In this my final post, I can hardly believe I’ve written as much as I have. I think it’s approaching 15,000 words. It feels quite epic!
The longest post was on sound and vision (video). As I said in that post, I think I had a lot to learn in that area and enjoyed finding out more about it, but also know there’s much more to know. The Goldstein and Driver book is now part of my workbag toolkit.
In terms of what I wanted to achieve from this module at the start, these were my thoughts:
I want to be better able to review and select material fit for purpose, so it’s best suited to students’ needs and me as a teacher
I want to be able to adapt and supplement material more effectively for the same reasons
I’ve certainly achieved this through completing the coursebook and task evaluation tasks with colleagues and the associated readings and posts. The key message I took away from completing these and listening to the other presenters was that evaluation should follow a process. That is, it should be systematic and answer the question – does it meet my principles?
The same appliesto adaptation and supplementation. Although publishers create and we select materials for a target market, adaptation allows us to add value to what is offered, so it can become even more suitable for the precise needs of the students in our context. Principled adaptation should always put the goals of the students first and should also meet our principles. Roll on flexi-materials!
I want to gain practical skills using different forms of digital technology and examine ways of using it in the classroom. I particularly want to learn how to exploit video.
I did learn a lot about using digital video and still digital images and believe I’m really going to enjoy using them in the classroom more – I plan to. With other forms of digital tech. well, I think I probably just scratched the surface, but discovered some fun and easy applications that enhance the learning process. I know much more about them than I did before the course and am far more willing to give them a fair hearing, to evaluate them properly.
I would like some insight into the design process when creating materials, to inform evaluation and selection and enable self-created supplementation
This was the most challenging part of the module as it brought together pedagogic knowledge synthesised into principles for design of text content, visuals and instructions; desktop publishing skills; sourcing skill; and evaluation skills. It was a challenge but it was achieved. I have no ambition to pursue materials writing in any serious manner, but can and may well produce a decent worksheet from time to time.
So this is THE END. Time to sign off. I feel compelled to end with an emblematic digital image.
In this our 9th seminar we started our conversation on the role of digital technologies in the classroom with a trial of ‘google cardboard’, which Anna kindly brought to class to share with us. It’s a free google app. used on a smartphone in conjunction with cardboard goggles (available for around £5) which are used to view the app’s pictures in the ‘virtual reality’ of the cardboard goggles. It was a hit with the class and we could well imagine students enjoying the experience of language games such as 20 questions, played with this simple and inexpensive tech. We thought students would be affectively engaged – a key principle in language learning. It demonstrated how everyday technologies can complement and enhance learning.
ELT materials have been hugely affected by digital technologies in recent years but there has been some concern expressed regarding their over use. For example, when technology drives the choices of what and how to teach, it bypasses the use of sound pedagogic and methodology principles because of a technologically driven bias. Maley (2011:390) for example as quoted by Tomlinson (2012: 165), accepts many of the advantages of digital technologies but warns of a ‘total capitulation’ to it.
It’s perhaps easy to appreciate the enriching quality of the mobile phone app. described above to facilitate interaction in the classroom. Resources such as YouTube and Google too, used for authentic multi-modal input from which to launch and stimulate interaction have more advantages than disadvantages as a language learning resource. Where some of the reservations regarding digital technology more frequently occur is where they purport to replace or marginalise the interactions traditionally found in our language classrooms. The rise of online learning in the form of formal online courses, virtual worlds, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), online language learning communities such as Web 2.0 and mobile apps such as Duolingo, have all come under the spotlight in this regard to a greater or lesser extent. In a recent ELT Journal publication, Hockley, N (2015), reviews the use of some of these and any associated research into these digital forms of language learning. He concluded with reference to apps, that “despite questions about the pedagogic effectiveness of the learning content and approach, app-based, mobile approaches are now major long-term players in the online language learning space.” (Hockley, N. 2015. p312).
