Monthly Archives: March 2021

Materials Adaptation and Supplements

It is pretty safe to say that every teacher adapts materials to some extent, even those created by the teacher themselves. Supplementing, maybe not so many. Adaptation and supplementing lesson materials usually springs from a learner need: be it cultural, learner specific, class specific or teacher specific. The reasons are myriad, but the goal is the same—to make something better suited to “specific learners, teachers and contexts for the purpose of facilitating effective learning” (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 82). Some of the more common reasons for adapting or supplementing include responding to dynamics in the classroom, the personalities of the learners, syllabus constraints, availability of resources and expectations and motivations of the learners (Mishan & Timmis: 2015).

Adaptation and supplementing may be similar but are distinct. Adapt implies a change to the given materials either through subtracting, adding, or re-writing parts of the materials. However, supplementing implies that something is required to fill a gap in the material; “a lack has been identified” so supplementary materials are required (McGrath, 2013, p. 128). Adaptation can be classified as “ad hoc adaptation and principled adaptation” (Mishan & Timmis, 2015, p. 101) and as the names suggests, ad hoc entails changes made in the moment based on teachers’ intuition or evaluation of the unfolding situation in the classroom. A teacher’s intuition is not innate but something gained over years of experience in different teaching environments and different learners, so it could be conceived as subconsciously accessing one’s experience. Principled adaptation implies more forethought and reasons underpinning the change and/or additions. This may involve the teacher’s beliefs in language learning such as learner-centred tasks or activities, or the importance of personalisation which may be lacking in the materials available. It could be a change of context for cultural reasons or learner needs and the materials need to be tweaked to fit the new context.

My teaching definitely encompasses all of the above, but the extent to which I have done so has changed over time as my beliefs, professional development, and experience have evolved. My changing behaviour could be encapsulated in Shawer’s (2010, p. 176) categorisation of teacher behaviour based on his research on degrees of adherence to curriculum materials: curriculum-maker, who develops a curriculum without using curriculum materials and bases course content on assessment of learner needs; curriculum-developer, who supplements and adapts curriculum materials; and curriculum-transmitter, who adheres closely to the curriculum materials.

Early in my career, prior to and shortly after gaining a certificate in English Language Teaching, I was heavily reliant on the materials provided and changed activities based on suggestions and advice from colleagues, so would fit Shawer’s curriculum-transmitter category. Lack of experience and lack of awareness and/or development of my beliefs limited the tools available to my younger self in planning and executing lessons. However, with more experience and training, I began to adapt and supplement lessons with activities from resource books, suggestions from other teachers, and some of my own ideas, which broadly fits with the curriculum-developer category. Although not consciously aware, I was responding to learner needs and the cultural context of the teaching environment. My first real taste of driving the curriculum myself was on the JET programme, which is a cultural exchange programme run by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Sport, Science and Technology where participants are placed in government schools around the country to teach English. It was by this point I had my basic language teaching qualification and several years of teaching behind me. Faced with learners who were academically strong but were communicatively poor, it was clear that the type of communicative activities set out in the curriculum would never be attainable by most of the learners. The needs analysis clearly pointed at a disparity between productive and receptive skills and the curriculum was created from scratch to meet this need, eschewing the course book in the process. Nowadays, I find that I readily move between all three types of materials use depending on learner needs, time constraints, available adaptations from colleagues. My last role in ELT before enrolling on this course was part teacher, part trainer, and part teaching support which entailed a substantial amount of materials creation and adaptation to support the courses being taught.

Shawer’s categories seem to encapsulate three clear stages/types of materials adaptation and supplementing, but our discussions concluded that there were very few real curriculum-makers and curriculum-transmitters through volition. Institutional policies were the drivers that pushed teachers towards either end of the spectrum, such as little-to-no guidance on how oral communication classes tied in with grammar and lexis classes, or teaching methodology and materials controlled by government ministries with emphasis on assessment results. Shawer (ibid) presents the categories in relation to experience, and intuition would make me agree but a member of our group began his career in English teaching faced with the role of curriculum-maker, bearing in mind the caveats that come with being a newly trained teacher such as minimal assessment and needs analysis training, and less awareness of methodologies, approaches, and second language acquisition. This experience brought into question how we define the three categories, such as unprincipled materials creation, adaptation, and supplementing being considered a syllabus/curriculum.

