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.
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+ 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.