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.