With the topic of ‘Adaptation’ our discussion is reaching a point where I find myself becoming much more interested and engaged on a personal level. While thinking about frameworks for designing textbooks and the evaluation of textbooks seemed quite dry, telling each other stories about times when we had successfully adapted our coursebook to better suit our learners felt a lot more real and about our day-to-day work as teachers. This is especially the case regarding instances of adaptation that are not part of some elaborate, pre-conceived planning process but the ‘on-the-go’ adaptation that teachers do all the time in the classroom when they are ‘thinking on their feet’ (McDonough, 1993: 84) to address problems arising during the lesson. I can see that there is a demand for centrally published materials and that it might be just as well to learn some techniques to tap into this to advance our professional development. But I am not overly enthusiastic. Over the course of my studies I have come to realise that I think of learning as co-creation of knowledge between participants, so in an ideal world I am imagining teaching scenarios where my students and I work together to create materials of the moment.
Saying that I do see why it is useful and necessary to first evaluate what it is most of us are working with, i.e. some textbook or other form of published material. However far one wants to take the ‘adaptation’ process this seems to be a good starting point. As McDonough and Shaw put it: “How can we change something unless we are clear about what it is we are changing” (1993: 82).

Why

One main question that needs to be addressed is why teachers adapt course materials. When we exchanged stories with each other during our seminar, several reasons became apparent. In our group Adriana, for example, decided that a YouTube video of a performance of the poem from her textbook was a much better way to introduce her students to the poem than just her or the students reading it from the book. She thought this was more likely to arouse her students’ interest and that it would also help a dyslexic student in her class.
With her class of 15 Turkish students who were in Brighton for only four days, Jane found out about her students’ interests on the first day of the course and then only chose units from the coursebook that matched these interests most closely. In one lesson they talked about people’s style and appearance and Jane, rather than just working from the images in the book (especially since her students only had photocopies of these!), encouraged her students to think about how the style of people in Brighton compared to that of people back in Turkey. Towards the end of the lesson Jane decided to let her students take over to change the topic to ‘food’, as she realised that there were many concerns with students finding the food they were offered in their host families lacking in quantity and quality.
Alison currently faces a particularly tricky situation on a new course which brings together a group of adult students who she has known for a while and another of young Danish students who have just arrived in Brighton. On the first day of the course one of the Danish students broke into tears completely overwhelmed by the expectation of having to speak English all the time and also threatened by Alison’s/the textbook’s use of grammar meta-language. In order to boost her students’ confidence, Alison decided to lift the following day’s lesson off the page using the interactive whiteboard. By providing lots of extra examples of phrases and thereby teaching grammar implicitly she also avoided using meta-language. A list of other possible ‘whys’ that includes many of our own reasons can be found on page 86 of ‘Materials and Methods in ELT’ (McDonough & Shaw, 1993).
Interesting here is also McGrath’s study of Chinese teachers’ and students’ images for coursebooks (McGrath: 2006). In agreement with Thornbury (1991), McGrath believes that the study of metaphors can lead to important insights regarding attitudes towards coursebooks as “teachers’ images not only reflect their thinking about teaching and learning but also influence [author’s emphasis] their practice” (McGrath, 2006: 172). What seems most surprising but also enlightening is the range of metaphors from very positive to extremely negative – ‘lighthouse’ vs ‘straitjacket’ both found in the teachers’ sample or, even more extreme, ‘God’s messenger’ vs ‘a devil’ in the students’ sample – but also at times contradictory, e.g. “bee hive which has sweet honey and a lot of painful stings” (McGrath, 2006: 177). Studying metaphors of coursebooks therefore is another way of finding out why some teachers are happy to follow the coursebook while others feel compelled to make changes along the way.

McGrath, 2006: 174 – Table 1

McGrath, 2006: 176 – Table 2

Table 2 (continued)

How

Alongside the ‘why’ of adaptation, the ‘how’ deserves maybe even more attention. Here are some examples of what we came up with in our groups during the seminar:

Overall extra visual input figures quite highly, especially videos (YouTube), photos and other images mainly sourced on the internet. Making effective use of technology is also evidenced when teachers create extra tasks using software like Kahoot or Quizlet or when the IWB is used to divert focus away from the textbook.

It seems that in recent years attitudes have changed from seeing adaptation techniques (e.g. ‘Framework for Adaptation’ in McDonough & Shaw, 1993: 96) in quite neutral terms simply as part of the teacher’s job description to an understanding of them as ‘coping strategies’ that make published materials ‘bearable’ (Maley in Tomlinson, ed. 2011: ). Maybe that reflects a recognition of the key role teachers play in identifying and catering for the needs of their students and the resulting need for teachers to be granted more power and control over what they are teaching with. Some argue that it is necessary to change people’s mind-sets at a much deeper level with regards to the creation and use of teaching materials. Maley for example values Prabhu’s idea of introducing semi- and/or meta-materials (Maley in Tomlinson, 2011). The first refer to (still centrally produced) single activities, e.g. skills exercises or vocabulary work, with the teacher deciding order and pace of use, and ‘raw’ materials, e.g. spoken/visual/text input presented by the teacher with the procedure of what to do with this input emerging in the lesson. Meta-materials on the other hand are ‘empty pedagogical procedures’, such as dictation or role-play. The teacher has control over choosing the input that these procedures are being applied to. Maley extends Prabhu’s ideas by introducing the notion of flexi-materials, a sort of combination of semi- and meta-materials. Flexi-materials would give teachers “control over content, order, pace and procedure”. What Maley has in mind is best illustrated by the tables below taken from “Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment” (in Tomlinson, 2011: 386/387).