In a previous post on the use of video in the language classroom I reflected on the growing expectations of learners to operate in a a multi-modal environment where text, visuals and sound are integrated. This reflects what society at large is doing and results in less patience for more traditional non-integrated approaches. Kiddle, T (2015. in Tomlinson, B. (eds) p190) also comments on this saying that, particularly amongst those born post 1980, expectations to use digital technology and an awareness of it permeates all of their lives, their language learning lives included. Despite this, observes Kiddle, for multiple reasons, we have some way to go before technology is normalised in the L2 classroom. He goes on to list some technologies that have the exploitation of a digital mode or media as their key concept, but like others, warns that this doesn’t make them ‘good’ or ‘valuable’ per se. Yet again the discourse returns to a debate on principles of L2 learning, and those coined in a referent discussion surrounding interactive whiteboards in 2010 are resurrected by Kiddle for all digital language teaching and learning materials.
These principles are: multi-modality– a central aspect and reason for using digital technology; orchestration – the teacher’s role in effectively exploiting these modes and of shaping how students participate in their use; and participation– the type of student interaction with the technology. He adds feedback as a further key principle. He too concludes that in developing technologies that seek to “add something different and equally or more effective to the learning process” care needs to be taken that it is not “there for its own sake or for arbitrary non-pedagogic reasons.” (Kiddle, T (2015. in Tomlinson, B. (eds) p203).
In preparation for our seminar we were given the option to explore the task of converting the worksheet we’d been working on (for week 7) into digital form, a process known as leveraging. My worksheet used a song as the ‘text’, which is already in a digital format. It certainly exploits multi-modality which is orchestrated by the teacher through the tasks in the worksheet which engender participation (or interaction).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsCPrboDunw
With regard to the worksheet itself, I looked into leveraging the 1st vocabulary task, which was matching lexical chunks with their definitions. I tried Quizlet for this but it wasn’t successful (at the level I tried to use it) as the lexical chunks were metaphorical phrases so there was nothing in the Quizlet database to convert this into simple picture prompt: just as there was nothing in the dictionaries that had the metaphorical meaning either. I could have paid a subscription and then written my own definitions for my terms as I’d done on the worksheet, but chose not to as the costs would have outweighed the benefits. I concluded that this worksheet was not suitable for digitalising more than it was already. Here again is the worksheet for reference.
What I’ve done instead is picked out a worksheet I’ve used and adapted before and leveraged part of that. This is an activity in which students use a questionnaire to ask and answer questions about friendship.There is a suggested lead-in and follow up to the main activity and it is taken from Quizzes, Questionnaires and Puzzles – Ready-made activities for intermediate students by Miles Craven. I like it because friendship is a universal theme that can engage all learners and has a particular resonance with teenagers. I also like it because it’s very flexible in how it can be used and that’s important because often, I don’t know ahead of time the exact level of the students I get on short course. Sometimes, with higher level intermediates I only need to do a quick elicit of relevant language and then it’s straight into the main interactional communicative activity which can be extended into a survey with a reporting follow-up. The relevant language is at the top of page 70. Here is the worksheet.
I’ve done this is a few different ways. One way I particularly like is with role play. As different scenarios are acted out the lexis is elicited in context, boarded and looked at in different ways -syllable stress and phonetically for pronunciation, word class and spelling. It is here that I think a digital activity with Quizlet would complement the lesson by reinforcing the learning of lexis by matching it to pictures in a ‘gamified’ way. Students would use their mobile phones for this. So I created a lexical set on friendship on the Quizlet app which was very quick and easy to do. And I like the pictures they offered although they were quite limited but if you pay the subscription you get more. Here is the link to the app.
I particularly like the games ‘scatter’ and ‘gravity’, but the ‘spelling’ and ‘learn’ features are good too. I also found the audio for pronunciation really clear, though I expect that would vary with device. I think with regard to the discussion above as to whether this digital element would add something useful to the lesson I would say ‘yes’. It’s engaging and varies the activities used to learn the lexis. It is multi-modal and orchestrated by the teacher for a specific task purpose. The students participation is with the technology directly via their mobile phones and they receive feedback directly through the app.
