Tag: Materials evaluation

Face2Face evaluation and an interesting interview

For this week’s session we had to work in groups and evaluate a course book, face to face for Advanced by Cambridge University Press. Following last week’s session it was interesting to see how all of us, individually and as a group, evaluate materials and how we determined the criteria for evaluation. I worked with Constantine, Emily, and Oscar.

We had a long discussion about what we had read and our personal views on the evaluation criteria for materials before we actually ended up with our final questionnaire. This could be partly because of our different teaching backgrounds. We based our evaluation on the following: impressions (flick test’), the publisher’s mission statements, CEFR C1 criteria, and our own evaluation. The actual questionnaire constitutes of two sections; the first one is the ‘flick’ test to which we gave a total score and the second one was the analysis of a unit. For the analysis of a unit we evaluated four different features of it such as: appearance and design, content and context, practice, and methodology. Each one of these four features was given a mean score and we used the ‘Likert scale’ (1-5, 1: strongly disagree, 5: strongly agree) for both sections of the questionnaire. At the end of the questionnaire we had an ‘additional comments’ section which we all used to write our final comments and evaluations on the book.

Here’s a copy of the questionnaire:

Our evaluation

And here’s a copy of my results:

Our evaluation (Eleni)

One thing my group and I picked up on was the presentation of grammar in the book. More specifically, we thought that the book’s grammar boxes included a lot of meta-language, explicit presentations and not real-life practice of the grammatical phenomena presented. We thought that this could be problematic for both students and teachers, especially novice ones and therefore not very familiar with meta-language. Additionally, we thought that the way grammar was presented did not allow for much adaptation from the teacher.

Finally, we created a PowerPoint presentation with our criteria and our results. What was interesting, was that even though our teaching backgrounds differ, our results were very similar.

Here’s the presentation:

face2face-Evaluation-presentation

A discussion with Theresa Clementson

Later on, we had the opportunity to have a conversation with one of the authors of the book, Theresa Clementson. Everything she said about the writing of face to face and ELT writing was really interesting. I think getting insights into materials writing from a person who has actually done it several times is particularly useful for our future development.

My main concern and our question as a group was about face to face being very densely-written. I personally find this a little off-putting, speaking from both the perspective of a teacher and an L2 student, which I have been in the past. I think that having too much going on on a page can be a little scary at times. Theresa’s reply to that was that different audiences have different expectations from a course book. Some respond negatively but others found this particular feature of the book extremely valuable. My impression is that students and teachers from different teaching contexts value aspects of books differently and that’s quite interesting on its own.

All in all, this session was really beneficial. Not only did we come up with our own evaluation criteria but we were also given the opportunity to discuss our concerns with one of its writers. I think I’m definitely going to be using these criteria when I create my own materials on the course and after the end of it. I think it would also be useful to share this list of criteria with colleagues and management at our school so we can then choose books which have the potential to maximise students’ learning.

 

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