In this module, I have gained a tremendous amount of information and insights into the field of designing teaching materials and all the philosophies and principles that govern this process.  I was first introduced to the notion of materials evaluating through the readings of (Tomlinson, 2013) where I learned that there should be some governing principles for evaluating and creating teaching materials. Tomlinson, in particular, was extremely beneficial for my work and tasks in this module. Moreover, the journey in this module continued and we visited other interesting areas of teaching material.

One of the interesting stops through this journey was the session about the importance of visuals, where we discussed the questions of why, when and how visuals are used in the classroom and their role in the coursebook. We learned that the visuals could be decorative and could be used to space-filling or they could be used effectively to convey the meaning of the lesson. Everyone knows that saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I myself tend to make my lessons infused with pictures and visual which I believe will aid in the learning process. “The more educational materials promote connections between the two methods of coding (visual and verbal), the more learning takes place” (Dubois and Vial, 2000). Yet the journey did not stop in the field of the still visuals, we journeyed to the land of the moving pictures, the use of video in the classroom stop.

Videos in the field of ELT are considered an interesting educational tool to use. I incorporate a lot of videos in my context and it really saves time and aids me in my teaching. But what really caught my attention in the video session was the notion of Video-telling by Jamie Keddie (2014). I believe that the magic of the storytelling has its effect on human beings. We are hard-wired to be in rapt attention to the details of a good story and we could lose ourselves in that fictional realm. Since the time our ancestors used to gather around the bonfire and tell stories about the gods, and since children in the desert used to hear stories from travelers about magical creatures and the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the story shapes our view of the world. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall is an excellent read in this field. Going back to the video telling, combining the effect of the story telling with video makes it an excellent technique to be used in teaching especially for young learners, and this is a thing I experienced first hand in my context where I saw the effect of the story and video in the eyes of the students.

There are many wonderful and beneficial stops in this wonderful journey, and I know for a fact that I was exposed to a great amount of information (up-dated in formation) about the teaching materials and I am sure that I will apply most of what I learned in my country. Another significant aspect of this module was the sense of confronting in the class. I believe that another source of learning in this module was the interaction and the discussion between the its members. Personally, I have learned more from the different experiences and contexts my colleagues come from, and it was interesting to see how each one interprets what we learned in the class according to their situation.

In conclusion, this module was exceedingly important for me as my knowledge in the area of teaching material was so limited.  I have learned from my tutor and my colleagues and I really enjoyed all the tasks I engaged in. Furthermore , the idea of a weekly post and maintaining a blog was absolutely soemthing new for me. However, I can say that by the end of the journey I can see the fruitful result of all the work throughout the semester. Thank you all.

References:

Dubois, M. & Vial, I. 2000, “Multimedia design: the effects of relating multimodal information”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 157-165.

Keddie, J. (2014) Bringing online video into the classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tomlinson, B. 2013, Developing materials for language teaching, Second ed, Bloomsbury Academic, London.

In this seminar with Teresa, we were introduced to materials design and why would a teacher design his or her materials. the main purpose od this session was to create out own materials. To do so, I teamed up with my colleague Grace and we discussed what the worksheet should be about. The first thing we discussed was the worksheet should follow a certain approach and our approach was a humanistic one. Just like in the humanistic coursebook “which respects its users as human beings and helps them to exploit their capacity for learning through meaningful experience and to connect what is in the book to what is in their minds” (Tomlinson 2013, p.139). Thus, we decided to create a worksheet that is relevant to the learners and it can place them in the real world.

Yet to create a worksheet in a systemic way, we decided to follow Jolly and Bolitho’s (2001, p113) design. With this framework in mind, Grace and I came up with the purpose of the worksheet. The main idea of the designed materials was to raise the awareness about the history and significance of the Silk Road.  What made choose this topic was its relevance to our learners both in China and Kuwait. We decided to go over Bolitho’s framework stage by stage as we shaped our worksheet.

There are several stages of Bolitho’s framework, and they are as follow:

• Identification of need:
  • As stated above, the need was to develop the learners’ awareness about the topic of the Silk Road from a cultural perspective. The worksheet also helps the learners to engage in extensive reading and speaking.
• Exploration of need:
  • We thought that the chosen topic, coming from a humanistic approach, would be interesting to the learners where they could ameliorate their understanding of the topic and increase the level of the vocabulary. The text of the materials was taken from an article from the New Yorker magazine.
• Contextual realization:
  • We have established that the topic and the worksheet would be appropriate to our learners who are in high school aged 16 to 18.
• Pedagogical realization:
  • Part of the materials designer’s work is to make the designed materials accessible and appropriate to the learners according to their context. We considered that the task of the Silk Road is suitable for the learners and we even considered the difficulty of some words and how could the learners deal with these words. We provided some translation and explanation of the difficult words so the students could refer back to them as they read the text. We also, cut part of the original texts due to its length. Moreover, the worksheet is designed for peer or group work, which was another aspect of the worksheet we had in mind as to how the learners engage with the created materials.
• Physical production:
  • Regarding the production, in the early stages of designing the materials, we referred to Jason Renshaw’s ELT materials design on YouTube. The videos were beneficial and of great importance to our work since both of us don’t have knowledge in creating materials using the word processor. In my case, most of the time I use ready-made materials and introduce them to my leaners.

Referring to the session about Visuals and Text and the importance of the picture in the coursebook, we applied Duchastel’s taxonomy for visual evaluation and its criteria are 1-affective 2-attentive 3-didactic 4-supportive 5-retentional.  Grace and I chose the appropriate pictures that could include all of Duchastel’s criteria.

As for the last two stages of Bolitho’s framework which are the use and evaluation, unfortunately we couldn’t perform accomplish these stages because we couldn’t use in an actual classroom and get the feedback and evaluation from the learners.

In the following session after the Easter Break, all the members of the module brought their designed materials for peer evaluation. Our worksheet was evaluated, and we received the following remarks and feedback:

• The instruction “talk about the pictures” might be a bit general, some direct instruction like” What do you see in the picture?” or “Where do you think the people in the are taken to?” such lead-in question could clarify the topic to the learners.
• There was the concern raised by our tutor about the level of difficulty of some words and why we chose them. We thought that exposing the learners to some difficult words might challenge them to know the meaning behind it and thus increase their knowledge about the words. But it appeared that the words were extremely difficult, and we should cater for the differentiation in the classroom.

In conclusion, I must say that although I don’t design materials in Kuwait because we adhere to the coursebook created by the ministry of education, however, I have learned a lot about the process of designing and the worksheet, the use od principles for evaluations, following certain frameworks so your design could systematic.

References:

Duchastel, P. C. (1978) Illustrating instructional texts. Educational Technology18 36-39.

Jolly, D and Bolitho, R. 2011. A framework for materials writing. In Tomlinson, B. Materials Development in Language Teaching. 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp107-135.

Tomlinson, B. 2013, Developing materials for language teaching, Second ed, Bloomsbury Academic, London.