curriculum materials adherence

The relationship between curriculum-maker, curriculum-developer, and curriculum-transmitter

We thought the relationship would be better represented with loci rather than the three distinct categories used in Shawer’s research. We felt that teachers are always reacting to learners and making changes, be it grading language, reformulating instructions, stopping activities that are not working, extending activities to give learners more time to complete the ask or practise the target language more. At the extremes of adherence to curriculum materials, we discussed with teachers that identified as maker or transmitter but even in these cases, curriculum materials were referenced for the curriculum-maker, and curriculum materials were open to interpretation, albeit limited, in the case of curriculum transmitter. Shawer does not define how much or how little adaptation defines the three different categories.

The final activity of the session was to adapt some materials from a course book, either English Unlimited B1+ (Rea, et al., 2013, pp. 30-37) or something we used in our classes. No one in our group had completed this optional group but I suggested possible adaptations of the English Unlimited course book. I took the activities from page 30 to create a lesson focused on talking about the learners’ accidents and risk-taking when they were young and whether they agreed with the findings from the reading text. The learners would review reading for gist and dealing with unknown lexis as well as some autonomous learning practice. The topic would be introduced with the photograph of the flight attendant to elicit safety, risk and accidents as well as activating schema.

English Unlimited B1+

English Unlimited B1+ p30

References

McGrath, I., 2013. Teaching Materials and the roles of EFL/ESL teachers. s.l.:Bloomsbury Academic.

Mishan, F. & Timmis, I., 2015. Mateials Development for TESOL. Epub ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Rea, D. et al., 2013. English Unlimited B1+. s.l.:Cambridge University Press.

Shawer, S. F., 2010. Classroom-level curriculum development: EFL teachers as curriculum-developers, curriculum-makers and curriculum-transmitters. Teaching ans Teacher Education, Volume 26, pp. 173-184.

Tomlinson, B. & Masuhara, H., 2018. The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Language Learning. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Materials Evaluation

On the surface, materials evaluation is a straightforward exercise in determining the efficacy of materials to be used in the teaching context but scratch a little deeper and it is a quagmire of subjectivity and beliefs that appear to be impossible to get away from. We also come back to the issue of relationships and power between stakeholders. Tomlinson & Masuhara (2018, p. 52) noted that “the prime users of commercially produced materials are learners their prime buyers are administrators”. Administrators in this sense could be teachers but also director of studies, senior teachers, or ministerial appointees, among others. We can also add teachers as users of materials, especially in the classroom context. Tomlinson (ibid) found that “in a few institutions the classroom teachers selected the coursebooks and that in no institutions were the textbooks selected by learners”.

This layer between materials and learners/teachers places responsibility on those choosing materials to make the optimal choice for the intended users. It also brings how we evaluate materials into closer scrutiny and how our beliefs and understanding of language learning affect the tools we use for evaluation. The very act of evaluating materials can bring new insights and understanding about what teachers want from materials (Mishan & Timmis, 2015, p. 72) and highlight our beliefs regarding what aspects of materials are important.

During the task this week evaluating materials and Tomlinson and Masuhara’s framework (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, pp. 69-71) was our preferred catalyst. There were strong requests for criteria focusing on authenticity of listening materials, which brought up differing opinions on the nativeness principle versus intelligibility principle (Levis, 2005, p. 370), and English as a lingua franca. One side argued that authenticity is important, but this led to attempts to define authenticity and “it is impossible to engage in a meaningful debate over the pros and cons of authenticity until we agree on what” authenticity is (Gilmore, 2007, p. 98). Non-native speakers with accented English are equally as authentic as native speakers with various regional accents and evaluating materials purely on accent content without insight into the breadth of accents represented would leave two different types of audio equally assessed if we were not to look into more detail regarding the origin of these accents. We then dig further into issues such as the authenticity of studio-recorded audio (or any material used in the classroom for that matter) versus comprehensibility, which raises semantic problems defining comprehensibility and whether graded language is needed: Loschky’s findings suggest modified input does not “facilitate comprehension relative to non-modification of input” (1994, p. 315). These issues were almost impossible to navigate in our short two-hour workshop and with the need to press on, we found that separating materials analysis and materials evaluation was equally challenging.

