribed set of tasks.

Personal learning outcomes

Overall, the process of design and evaluation taught me a lot about my teaching practice and attitudes, and my personal principles for materials design. At this stage I feel that a constructionist approach is effective, and it meets with a great deal of my pre-existing principles for materials and teaching in general. My positive feeling about constructionism was reinforced by my evaluation of our own materials, in which I concluded that for me, a lot of principles and criteria were fulfilled by the presence of the end-product, and its effect on the learners’ attitudes. This really reaffirmed Jolly and Bolitho’s suggestion that the materials writing process forces you to engage with all the important elements of teaching and learning (Jolly and Bolitho 1998). Teaching and learning principles are a subjective thing, at least insofar as they vary from individual to individual (naturally, mine are objectively true…). The process of materials creation and evaluation forces you to more consciously and critically analyse the basis for particular decisions you’ve made, which teaches you about yourself, and what you hold to be important as a teacher.

Another big learning curve for me was the rigidity of our learner needs identification compared to our colleagues, and how that constricted our materials (if taken together as both text and procedure) to quite a specific context and application. The materials based on non-linguistic learner needs had an adaptability and potential for autonomous learning that made me think we shouldn’t have dropped our Disco Bunny idea after all.

 

Johnson, K.; ‘A step forward: investigating expertise in materials evaluation’ in ELT Journal Vol. 62 Issue 2, 2006

Mishan, F. and Timmis, I.; Materials development for TESOL; 2015

Tomlinson, B. Materials Development in Language Teaching; 2013

Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H.; The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Langauge Learning; 2018

 

 

Having identified needs for the material, explored the language related to the needs and established a contextual realisation of them – although not in that order – we moved into the pedagogical realisation stage for the second time, more confident of the basis provided by the three aforementioned stages and our own principles for materials. Our group met again to discuss how best to approach this, and hoping to move into planning the procedure we would apply to the material before beginning production. In this post, I describe our process of creating a text, and designing a procedure to be applied to it to ensure our materials met our identified learner needs.

Creating a text

The first point of discussion was how to introduce the context and activate learners’ schemata in that area. We decided a text of some kind was the best way to do this. Thinking of Kress’s argument for our responsibility as language teachers to represent the real world (Kress 2003), and her proponence of multi-media texts and video to do this, we thought a video would be appropriate. It would be a form of text that supported our principle of ensuring the skills and language learned were transferable to learners’ wider contexts, and that language presented was perceived as natural and relevant to learners. A video would immediately demonstrate the context of the language points and skills foci, and would provide opportunities for noticing of pragmatic and sociocultural communicative competencies within the context of communication. It could fill a supportive role, explaining and ‘rescuing’ the language used, but also a didactic role, demonstrating the behaviour expected in the context of networking.

The first possibility we considered was using a publicly available video giving an introduction to professional networking (the context we had chosen for our need), perhaps aimed at first-language speakers of English. The advantage of this would be it’s status as ‘authentic’ material, in the sense that it would be targeted at speakers of English as a first language, and it’s clear relevance to the perceived and professed needs of our learners to use English in a professional context in their lives. However, we realised that if we wish to establish the communicative context for the language needs, the text should ideally reflect the language skills that the context had been chosen to realise. As a result, we decided an originally created example, or model, of the communicative context and its language needs would be the most suitable, as then we could control the language used. Also, the class being a low-to-middling A2 level, I thought that a text aimed at speakers of English as a first language could contain language which would be complex enough to cognitively overload learners, making them less able to apply their cognition to the elements of the text required by the tasks. Here we were reminded of the point that a teacher is in an unparalleled position to assess the contextual and linguistic needs of their own class, and this is part of what makes teachers ideal candidates for designing materials for their own learners (Jolly and Bolitho 1998). For these reasons we decided that producing our own text would be the best way to ensure the needs behind the materials were pedagogically realised.

On deciding to produce our own text to establish the context of the language focus, and model the language itself, we reconsidered the type of text. We didn’t have the expertise, or to be honest the time to develop the expertise, needed to create a video that would satisfy all that we expected from our text. Creating videos to demonstrate professional and social contexts seems to need more resources, and possibly experience, than we had access to. We determined that the text would be an audio recording instead, accompanied by an image to establish the context further and to partially ‘rescue’ the meaning and significance of the language in the audio. Prabhu’s idea of ‘semi-materials’ (in Maley 2011) gave us confidence in the potential value of an originally recorded audio which we had written a transcript for, as it would provide us all with a raw text which could yield different learning outcomes if we applied a different procedure or language focus to it. The content for the audio would be a conversation between two people, for the purpose of networking by sharing and asking for personal information about current situations, habits and future plans; the topic of conversation would be work, studies and making future arrangements. Although this material is driven by the linguistic need of using the present simple and present continuous effectively, the text could also suit needs such as tonic stress and intonation in questions, language for greeting, asking and responding to questions, functions for maintaining conversations, and so on. If a different set of tasks was applied, a different need could be met using such a text, in line with the ideas behind semi-materials.

Planning the procedure

Having determined this type of text, we started planning the tasks that would form the procedure of our materials. We agreed that the material should provide learners with a clear outcome, and thought that focusing the procedure towards an end product would make the outcome evident to the learners. Ideally, this end product would be something they might be expected to produce in English in their lives outside the classroom, to fulfil personal goals. This reflects constructionist theories – I’ve become increasingly convinced during this course that working towards a demonstrably valuable end product, extending fractally from within a task to within a lesson, a week and a course, aligns well with my principles for materials as well as language learning in general. It can provide learners with evidence of the potential for real-world application of the skills and language they are learning, both making the material more relevant in their eyes and encouraging them to develop their autonomous learning capabilities by applying these skills or language in their lives. Also, if the values of CLT theories are part of your teaching, an end-product based activity, lesson, week or course provides a basis for genuinely meaningful communication between learners, as they have to really produce something through collaboration and use of their language. Each communicative stage is made more meaningful by the larger goal. Furthermore, if the procedure is based on a language need, an end product reflecting a real-life context for the use of that language point – real-life in the cases of the learners, that is – makes the contextualisation of that language point constantly available to the learners as a reference for the meaning and communicative use of the language. So, as you can see, I felt quite strongly that an end product for our materials was justified.

In choosing an end-product around which to orient the procedure of tasks in our materials, we talked about how networking is often done on the internet, on forums like LinkedIn. Whilst we didn’t want to lose the element of face-to-face communication that we feel is still valuable and relevant to the lives and English goals of our learners, we did think about Kress’s call to bring the communicative contexts of the ‘real world’ into the classroom as much as possible to ensure learners are acquiring genuinely valuable skills, and practicing the use of English in genuinely realistic contexts. We also considered Karasthati’s suggestion (2016) that we as teachers should be re-examining the contructs of communicative compentencies that still underlie much of the material we use. This struck a chord with me before with reference to teaching multiliteracies in class and integrating multimodal texts, that we encounter so often in daily life, into the classroom. In this case, it seemed to bear relevance instead to the outcome we expected them to see as a valid use of language, and the communicative skills we were presenting as necessary in a particular context in English. Communicative competencies in the context of networking are now centred around online interaction as much as, if not more than, face-to-face conversation. We decided that our end product would reflect this.

The procedure

In light of the above, the procedure of the lesson aimed to create a requirement for learners to use the target language meaningfully in the context of professional networking, or exchanging information about their current situation, general habits and future plans. This would happen in the context of a spoken conversation, and ultimately in the context of a written profile which could be the basis for communication through messaging, comments or emails. The written profile, modelled on a LinkedIn profile, is the end product. Now I’m writing this, it makes me think that the pedagogical realisation stage of Jolly and Bolitho’s design process model is essentially visualising what students themselves will need to do to achieve the outcome we want, and then creating tasks which provide a need for them to do this. The tasks we planned were as follows:

