When I took a job at a private language academy in Sicily, a few years into my teaching career, I must somehow have missed the memo that detailed the requirement to teach children. Having never done anything of the sort previously and benefitting only from my one month long CELTA course by way of teacher training, it was something of a baptism of fire. I had not the first idea what to do with my classes of five, six and seven year olds and it became quickly apparent that the course book they had been provided with was not going to be up to the job of holding my young learners attention or interest for an hour and a half after they had already spent a day at school. Never having taken to the Italian tradition of the Sunday afternoon passeggiata, I instead spent the hours dreaming up ways of keeping my small charges occupied. I created vocabulary activities based on children’s picture books, invented games, dreamt up a craft project to celebrate every special occasion. Looking back, my creativity enabled me to make a success of what otherwise would have been a disaster. Had anyone asked, though, I would not have said that I saw what I was doing as ‘materials design’. There certainly were no explicit principles or frameworks involved. As I got to know my little classes better, I developed a better understanding of what would work and my decisions, not dissimilarly to those made by the authors Hadfield ¹ refers to, were based on those instincts alone.

Fast forward a number of years and I have been tasked with designing a worksheet. I set about deciding how I should approach the matter at hand, taking into account Hadfield’s advice that making explicit one’s unspoken framework can be a useful development tool for the novice. Having discussed the principles which I hope would underpin the materials I create, I have chosen to use Jolly & Bolitho’s ² framework for materials writing. They describe it as having a ‘one-directional simplicity’, a point which McGrath ³ perceives as a weakness. He points out the necessity of distinguishing between the need for knowledge and the need for skill as well as the value in receiving input from colleagues and the fact that not all needs identified have to result in the production of materials. In spite of these criticisms, I have chosen to embrace its simplicity. I am not an experienced materials designer but as I have noted the times, like the period described above, in my teaching career when it’s been necessary or desirable to create original materials have always taken place under what McGrath ⁴ terms a ‘concept-driven approach’, whereby ‘teaching material seems to suggest itself’. Jolly & Bolitho’s framework might be a simplification of the process that professional materials writers go through but it is a good starting point for the teacher-cum-materials writer who is trying to take more of a principled approach to materials design.

Identification

So who are my learners and what do they need? And which need specifically am I trying to address through this worksheet? I teach a variety of different classes that change over the course of the year but one constant is my part time exam class who are preparing for Cambridge First. These students are unusual in the UK private language sector in that they are settled members of the local community who have jobs and homes, as opposed to full time class commitments and host families. This can mean the stakes are higher for them than most – they receive no funding or support for the cost of their course and have a lot of demands on their time. However, their level of motivation is high. Exam success can mean the chance to do the job they want to do instead of doing something just to pay the bills and this is reflected in their dedication. My current contingent are about 5 weeks in to an 18 week course – by now, they have been introduced to most but not all parts of the exam.

As Anna observed from her experience of teaching preparation classes for the same exam, the reading paper is the part often identified by exam candidates as one of the biggest challenges. In particular they find the time pressure stressful. Intuition tells them they should strive to understand every word but the paper pushes them in different directions. It’s no use telling them not to do the former without providing guidance on what to do instead. Like Anna, I also feel passionately that my learners should leave my classes having done more than simply complete practice exercises and check answers. If they are going to overcome their instinct that the way to successful comprehension is thorough painstaking, bottom-up processing, my learners are going to need a thorough understanding of what is actually being tested in the paper and what strategies they should use to approach the task.

Exploration 

There are three parts in the Cambridge First reading paper. Parts 5 and 7 test relatively similar sub-skills: both require candidates to read for detail, opinion, and attitude. Part 5 additionally tests an understanding of tone, implication and purpose. Part 7 requires reading for specific information. In my experience, these sub-skills are relatively familiar to my learners, whether that is from their pre-exam studies or from the demands of every day life. Part 6 presents a different challenge, as it requires the candidate to ‘understand the structure and development of a text’ ⁵. This requires an awareness of in-text references and conjuncts. For an explanation of the issues, I turned to Thornbury ⁶.

He points out how ‘cross-referencing serves to bind the text together, connecting sentences with other sentences and connecting the text to its context’ ⁷. It is this web of connections that my learners need to be able to recognise and, as Thornbury notes, it doesn’t always come easily to them. My personal theory as to why that is revolves around the ubiquity and familiarity of the pronouns and articles commonly used to achieve anaphoric and cataphoric reference. Is it possible that learners don’t recognise their importance?  Thornbury ⁸ explains the complexity with the following explanation of the word the:

‘The function of the is to signal knowledge that is given, i.e. knowledge that is shared between the writer and reader… It is as if to say: you know which dog (or boots or rabbit) I am talking about. The reason we know, in this case, is because the dog and the boots and the rabbit have been introduced to us previously in the text’

If learners fail to recognise the signal for given knowledge, or similar indications provided by other referents and conjuncts, they could fall back on lexical or topical clues alone in the task of inserting a missing sentence into a gapped paragraph, a strategy which can lead to distraction and incorrect answers. As such, my aims for this worksheet were to drawn my learners’ attention to the features that make a text coherent and cohesive and to illustrate how critical it is to question their use in reading part 6.