Maley in Tomlinson, 2011: 386/387 – Tables 15.1 and 15.2

And that is more or less where I started at the beginning of this post: my current understanding of my role as a teacher as facilitator and of learning being at its most exciting when you let the process take over.

“[T]eachers may decide to dispense with pre-developed materials altogether. Instead, they set the scene for a process to take place. It is the process which will generate its own content and learning activities” (Maley in Tomlinson, 2011: 383)

References:

Maley, A. (2011) “Squaring the Circle – Reconciling Materials as Constraint with Materials as Empowerment” in Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) Materials Development in Language Teaching, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and Methods in Elt: A Teacher’s Guide, Oxford: Blackwell.
McGrath, I. (2006) “Teachers’ and Learners’ Images for Coursebooks”, ELT Journal, 60 (2) pp. 171-180.
Thornbury, S. (1991) “Metaphors We Work By: Efl and Its Metaphors”, ELT Journal, 45 (3) pp. 193-200.

Principles/Frameworks vs Spontaneity/Inspiration:

Materials Design Process

The topic of our last seminar was ‘Principles and Frameworks for ELT Materials Design’. To start with our discussion centred around the question whether ELT material designers do and/or should base their work on a set of underlying principles and follow a framework during the design process. Apparently a lot of experienced designers deny or are not aware of being guided in that way but instead believe that they use their inspiration and intuition (see Tomlinson, 212: 152/153). In our class we agreed with some findings by Johnson (2003 in Tomlinson, 2012: 153) which indicate that as a novice materials designer you might want to have some guidelines to follow and that it is therefore useful to study how designers move along the process of creating new materials. As we are all potential future designers of ELT materials, Paul thought it would be a good idea for us to reflect on our own personal beliefs about what we think makes for good teaching materials.

What are the principles that guide materials design?

To help us with the reflective process we were given an exercise which made us first list our own personal principles, then compare these with those of other members in our group as well as between groups. Finally we were given some statements by experts in the field of materials development to compare with the ones we had come up with as a class.

Commonalities and Differences

The exercise was interesting and thought-provoking. At first I thought that I had worked out my principles over the course of my studies on the MA so far and during the recent process of essay-writing. I suddenly found that my beliefs about effective teaching/materials had very much become coloured by my studies of SLA last year and the learning theories I had immersed myself in over the last few months. What struck me most was how much closer to the practice of teaching some of my colleagues’ principles were (especially those of the diploma students)! I particularly loved the straightforwardness of one of my colleague’s statements: ‘Materials should be teachable’. How simple and to the point! Obviously what is and isn’t ‘teachable’ is very subjective. But however much I might be in love with a particular theory or convinced by someone’s research findings, in the end effective materials are about whether I can teach with them in my particular class tomorrow.

My Group’s Principles

When I first started the MA I was exasperated by how theoretical and removed from the classroom a lot of the research seemed and I spent a lot of time and effort ‘fighting’ theory. However, over the last few months I have completely fallen in love with theory and could endlessly keep reading, philosophising and thinking. It’s about time that te714 brought me back down to earth!

All this is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of agreement amongst all of our statements. Most of us seemed to think that materials should be engaging, interesting, learner-centred, flexible, varied, context-sensitive to name but a few.

I suppose the exercise showed us that even ‘principles’ are not as static as you might think. They are, of course, subjective but they can and need to be continuously reviewed first by ‘being brought to the surface’ of your own thinking and also by being discussed with other professionals.

‘Silent Period’

To finish I would like to reflect on one more thing. One of my principles did not make it into my group’s final selection: ‘Materials should encourage/leave space for a silent period’. Until the discussion last Thursday I hadn’t realised how important this is to me at the moment. When I first came across the notion of a ‘silent period’ in SLA last year I thought about it quite literally as in some learners needing a period of listening to a new language before they can start talking (this has been observed in particular with children and has been seen in connection with first language acquisition, which of course has an extensive ‘silent’ period before ‘proper’ language is produced starting from around age 1).

Reflecting on my own process of learning since the beginning of my course at uni I have started to think of it more as times when you do not directly engage with new learning material or even times when you are engaged in an activity that is completely unrelated to the subject you are learning about. I have found, for example, that over the course of last summer when I completely disconnected from anything to do with ELT, somehow everything had become much clearer and at a much deeper level at the start of my second year. It’s as if my brain by being ‘left to it’ made connections ‘independently’ of conscious thought. It seems I generally need a silent period at the start of learning something new/being exposed to something unfamiliar, some time to just listen to my tutor, my peers’ ideas, to ‘read, read, read’ or to walk away from it completely. I don’t like the pressure of having to create something while I haven’t got a grip on it/how it fits in yet. It’s as if my brain needs to put on a brake so that it can organise my thoughts, internalise new knowledge and make connections to what I already know. This has made me wonder whether I give my students time for that to happen…

References:

Johnson, K. (2003) Designing Language Teaching Tasks, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Tomlinson, B. (2011) Materials Development in Language Teaching, 2nd Ed, Cambridge Language Teaching Library, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) “Materials Development for Language Learning and Teaching”, Language Teaching, 45 (02) pp. 143-179.