1. Learners listen to the audial text and look at a supporting image. The task is a ‘gist’ listening – deciding where the conversation is taking place, and what the purpose of it might be. SS therefore will hopefully be thinking about the communicative context of the materials, and imagining the situations this might occur in and the reasons for it.
2. Learners listen to the audial text again, and answer more detailed questions about the information that constitutes the content of the conversation. This will lead to learners engaging with the meaning of the language being used, and the information being communicated in the context established in task 1. They will then check their answers to the question by reading a written audioscript, leading to them being exposed to both the spoken and written forms of language which communicate the necessary information.
3. The first language focus follows. Learners read the audioscript again, and focus attention on the highlighted language. The highlighted language will be examples of the present simple and present continuous, the latter with both present and future meanings. Learners will be given a worksheet asking them to classify the highlighted language as referring to things which are always/usually true, true at the moment but not always, and arranged plans for the future. This will require learners to evaluate the meaning carried by the form of the target language and the language around it. The inductive nature of this language focus will require learners to autonomously engage with the language, applying their cognition to it, in an analytical way which has been suggested to be the most effective with adult language learners. It will also hopefully ensure that learners’ cognitive abilities are engaged and focused on the target language, and that they are not passively “receiving”. Learners will do this in pairs or small groups to encourage peer to peer discussion of meta-language, and collaborative language analysis. They will then compare their answers in larger groups, maintaining the focus on learners’ own processing power and collaborative communication as the tools to analyse language, as opposed to reliance on the teacher.
4. The second language focus consists of an information gap activity, with two profiles – similar to LinkedIn profiles, containing similar information to the audial text from stage 1 – each missing key information. Each learner has one complete and one incomplete profile, the task being to ask questions of a partner to get the information needed to complete that profile. The missing information will require learners to ask each other questions using the target language, and provide information using the target language. This will hopefully lead to them producing the target language in all forms to meet a communicative purpose, whilst being supported by the existing information, and their own complete profile. The communicative purpose they are fulfilling reflects the communicative context of the lesson outcomes. After this stage, the teacher could carry out class-wide error correction based on monitoring during the task, highlighting the contruction of question forms using the target language, and drilling pronunciation. This will require learners to re-analyse the language they have been using, and will enable them to fill any gaps in understanding, or ask for clarification, after their inductive language analysis.
5. In the next stage learners will have a non-templated conversation with a partner. The task will be ‘find out the same things about another student’. This will hopefully provide learners with an opportunity for more natural, spontaneous and personalised use of the language, within the context of the outcome. They will in theory be using the language they have focused on for the real purpose of explaining their own situation, and finding out about their classmates. This will provide them with an opportunity to recreate the communicative context of face-to-face networking.
6. The next task is writing a profile of another learner. Students will be asked to write their previous partner’s networking profile based on the conversation they just had. The profiles used in task 4 could be used as scaffolding, and students could check and clarify details with their previous partner. This task is designed to allow learners to practice producing language mirroring what they will produce as an end product, and practice producing within the online networking context outlined earlier.
7. Learners will then be asked to introduce their partner to another student, based on the profile they’ve written, but not reading from it. This will hopefully require learners to further use the target language in the communicative context of face-to-face networking, practicing the language and that skill identified as relevant to their goals. This task and task 6 could also be dropped, if learners didn’t need further practice of the language or there were time contraints, and the prodecure could move straight on to the final task.
8. For the end product of the material, learners will produce a written profile for themselves. This could be on paper, or posted online using a teaching resource such as Padlet or Lino. This will require the learners to use the language they have learned, supported by the contextualisation provided by the tasks leading up to this point, for the authentic (to them) communicative purpose of networking in an online context. A possible extension to this end product, if the profiles could be posted on an online collaboration platform, would be online interaction between the learners based on their profiles – suggesting ideal job opportunities based on their profiles, making plans to meet with each other, comparing interests and activities, and so on. In the case of our own linguistic aim, this could lead to learners making more communicative use of it, this time in an online setting that could well represent likely situations for their use of English in the future.

Conclusions

The materials which we created drew on constructivism as a way of ensuring perceived relevance by the learners, motivation for meaningful communication, a potential for further autonomous language use outside the classroom, and a basis in real use of English in my learners’ contexts. The tasks which are involved require learners to identify a sociolinguistic context and its relevance to themselves, inductively analyse language for meaning, form and use, and practise using the language for communicative purpose in a semi-controlled setting, before using it spontaneously. Finally, they create personalised language to form an end-product which they will hopefully find useful in their lives outside the classroom.

 

Tomlinson, B.; ‘Materials development in language teaching; 2011

The beginning of our materials design process was messy and disorganised. We fumbled around for ideas, all three of us approaching the task from different angles and with different proto-plans in our minds. This post describes and discusses the initial difficulties we had in this process, and the measures we took to resolve them. I’m writing this introduction somewhat after I wrote the rest of this post, and with hindsight (and Paul’s guidance) I now believe that we were too dismissive of more widely contextually relevant, non-linguistic learner needs, and stayed within our comfort zone as language teachers in the need we identified. Below, I outline our progress from rudderlessness to purposefulness, and what led us to flounder slightly at the beginning.

Teething problems and missed opportunities

Having concluded that learner needs are a universally reliable foundation for any aspect of materials design, we decided that identification of needs would be an advisable place to start. However, the timing of the terms at Eurocentres, the school where I teach, meant that I hadn’t yet met the students who I would be teaching the following week. Cherry and Phil weren’t teaching at the time, so we didn’t actually have any learners to identify needs in. This lack of an anchor for our material design was disorienting, as removed from the context of student needs, it was difficult to evaluate the suitability of language content, procedures, topic content or anything else. Also, it rendered use of the flowchart diagram in Figure 2 detailing the path of materials production (Jolly and Bolitho 2011) difficult. As I believe that all the stages are interdependent and cyclical by nature (see Week 8), not being able to approach one of them – which is also, in my view, the most fundamental to the process – meant that that other stages lacked meaning.

We then shifted, unconsciously, towards beginning our design process with a text or input of some kind, in the manner suggested by Tomlinson (2011). With reference to Figure 2 from Jolly and Bolitho’s chapter, providing a text as a starting point could be said to connect to the contextual realisation stage. It provides to an extent the sociocultural context and the topic area of the materials, so is the basis on which learners will feel the materials are connected to their experiences and goals, and will be able to interact with the material personally. One text was a video on Instagram of the ‘Disco Bunny’, who’s a fairly famous Brightonian, dancing on a busy street with passers by. It’s an interesting video, which might have suited a videotelling-style lesson plan because of it’s short length and relatively compelling content. It has no dialogue and no written language, but the visual elements to it, and the sociocultural elements too, could stimulate some language use – but since we had no student needs on which to base any exploration of language possibilities from the text, we didn’t get much further than this stage. We found possible contextual realisations, like Brighton’s culture, people’s attitudes to dance and music, people’s behaviour in public and what it says about them, but we had no pedagogical angle from which to approach it. Other texts, also from the disco bunny, included his twitter feed in which he talks about the challenges and successes of his transient life in Sussex and Brighton. Again, this could have provided a great context of discussion of life in Brighton, where our students live and study for varying periods of time, but again, without being aware of student’s linguistic needs we didn’t get any further with it than a long, generalised list of potential procedures and language points which could be applied to and taken from it.  We thought about split reading and listening, task-based creative procedures like making a short video, even hands-on cooking in community kitchens in Brighton, but our wildly ranging ideas were difficult to develop further without more information about our learners. From the texts we began with, we progressed to pedagogical realisation concerning procedures, contextual realisation concerning potential relevance to learners, and student use of materials, visualising their interaction with the texts and their end products. However, all of these ideas were stop-start. We reached a vague outline of a plan, couldn’t agree on a way to flesh it out, and thought of a new one, chasing a lot of different blind alleys.

Identification of a need

I now think that all of this disorganisation and confusion, which was quite demoralising once we had been fruitlessly exploring possibilities for the texts for some time, was a result of not being able to identify learner needs. As mentioned in ‘Week 8′ and above, and as is evident in Jolly and Bolitho’s model (2011), learner needs are the constant touchstone which orients materials design. The interaction between either perceived or genuine learner needs and the materials dictate their design, use, and evaluation. Although learner needs include non-linguistic competencies – Sociocultural competencies pertaining to life in Brighton, for example – we all felt most comfortable with basing our materials on a linguistic need, (which is an interesting comment on our reliance as teachers on linguistic competencies as a basis for lessons and materials). So, the next time we met, after I had started my new class, our path was much clearer.

The learners in my current morning class, towards whom the materials we’re creating are aimed, are A2 level in the CEF. It didn’t take long to identify their learning needs – it was based on teacher evaluation but also on the learners’ determination of their own goals and gaps in knowledge, which is very positive. Constructive learner input in their own needs analyses is central to creating a course in which learners can maximise their language acquisition through exercising their own autonomy. Student-driven needs analyses create student-driven aims, and can be developed into student-driven content through learning training to build autonomous capabilities (Sowden 2007).

There are four students in the class, two of whom are professionals who need English skills to further their career opportunities, and two graduates who are about to go into professional careers. There’s one banker, one HR worker, one lawyer and one civil servant, and they’re all from Saudi Arabia. They explained to me their need to communicate effectively in a professional context, and all were focused on spoken and conversational ability. My assessment is that they do not lack communicative skills, such as pragmatic or contextual competence, but lack linguistic competence and accuracy, and also sociocultural competence for a multicultural working environment. Two students (the banker and the HR worker) already plan to work in a multicultural environment in their next prospective positions, and the others are not unlikely to. The combination of them volunteering their own personal needs analyses, and me working closely with them individually (being quite a small class) meant that specific and shared needs could be identified quite quickly, so we established the student needs to base our materials on, and also began addressing the contextual realisation, simultaneously.

