Tag: Week 8 – Task design and Evaluation
Task Design and Evaluation
This week we all brought in our materials to be evaluated by our peers. Emily and I got paired with Sandra and Steph and we reviewed each other’s work. It was extremely useful to get other teachers’ feedback on our material and very interesting to see if and how easily people can go through our worksheet and whether they can use it straight away or not. I really appreciate constructive feedback, and these past two years have shown me that this is probably the most important and helpful part of the Diploma course. There’s always a lot to learn from teachers of various backgrounds, and the idea of getting new insights into different teaching styles and creation of materials could prove vital as it makes us, teachers, more flexible and ready to apply our acquired knowledge to different teaching contexts.
Sandra and Steph had created a worksheet related to famous monuments in London. Listening and reading were included in their material and they used QR codes for the listening. The audios were referring to the monuments and the students would scan them to get the information for their sites. What I liked about that was that they used new technologies to make the activity more creative and interactive and that each audio was performed by different speakers. When asked, the girls told us that the aim behind that was to get students exposed to different accents. That was a great idea! In our exam contexts students have to listen to different speakers talking about various topics and that would be something I could use in the future if I wanted to create my own materials.
I liked how Sandra and Steph organised their worksheet so that students can practise different skills such as reading, listening and speaking. Their worksheet could be used with groups of students/teenagers who come to study in Brighton, and I could definitely see myself using this worksheet before a trip to London. As I also suggested on the day, this piece of material could also be used in a post-trip lesson to see what the students had consolidated from their trip and if they could guess any of the information included in the worksheet just by memory. They could also get students to create their own recordings, familiarise them with QR code apps and finally create a final worksheet as a class.
Sandra and Steph gave us constructive feedback on our tasks and exercises as well, and Emily and I thought that we could tweak our worksheet in the future to see how it’s going to play out in our classes. Before I move on to the girls’ feedback I’d like to use Ellis’s (2003) distinction between tasks and exercises. Tasks are defined as ‘activities that call for primarily meaning-focused language use’ and exercises as ‘activities that call for primarily form-focused language use’ (Ellis, cited in Motteram, 2011). Our worksheet includes both tasks and exercises. The main question the students have to discuss in pairs is the task related to speaking part 3 of the CAE exam and the gap-fill we created for the third listen of our audio is an example of an exercise.
Sandra and Steph’s feedback:
- They mentioned that the questions for the warmer were easy to answer and the aim of introducing the topic was met. Our classmates paid attention to the visual at the top of our worksheet only when we asked them some questions in relation to the reason why they thought it was placed there. To be completely fair, we explained the reason for using the visual in the teacher’s notes, but Sandra and Steph were focusing on our final worksheet at that moment. However, while they were giving us feedback, we elicited the idea of negotiating by asking them questions about our visual. I think that was an interesting observation as something similar could happen in the classroom. In case we use visuals to stimulate interest or to elicit the topic of a whole task and students seem to fail to notice, CCQs and a class discussion could help to move smoothly through various stages of a task.
- Another comment on our worksheet was: “Nice that different language points are allocated to different students when they have to listen”. Their suggestion was that students could check answers in groups instead of checking as a class. I think this was a useful piece of advice and that would also make the activity more student-centred.
- Before the third listen: Sandra and Steph suggested asking students to fill in the gaps by memory and then listen to check their answers. That would be a good idea; however, if we wanted to do that we should probably check the answers as a class in the previous stage, as students could have got the answers completely wrong. This doesn’t mean teachers being hands-on all the time, but I think that in order for a lesson to get to the final outcome, students might need some guidance during different stages. If the teacher believes that checking as a class first would be more helpful for the students, maybe they should do so. I think that this probably varies depending on the students, the context, the level of difficulty of the task as well as teaching styles. We always need to remember, however, that, ultimately, whatever takes place in class should revolve more around the learners’ needs than anything else.
- The girls’ next question was what the rationale was behind checking the language after the gap-fill activity. I think there needs to be some reassurance in terms of whether the learners have done the exercise accurately, and students tend to rely on the teacher to give them answers sometimes. We decided to hand in the table to students to promote student autonomy and because we thought that this way students could probably take better notice of the target lexis. What is more, the table displays what phrases to use for each function clearly and this could also help students do the activity in stage five more easily.
- Sandra and Steph thought that the ‘progressive deletion’ and the ‘active listening’ activities included in stages six and seven would be very useful and interesting. Both activities are elements of Task-based learning and I used them in my third observation with my pre-intermediate class. In fact, I’ve now integrated ‘active listening’ in all my classes and have been using it ever since I read Willis’s (1996) book on Task-based Learning. In the book she mentions that teachers ‘should be very clear about the purpose of the report’ stage in a TBL lesson and that students should know ‘what kind of information they are going to look or listen for in each other’s reports and what they will do with the information’ (Willis, 1996:56). I think ‘active listening’ is a very useful activity when doing speaking in class to make sure that students are paying attention to each other and are not distracted. In my FCE classes we do mock speaking tests and I always ask students to listen to their partners and write notes about things which they think are good or things they would change. They know that apart from fluency, they will be marked on accuracy too, so ‘active listening’ seems to help in this case. It also seems that students highly appreciate this activity and they do not feel competitive or embarrassed to give peer feedback either. As for that, I think it’s the responsibility of a teacher to create the necessary positive atmosphere for positive feedback to take place. I always tell my students that the purpose of ‘active listening’ is not to be judgemental towards each other but to help each other. At the end of the day, they will all be taking the same exam and most of the time they face similar challenges when speaking.
All in all, I found peer reviewing each other’s materials very useful for our future professional development. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s always something to get from another teacher’s feedback, perspective, experience or teaching background. This was an invaluable experience!
References
Motteram, G. (2011). Developing language-learning materials with technology. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 303-327.
Willis, J. (1996). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Harlow: Longman.