This was a very challenging seminar, in many ways, due to the difficulty of giving constructive feedback and the lack of familiarity between participants. Having experienced both sides of giving and receiving constructive feedback, it is a fine line one must tread between honest appraisal and taking into account personal feelings considering the amount of effort that has been put into creating the materials. Then there are the myriad beliefs that intersect and inform the production of materials and how and why they were created like that. There was also a considerable gradient of teaching experience amongst the group from zero to 16 years, and the associated professional development that can be accrued within that time frame. Ypsilandis (2002) cited Ross’ (2000) three characteristics of quality feedback: timely feedback, helpful feedback, and developmental feedback. He also contrasts this with poor feedback characteristics provided by Falchikov (1993): tonally negative, focused on trivial issues, and variable in its extent. As you can see, it is quite a tight rope to walk in giving feedback and evaluating the materials created by the other members of this module.

Jolly & Bolitho’s recursive process for materials creation

From listening to the presentations, it was clear that most of the students would agree that the process was much more similar to figure 5.2 and that not everyone started with learner need. It must be noted that the interpretation of learner needs was quite different among the group. Ingunn and I created a class profile to help us establish that the need did truly exist while other groups focused on more general problem areas that needed addressing at a cultural level rather than for a specifc set fo learners. The other approach was based on re-envisaging classic materials that appear in almost all mediated materials: giving and receiving directions. This blurred the line between mediated and unmediated (Mishan & Timmis, 2015), even though there was no editor or governmental department to oversee the mateirals development, they were created to be used in a very similar fashion to course books. It was quite interesting to see that teacher-driven desires regarding what to teach were prevalent and is something that was much discussed between my ex-colleagues and me when preparing for our classes.

After noting what we wanted from course book materials in previous sessions, it was quite clear that the gap between what we, as teachers, want and what is realistically achievable is quite considerable. This is in part could be attributed to the text-driven framework (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 144) that many of us experienced when working with published materials, in turn replicating the course book experience with texts more relevant to our learners or more “authentic”. This would inevitably lead to materials that more closely resembled those found in course books and replicating many of the strengths and weaknesses associated with them.

There were other examples of materials that simply would not be possible in traditional mediums, ie print. The addition of modern technology and the internet-connected classroom meant that classic tasks such as creating a board game are quicker and can be stored indefinitely online, and branching-narrative stories are possible to create, and iterate, edit, and publish much more easily than previously. Branching-narrative stories are commonly found in modern role-playing video games and encourage players to return to the game to find out how different choices pan out and affect the ending. This is a powerful motivator to encourage learners to revisit texts that they have already read, and help learners develop extensive reading skills because “we want our learners to be sufficiently motivated to want to do the reading” (Watkins, 2021) and “the only way they will get better at reading is by doing quite a lot of reading” (ibid). The creators of the story envisaged learners in a democracy of storytelling with debate and discussion about which branch of the story to continue along.

It was clear that technology has reached a point where teachers can, given sufficient time, create custom materials that look and function much like traditional course books, and enables types of activities that were difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the classroom. This includes previously covered materials such as infographics that can be readily produced as a final outcome task in one lesson. The wealth of resources available online allows professional-looking materials that have been tailored to a specific set of learners and can be easily modified for similar groups. The main barrier to creating these materials on a regular basis remains the same as ever: time. They require less but not yet an inconsequential amount of time.

References

Falchikov, N., 1993. Group Process Analysis: Self & Peer assessment of working together in a group. Education & Training Teaching International, 30(3), p. 275.

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

Ross, 2000. From a teacher Training Course hold in Thessaloniki. s.l., unpublished.

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.

Watkins, P., 2021. What research tells us about reading skills and how to improve them. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STxXMt3YpF4
[Accessed 18 May 2021].

Ypsilandis, G. S., 2002. Feedback in Distance Education. Computer Assissted Language Learning, 15(2), pp. 167-181.

In my career teaching English as a second/foreign language, there have been few opportunities to collaborate to create materials, so being able to work with Ingunn was a great opportunity to have access to her expertise and her valuable input in materials design. Previously in my career, collaboration was more about dividing materials among teachers to produce in isolation and any collaboration was ad hoc rather than premeditated. This was produced in a primarily unmediated form, where it will “pass straight into the classroom” (Mishan & Timmis, 2015, p. 220) and less mediated, where “editors and government officials may influence the final form of the materials” (ibid) but in my case, it was senior teachers requesting edits rather than government departments getting involved.