The linguistic need identified was the use of present continuous for present time, as opposed to present simple for present time. We were looking at question forms, and one student asked about ‘-ing’ forms. Once it was clear that the other students couldn’t help him, I decided that this was a need that was relevant to the whole class. Because of their similar situations, as described above, we added the possible needs of developing sociocultural communicative competence, and took a step further in Jolly and Bolitho’s cyclical process by adding the contextual realisation of professional working situations.

Principled materials design

We also resolved to start with our principles for materials design and evaluation, determined in Week 2 of this process. Cherry and I worked together before to create a framework for materials evaluation, and I commented in Week 3 that when we initiated a process of either creation or evaluation of materials again, we would get better results by approaching the process in this way, with teaching and learning-based principles at its foundation. As a result, the second time that we met, I brought a printout of principles of my own from week 2, which we could use to keep our materials design process centred and coherent – subject to discussion and mutual agreement. The principles which stood out for us immediately in this situation were that materials…

• should use natural language – Present simple/present continuous is often, we remarked, presented unrealistically. It’s not very often that speakers of English describe what somebody is doing in a picture, or what their family are doing right now, but still that style of practice and target for production is common in pre-determined materials. We thought that describing your situation at the moment, as opposed to what you usually do,  was more natural or “authentic” language use, for most users of English at least.
• should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful – Again, the benefit of learner-centred course planning can be seen here. A lesson focusing on a language point raised by learners, contextualised according to their shared experiences and language learning goals which they explained to their teacher, will be clearly signposted to learners as relevant and useful to them, and a direct reaction to their own needs. We therefore decided to remain focused on these points raised by the learners.
• should encourage learners to apply their developing skills to the world beyond the classroom – We resolved to present the context and language points of the lesson in such as way as to encourage learners to consider how the lesson’s skills and language focus could be useful to them specifically in the future. We thought this could be best approached in setting up the lesson, and in creating an end product that would demonstrably be useful for learners to create in their “real” lives.
• should require and facilitate learner self-investment – The lesson as a reaction to learners’ own expression of their needs positions it as facilitating learner self-investment, by showing that it pays dividends. We decided that by giving the lesson an outcome and an end-product that were personally applicable to learners and their lives, and demanded personal input from them to achieve, the material would also require self-investment from learners. By requiring learners to exercise their autonomy, the material would hopefully cognitively engage learners more extensively, and the language acquisition it facilitated would be more effective.
• should provide the learners with opportunities to use the TL to achieve communicative purpose – This principle is linked to the previous decisions to make sure there is an outcome to the material that provides natural use of the target language, which is perceived as relevant by learners and is applicable to their lives outside the classroom.

Exploration and contextual realisation

Having got this far, we moved straight into planning the lesson procedure – which could be argued to be part of either the pedagogical realisation or production stage – and settled on a job interview as an end product. We decided that we would make a video or a recording of one, as an example text to show learners how the lesson focus was relevant to them, and applicable to their goals and lives. We decided that this would be a natural and realistic context for the use of present simple and present continuous for present time, learners having to give facts about themselves and also to describe their present situation.

At this point we hit a stumbling block. Seeing as we wanted to make sure the material provided natural, realistic language use, we thought it might be more effective to also highlight the use of present continuous for future time. This would help the presentation and use of the target language in the material to reflect more accurately the way in which present continuous is “naturally” and frequently used. This represented a return to the ‘exploration of needs’ stage of Jolly and Bolitho’s model. I think it was actually the first time that we really investigated this stage.

Returning to our process, we continued planning procedure. Should we present the video with the sound off, and ask learners to discuss the possible situation, as practice of sociocultural and pragmatic communicative competencies (Shumin 2002)? Should we do a more bottom-up warmer, focusing on relevant vocabulary first to provide some scaffolding? But then we had to circle back in our process once again, on noticing that our ‘contextual realisation’ wasn’t quite right. The context we had chosen of job interview fitted the context of English at work taken from learners’ experiences, goals and needs – however, it didn’t fit our identification of a language need. Job interviews naturally involve discussion of past experiences, and the materials would not be presenting realistic contexts or use of language if this was not represented. The material wouldn’t have been authentic to the reality we were modelling it on. Learners would either have been given a false impression of the communicative and contextual use of the target language, and the language relevant to that context, or they would have noticed, and lost faith in the contextual relevance of the material to the language points it dealt with. This would either have damaged learners’ perceptions of the utility of the materials, or made the language use less natural in that communicative context, going against our aforementioned principles.

“Authentic” materials are in my opinion (see Week 8) dependent on the authentic situations of the learners who they are aimed at, but also on the reality of those situations in the wider world. The reality of our contextualisation, job interviews, did not match the linguistic student need identified for the materials, or the exploration of that need which we later revisited. As a result we decided to alter the contextual realisation, centreing the materials on a real-world communicative need for the students, which was also a realistic and ‘authentic’ use for the needful language. We thought about an employment agency at first, but we couldn’t really get behind that as a situation bearing serious relevance to the learners’ lives outside the classroom. Then we hit on the context of a networking event, or conversation. The context of sharing personal information, current situations, and future plans and prospects in a professionally geared environment fitted our principles and language need well. It also added the benefit of allowing more scope for personalisation for the learners; when networking, as opposed to in a job interview, they would be more likely to discuss their hobbies, likes, dislikes and personal plans for the future as well as just their working life.

Outcomes

After these initial meetings, we were more satisfied with the relationship in our design process between the “first” three stages of Jolly and Bolitho’s model, and the basis they provided for beginning in earnest the pedagocical realisation and production of the materials. We were reassured by the support our principles had given to our materials design process so far, and were comforted by the identification of a familiarly linguistic learner need. If we were to revisit this process, I hope we would have to confidence to fully explore the potential offered by the Disco Bunny’s social media presence, and its relationship to our learners needs concerning communicative, sociocultural and sociolinguistic competencies.

 

Tomlinson, B.; ‘Materials development in language teaching; 2011

 

The eighth week of this module was probably the most daunting one to prepare for and reflect on, because it marked the beginning of the slightly daunting task of collating everything which has been explored so far into applied practice. Being introduced to and made more aware of the different ways to conceptualise materials creation and the role of materials in learning has been fascinating, but a lot of the investigation we have done has led me to completely new conclusions and ideas. The sheer volume of factors which would reward inclusion in the design process makes me concerned that I might miss something of import that I’d noticed or investigated earlier on in the process. This, though, is another concern that can be met by evaluation – either post- or whilst-use – and, especially helpfully, by peer evaluation as well as self evaluation. This week I’m writing about the reflections elicited by Jolly and Bolitho’s chapter (2011) and our discussions in today’s seminar, and how these helped prepare me for this new threshold.

Needs and authenticity

In preparation for week 8, I found the Jolly and Bolitho chapter (2011) interesting, and also revealing of the centrality of particular attitudes to the authors’ materials design process. Beginning as they did with a collection of quotations from teachers and learners, and extrapolating from these quotations the points they see as crucial parts of the unmediated materials design process, they showed that for them, positioning classroom needs at the centre of the design process was more than just a principle to be considered, but a basis from which to proceed in every part of the process. They took all the key points for their chapter from direct reporting of needs, by teachers and students. It also highlighted for me personally that no one particular need has primacy because it is more “valid” or common, but any need which is present in a learner, or indeed a teacher or context in general, is as relevant as can be, because it pertains exactly to the context which material will be used in. The example (Jolly and Bolitho 2011) of the Danish student who needed a specialised skill set to be a sports commentator springs to mind. In this example, the question of providing what is often called “real” and “authentic” language can be answered by looking at specific student needs. What is authentic for one person’s situation is totally artificial in another’s; for instance, if you’re a football commentator, you need to expertly use language on a daily basis which, say, a lawyer might never use in their life, whilst language use that a lawyer would see as authentic, real and relevant would possibly never appear in the equally “authentic” reality of a nurse, and so on. To clarify, the inclusion of language which can be described as “authentic” or “real”, as is a principle for many in materials design, is dependent on identifying the needs of the learners, because that is what determines whether language use or skills are “real” or not. The consistency of referral to classroom needs throughout Jolly and Bolitho’s chapter brought to my attention the thorough relevance of classroom needs to each part of the process of materials design.

The design process models (Figure 5.1, 5.2 in Jolly and Bolitho 2011)

Interestingly, the fact that student or teacher needs can justifiably be used as a basis for each stage of the linear materials design process initially debunked by Jolly and Bolitho – Identification, exploration, contextual realisation, pedagogical realisation, and finally production (Fig. 5.1) – is a very good reason for accepting their reconstruction of it into an internally referential cyclical process with slightly more steps (Fig. 5.2).

