ADAPTING & SUPPLEMENTING

It was refreshing to see the lesson on “Visuals and Text” beginning with a discussion on the use of metaphors in ELT, which I have already come across during the “Exploring Language Teaching” module. If you have been reading my blog up to this point, it is obvious that the title of every post was cooking-related. The image of a classroom as a “kitchen” has always been in my head for as long as I can remember – the teacher as the head chef, the students as line cooks or cooks in training. Even though this metaphor is not without flaws if we spend time dissecting its implications carefully, it still brings me a sense of community, along with a warm and cosy feeling. In that “kitchen”, I can imagine each member expressing his or her own uniqueness and expertise while essentially doing the same job, and one day someone might even surpass the head chef. What a coincidence it was that one of my favourite authors, Peter Elbow, also compared the process of writing to “cooking” (1998) – Is it possible that our fascination for foods can lead us to the same destination?

Starting from the discussion on metaphors, I will look at the role of teaching materials in the educational context in Vietnam. Next, adaptation and supplementation of coursebooks will be discussed with examples from my own teaching experiences. Lastly, I will return to the discussion of metaphors and explore their implications.

Metaphors for coursebooks

According to Thornbury (1991: 193, in Hall 2018: 76), the metaphors that teachers have for their classrooms can “reveal their beliefs about, and value-based perspectives on, classroom life”. Regarding the image of a “kitchen”, I personally relate teaching materials to “cooking ingredients”, which means that teaching materials are “resources” that I use to build my own lessons. While these resources can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of my lessons, they do not predetermine what I can and cannot do in the classroom. This belief comes from the fact that I have been told not to use a single coursebook ever since I started teaching professionally, due to institutional regulations and policies. Instead of fixed lesson plans, my teaching materials have mainly been a combination and adaptation of multiple coursebooks and online sources, with regular revisions.

 

Digging deeper into this image of “cooking ingredients”, a coursebook seems to me like pre-packed meals people can buy from a chain supermarket – quick and easy but not very tasty or nutritious (and not necessarily cheap either!). On the contrary, adaptation from different sources resembles the use of raw ingredients bought from a local farm shop – it takes much more time and dedication but you can create something delicious and healthy with larger portions. This distinction boils down to the choices people make in their lives and the consequences of which we might only be able to witness after a certain period of time. As I have always made an effort to cook my meals from scratch, adaptation of teaching materials will always be my first choice for every lesson.

Nevertheless, the above view is only from my perspective as a teacher – the view of Vietnamese students on coursebook could be totally different. As students are responsible for their own learning, I believe we should take into account their opinions and expectations. During the in-class discussion on learner’s images of the coursebook, I tried to recall memories of myself as a student in a Vietnamese state school many years ago and finally came up with a specific metaphor. Unfortunately, for fear of unintentionally offending some of my classmates, I chose not to voice my opinion.The image in my head at the time was “the Bible”.

The coursebook was “the Bible” in the sense that my teachers and classmates had to consider everything stated in the book as “true facts” and every test question had to be mentioned in the coursebook at least once. Ironically, I do not think many Vietnamese people have ever seen a bible in real life (my first time was when an old guy shoved it into my face during the Fresher’s Fair!). However, while the image of a bible is generally considered positive, my experiences with Vietnamese textbooks leant towards the negative side. Vietnamese people often discuss, on a yearly basis, the various problems regarding design and content of the national coursebooks. Meanwhile, at the same time, they lament the burden put on their children’s shoulder by the Ministry of Education whenever there is an attempt to break away from the traditional syllabus. In retrospect, I have luckily moved on from that way of thinking ever since entering university – partly due to the fact that my undergraduate course at the time adopted a “negotiated” syllabus instead of a rigid one. In conclusion, for Vietnamese classrooms, teachers should consider how their students interact with the learning materials, especially the younger age groups, to adapt the resources accordingly.

Adaptation

While the above discussion appears to paint a picture of coursebooks with multiple issues and restrictions, the existence of coursebooks could still contribute positively to teachers’ creative process. Talking about coursebooks, Swan (1992) stated that the “ready-made” ones can “absolve teachers of responsibility” and make them feel like they can “just sit back and operate the system”. However, the reality is that “no coursebook contain exactly what is required for a particular individual or class”. As long as teachers can realise this limitation, I think they will make an effort to change and improve the coursebook. In my opinion, creativity derives from restrictions, control, and scare resources, not from convenience and abundance. The constraints of the teaching context will force teachers to make choices, and thus they will have to learn how to adapt the materials.

