TE714 Robyn Moallemi's blog

For last week’s seminar we had the pre-seminar task of creating a worksheet for a class that we are currently teaching. At first I thought that this wouldn’t take too long because I adapt, supplement and create materials for my learners on a weekly basis but what I realised from this task was that actually, I don’t go through a systematic materials design process, which can take a very, very, very long time. Not only that, but knowing my worksheet would be peer reviewed in the seminar added even more stress, mindfulness, reflection to the process. The feedback from which then had to be taken into consideration, the worksheet revised and evaluated prior to use. Although I am yet to use the worksheet in class, I feel happy with it and will now talk you through my design process.

Click here to view the worksheet: Worksheet v0.3-2gcdkt1

Before I started to create my worksheet I carried out pre-seminar reading (Jolly & Bolitho 2011; Richardson 2013; McGrath 2016) and research of online videos (Renshaw 2010) to gain a deeper insight into the design process. These online videos and articles proved really useful in terms of understanding the rationale behind design choice and also enabled me to modify some of my pre-existing design style i.e. Renshaw (2010) advocated the rule of thirds for layout design and emphasised the need for teachers to take ownership over the worksheets. Reading McGrath’s (2015) chapter Supplementation: exercises and worksheets I identified how I supplement the coursebook to “add something new”, to “bridge the gap between the course book and syllabus” and to “take account of learner differences by providing differentiated materials” (p79 – 80). One aspect that McGrath didn’t include in his purpose of supplementation was the teachers’ preferred teaching and learning style, attitudes and beliefs, which I believe is inherent in the motivation for designing a worksheet and in the worksheet’s content, style and purpose. This reflection of teacher individuality in their materials’ design arguably has potential to affect its use: restricting, empowering or maybe making the language learners ambivalent to the task and lesson at hand.

In order to create the worksheet I referred to Jolly & Bolitho (1998) A framework for materials writing,(see here for illustrative diagram: the design framework-1b0796y) where the first stage involves identifying of need. I decided to focus on a grammar topic that my A1 French learners are currently learning – the passé composé, which is particularly difficult to grasp because it can be used to replace three past tenses in English: simple past, present perfect and the past emphatic. It is a complex grammar topic and one that I feel could be explored more creatively in the coursebook. I decided to design a worksheet for the last lesson on the course, where the learners will consolidate all of their knowledge on the passé composé. I decided to make the lesson/activity more visually creative because the coursebook textually and orally represents grammar topics but there are no visuals or opportunities for personalisation or differentiation. I intended to design a material that will afford a) visual representation b) personalisation and c) differentiation in learner need.

The next stage to consider was Contextual Realisation. I am sorry I am late is a topic of the coursebook and I found a really pleasant animated video, with very limited dialogue with the same title (See video). This topic enables learners to produce the passé composé; talking about what happened to make them late and is ultimately something that all learners can relate to. Although interculturally there might be differences in attitudes to punctuality, which could lead to an authentic discussion and raise issues of intercultural awareness, the topic can afford personalised and individualised responses.

The third stage, pedagogical realisation made me consider exactly how the worksheet will be used in class. As already mentioned, the worksheet will extend what has been already taught and used in lesson but will involve learners watching and producing text. The aim of the worksheet was first for learners to revise how to construct the passé composé, then to watch the video where the character experiences a series of events that make him late. In pairs they have to discuss in English what happened to the character to make him late and then carry out the first activity, where they have to reorganise sentences so that they make sense and in doing so, reveal the different experiences in French. Whole class review of the exercise would follow, allowing for error correction and extemporisation. They then have to put the experiences in order from 1 – 10, in which they happened in the video. Whole class review of the exercise would follow, allowing for further error correction and extemporisation. The class would then work individually to create their own comic strip on the theme I am sorry I am late, adding thought bubbles and speech bubbles to make it both visual and textual representation of the passé composé. When finished, learners could take individual photos of their frames and either use iMovie (on iPhone) or similar software to create animation or send them to me in class, so that I could then turn them into an animation film (using PowerPoint). For those who were finished they could then record and upload the audio themselves or send that to me also, for that to be added to the animation. The final task, for those finished, would be to work with their neighbour’s comic strip and to suggest in French, what happened in the frame before and after.

Access to the internet in class to watch the video will be essential, as will the worksheets to be printed and learners to use their own Smartphones or devices to photograph their own animation/comic strip frames to then email me and also the phone’s voice memo recorder to record the events of the comic strip. The activities are designed so that they can be carried out either in pairs or individually, in class but also out of class.

The fourth stage of physical production was the actual creation of the worksheet, and research into worksheet design (Richardson 2013, Renshaw 2009 and McGrath 2015) really helped to educate me further on how to make worksheets visually engaging, purposeful and professional. However, fundamentally, the main aim of a worksheet is to “facilitate learning through activity” (McGrath 2015, p. 85) and in order to do this I acknowledged that it has to be clear, concise and with natural reading pathways. I followed Renshaw’s video to design the general layout so that each page had the same bold header, title and a footer that contained my name, as the teacher and where the course took place, to give the worksheet an identity and to situate it within the course. On the left hand-side of the second page there is a vocabulary list that contains new words and space left for each individual learner to add to during the lesson. I tried to follow Renshaw’s rule of thirds, with all tasks taking up no more than a third of the page. Reading McGrath (2016, p.95) and his emphasis on the visual appeal, I followed his advice and “spread material over two pages than trying to compress too much material into one”, as well as “use capital letters and emboldening sparingly”.  I found both of these techniques to be effective and made the worksheet easier to read and follow.

