Category: Week 4 – Adapting and Supplementing

Adapting and Supplementing Materials

Week four was about adapting and supplementing materials. The session started with the definition of the word ‘metaphor’ and moved on to metaphors related to coursebooks. I had never thought of a metaphor to describe a coursebook before, but if I had to choose one, I’d probably say that coursebooks are like traffic lights. To me, a green light is the moment when a teacher finds exactly what they’d been looking for in a book, and so they use pieces of material straight away without any adaptation. A red light is the exact opposite. It could signify moments when teachers feel that specific materials might not be very effective for their learners and, therefore, adaptation/supplementation takes place. The yellow light lies somewhere in between. As I see it, novice and experienced teachers would react differently to a yellow light. Novice ones would probably stop to think and plan of what and how they would adapt/supplement whereas experienced teachers would probably act on top of their heads. They would adapt/supplement quite fast based on their experience. This last idea reflects on what McGrath claims about more experienced teachers being more ‘flexible’ when adapting. More specifically, he states that ‘this flexibility may derive from the possession of a wider repertoire of options or the confidence that comes with experience – knowing how to deal with a problem one has encountered before’ (McGrath, 2013).

Later on during the session we got into groups with students who had read the same articles and then into groups with people who had read different ones. Our task was to design a ‘seminar’ to present these ideas of adapting and supplementing to novice teachers. I found this part of the class quite exciting as I would like to move on to teacher training in the future and I strongly believe in exchanging experiences with other teachers. My group decided to focus on the following questions:

    1. Why do teachers adapt/supplement materials?

    2. How do they do it?

    3. What do they adapt/supplement?

    4. When and how often do they adapt/supplement materials?

As for the whys we thought that teachers adapt or supplement materials due to learner differences, to show professionalism, to show how responsibly they can respond to their students’ needs, how motivated they are, to increase their learners’ motivation as well as due to the fact that they are sometimes expected to do so. In terms of the hows, we all agreed on the ‘omit’, ‘select’ and add’ process as well as the fact that adapting or supplementing could be teacher driven but students could also be involved. Personally, I like involving and asking my students’ opinion on materials, especially for my exam classes. They all have an ultimate goal when it comes to their studies, and at the end of the day it’s all about achieving these goals together, as a team. Finally, we agreed that adapting/supplementing could also mean changing materials completely when they do not seem to ‘work’ for our students.

We then talked about what to adapt or supplement and we came up with: texts, tasks and activities, the structure of what we want to teach, the content or context as well as the syllabus. A sound grasp of one’s class can help identify what we should be adapting/supplementing to help our students. As for when teachers adapt or supplement materials, we thought teachers usually follow the ‘pre-while-post’ process of doing so. ‘Pre’ in this case means planning before adapting and it could be connected to less experienced teachers, ‘while’ is usually spontaneous and is related to more experienced teachers, and ‘post’ would be more of being a reflective practitioner, and in this case would be related to being ‘evaluative’. The latter appeals a lot to me, especially after doing this course. I think that getting feedback from students as well as reflecting on how we teach, the materials we use and they way we use them should be part of our everyday practice to facilitate our students’ needs as well as our own professional development.

Last but not least, the idea of ‘how often’ we adapt or supplement stemmed from my own personal experience and my workplace. At our school we have a policy of using the book 60% of the time. The rest 40% of it is when we can adapt/supplement. Therefore, professional demands could affect how often we supplement as could the level of our students and the teacher’s ability and time.

                                               

A recent example was during my second assessed observation, which was a reading lesson in my FCE class. Knowing my students’ strengths and weaknesses, I specifically chose a type of reading they all found difficult and always moan about. However, I chose to tweak it slightly to meet my teaching aims which were to increase their confidence in this particular type of reading exercise. The exercise was a gapped text, one where sentences are taken out of a text and students need to place them in the correct gap within the text. An extra sentence which does not need to be used is also provided.

Referring back to our class presentation on adapting and supplementing materials I can say that my decision to ‘tweak’ this reading exercise relates to a lot of things mentioned in the picture of our mind map above. As for the reason why I decided to adapt this piece of material, it definitely had to do with increasing my students’ motivation. I’d done this exercise with my students quite a few times before my observation and most of the time they looked confused and demotivated. The fact that they became aware of specific reading strategies and discourse devices made it easier for them to notice them in the text, and therefore their results were almost perfect. I also remember one of my students saying at the end of the class: ‘I now feel that I’m getting better and better at this type of exercise’. That was the moment which made me feel that adapting had probably been the right decision.

As for ‘how’ I adapted the material: I found two different sources talking about the same topic (the history of Valentine’s Day), I selected the parts that were similar to each other and more relevant to the topic itself, and then added some linkers hoping that my students would notice them and choose the correct answer. Providing some extra discourse devices, seemed to help with ‘noticing’ the language and students were able to see how using particular reading strategies can help when answering comprehension questions.

As far as ‘when to adapt’ is concerned, I decided to do so after I’d realised my students’ need for it. It was an observation rather than a spontaneous decision. The next step was to plan how I could adapt the material to facilitate my students’ needs, and at the end of the class I asked them to provide feedback on the level of difficulty of the text as well as whether the reading strategies we’d discussed had helped. They all reported that it was neither the easiest nor the most difficult reading exercise they’d done and that the strategies were helpful. Finally, my tutor’s feedback was that the level of difficulty was appropriate for a B2 reading exercise and that the ‘explicit attention to the use of cohesive devices benefitted the whole class in their success in this practice’.

In a nutshell, I’d say I really enjoy adapting and supplementing materials and this example has taught me that we should adapt or supplement as a response to our students’ needs, not merely for the sake of it.

 

References

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