My first reaction to Jolly and Bolitho’s diagram of the design process was that explicitly pointing out the cyclical nature of materials design, and going to the lengths of redesigning the first example of a model process, was basically unnecessary. It seems strange to imagine that anyone would proceed in a totally linear fashion through the steps of any creative process. I’d argue that if you did – only moving into any form of pedagogical realisation of your activity after you felt it had been contextualised from all possible angles, and never returning to thoughts of contextualisation afterwards – you’d either be left with incoherent material, or material which you were fully aware of the flaws of just by a cursory pre-use evaluation. The writer would then, naturally, return to particular stages of the process to adapt and alter the material – but why would anyone wait until the end to do this? As apparent obstacles arose in “new” stages as a result of problems with “previous” stages, any writer would automatically reconsider the earlier design decisions. Similarly, as you identified a student need to base your material on, you might naturally jump to visualising a classroom procedure for how this could be approached before thinking about exploration of the language, or contextual realisation. This is not to disagree with the more complete and accurate imagining of the design process that is the second flow chart diagram in that chapter. It’s just to point out that anybody attempting to use the first diagram would, in my opinion, inevitably end up carrying out the process in the way represented by the second diagram. For reasons of practical application, then, either diagram could be used and would often produce the same results in terms of process.

However, the centrality of classroom needs to all parts of the design process does, I think, justify the emphasis on the second flow chart. Jolly and Bolitho appear to hold teacher and student needs to be paramount, centring their exploration of design processes itself on a classroom needs assessment. Therefore, it seems sensible of them to point out that identifying and exploring student needs can and should be referred to retrospectively at all stages of materials design, including production, use and evaluation (whenever the latter takes place). The same idea, I believe, also could justify the approach outlined by Tomlinson in which the process is begun with a text, as opposed to an identification of student needs; it doesn’t matter which is the “first” stage of the design procedure. Seeing as each step relates intrinsically to others, and it is not a linear process, the point at which you decide to begin is less important than the awareness of how each stage relates to the other.

Materials creation as a learning process

Another shared idea between the Jolly and Bolitho chapter and other literature is that materials writing as a discipline is very important, even necessary, to properly develop the skill set needed to use other material – essentially, to develop teaching skills. The idea that ‘all teachers need a grounding in materials writing’ (Jolly and Bolitho 2011) to build criteria for evaluation, adaptation and improvisation is echoed by Richards’ (2001) re-emphasis of the potential in materials design for professional development. I’d thought before that looking at the reasons why materials do or don’t work, and the reasons why we as teachers see some materials as more productive than others, is a really effective way of engaging with different aspects of teaching. It helps to expand your awareness of what we can do in class to create ideal conditions for learning, and makes one more efficient at making small adaptations to predetermined material that result in big improvements in learning outcomes. I’d never conceived of it as a necessity before though, but thinking about it now, if our aim is to provide the best opportunities possible for learning, anything which improves the upper limit for our learners’ language acquisition is a necessary step towards that aim. It’s true that examining the process of materials design, and trying it out yourself, moves you beyond that ‘whatever works’ mentality, demonstrated by behaviours like the flick test or other apparently arbitrary, experiential evaluation and adaptation, and allows teachers to be measured, justified and controlled in their choices concerning adaptation, evaluation and improvisation of materials. I agree with Jolly and Bolitho here, that it expands to all areas of teaching; everything that is important for learning and teaching.

Personal learning outcomes

This week provided an important nudge in the right direction, helping me to put the rest of our work during this module into action, and make the step into princpled, informed materials design. From the seminar and preparation, Cherry, Phil and I decided that in our own materials design process, student needs would be the ever-present reference point, in order to keep our material anchored to the context, the classroom and the learners themselves. We believe that this will ensure ‘authenticity’, relative to our learners. In progressing through the stages of the process we resolved to allow ourselves to approach whichever stage we were drawn to in whichever order, as long as there was an underlying reaction to identified student needs. Perhaps most valuably, we were also reminded that this process could be of great benefit to us as adaptors, evaluators and creators of materials for language learning, and as teachers of English.

 

Tomlinson, B.; ‘Materials development in language teaching; 2011

 

In the first week of this module, we were asked about our hopes and ambitions for what we aimed to get out of it. One of mine was course planning. This remains true, in that I would highly value improving my ability to structure a long term programme for students to follow, and increasing my confidence in evaluating and adapting materials on a macro scale, not just in the context of a lesson or a week. This session, I feel, went some way towards realising those ambitions, and I found this particularly exciting. Although we were looking at task design and evaluation, what I see to be the pivotal point of the Maley reading I looked at (2011) threw new light for me on the methods by which a task, larger series of tasks, or indeed an entire course could be put together from scratch (or at least not using mediated or predetermined materials). Within this blog I’ve already discussed the possibility of learner-centred course planning (Sowden 2013). Sowden and others’ views on the possibilities of learners taking responsibility for the content and structure of their learning bear similarities to the references to community language learning (CLL) in Maley’s chapter, in which learners decide what they want to do and say and it’s taken from there (2011). What was new, and most valuable, to me was Prahbu (in Maley 2011) and Maley’s combined ideas of semi-materials, meta-materials and flexi-materials, which provided a potential approach to creating a course syllabus which I hadn’t considered. It’s the implications and possibilities provided by semi, meta and flexi- materials which I will engage with in this post. I’ll also touch on the less convincing ideas in Maley’s passage, and how they inspired some worthwhile reflection on my own practice.

The power of flexi-materials

Prabhu’s conceptions of “semi-materials” and “meta-materials” were totally new to me, and really quite exciting. Combined with Maley’s development of them, “flexi-materials”, they seem to share common elements, in terms of motivation for their creation and in use at point of delivery, with Tomlinson and Masuhara’s ideas in their discussions of the paradigm shifts affecting materials development today. The latter chapter’s outline of a global mass-marketing materials production industry concludes that ‘global’ English language coursebooks often tend to actually only be universally applicable on a ‘pic-n-mix’ level, being aimed at such a wide diaspora of language learning contexts and learner needs that teachers are required to use the materials selectively and adapt heavily as a matter of routine. Similar ideas are expressed in Maley’s chapter, with the interesting addition that as well as more necessary and commonplace, adaptation actually becomes more demanding of teachers the more disconnected materials production becomes from materials use. I feel that the idea that teachers must selectively use mass-produced materials coincides with the idea of flexi-materials; the same ‘pic-n-mix’ concept applies, but instead of being a necessary evil it is what flexi-materials are targeted at, intentionally allowing a teacher to quickly and easily fit the materials to their learners and context. This is a wonderfully creative way of approaching the challenges that both chapters perceive in the materials industry.

Semi-materials – in which a series of “raw” texts is provided, allowing a user to apply whichever procedures are most relevant to the learning aims of the lesson – is, in my view, a concept that could quite easily be applied in the situation described in Tomlinson and Masuhara’s chapter. The idea of being responsible for adding appropriate processes to exploit raw materials can be used with mainstream materials, if the user just ignores the procedure they give and extracts the texts. So, just the idea of semi-materials gives more agency and control to teachers in itself, without the need for production of them.

It did occur to me, though, that since meta-materials – which I’ll define as a series of procedures, processes and task types that could then be applied to any text chosen by the teacher (or learners), allowing them to define contextually and pedagogically relevant topical and linguistic content – could be used at any level of proficiency, with almost any learning needs in mind, perhaps its publication is not fully in the interests of producers of mass-marketed English coursebooks. A coursemate who works in a partly managerial role, Laura, told me that resource books, like Miles Craven’s “Extra” series, are quite a lot pricier than mainstream textbooks, because they are sold at the rate of about one per school as opposed to one per student. The availability of easy-to-use, completely adaptable materials (such as meta-materials or flexi-materials) with a framework to which any input can be tailored would surely significantly reduce the sales of traditional predetermined materials. Are flexi-materials in the interests of publishers, then? I’m not a businessperson, but I could imagine that they’re not. Either way, the idea of a template which you can fill to meet whichever learner needs you like is, to me, pretty huge. I think it could be applied not only to task design but to overall course design – all the course designer would need to select would be a term’s worth of text types and language input, according to student needs, and then procedure and process for each week of the course could be chosen from the flexi-materials. It makes the process seem far more achievable and accessible to working teachers than doing the whole thing from scratch, without a toolkit. It could also be productively combined with learner-centred course planning, as altering the language input or the procedures applied to it would be a case of adjustment and reorganisation, as opposed to abandoning a coursebook and supplementing instead. This means that ongoing student feedback could more smoothly be incorporated into the structure and content of the course without causing upheaval.