In terms of the actual worksheet content and tasks, I reflected on McGrath’s suggestion that “worksheets should also have a clear developmental progression (grading) from easier to more difficult” and where “three exercises per worksheet is often a good number” (2016, p.94). I demonstrate this in the three core tasks, starting off with Task 2: reorganise sentences so that they make sense (the introduction is revision of passé composé and Task 1 is for learners to talk in English about the film), Task 3: put the sentences in order of event and Task 4: create a comic strip where they produce the passé composé and “a check on learning” (p.94). The incorporation of a comic strip into the worksheet links back to my previous blog post comments on the use of visuals and also reflects my accordance with Astorga’s viewpoint that illustrations “facilitate the decoding process by making the language of the story not only meaningful but memorable” (1999, p.213). The comic strip further reflects principle 9 of our collaborative principles that materials should provide personalised practice and 14: materials must engage, motivate and interest the learners. The remaining activities are for those who finish early, who wish to be challenged further and who wish to practice other communicative competences i.e. speaking and listening.

The worksheet was subject to peer review in the class and despite only speaking to two of my peers about my worksheet, those who reviewed it gave feedback (see attached), which was encouraging to read.

However, it did occur to me when I was actually in the seminar that I was surrounded by English teachers and my worksheet was all in French. The extent to which they understood and evaluated it on a greater level than purely aesthetic or number of exercises is unknown. Although luckily, there were a couple of French speakers whose advice was greatly received and in light of their constructive feedback:

Task 4: Identifying the verbs and creating the language before learners draw the comic strip in order to keep them on task and producing the passé composé as opposed to something/anything else

Task 4: add information amount how and where they can add text i.e. speech and though bubbles

I reflected and updated my worksheet to the newest, most revised model v0.2. The modifications reflect these peer review opinions as I too, wholly agreed with them. The peer feedback proved really useful, not only in terms of my peers reviewing my worksheet but also reviewing others. Everyone’s worksheets were so different and I believe, reflected as much their language course and teaching environments as much as they did their teaching styles, values and beliefs.

Subsequent to these modifications, I have evaluated the worksheet using the framework questionnaire I created for the evaluation seminar (see attached: Materials Evaluation using framework-26c4d6s). The evaluation that I created was intended for a coursebook and therefore it is not completely suitable for evaluating a worksheet. That being said, I have used it and have given the worksheet 90/130 marks. This in itself was difficult because how can you objectively mark your own work? Full marks will insinuate utter bias and too low marks could just question the confidence or false modesty of the teacher. The mark for this evaluation therefore is somewhat insignificant. The process of scrutinising my worksheet using a framework that I created for professionally made course materials, however, made me really understand what I hold in high regard in terms of materials and allowed me to further reflect on how I attempted to demonstrate this in the worksheet.

I am going to use this worksheet in class after we return from Easter and I am really enthusiastic about it. I will observe how my learners respond to it and aim to gather some feedback from them using the same adaptation evaluation that featured in my adaptation blog. Let’s hope they enjoy it, appreciate my headers and footers and feel challenged by it as much as I did designing it!

Since writing this post I have implemented the worksheet and informal feedback from my learners was positive. One student completed the comic strip animation for homework and the effort that the student put in was phenomenal. The video was shown at the beginning of the class and although not exploited as it could have been in terms of tasks relating to it, due to its unexpected submission, showcasing it in front of peers celebrated the student’s effort and achievement of producing a creative piece of work that demonstrated her language learning. The act of producing a piece of work to be presented to the class, also provided greater potential for “building knowledge structures” which happens “especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity” (Papert and Harel 1991). When the student was congratulated she commented “well I enjoy these kind of things”, a comment that resonated with me and echoed the need to always respond to my learners’ diverse needs, interests and motivations, not only in class but also in homework. Had I know that this student was interested in more creative processes such as animation, I would have encouraged this. I feel there is a need for learner pre-assessment and profiling that will give me the learner knowledge in order to offer appropriately interesting and responsive language learning tasks. A responsive approach to individual learners, which is again situated in my principles for material design: Materials need to offer variety, choice, be interesting to the learner and enable them to learn the L2 (principle 3) that unfortunately I have failed to optimally respond to in the French course but it is something that I will continue to develop in my teaching practice.

Watch the student’s animation here: Student Animation Je suis desolee je suis en retard-29ta7zm. To begin it press play presentation.

References:

Jolly, D. & Bolitho, R. (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd edn) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-134.

McGrath, I. (2016) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. (2nd edn) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (See Chapter 5: Supplementation: designing worksheets.) – You will also find this chapter the first edition (2002) of this book.

Jason Renchsaw. (2010). ELT Materials Design and Use (Part 1). [Online Video]. 1 September 2010. Available from: https://youtu.be/iUOzai5yWOs. [Accessed: 30 March 2017].

Papert, S. and Harel, I. (1991) Constructionism. Chapter 1. In: MIT Media LAB, Situating constructionism. Available at: http://web.media.mit.edu/~calla/web_comunidad/Reading-En/situating_constructionism.pdf [accessed 20/01/17]

Richardson, K. (2013) How to Write Worksheets. Oxford: ELT Teacher2Writer.