The key to using digital technology in my view, is to evaluate it in exactly the same way as you would other materials. Does it add, not take away from the purpose of your task or lesson? If you subjected it to your evaluation criteria based on your principles (developed in week 2 and 3 and applied to the worksheet in week 7), how would it do? Don’t use it just because its there. Equally, be prepared to try out new ways of doing things as they may represent a considerable enhancement to learning. They may also be easier to use than you think. And that’s coming from someone who certainly wasn’t born before 1980.
References
Hockley, N (2015) in ELT Journal 69/3, July 2015; doi:10.1093/elt/ccv020
Kiddle, T (2015) in Tomlinson, B. (eds) Developing materials for language teaching
Miles Craven (2010) Quizzes, Questionnaires and Puzzles – Ready-made activities for intermediate students.
For seminar 7 we were asked to create a worksheet with a specific group in mind and bring it along to the session to share. Unfortunately I missed this session so missed the sharing bit but here is the worksheet bit!
The group I had in mind when creating this worksheet are C1, 16-18 year old learners.
Earlier in the year I had been looking at figurative language – specifically simile and metaphor through working with a play with learners in this category. The students were quite academic and easily able to transfer the analytical skills used in their L1 to an English language literary piece – so once they’d learnt the English terms they could easily apply them to any text.
The lesson was successful and I supplemented it at the time with a couple of songs laden with metaphorical language – a rich source. In the commentary below on how the worksheet was designed, I have highlighted in bold italics all the ways in which I feel it meets my design and evaluative criteria. Firstly, why did I choose this text and process for these learners?
because I’ll be using the same coursebook and the lesson referred to above with similar ‘summer school’ students this summer and wanted to supplement it to further explore figurative language, in this way it is suited to context
because C1 learners need lots of this type of vocabulary to develop their language use, so they don’t just settle for literal uses
because some teenagers like plays and poetry sometimes, but nearly all of them always love songs so its affectively engaging.
At the time I delivered this lesson my songs were not fully mined for their learning potential. I had simply prepared gap fill lyric sheets to accompany the listening – they were orientated more towards listening skill than vocabulary development and I wanted to switch that round. I dealt with lexis as it arose using the whiteboard – insufficiently in my view. I thought at the time that a more thorough treatment of the complexity of the vocabulary was called for if the learners were going to be able to retain the new language from the text. My text choice therefore, for this assignment, is one of those songs – Demons by Imagine Dragons.
My primary reason for selecting this text then, was for it’s use of metaphor and the examples from the text I aimed to direct students to notice and assimilate. It was also because this band is very popular with young adults and relevant to their real life and therefore motivational. It is also an authentic text. So my expectation is for a high level of engagement from learners wanting to discover the meaning of the lyrics they might already know how to sing along to. I expect to be able to use the worksheet with this song as a much better supplement to the play based lesson mentioned above but it could also stand apart from that, as long as there was an appropriate lesson plan built around it.
In accordance with the guidelines for the task, the worksheet has a lead -in, a gist task, a sequence of tasks to develop lexis (and listening skill as a secondary aim), visuals and a record of the language taught. According to Jolly, D and Bolitho, R (2011, p110, in Tomlinson, B (ed), Materials Development for Language Teaching):
“The physical appearance and production of materials is important both for motivation and for classroom effectiveness.”
As such I turned to Jason Renshaw’s video which provides an introduction to some of the basics for producing an effective and attractive ELT worksheet. Here I found the mechanical knowhow for building a worksheet – with layers of text boxes and fill colours, themes and layout advice. Worksheet design 101 and I needed it all! Here is a description of what is in the worksheet with a commentary on how I got there followed by the link to it.