Our process mirrored Jolly and Bolitho’s framework (figure 5.2) (2011, p. 112). We started with learner need and looked at previous lessons and performance of Ingunn’s learners. We identified areas in which the learners had performed poorly, which included top-down processing skills, collaborative learning, and learner autonomy, and allied this with recurring complaints that chosen reading texts and listening audio was too easy or difficult or was not very interesting, which is also known as differentiation.

figure 5.2: Jolly & Bolitho’s recursive process for materials creation

This was then matched with the Norwegian Directorate of Education and Training competence aims for English Language Learning to contextualise the materials for the learners. In this case, it is to explore and describe ways of living, ways of thinking, communication patterns and diversity in the English-speaking world (NDET, 2020). Initial ideas involved wall crawl/gallery-style activity, but upon closer inspection of the physical constraints of the classroom highlighted the impractical nature of this idea. Ingunn’s class is taught in a shared room with two other classes and under the restraints imposed by the pandemic, it is not possible for members of the class to wander freely across the entire space. This required the class to remain within the assigned space so we moved the gallery activity into the virtual realm riding atop a Jamboard. The initial idea was to “signal changes in tone and pace” (Scrivener, 2012, p. XXIX) in a concept for classroom management for young learners known as stirrers, to increase activity and alertness, and settlers, to reduce levels of activities and calm the learners. In this case it would have acted as a stirrer before the settler activity of reading or viewing the video.

Our previous experience of using Jamboard meant that aesthetics would necessarily be compromised due to the limited editing tools available. The materials were not intended for actual consumption, so this was acceptable. The online nature of the materials presented another challenge that many a teacher has fallen afoul. Preventing learners from accessing the text until it is time to view it was a key consideration because it is a common affliction of course book design that learners can complete the activities in the book at any time they wish, and teachers are generally powerless to stop this happening. Our solution was to present the hyperlinks on a separate page at the end.

One area that was not derived from the learner need was the writing task. It was also the only part of the task that had not been evaluated or iterated upon. We ran out of time before we could discuss how the writing task would integrate with the reading/listening task hence why it looks out of place in the grand scheme of the materials. Our process was mostly iterative and based on multiple evaluations of the material before use. We did not use this for teaching so post-lesson evaluation was not possible.

click to see jamboard

The expected set up for the task would be that learners are introduced to the context of spring festivals (brainstorm, discuss Norwegian spring festivals, discuss any spring festivals that learners know about and so on); introduce gist reading and explain that they must choose three articles out of the twelve that interest them by placing a sticky note with the number 1, 2 or 3 to indicate preference on the jamboard; remove any articles that learners have shown no interest in; learners have a minute to quickly read the three articles they have chosen using the links on jamboard; then they choose one to read/watch in more detail; and finally the learners share what they’ve been reading/watching with their group. We decided on this approach because it was something that traditional materials could not accomplish very easily but technology gives us these affordances. Even though there are no physical elements to our materials, we feel they are not too different from more traditional print materials and thus maintain face validity.

One thing that became clear was the recursive nature of how we produced our materials, and it was not a linear beginning-to-end creation process as envisaged in Jolly and Bolitho’s framework (2011) for materials creation (see figure 5.1).

figure 5.1: Jolly & Bolitho’s linear process of materials creation

We can see that this activity can be reproduced with hard copies, in the case of the reading texts but the video(s) cannot. This is a remix of tasks that have been used before but in a way that previous iterations of technology simply cannot do. This necessarily means that the materials we have created cannot be replicated easily in a lower-tech teaching environment without substantial alterations and extended preparation time. The bespoke nature of teaching and learning, where every context is different is the challenge for material creators. Although certain materials can be recycled, they can rarely be re-used as is without some acknowledgement of the new context in which it is being used. Dogme-like approaches to teaching allied with technology to fully utilise learner-generated materials may be the bridge between the perceived inflexibility of published materials and those that best meet our learners’ needs.

References

Jolly, D. & Bolitho, R., 2011. A framework for materials writing. In: B. Tomlinson, ed. Materials development in language teaching. s.l.:Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-134.

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

NDET, 2020. udir.no. [Online]
Available at: https://www.udir.no/lk20/eng01-04/kompetansemaal-og-vurdering/kv4?lang=eng
[Accessed 17 03 2021].

Scrivener, J., 2012. Classroom Managment Techniques. Cambridge: 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.

In today’s blog entry, I will be discussing how I moved on, albeit slightly, from video as “glorified audio” (Goldstein, 2017, p. 24), which is considered an anachronistic model but one that I have seen practised in many classrooms during my career (and have actively indulged in myself). Video and image share many similar qualities and we can use video in the same way as images but with some key differences. The pedagogy behind video and written text followed similar development trajectories but as the way we use written text in class has changed, so has video. We cannot ignore the increasing prevalence of video in our lives helped along by the proliferation of high-speed internet connectivity everywhere we go. This has led to realisation that video is no longer considered a passive activity and part of this is also attributable to the rise of social media and the immediacy of reactions to watching content. The final area I will touch on is the importance of paralinguistic features of communication and how video offers something that traditional print-based materials could not.