A critical reading

That is not to say that Maley’s chapter is brilliant in every respect. From my point of view, some of the comments made in it seem dismissive and somehow narrow in scope. Despite interesting and quite wide ranging ideas concerning the potential for student-generated materials, or materials based on process – such as creative writing, CLL and extensive reading (the last of which Maley claims in cavalier fashion to be ‘overwhelmingly the most effective way to acquire proficiency’ in a foreign language (2011), which takes me aback although I’ve never tried it) – there seem to be some oversights in terms of potential expansions of his ideas. The throwaway reference to games, songs and physical activities as ‘cosmetic entertainment’, the role of which in task design can only go so far as ‘light relief’ (2011), suggests a lack of exploration of the potential for valuable language exposure and skills development that could take place during a game. Maley goes on to include both games and music as a valid form of input in table 15.1, which indicates that maybe their potential is taken more seriously than first appears. Looking at table 15.2, though, in which text types are combined with procedures to create a large number of possible tasks, almost every procedure could be re-interpreted as a “game”. Games are an interesting idea in themselves, as to what constitutes one and what doesn’t. I find that almost any task can be presented as one, but to be considered a game learners have to have a desire to take part, enjoy themselves, and do well in whatever the objective is. This can create excellent opportunities for powerful information gaps, truly spontaneous language use and application and practice of communicative competencies, as well as meaningful use of receptive skills.

Maley’s treatment of IT in language teaching is also puzzling. The majority of what is said on the topic is not news to anyone who has taught English to speakers of other languages and has access to Google. The general attitude to “The Internet” (which is genuinely capitalised) is one of distance and an unwillingness to engage, seeing it as an additional medium as opposed to, arguably, the most widely used vehicle for language use today.

A personal reaction

Without wishing to engage with it too much, Maley’s curious foray into the use of IT in language teaching (interestingly he makes little mention of the potential for use in language learning) did actually raise a couple of interesting points for me; his explanation for this lack of exploitation is interesting. Maley makes the point that ‘any application [for IT based procedures or materials] is bound to be ephemeral’ (2011) as support for the advice to think in ‘broad modes of application’ rather than particular detail when designing tasks using technology. Whilst I disagree, and believe this advice is post-rationalisation of an aversion to technology, the point about the ephemeral nature of edtech conventions, platforms and materials could go some way to explaining the lack of exploration of them exhibited in this chapter – and also, more pertinently, by many practicing EFL teachers. Why bother incorporating the use of technology in your task design if it’s only going to move on in a couple of years anyway? Because its a central part of the world learners live in, and not engaging with current media will not make it easier to keep materials relevant, personalised and authentic to real use of language, but far more difficult.

It does move quickly – I’m only twenty-four and the students I teach use platforms I’ve never used, are involved in modes of communication using technology that I’m not, and have technological literacies that I don’t. Technology, and therefore the pedagogical use of it in task design, is ephemeral, it’s true. Materials writers should therefore make a point of keeping abreast of the changing potential for its application. Maley’s treatment of IT as a resource for task design had the great benefit of drawing my attention to a point I’d made in Week 6:

“Whenever I’ve asked learners to make a video they have edited it on their smartphones on their own initiative. I don’t know how to do this because I’ve never tried, although seeing as apps are designed with accessibility in mind I’m sure its relatively simple. Either way, the point I took from this is that from a constructionist point of view, end products which fall within the learners’ capabilities are the important thing – we’re not necessarily required to be experts in what they are doing, or in this case even competent. What we can offer learners is upgraded feedback, guidance, facilitation and support concerning language use and opportunities for it. They don’t need me to help them to edit their videos, they need me to help them develop their language ability.”

I need to be careful of the attitude I showed towards video editing there. It’s true that I don’t need to instruct learners in editing video, and that it’s perfectly justified to use IT as a resource relying on the expertise of your learners; it’s not scary, and it won’t bite you. Even so, if we’re using a digital medium in class, I would be in a better position to exploit the potential it holds for language learning if I myself understand and use it in the real world. To develop my use of digital and IT resources, familiarising myself with their use would, I believe, be instrumental. If I wasn’t a user of Whatsapp, for example, I wouldn’t have noticed the potential for some tasks based around the medium, like recording voice messages and making plans via group conversations, and these have so far produced lots of opportunities for language development in my learners.

Conclusions

The potential offered by flexi materials is something I was totally unaware of until this week, and I feel it could be one of the most significant discoveries of this module (which is a very competitive field). I am eager to explore possibilities for its use in the future, especially with reference to my endeavours towards learner-driven course planning, and learner input in materials design. It will also be interesting, now that I’m aware of the concept, to see how flexi-materials are being monetised in edtech and publishing, and to keep an eye out for possibilities in that vein. I’m also very glad to have consolidated my thoughts about the use of technology in the classroom towards constructivist, or constructionist, purposes. I will continue using as a medium digital platforms which are within my learners’ abilities and relevant to their needs, whether or not I’m personally familiar with them. I will, however, make sure I explore the deeper potential for their exploitation whenever possible.

 

Sowden, C.; ‘Culture and the “good teacher” in the English Language classroom’ in ELT Journal Vol. 61 Issue 4; 2007

Tomlinson, B.; ‘Materials development in language teaching; 2011

The exploration in week 6 of the use of video in ELT gave me two main take-away points, I think, to be discussed in this post. The first was a totally new discovery, and the second was the expansion and consolidation of something which has been featuring quite a lot in my reflections about teaching and materials recently. Apart from these new steps forward, a connection with our discussion of multimedia literacies last week occurred to me, which seems like a great way of bringing together some things I resolved to do in that week with some of the developments from this week. I aim to explain this connection here also.

Videotelling: A principled mini-evaluation

Jamie Keddie’s ‘Videotelling’ method (http://videotelling.com) was a revelation. I was a bit surprised I’d never heard of it before, but the discussion we had during the seminar about the timings and staging of the use of videos in the classroom highlighted how innovative Keddie’s approach is, and how rarely it’s mirrored in mainstream materials based on traditional practice and the long-term habits of the ELT industry. I’ve always been a user of video in the traditional staging, if I base a lesson around it. There will be an activity aimed at activating schemata and bringing up some key vocabulary, possibly a pre-teaching vocabulary task, then the viewing (which I usually use as part of the vocabulary task), followed by listening-style questions, after which a language focus will be extracted from the video and a follow-up communicative task will be done using the language. It mirrors, as was observed during the seminar, a traditional listening skills-based lesson. I also occasionally use video footage to provide an example of the situation in which particular language is used, to further contextualise the rest of the lesson’s language for learners.

Keddie’s method of extracting an entire class-wide communicative lesson from a short video clip before even watching it is, I’d say, far more exploitative of the learners themselves, and places more demands on their cognitive engagement. As I mentioned in several previous posts, cognitively engaging learners as much as possible, and providing opportunities for learners to be at the centre of their own learning, are principles of mine for materials. With reference to other principles our group agreed on in week 2, videotelling creates materials which…

 

• …ought to be easy to use, and not dominate the lesson/the planning but faciliate them. Using the learners’ imaginations and predictions about the video as a source for language makes sure that the material is focused very much on student needs, being at less risk of overshadowing the learners and restricting emergent language.

 

• …should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful
• …should encourage learners to apply their developing skills to the world beyond the classroom. As discussed in Week 5, the world our learners experience and use their language skills in is increasingly multimodal, and connecting their learning to something like a youtube clip, a scene from a decent film or T.V show, or a short advert serves both of the above principles. It highlights the application of the language they are learning to the world they experience beyond the classroom, emphasising both its relevance and the possibility of autonomous development of it in their daily lives.

 

• …should require and faciliate learner self-investment. All the language in a videotelling lesson could, if the teacher wanted, be elicited entirely from the learners. The cognitive load on learners could be higher or lower, but as the source of the bulk of the language, learners in a student-centred lesson are asked to invest more in their own learning, and given an opportunity to do so.

 

• …ought to be humanised and localised. This comes down to dealer’s choice, but a short, engaging video clip will be far more effective as a communicative motivation if it is tailored to the experiences of the learners. A successful videotelling lesson would, I think, reflect these principles.

Contructionism and developing multimedia literacies

Another point of interest for me from this week was the discussion we had about the benefits of constructionism. I have, not infrequently, asked learners to create their own videos as task-based project work, either using it to focus on building specific language skills and knowledge, or to work on the “21st century skills” curriculum, largely mediation based, which is followed in the afternoon classes at Eurocentres, the school I teach at. This was discussed during the seminar, partly in the context of video editing. Whenever I’ve asked learners to make a video they have edited it on their smartphones on their own initiative. I don’t know how to do this because I’ve never tried, although seeing as apps are designed with accessibility in mind I’m sure its relatively simple. Either way, the point I took from this is that from a constructionist point of view, end products which fall within the learners’ capabilities are the important thing – we’re not necessarily required to be experts in what they are doing, or in this case even competent. What we can offer learners is upgraded feedback, guidance, facilitation and support concerning language use and opportunities for it. They don’t need me to help them to edit their videos, they need me to help them develop their language ability. (EDIT– my ideas on this point were shown to be a little short-sighted by Week 7 of this module and continued teaching and reflection)

Recently I’ve been made more explicitly aware of the justifications for, and the advantages of, task-based or project work. In an assessed observation last month the observer pointed out that an end product would have provided learners with more motivation for meaningful communication, and more motivation for the full application of cognitive processing powers to the available language input. I then realised that the benefits of project work, this being one of the main ones, can be applied to other lesson styles if a more task-based focus is provided, and a collaborative end product is required. My most recent assessed observation included a longer term task-based motivation for the language use involved, and it did lead to more meaningful communicative use of the target language. Learners were asked to build a questionnaire around the target language, compound nouns related to social and environmental issues, to find out about Brightonian attitudes towards their chosen topics, which they then wrote a report about at the end of the week. The genuine information gap, personalisation and relevance this gave to the activities during the process made it an altogether more collaborative and meaningfully communicative process than it otherwise might have been.

