Mountain-climbing has been much discussed in my intermediate level general English class this week, in the context of our discussions on ambitions and achievements, courtesy of our current course book.

Not being much of an outdoorsman, I have limited experience to draw upon. Limited, but not non-existent – the photography herein is testament to the fact that once upon a time, I climbed a mountain of my own. At 968m, Monte Fossa dell Felci is the highest peak in the Aeolian Islands, which lie just of the coast of Sicily where I taught for two years. Not quite tall enough for my uncharitable climbing companion, who told me that, as I struggled onwards, that it wasn’t a proper mountain and to stop complaining about my shoes, which according to him were more than adequate for the task. Tall enough, though, to qualify by most definitions of the word that I can find. And more importantly, tall enough to qualify as ‘an achievement’ about which to tell my class this week.

Having read the article about Maurice Wilson‘s attempt on Everest, it seemed like a shame to push forward immediately onwards to the next topic. I wanted my students to have more of a chance to explore the themes of achievement and ambition in a more personal sense. Of course, there is a follow on speaking task suggested in the book, but it seemed unlikely that this would be sufficient for a three-hour class. What I wanted was another text of some description on a connected theme. Perhaps something that would provide some interesting language to notice and exploit for referring to future ambitions, rather than past achievements, as my learners are still at the stage where many utterances are expressed as if they occur in general present time, regardless of their intended meaning. The only thing that came to mind was a listening activity from Advanced Skills – five people talking about their ambitions, which I remembered using it quite successfully last summer with a high level fluency class. The question of whether my intermediate learners would benefit from a text taken from something called ‘Advanced Skills’ did not escape me. If it was useful for those high-level learners last summer, could it also be appropriate for my current contingent? If one of the purposes of adaptation, according to McGrath ¹ is ‘to make the material more suitable for the circumstances in which it is being used’, could the principles of adaptation be applied here? With my recently written post in mind, I decided to ignore the word ‘Advanced’, imagine that the text in question was part of a bank of ‘semi-materials’ and make an attempt at adaptation. As the text in question was an audio recording and my aim was to simplify the material to make it appropriate for intermediate learners, it seemed this was going to involve grading the task rather than the text.

Cunningsworth ² puts forward the following three questions to prompt a teacher’s thought process when adapting materials:

1. What does the exercise actually get the learner to do?
2. What do I want the learner to do?
3. How can I get the exercise to do what I want it to do for the learner?

I decided to apply these to the ‘Achievements’ lesson. The listening activity consists firstly of a gist task which is followed by questions in which the learners listen for details. Having looked at the suggested activities, I decided that the second listening task would be the part that would need adapting if this material was to become suitable for intermediate learners.

The original task asked the following questions:

Match the speakers to the attitudes towards the abilities they describe. Who…

a. knows it is a fantasy 

b. is doubtful about whether this ability exists

c. is determined to do it eventually 

d. doubts their family would allow it 

e. is hopeful of being able to do it

f. is confident about doing it in the near future 

g. realises it is impractical 

And so to Cunningsworth’s questions.

What does the exercise actually get the learner to do?

The task requires learners to show that they can understand shades of meaning within speakers stated and unstated attitudes towards the likelihood of their achieving an ambition. For example, a successful participant in this task would need to be able to differentiate between a speaker feeling ‘hopeful’, ‘confident’ and ‘determined’.

What do I want the learner to do? 

I want my learners to be exposed to a text in which speakers describe ambitions in order that useful language for doing so might be exploited.  In order to make this task accessible to intermediate level learners, I need to remove the requirement for such sophisticated differentiation. Rather, I want my learners to have a good global understanding of each speaker’s message – what is their ambition and how do they feel about it?

How can I get the exercise to do what I want it to do for the learner? 

The original statements a-g could be broadly classified as positive or negative attitudes. I decided to rewrite the second question as follows:

Who feels positive about achieving their goals? Who doesn’t think they will? Write +/- 

McGrath discusses simplification in his chapter on adaptation. He notes that the traditional approach involves making changes to the text itself, and goes on to describe how such removal of the non-essentials can actually make it harder for a learner to understand the global meaning of a text due to an increased density, as well as reducing authenticity. The approach I have taken here avoids these issues whilst still making the task appropriate for and accessible to my intermediate learners.

Interestingly, they were quick to pick up on the fact that they were listening to something ‘Advanced’, thanks to the announcement at the beginning of the CD. They seemed to find the stream of speech faster than usual but not overwhelmingly so. I’m happy to report that they were able to complete the task I planned for them and that it led to noticing of useful language and interesting discussion.

I declare my experiment a success. A success in that diversion from the course book gave my chance to properly explore a topic they were interested in further. A success in that a text with what at first glance would seem an inappropriate label on it was put to good use. A success in that my learners got a confidence boost from realising that there are different levels of comprehension and recognising their ability to understand the most important points even from complex utterances, delivered at a natural speed. Has anyone had any successes like this? What about going the other way, using a text intended for lower levels with a higher level class? How did your students react?

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