From the in-class group work, the underlying principles for adaption (Why) and different ways of adapting materials (How) were the focus of my group:

 

 

The following principles are from McGrath (2013: 66) and used as a basis to adapt and tailor the materials to suit the needs of students:
– Localisation
– Modernisation
– Individualisation
– Personalisation
– Humanising
– Differentiation
– Variety

This kind of adaptation is considered as “change” instead of only an “addition” because it changes the nature and the effect of the task. Reading the descriptions of these principles helped me to better understand the difference between “individualisation”, “personalisation”, and “differentiation”. However, while it is pretty simple for me to imagine how a task can be adapted to cater to learners with different learning styles or become more personal, I did not know exactly what the author meant by “simplification/complexification”. Thus, I looked for real examples of adapted materials and found one of them in McGrath (2016: 305):

In this example, the teacher made the task more appropriate for students by adding more open-ended questions for those who find the other questions too easy (sample B). Although this change led to a much more effective task design, I could see two potential problems with it: (1) Teachers will have to spend more time looking through all the activities and altering or adding new information by themselves; (2) The longer the task is, the more space it will take up on the worksheet and the more likely it will overwhelm students. While the first issue is basically the responsibility of teachers and in a long-term plan it may even save time, the second relates to the physical design of the worksheet. I think there should be a better way to integrate differentiation and present information on a teacher-made handout, which I hope to find out after the upcoming lessons. Besides, no matter how teachers adapt an activity, it would be beneficial to follow a principled approach, as follows:

– What is the objective of the activity?
– What does the exercise actually get the learner to do?
– What do I want the learner to do?
– How can I get the exercise to do what I want it to do for the learner?
(Cunningsworth 1984: 66, adopted by McGrath 2016: 73)

Supplementation

Unlike “adaptation”, “supplementation” means that the teacher will bring into the classroom materials not from the coursebook, often in the form of a worksheet (McGrath 2016). Looking back at my own experience teaching IELTS, it seems that what I did was modifying the syllabus of an IELTS-preparation book to suit the course length and then supplementing each lesson with extra exercises from other books. Sometimes, I will also include Internet resources into the lesson in order to connect the language focus with reality. Take this Writing lesson for example:

As the illustrations alone might not be enough for the students to imagine the process of recycling paper, I included a Youtube video on the same subject into my presentation slides. The subtitles on the video also help students to get familiar with the new vocabulary they will encounter later on in the lesson. A subsequent task would be to have a discussion on paper recycling or to ask some students to briefly summarise the whole process in their own words. However, because I did not follow any principles for making these changes, I have failed to reflect on how effective the supplemented materials were and what could have been done better. Now with a new understanding of supplementation, I will consider other issues like knowledge and skill, practice or testing, differentiation and motivation, etc. when I have to create my own teaching materials.

The danger of metaphors

With the image of “cooking ingredients” in mind, the process of adapting and supplementing teaching materials looks more vibrant and colourful than ever. However, Thorburry (1991) warned of the downside of metaphors as they can bring “degenerate effect on conceptualizing, inhibiting the development of fresh insights”. Similarly, in one of my most favourite books – “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” – Milan Kundera (1984) wrote the following warning:

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
A single metaphor can give birth to love.

The use of “dangerous” here, in my opinion, does not mean that metaphor can bring about detrimental consequences to the users. Instead, it means that people often fail to realise the huge impact of metaphors on our lives. As a metaphor “can give birth to love” and love could lead to more love or, in the worst case, destruction, only time can tell what is the consequence of a metaphor.

References

Cunningsworth, A. & Tomlinson, B. (1984) Evaluating and selecting EFL teaching materials. London: Heinemann Educational.

Elbow, P. (1998) Writing without teachers (2nd edn). New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hall, G. (2018) Exploring English language teaching: language in action (2nd edn). London: Routledge.

Kundera, M. (1984) The unbearable lightness of being. London: Faber and Faber.

McGrath, I. (2013) Teaching Materials and the Roles of EFL/ESL Teachers. London: Bloomsbury.

McGrath, I. (2016) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching (2nd edn). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Swan, M. (1992) The textbook: Bridge or wall. Applied linguistics and language teaching 2(1): 32-35.

Thornbury, S. (1991) Metaphors we work by: EFL and its metaphors. ELT journal 45(3): 193-200.