Connecting this with multimedia literacies through the use of video in class could be interesting. In week 5 I decided to try and apply the Canadian national curriculum’s questions based on visual literacy to my B2-C1 class to stimulate some really motivated communication, and to raise learners’ awareness of multiliteracy, with a view to developing their skills in this area. I was undecided about the visual material that would be involved though; I knew it needed to be something which they could interpret differently, and which would exercise their critical and analytical skills, as well as perhaps providing them with an insight into each others’ world views to inspire meaningful use of language. I’m now thinking that a project based on video advertising could fit the bill, both of approaching multiliteral skills in class and of exploiting the learning potential of video in the classroom. It could even be psychological or behavioural advertising; learners would begin by applying themselves to a multimodal text, such as the new government advice videos about drink driving, or a commercial advert aiming to influence people’s lifestyles. Having spent class time evaluating and discussing the motivations and values behind the video, who it is targeted at and who it is not, and other foci of the criteria of the Canadian curriculum, learners would then create their own behavioural advertising video based on a chosen area from our current topic of social issues. A videotelling-style method could even be used during the first stages of the project, learners being asked to imagine the setting, predict events and provide the key language for the area before being shown the clip.

Action points

I’m aware that I’m feeling a little over-zealous about combining all these elements at the moment, but I intend to give some thought to developing this as a series of lessons. I think the possibilities are very exciting, and as outlined above, the nature of this type of project fits in remarkably well with my own values and principles about language teaching and language teaching and materials. Based on the above, a constructionist project featuring a ‘Videotelling’ approach to introduce the initial text, and collaboration to produce behavioural advertising in the form of a multimodal text, would provide a foundation for materials which met all of my principles. I would also certainly learn more about the relationships outlined in this post, and about my own principles, in doing this.

The message I took from the preparation and seminar this week, on the subject of visuals in ELT and the development of multiliteracy, was the significance of the extent to which a rethink is needed in ELT – and personally speaking – in this area. In this post, I’ll outline my opinion on the nature of these necessary adaptations to the skills we teach, and the way we recreate the ‘real’ world’s demands on learners’ language skills in the classroom. I’ll also describe some of my personal reactions to realisations from this week, and what it means for my teaching.

A rethink within ELT – expanding our remit as teachers

Karasthati’s call (2016) to re-examine and adapt our constructs of communicative competencies struck a chord with me. Kress (2006) made a point which built on this; ‘TESOL professionals continue to act as though language fully represented the meanings they wish to communicate’. As language teachers, whose expertise is founded in how to decode and encode meaning in language, perhaps we’re a little too enamoured with language itself. I take great pleasure in showing students how English can be manipulated to represent what they wish it to, and believe in the value and importance of training them in sociocultural linguistic competency, pragmatic use of the language available to them, and contextualising the language they have, use and are exposed to. This is not really enough though. Kress (2003) and others have described the inconsistencies with the way in which we present communication through spoken and written text, and the way in which our learners experience it in the real world. The conclusion of this description is the need to combine language with semiotics in order to represent communication as it really is.

Our learners are exposed to holistic, multimodal input as a matter of course – screen-based texts, images and sounds, which we scroll through as a whole, rather than reading line by line, and which create and communicate messages using more media than purely written or spoken text. Visual literacy is the missing link between reality and the ELT classroom, in both our teaching and learning approaches and our materials.

This demands, as I said, a rethink. I believe the role of the teacher is one of the most challenging of the areas involved that need to be recalibrated. Teacher development, however, as we discussed in Week 2, can be driven by materials, and ELT culture at large certainly is. I’m reminded of Donaghy’s anecdote (2017) about offending a room of Japanese teachers by suggesting Headway had had more influence on ELT than Krashen’s entire body of work. I tend to agree with him; experience is the biggest factor by far in most teachers’ development, and unless extra initiative is taken, it is predominantly shaped by the materials we are given to use. Whether through the evolution of materials or of explicit teacher training, teachers’ area of expertise – the comfort zone – needs to expand into multimedia literacies. We’re not just ‘language’ teachers any more – although perhaps we never were only this. We need to meet the increasing demand on us to build our learners’ competencies with English into decoding and encoding multimodal input.

Paul’s point in the seminar today about the investment of power and status in certain institutions drove this need home. As language teachers, our sense of authority as an owner and imparter of knowledge, a source of learning, derives from our expertise in the field of language. The written word, as Paul pointed out, is invested with power and status; our own authority stems from our relationship with the authority held by language-based texts, either spoken or written. This will soon no longer be sufficient to prepare learners – we need to be able to develop their skills and awareness in visual literacy and media production, in viewing and representing through multimodal media. This is where the focus of cultural significance is shifting towards. I found the framework for visual literacy from the Canadian national curriculum (Donaghy 2017) to be an excellent basis for equipping our learners for a world where ‘communication is increasingly multimodal in nature’ (Donaghy 2017). A large part of it appears to be encouraging critical and analyatical thinking; making learners active decoders, not just passive receivers. This should be something we include in our aims for developing learner’s mediation skills in communication – whether receiving or representing, they need competencies in multiliteracy which enable them to see the sociocultural, pragmatic and contextual significances behind multimodal communication, as well as linguistic communication.

A personal reaction – multiliteracy in my classroom

Today also made me personally rethink my own visual literacy. Some of the foci of the Canadian curriculum’s visual literacy skills are the purpose, the intended and excluded audience, the personal associations and the assumption, beliefs, values, interests or biases involved with an image, or a multimodal text (Donaghy 2017). The differences in the ways we all applied our visual literacy in the seminar was really surprising. Some images (state-sponsored posters from the USA and the USSR) which I interpreted as emblematic of nationalism and ideological coercion others saw as personally motivating, centred in positive values and created for a benign purpose. Others (a statue of Rameses II, and Trajan’s triumphal column) which I viewed as having the purpose of conveying the creator’s political and financial power and dominance, and representing the interest of consolidating this dominance, created utterly different personal associations in others, and were seen as having utterly different motivations.

There are two key attitudes of mine that I should rethink here. The first is my own awareness of affective factors on visual literacy – what makes me see one thing, and another viewer see it differently? What values, beliefs and biases in a viewer produce different visual decodings of values, beliefs and biases? Can I improve my multiliteracy to the extent of being relatively able to predict or imagine the reaction of a particular viewer? I’m sure the answer to the latter is yes – advertising companies are built on this ability; this is also, in fact, the kind of communicative competence in multiliteracy we need to foster in learners, to enable them to reliably encode messages multimodally. They need to control the impact a multimodal text will have on a viewer, just like they learn to do using language.

The second rethink concerns the images and media I use in class. I use images a lot, although usually without accompanying text. The teaching and learning opportunities which I was introduced to today of combining the two, for example to develop pragmatic competence using both a speech bubble and a thought bubble with an expressive image of a face, are really exciting and I hope to explore this more. I mostly use them to stimulate communication, or to activate schemata. Sometimes I use them with lower levels to illustrate or ‘rescue’ a text or a word which would be hard to contextualise without one. What I need to re-examine is the potential reactions to images we deal with, and how I can harness this to stimulate creative and spontaneous language use in my learners, for real communicative purposes. Personally, I could have ranted for hours about the images we looked at in the seminar today. There’s no information gap quite the same as wanting to tell others how you feel about something you’re experiencing together. If there’s a difference in how you’re experiencing the same thing – interpreting an image, for example – it only becomes more motivating.

This is something I try to harness already but mostly in quite a surface-level way. Earlier this week, for example, I showed a group of A2 learners in a General English class six pictures of night-life activities in Brighton; reading a book at home, going to a cinema, dancing in a mainstream club, seeing live music, and so on. They described the activities in pairs, then decided which were their favourites in order from 1-6. They then went into larger groups and tried to defend their rating, justifying their choices. This is an ELT favourite and not very original, but generated some useful lexis and stimulated a real and authentic need in the learners to communicate using their language. I would love to try out a similar activity to the one we did today in the seminar; explicity investigating and discussing the questions posed by the Canadian curriculum’s framework for visual literacy could potentially create huge amounts of meaningful, inspired language use in an ELT classroom. Compared to discussing different nights out, the desire to communicate to bridge gaps in understanding would, I venture, be a lot stronger, and the gaps would yield a lot more language use.