Contextual Realisation 

My next question was whether to select an ‘official’ First text or something else. A Cambridge-approved text would already be the right length and the right level of difficulty but also it would also be too easy to get distracted by the tasks already suggested. How much could I really add to a text already published for that purpose? More importantly, I wanted my students to see that the language that is tested in reading part 6 is present in every text they encounter. My ultimate aim is to give my class the tools to access and process the language that surrounds them in a way that contributes to their chances of passing the exam but moreover, their expanding capabilities as speakers of English.

Families, relationships, lifestyles and routines are the topics we have discussed in the recent introductory sessions, so I wanted to choose an article that would fit in with this without it being a contrived choice. Taking inspiration from Thornbury ⁹, who uses a Ukrainian tale to illustrate cross-references, I first looked at folk stories. I found that the language used was often archaic and likely to be unfamiliar to my learners and so moved on to the more prosaic BBC which I browsed in the hope of finding a suitable current-events-related article. Aside from the fact that BBC articles appear to favour one-sentence paragraphs which would clearly not lend themselves to a gapped sentence style task, there was another problem.

‘Sir…. what is opera?’, said the curious but befuddled Iraqi student quoted by Jolly and Bolitho ¹⁰ on encountering this word for the first time within a reading text, who are pointing to the need for materials to be culturally accessible to learners. Articles within the mainstream news are understandably filled with references to the depressing world of politicians and their tall tales. I’m sure there’s a way to approach that which would be of interest and benefit to those, like my First Certificate learners, who live and work in the UK in the relative long term. But I’m not sure that its compatible with the need I identified, and so I moved along to the Life and Style section of The Guardian, in search of a human interest story, something relevant to my learners culture, that wouldn’t date too quickly. Given that I started off with the topic of families & relationships, I might have saved myself some time by getting there faster. I decided on this story, from the Guardian’s experience column – a first person narrative of a mother who paid to have her teenage daughter ‘escorted’ to a boot camp for troublesome teenagers. 

I wanted to check my assumption that my class would be able to cope with the text. After all, the purpose was not for them to deal with unfamiliar lexis, even though this is a valuable skill. In any case, there is research to show that learners who don’t recognise most of the words are going to struggle. As Leo Selivan explains in his introduction to Vocab Profiler:

Research shows that 95%- 98% lexical coverage is needed for adequate comprehension of a text, i.e you need to know a minimum of 95% (Laufer 1989) and optimally 98% (Nation 2001) of all running words in a text to be able to understand a text. Vocab Profiler allows you to analyse a text by sorting all the words in it into the first and second thousand levels (K1, K2), academic words (AWL) and off-list.

I used this tool to check the text I had chosen and found that it contains 5.3% of off word lists. The detailed results listed the names of states (Florida and Utah) amongst these, along with some topic-specific lexis such as escorts, gruelling (physical challenges), (young) offenders, therapy. It also contained some terms which I would expect learners of this level to have encountered before: embarrassed, kids, scared and hugged, for instance. It would be an interesting experiment to compare the results from some official Cambridge First level texts. This would serve as a useful benchmark for the design of future materials.

Pedagogical Realisation

When it came to the pedagogical realisation stage, I returned to the principles that emerged from our seminar discussions. I realised that I had not been thinking of my exam students during these conversations or whilst I was writing about it afterwards. That isn’t to say that the principles I identified don’t apply to these learners, more that there are perhaps additional, more specific principles that additionally apply to this particular class. These include the following:

1. Materials should make maximum use of classroom time.
2. Materials should recognise the need to prepare learners simultaneously for examination success and real-world communication.

These two principles informed the pedagogical realisation of my worksheet in a number of ways. Firstly, in the design of the ‘getting started’ task. The presence of some form of introductory, lead-in activity comes as standard in most published materials. In the case of a lesson built around reading, this is often intended to activate schemata in learners’ minds, bringing to the forefront of their consciousness whatever they already know about the topic in question. Especially as the text I had chosen was ungraded, I wanted to maximise the benefit of schemata activation to my learners’ understanding but I wanted to find a way to do this that would be make maximum use of our limited classroom time. For this reason, I chose two pictures and wrote a task which mimics part 2 of the speaking exam. I did not explicitly frame it as exam practice as I felt that certain elements of the task as it appears in the exam (for example, the strict time limit) were conducive to my main aim. Having said that, I felt that the task of identifying similarities and differences and the language used in their description would be a step towards achieving the first principle I identified above.

The second principle was partially addressed in my choice of text, as discussed above. By choosing a text that had not been officially selected for Cambridge First, I hope my learners had the opportunity to recognise how referents and conjuncts are present in all texts. As such, any text can be exploited for the purposes of exam preparation and conversely, exam preparation tasks are also developing an important reading sub-skill. The task entitled ‘understanding references’ was inspired by one of Thornbury’s ¹¹ discovery activities, whereas the sentence-insertion task was modelled closely on the Cambridge First exam specifications.

Physical Production

The physical production was the stage that was most daunting to me at the outset but proved in practice to be straightforward. I used Pages, a Mac-based word processing package. As a person who has benefitted from no formal graphic design training, I was pleased with what I managed to produce. The next stage was to print some copies to present for peer evaluation and to try out with my class. Another post will explore what happened here.