The literature distinguishes between evaluation and analysis (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 56), and highlights some pitfalls of mixing them together as well as its effect on weighting, which was another headache for our team. Analysis of materials are typified by factual questions (Mishan & Timmis, 2015, p. 88) and generate definite answers from questions such as “how many chapters does it contain?”, or “does it provide speaking opportunities?”. This type of question was posited as effective by a member of our team because, from experience, it was simple to use but, as noted by Tomlinson and Musahara (2018, p. 55), these types of questions are open to bias from the author or can be interpreted from different perspectives which will lead evaluators to different scores and therefore results. In our example, it is not clear what can be deemed a good number of chapters because it is not possible to evaluate materials based on number of chapters. From our evaluation tool, you can see in the content-specific criteria that we have put a question regarding task-based learning into our evaluation. It suggests we are looking for task-based learning materials, and that task-based learning is preferable to other approaches, although that was not one of the underlying beliefs of our group. Despite this being presented to us in our reading, we added these questions into our evaluation tool and this promptly led to disagreement about how binary options can be represented on our cline of 1 to 5. This naturally led to how to weight different criteria, because guidance notes for teachers is not equal to cognitive challenge of materials.

Evaluation Tool

The evaluation tool we used to evaluate English Unlimited B1+

Ultimately, our evaluation tool did not weight the criteria and the Teacher’s book is weighted less because we could not think of more criteria. Universal criteria is not the most important category but is weighted that way as a result of not giving time to think about and discuss weighting. When we used the criteria for evaluating, we came across problems that were impossible to evaluate but time pressure, and our own experiences of teaching left us at an impasse, so we did not rewrite or delete the question.

Time and complexity is an area that has been highlighted (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 61; Mishan & Timmis, 2015, p. 97) that affects how teachers use evaluation tools. Teachers are busy teaching and would not be able to go through a protracted pre-evaluation process in addition to evaluating the materials. Materials selected for an institution will be used by teachers of all experiences and novice teachers will be disadvantaged with evaluation tools that can only be understood by experienced teachers, and thus return unreliable data. This is without considering evaluation from learners (ibid, p. 98), an area that we had not considered. The reality of the situations in which evaluation tools will be used compared to the research are far apart, and this is most notable in how the different responsibilities overlap.

Theresa Clementson, one of the authors and editor of the course book we evaluated (Rea, et al., 2013), advised us to be careful about overlap between what teachers should do in the classroom and what materials are designed to do and this issue came up with evaluating materials based on long-term learning goals, and with engagement and motivation (ibid, p. 91). I would argue that long-term learning goals are not within the remit of materials creators and lies firmly in the learners’ own hands along with their teachers. There are clear limits to what materials can realistically deliver, and this is further muddled by the decision-making processes behind how the course book was put together. It was surprising to discover that the editor does not have authority on all aspects of the book and the publisher, and its marketing team, wield considerable influence on visual media and layout. This information shed light on a question that we had grappled with throughout the evaluation task regarding the discontinuity of the visuals used within one unit, with a mix of cartoons and photographs that were integral in some activities but were totally irrelevant in others.

We noted that these issues were probably borne from spending too little time preparing our framework and exploring our beliefs before creating criteria for evaluation, and that with more time we could have produced a more objective evaluation tool that had itself been evaluated. However, our situation mirrored those in many teaching centres and schools around the world where materials need to be evaluated and ready for new classes.

References

Gilmore, A., 2007. Authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning. Language Teaching, 40(2), pp. 97-118.

Levis, J. M., 2005. Changing Contexts and Shifting Paradigms in Pronunciation Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), pp. 369-377.

Loshchky, L., 1994. Comprehensible Input and Second Language Acquisition: What is the Relationship?. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16(3), pp. 303-323.

Mishan, F. & Timmis, I., 2015. Mateials Development for TESOL. Epub ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Rea, D. et al., 2013. English Unlimited B1+. s.l.:Cambridge University Press.

Tomlinson, B. & Masuhara, H., 2018. The Complete Guide to the Theory and Practice of Materials Development for Language Learning. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.