There could be problems with this, however. As Goldstein observes, images in most coursebooks are ‘sanitised’ and are not representative of ‘real life’ (Goldstein 2002), making interpretations of them fairly shallow, there being little reasoning or thought behind them. Whilst I could display images from different sources, there’s a reason that they are sanitised – learners’ cultural sensitivities and reactions to images can be difficult to predict. A few weeks ago some of my students refused to use a learning resource from the BBC I’d directed them to. They come from Saudi Arabia, and they saw the BBC in much the same way as I saw Soviet and U.S government “public information” multimodal texts. As a result, they didn’t want to recognise their validity or authority.

When this episode first re-occured to me during the seminar, I thought that this would make it challenging to stimulate debate and discussion of deeper decodings of visuals. Now, though, I think differently; If I had encouraged them to critically, actively engage with the multimodal texts presented by the BBC, considering their reaction to it and their decoding of it, this would have potentially provided the motivation for meaningful communication I’m looking for. I don’t need them to accept the cultural validity of the multimodal text to develop their competencies in multiliteracy. In fact, quite the opposite; they shouldn’t accept it, but should use all the constituents of the medium – context, images, symbols, conventions (Donaghy 2017) – combined with a list of questions based on visual literacy to deconstruct the messages that the multimodal text holds for them.

Action points

There are contextual limitations for an explicit visual literacy development lesson like this. A relaxed, comfortable and confident classroom atmosphere would be necessary, to reduce affective factors like stress and nervousness on spontaneous communication. Also the learners would need to be of a high enough level to avoid frustration – having an extremely motivating information gap without the language to bridge it would be unconstructive, and demoralising. I plan to implement a lesson of this kind with the B2/C1 class I’ve been teaching for the past few months; I also intend to adapt the lesson for lower levels by finding a way in which visual literacy can be explicitly applied, and the messages decoded through it shared between learners, using simpler content. Advertisements could be a productive source. Watch this space…

 

Donaghy, K. and Xerri, D; The Image in English Language Teaching; 2017

Tomlinson, B; Developing Materials for Language Teaching; 2013

Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H; The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Langauge Learning; 2018

As the module progresses everything we have been talking about continues to connect into larger patterns of co-dependence and correlation. From these patterns, themes which seem central to the field of materials design have emerged. One which jumped out at me this week was the underlying pragmatism of the field – the discussion of the “Paradigm shifts” that have affected the role of materials adaptation (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2018), the opportunity we had in week three to hear Theresa Clementson’s insights into authoring commercial coursebooks, the task this week of designing a brief introductions to materials adaptation for a hypothetical group of newly qualified teachers, and several other instances over this module finally allowed me to appreciate this. These three factors, and the relationship between them, are the topic of this post.

Necessary pragmatism in materials design and adaptation

Materials adaptation is rooted in pragmatism. Materials design in itself is a practical discipline with practical application in mind – the theory and literature concerning principled evaluation, adaptation and design of materials  is not the end goal of the field. The point is applying the conclusions these give us to the real world, not perfecting an abstract ideal. The real world is constrained and affected by things like markets, resources, time and priorities. Theresa Clementson, for example, openly accepted that Face to Face C1, a book which she authored, was not concerned with manifesting principles such as humanisation and localisation of materials, aligning the material with the development of “Global English” and the non-Eurocentric realities of most of the users. This was after extolling the reflection of these principles in English Unlimited’s content and design, and voicing her support for these principles’ inclusion in the materials design process; it was not a rejection of them that caused their absence from Face to Face, but an acceptance of the publisher’s goal of marketability taking priority. This is totally understandable, and to an extent inevitable – writing coursebooks is a business, so pragmatism rules the application of the theories behind materials design. This is an example of a symptom of Tomlinson and Masuhara’s first ‘paradigm shift’ affecting materials adaptation today – the distance between materials producers and users, and the resulting disparity in priorities between those parties. Needs analyses are replaced by market research (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2018), and the goal of learning is replaced by the goals of business concerns. Although Theresa’s perspective was related to designing materials, the same pragmatism from the same source is a driving force in adapting materials. The pragmatic necessity of selecting only marketable principles for your materials design results in the pragmatic necessity of adapting those materials to refocus them on learner needs, and to reintegrate key principles. As observed by Bell and Gower, a ‘global coursebook’ is really more of a pick-and-mix of material which could be used selectively in many contexts, not a one-size-fits-all course (1998 in Tomlinson and Masuhara 2018). Tomlinson and Masuhara also note a 2011 study showing that most textbooks are still dominated by “native-speakerism” despite it’s increasing irrelevance globally. Real-world necessities for producers create necessities for the users of material in an increasingly wide variety of contexts. One pragmatic decision leads to another, and the ideal therefore meets the pragmatic in both mediated and unmediated materials adaptation and design.

A good example of the pragmatic and  the ideal clashing is found in Mishan and Timis’s caveat on Tomlinson and Masuhara’s inclusion of the teacher’s preference as a factor motivating materials adaptation (Mishan and Timmis 2015). They warn of projecting needs, motivations and methodological beliefs onto the learners, imposing adaptations which are not perfectly tailored to the learners themselves but more to the teacher. I believe this certainly applies to what they describe as ‘ad-hoc’ materials adaptation or supplementation, the most common form, involving a teacher flipping through a book, or reviewing planned activities, and adapting based on as little as ‘whim’ (Mishan and Timmis 2015). This risks subordinating learner needs to what a teacher feels like doing in the moment. However, if we are considering a principled materials adaptation, informed by an evaluation of the materials according to context and learners and accompanied by a rationale, the inclusion of the teacher as a factor in how, when, what or why to adapt seems pragmatically sensible. A novice teacher, for example, will be better able to facilitate learning with some tasks and procedures than with others; Cunningsworth’s inclusion of learner personality as a factor in adaptation could easily be pertinent not only to learners, but to the teacher’s personality and style making particular activities or methods more or less effective. Having said this, I did feel more attracted to Cunningsworth’s conception (1995 in Islam and Mares 2003) of the reasons behind adaptation, although they were less inclusive of teacher needs. They seemed closer to the ideals I hold. There was a focus on learners, and on the importance of their cognitive skills being challenged and engaged, and their autonomy being developed, through adaptations of materials (Mishan and Timmis 2015). This was something I chose to take further, as will be explained below.

The seminar: pragmatism and ideals

It’s important to recognise that there’s no reason that ideals and principles can never be pragmatically applied. Pragmatism and principle aren’t mutually exclusive, and in the case of materials design, evaluation and adaptation they can’t be – they need to combine to create solidly founded, practically applicable materials, or activities, or other real-world end goals. I feel like this came out of the seminar in week four. We were designing a one-off session to provide novice teachers with guidelines for adapting a coursebook in their first ever week of teaching. In this situation constraints of time, and teacher knowledge, necessitate pragmatism; an in-depth exploration of the field of materials design is not possible time-wise, and is not helpful regarding the teachers’ immediate needs and experience. As a result, we chose to organise our key points like this:

While this doesn’t exactly represent what we would have done in that situation, it’s definitely representative of the approach I would take: a simple step-by-step process, without bringing in unnecessarily developed or complicated ideas. ‘What do they need to know’ would have been better placed under the ‘knowledge’ umbrella at the top of the page. We included the confidence of the teacher as a key factor in this context – adaptation can span from constructing intricate role-plays using material’s language, to ‘not finishing a pronunciation drilling exercise’ because of time constraints (Islam and Mares 2006 cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015). Whilst adaptation and evaluation of materials should hold learner needs at its heart as an ultimate motivation, pragmatically speaking, novice teachers need to be in their comfort zone. Nobody will benefit from a bungled activity or a hastily mis-explained language point. Our model also is not immediately based on the set of questions – ‘When’, ‘Where’, ‘Why’, ‘Who’, ‘What’ and ‘How’ – which reoccur in literature discussing materials adaptation. We felt that to best achieve the practical task at hand, a more direct and less theoretically focused approach was needed. While the frameworks for discussion of materials adaptation provided in Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018) and Mishan and Timmis (2015) are apt, the aim here is not an academic discussion of materials adaptation, but a crash course in using a coursebook effectively.

However, clear derivation from principled materials adaptation can be seen. Another group wisely used ‘student needs’ as the centre of a spider diagram for this task. Excluding the factor of the teacher’s confidence, all of the reasons for adaptation displayed on the sheet above fit that category. McGrath’s recognition of adapting the cognitive or linguistic demands of material (2013, cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015) chimes with our vague reference to ‘knowledge’ as a reason for adaptation. Our broad questions ‘Who’s in your class? Where are they living?’ encourages novice teachers to more directly consider principles, held by McGrath, of localisation, relevance, and personalisation. The inclusion of ‘Skill sets’ shares ground with McGrath’s call to consider individualisation, and a focus on adapting the process of a lesson. In fact it is very important that materials adaptation remains centred on principle to avoid the powder-puff, on-a-whim adaptation mentioned above, otherwise focus on learner needs is lost. Still, this can be achieved in conjunction with pragmatic concerns, such as time, resources and teacher experience.