My lead-in uses a picture which helps to establish the topicof music but I had to modify my photograph choice here as the 1st one I chose was copyright protected. This I think affected the quality of the image I had to use. This was my 1st choice.
And this was the 2nd choice filtered by creative commons licence. But it’s still good enough I feel.I used pair-work prompts to accompany the picture to encourage interaction on the topic of music to set schema. This was both personalised, drawing on the students own experience of listening to music, and interactional so communication was encouragedas students needed to work on a ranking task together to complete the activity. There is no right or wrong answer to the ranking task. It therefore promotes the sharing of opinions, the justification of choices, and gives room for student choice over content.
What are the top 5 songs you are listening to right now? Look through your phone if you can’t remember.
Compare your top 5 with your partner’s. Then rank your combined top 10.
My gist task uses a graphic picture and question prompts to help determine the mood of the forthcoming text.
These lyrics are taken from ‘Demons’ by Imagine Dragons. Work with a partner.
Who do you thing is saying these words and why?
Take a few moments to discuss the meaning of the words and write your thoughts here
The visual gives the idea that we are talking about feelings and emotions here so that the idea of a non-literal meaning is conveyed by combining the 2 modes, text and image.
Again though, my choice of image was a copyright piece. So I found this alternative. I haven’t substituted the 1st for the 2nd in the worksheet however because I would have to rework the space and add in the words which would take too much time right now, but I’d have to do this before publishing it for use. Actually I prefer the second image because it has more impact. I’ve noticed when reviewing that I haven’t enabled students to ‘talk with’ either image and could do this by adding a personalised question – perhaps about a film they’d watched or someone they’s met.
The first lexis development task is a matching one with 9 lexical chunks, 3 of which are here below.
‘cards all fold’
‘lights fade out’
‘ones we hail’
These are matched with definitions. They are in chunks so that the nouns and collocates are learnt together in context. The cognitive load with 9 items is not too heavy and there is a specific cognitive task to fulfil – that of matching. During the task students could use dictionaries to help with individual words. This task is likely to be challenging as the whole metaphorical meaning is unlikely to appear in the dictionary, so some working out and guessing will be needed. At the end of the task students would compare their answers in pairs before whole class feedback. All three of these tasks have plenty of space on the page for students to write, a contrastive background for clarity and straightforward instructions with no clutter. For differentiation purposesthere are several more items in the song that could be deciphered by quick finishers – ‘curtain’s call’ ‘saints we see’ ‘my kingdom come’ for example. Her is the link to the worksheet.
The second lexical development task is to listen to the songwithout visuals and complete the gap-fill lyric sheet. Here I’ve included prompts by providing the initial letter of the missing words. I’m not 100% sure of this feature as it may make the task too easy, but I like the fact that it provides confirmation of the correct phrase as the students are listening and therefore makes it more about the vocabulary than the listening skill. I’m happy to trial this approach.
Students would thenlisten again using the YouTube video with the words on the screen (as above) and sing along to it as a whole group. This would be good for contextualising the lexis, as a pronunciation model, and for giving the students confidence and putting them at easewith using the lyrics and tune.
Then, depending on the confidence level of the group, a karaoke style YouTube treatment could be done. In this, pairs of students take turns to sing parts of the song, with only a backing track and the words on the screen. I got this idea from Goldstein and Driver (2014, p94), and it sounds like a lot of fun. It would also help students to really focus on the words of the song and imitate the pronunciation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsCPrboDunw
A final follow up task could be included too, which I would expect to give as homework. A writing task could be set to use some of the phrases from the song to compose a text of the students’ choice. Or, the lead-in task could be further exploited to choose another song, according to the majority preferences of the students, to provide a future input text for a later date thus enabling student choice. Incidentally these 2 final tasks (the karaoke and the homework followup options) also allow the teacher to adapt to context, giving teacher choicetoo.
And with an eye to recycling the lexis learnt from this lesson, the song could be ‘karaoked’ again at a later date with students taking different parts of the song as their ‘bit’ to sing. This could be practiced, recorded, and played back. (again this idea is from Goldstein and Driver). One further point on the design. By creating a template and keeping the design and instructions simple, I can easily adapt it for use with different input at different levels without too much extra work.
Reflecting briefly now on the process of materials writing it is useful to refer again to Jolly, D and Bolitho, R (2011, p112, in Tomlinson, B (ed), Materials Development for Language Teaching) who provide a summary of the standard process of materials writing and then add two further important elements to the process:
IDENTIFICATION – by teacher or learner(s) of a need…
EXPLORATION – of the area of need…
CONTEXTUAL REALISATION – of the proposed new materials by the finding of suitable ideas, contexts or texts…
PEDAGOGIC REALISATION – by finding appropriate exercises and activities and the writing of appropriate instructions…
PHYSICAL PRODUCTION – of materials, involving consideration of layout…..
In my commentary above, I feel confident I have covered those processes in the production of my worksheet. Job done? Not quite. Jolly and Bolitho go on to highlight the dynamic or iterative process involved in the production of materials so the next steps are:
STUDENT USE OF MATERIALS
EVALUATION OF MATERIALS AGAINST AGREED OBJECTIVES
These two factors are a critical part of the process. In terms of the former, I expect to be able to use this worksheet in the near future. In terms of the latter, it is necessary to refer once more to the evaluation framework used in seminar 3. There, we evaluated a coursebook unit but the framework is equally valid to evaluate the worksheet. Our framework was organised by category thus:
The evaluation framework was constructed on the basis of our shared principles examined in the preceding seminar.
Using the framework it was possible to reflect on the worksheet in a systematic way. During the commentary on its design above, I have highlight in bold italics all the ways I believe the worksheet meets the majority of the evaluative criteria of the framework. – not all as it was a single item.
As part of that process, simply printing out the worksheet and seeing how it looks and reads, led to three reviews. Johnson (2003), in listing the characteristics of ‘expert’ materials designers highlights the evaluative process (when writing tasks) as being ongoing, saying there is a constant sense of review in which tasks can be rejected, maintained or fixed. Working through the tasks in my worksheet as if I were a student, to get a feel for timing, level and achievement of learning outcomes, lead to adjustments to the original worksheet and development of its associated post listening task. This in Johnson’s list of characteristics is a way of ‘concretely visualising’ the tasks from both the teacher’s and the learners’ point of view. It also facilitates exploration of post task types, another of his expert characteristics.
Finally, though myself and others studying this module are by no means expert materials designers, we have to some extent absorbed some of the characteristics they possess by completing this process of worksheet design. In Johnson’s words ” what they (experts) know beforehand helps what they do, but what they do becomes part of what they know also.” (Johnson, K. 2003, p127).
So maybe we’ve all become a little bit more ‘expert’ and have applied out principals without conscious awareness when creating. And these principles, of course, are not fixed in stone but will evolve and adapt to context. We have however always got an evaluation framework from which to evaluate our own materials and those produced by others. I am satisfied with my worksheet, confident it meets my principles, but will revise it again before use. Ultimately however, the ‘post use’ evaluation will probably make the most difference to how I adapt the worksheet further – and I fully expect to do so.
References
Goldstein, B. and Driver, P. (2014) Language learning with digital video.
Johnson, K (2003), Designing Language Teaching Tasks.
Jolly, D and Bolitho, R (2011), in Tomlinson, B (ed), Materials Development for Language Teaching.
Jason Renshaw How to make ELT worksheets video – http://youtu.be/pd4TUrcc2y4
Richardson, K. (2013) How To Write Worksheets, article in One stop english.
For our 8th seminar we were asked to work in pairs to examine a unit of a coursebook to focus on its tasks and ask: what is a task; what makes an effective task; and how do we categorise task types?