Personal learning outcomes

It was with reference both to the interest I had in Cunningsworth’s student-centred principles for adaptation, and the apparent need to temper these with pragmatic considerations, that after the seminar on Thursday I decided to pre-adapt the material that I’m teaching this week. I was interested by the descriptions in Tomlinson and Masuhara (2018) of different instances of materials adaptation on very different scales, and involving different “stakeholders” in the adaptation process. For adaptation to be as closely tied with learner motivation, classroom dynamics, personalities (Cunningsworth 1995 cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015), and learner autonomy as possible, it stands to reason that learners should be involved in adaptation where possible. The adaptation is relatively limited in scope, but is based on a week – usually one unit of the coursebook – rather than just a lesson.

I asked my students on Friday morning to think about their long-term and short-term goals in English, and discuss them with each other when they were ready, if they wanted to. This was intended to help them clarify their motivations and needs to themselves, and think about why they held them. I was planning to adapt content and language, and possibly process if they had clear ideas in that area. At the end of that day’s classes I asked them to remember the conversation they’d had and write down suggestions for the following week in the categories of topics, skills, and language (grammar/lexis). They showed each other and compared their aims and motivations, and I adapted this week’s plan based on an admittedly haphazard, but certainly valuable, mini-survey of learner needs. I think it’s important that they were also aware of their agency in this process, and that they were influencing the focus of their course. This helped to raise their awareness of their autonomous capabilities, and the benefits and power they can acquire through investment in materials they use and their language learning in general. The suggestions were both considered and justified with reasons, which was encouraging, and most were realistically achievable as a basis for adapting the material and activities. Ideally, more involved, informed learner needs analyses would inform the adaptation of my material. Still, this pragmatic approach has enabled me to make my adaptations more principled, more robustly centring them on key principles of mine – developing learner autonomy, and cognitive engagement.

 

McGrath, I.; Teaching materials and the roles of EFL/ESL teachers: Theory versus practice; 2013

Mishan, F. and Timmis, I.; Materials Development for TESOL; 2013

Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H.; The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Langauge Learning; 2018

 

 

Discovering the spiralling cycle of thought and self-reflection that goes into the evaluation of materials when synthesising the articles we had read as a group (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2003; Johnson 2006; Mishan and Timmis 2015) was very enlightening for me. I had no idea that such detailed and considered construction of a framework would be applicable to this, and that the process of construction itself would necessitate such investment – probably because I’d never really thought about it before, having been a chronic ‘flick test’ user (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2003).

This discovery was both motivating and slightly worrying, considering we’d had to leave it until yesterday to collectively implement this process ourselves for a presentation today. However, as we’d recently confirmed and refreshed our own principles for materials design in week 2, it was relatively straightforward to draw on these, as advised by Mishan and Timmis (2015), as sources for the extraction of our criteria for evaluative questions. This post discusses the process with which we constructed an evaluative framework from these principles, and provides a brief evaluation of that process. It also explains a point of confusion for me in some of the literature, and the personal conclusion it led me to.

Evaluating our evaluation process

Our process, I now believe, would have been improved by defining our collective core principles to begin with, and then applying a categorised framework to them; post-categorisation would have been a better way of creating criteria which were measurable both discretely and universally (Tomlinson and Masuhara 2003), because the principle-based evaluative questions would be more succintly and accurately categorised, and therefore more relevant to the category’s focus. Instead, as our first step was discussing what we had all read, our next was to choose elements of the frameworks for creating evaluation criteria which we had been presented with in these readings, so we focused at first on categories of evaluation. More than one of us, myself included, is interested in some of the facets of learner autonomy. My essay for the Methodologies and Approaches module of this course was an investigation into the appropriacy and achievability of developing learner autonomy in my own context. A focus of this was the encouragement of learners’ full application of their cognitive abilities in class; engaging with opportunities presented to them to extract as much relevant language and skills development as possible, and exploiting activities to work towards their own goals and targets. Consequently, the category of psychological validity proposed by Rubdy (2003, cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015) appealed to me – my evaluation of materials would certainly include assessment of the possibilities for cognitive engagement, and learners themselves taking advantage of opportunities to develop their skills, presented by coursebook language input or tasks.

The question of learner autonomy arose during the seminar today as well – Roo mentioned the potential benefits of delegating responsibility for materials evaluation to learners themselves, and noted how difficult it was in the context some of us share of roll-on, roll-off classes in private language schools. An eventual goal of mine is to investigate learner-driven course planning (Sowden 2007), and gently introduce it with a long-term, closed group of students, after some learner training and awareness raising. This would ideally involve learners pre-evaluating material, and would definitely involve ‘whilst-use’ and ‘post-use’ evaluation (Mishan and Timmis 2015). Clearly these are areas of interest which complement each other.

In any case, the process we used meant that we made our criteria categories before deciding on principled evaluative questions, which led to some slightly ill-fitting categorisations. More importantly, it led to some significant evaluative criteria being omitted, as we were focused on filling our categories, not on comprehensively representing our principles in our criteria. In the end, I had to add two evaluative questions of my own when applying our framework to the selected materials – which still, by no means, made it an exhaustive and comprehensive set of criteria. Mistakes are an excellent way to find out the best way to achieve something – lesson learned. In any future evaluation frameworks the initial root of the process will be a reiteration of principles for materials.

Dogma, or informed principles?

I’ve often found that, during this course, crossovers between our own ideas and our interpretations of the literature have proved interesting and thrown up links I hadn’t noticed before. Often these are supporting ideas or theories which develop each other. In this instance, one happened to be a contradiction which is, I feel, rooted in the co-dependence of an evaluation of materials, and the teaching and learning beliefs of the evaluator. Tomlinson asserts that a materials evaluator should form an ‘overt’ set of principles for doing so, which should be constantly referred to both in construction and implementation of an evaluative framework (2003). I couldn’t agree more; I’ve expressed my belief already that a lot of the impression given by your intuition, or gut feeling, when summarily reacting to material is based on deep-seated convictions and beliefs about how languages are learnt – principles, in other words – whether they are examined or unexamined. Principles are present in any form of materials evaluation or design, and we should be consciously aware of their effect on our work.

But here lies the contradiction; the same author argues that principled evaluative questions should be free from ‘dogma’, which I interpret as the influence of methodological schools of thought, as this shouldn’t play a role in the evaluation of material. How can one’s evaluation be both principled, and totally unrelated to the ‘dogma’ which one actually holds to be valid? It could be that I have misunderstood Tomlinson’s conception of ‘dogma’, but I see it as fairly interchangeable with long-standing, popularly supported ELT theories, methods and approaches. These certainly play a role in my own principles, and I venture that they are influential in most teachers’ beliefs and attitudes. They should be deconstructed and reflected upon, developed and adapted to context, but shouldn’t be ignored. Furthermore, Tomlinson stresses the importance of a localised, contextually sensitive evaluative framework – rightly so, I believe, as an effective evaluation must be based on the learners and learning environment to which the materials will be applied. This is even more difficult to reconcile with a lack of established theories about learning in evaluative principles – what if your context demands a particular element of ‘dogma’? What if the teachers for whom the material is being selected subscribe to this school of thought, or the institution the material will be used in is based around it? Surely, it is both acceptable and indeed desirable to take into account the impact of ‘dogma’ both on the context in which the material will be used, and on the principles that the evaluator holds. Grant (1987, cited in Mishan and Timmis 2015) actually includes the word ‘Communicative’ in his ‘CATALYST’ acronym, representing a proposed universal framework for evaluative criteria. There is more than a hint of CLT-based teaching approaches to this – if CLT isn’t dogma, what is?

Personal learning outcomes

Overall this experience has been very productive, personally; there is a lot more to materials evaluation than met my eye – it bears relevance to my ambitions for fostering learner autonomy, and is possible to approach with a variety of attitudes and focal points which can influence the outcome. I’ve learned how not to approach it, which is valuable, and feel equipped to keep working on evaluative criteria for my own context. As contexts constantly change, evaluative frameworks will be in constant motion, so I’m sure I’ll get enough practice.

 

Johnson, K; ‘A step forward: investigating expertise in materials evaluation’ in ELT Journal Vol. 62 Issue 2, 2006

Mishan, Freda and Timmis, Ivor; Materials development for TESOL; 2015

Sowden, Colin; ‘Culture and the “good teacher” in the English Language classroom’ in ELT Journal Vol. 61 Issue 4, 2007

Tomlinson, Brian and Masuhara, Hitomi; The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Langauge Learning; 2018