Aleks and I used Move Advanced (C1), module 3, unit 1. Published in 2007 – because it was available to borrow and we’d both used it. It aims to appeal to older teenagers and young adults and integrates reading, listening, speaking and writing with vocabulary and grammar input. From this point of view it is well balanced, offering all those elements within the communicative approach on the topic of literature and storytelling.
As we later discussed during the seminar, defining exactly what a task is, depends largely on who you consult and the context in which you ask the question. It might be easy to conflate language learning tasks with task-based learning for example which would be misleading. In the latter, narrower definition, learning is focused on using language in a meaning focused way to convey a message (Ellis 2003). In the former, broader definition, the scope is widened to include “what we give students to do in classrooms” (Johnson 2003:4). Thus, in this broader definition, all the activities and exercises of a unit designed to promote language learning are included for the purposes of task evaluation. And this is the definition we used.
Next, we designed a framework from which to examine our unit so the information we collected could be organised and interpreted. For this we were guided by Ellis’s (1998:227) framework for evaluating communicative tasks. He states that “the evaluation of a task requires a clear description….(that)….specifies the content of a task”. To this end we ordered out finding under these headings as he suggests:
Language activity: such as reading for gist, listening for key information, speaking to exchange information, personalised writing. (the simple description of the activity).
Input: such as pictures, texts, directions (the information the learners are supplied with).
Procedure: such as paired discussion, class brainstorm, table completion, individual reading. (the activities the learners perform to accomplish the task).
Objectives: to answer the question – was the task pedagogic (purely to facilitate language acquisition – e.g. to facilitate lexis acquisition) or real world (something that would happen in real life – the example given by Ellis is ‘writing a cheque’ and an example from our evaluated coursebook unit is ‘having a discussion about books you’ve read’).
Focus: here we used the language of task taxonomy – speculating, ordering, interpretation, analysis, matching, comparing etc. (these are the categories of task types). Defining categories can be done in a number of ways but our taxonomy most closely matched Maley’s (1998) list of ‘generalised procedures’ which included those listed above. He cites 12 in all . (As summarised in McGrath (2002:113). These task types seemed to fit quite naturally with how we interpreted what we perceived to be happening in the tasks we looked at – what learners were being asked to do cognitively. We saw evidence of 9 from that list. It is not however the only perspective from which to view task taxonomy (more on this below).
Principles: under this final heading we referred back to out beliefs about language learning in order to say if the activity was effective, in that it was able to meet one or more of our principles of language learning.
For reference, here is the scanned unit we looked at consisting of 4 pages and the completed evaluation table below that.
We found the process of task evaluation for a whole unit quite involved and time consuming. As noted earlier we relied heavily on Ellis’s procedures and Maley’s taxonomy of tasks and found the fitted well with our approach. What we didn’t achieve in the timeframe was a final stage of the procedure – an analysis of the information collected into quantifiable collated data. We have the raw data, so this could of course be done at a later date. What we did find was a varied range of task types with interpretation and analysis tasks being the most frequently occurring.
I said earlier that a ‘generalised procedures’ taxonomy was not the only taxonomy one could use. I discovered Bloom’s Taxonomy after completing the above evaluation. It seems to add an interesting and very useful dimension to the task evaluation process. In this taxonomy, task types are synthesised into 6 broad categories (see below) and ranked in a hierarchy with the higher order skills at the peak. I think an analysis on this plane would add an extra layer to how we evaluate tasks. Not only would we see the variety of task types used but also the depth of cognitive processes involved in each. I have Anna’s blog to thank for drawing my attention to this type of task taxonomy.
References
Ellis, R (2003) Task-based language learning and teaching.
Ellis, R (1998) The Evaluation of communicative tasks. In Tomlinson B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching.
Johnson, K. (2003) Designing Language Teaching Tasks.
Maley, A. (2011) Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching.
McGrath, I (2002) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching.