One of the main issues I have with using video in lessons is the length. I personally find that 2-to-3 minutes sufficient, but the average YouTube video is approximately 12 minutes (Tankovska, 2021). TED talks are up to 18 minutes long (TED, 2020). This is in line with how I treat audio and I find 6-to-7-minute segments in higher level course books incredibly challenging to work with. I would often ask learners to do those listening tasks in their own time, although many did not. The other issue which I did not really consider was the socio-linguistic context of video and how it can reveal much about other cultures (Clare, 2017, pp. 35-36).

I was pleasantly surprised when another student presented an animated video, Cuerdas (Cuerdas Cortometraje Oficial, 2014), that she had used for English language teaching, which was entirely in Spanish. Thus, highlighting the importance of the moving image over the audio track. Although long at over 10 minutes, there were themes, motifs and issues that would appeal to learners and bring an emotional response (Witcher & Donaghy, 2014). The video clip I presented was a trail for a BBC television series about Valley Boys in Wales, which I had used in teaching adult South Korean learners. This was rooted in my reluctance to forego audio but also because of the learners’ desire to hear a broader range of British accents and learn more about British culture. This clip reflected changes happening in South Korea and was chosen because it would trigger emotional responses from the learners, touching on gender biases, wealth, age and human aesthetics. A lot of my focus with video is on bringing the paralinguistic features of communication to the forefront of the learners’ mind and also the top-down processing of this information in conjunction with audio information. I must admit that there were issues with “cognitive overload” (Guichon & Cohen, 2016, p. 666) for some learners with so many variables to work with and no control over the playback. In hindsight, making the video available to learners to watch and playback at their leisure may have reduced the cognitive cost (ibid).

My use of video, and it seems many of the other students’ on this course, follow the traditional teaching format of pre-viewing task, while-viewing task, and post-viewing task commonly associated with reading/listening texts (Donaghy, 2019). In much the same way that teaching reading/listening skills has moved away from this model, use of video has begun to move away as well.

Video as warmer, to activate schema, was a popular use among our cohort of students on this course. Jamie Keddie presented us with a task we have used with our learners: the pause-predict-play activity (2020) but he goes further in developing the tasks derived from his chosen video so that learners are not constrained by what is presented on screen. The video’s appearance in his lesson is inverted and appears at the end upon completion of the tasks based on his chosen video. He goes even further and creates an additional video to use with the original. Suffice to say that none of us went that far in our use of video. He also talks about the motivation behind the creation of the video he used and links it with monetisation and advertising revenue. It is a very holistic approach to using video in the classroom compared to the more traditional usage discussed earlier.

This treatment of video makes the activity much more active than how we traditionally think about watching video (Clare, 2017). We are moving into higher order thinking skills and with the tools available to us now, we can remix and reimagine videos and share these responses. This is something that wasn’t possible only a short time ago and leans on “remix literacy” (Dudeney & Hockly, 2016, p. 173). The important development is how the task we set learners has evolved and the focus is moving towards communicative competency over grammar or lexical competency. It is in this light of communicative competency that the paralinguistic features of communication become an important feature rather than a visual representation of grammar or language. This is all bound in “cultural and intercultural literacy” (ibid, pp.172-173) and is often highlighted in the different hand gestures employed in various cultures around the world. As educators and as learners, awareness of how actions (or inactions) are perceived are as important as knowing common learner errors exhibited by people from various cultural and language backgrounds.

It is this change from glorified audio to central role in digital literacies that marks video out as an important feature of language learning in the future. Learners will not only consume video but will engage critically with video content and redefine and remix it in their response and/or critique of it. The ubiquity of cameras and recording devices coupled with increasingly easy access to internet connectivity will only further the evolution of video in language learning.

References

Clare, A., 2017. The power of video. In: K. Donaghy & D. Xerri, eds. The Image in English Language Teaching. Malta: ELT Council, pp. 33-42.

Cuerdas Cortometraje Oficial, 2014. CUERDAS english subtitles. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtrHIa0RkAo
[Accessed 17 March 2021].

Donaghy, K., 2019. Using Film to Teach Languages in a World of Screens. In: C. Herrero & I. Vanderschelden, eds. Using film and media in the language classroom: reflections on research-led teaching. s.l.:Multilingual Matters, pp. 27-43.

Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N., 2016. Literacies, technology and language teaching. In: F. Farr & L. Murray, eds. The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 166-180.

Goldstein, B., 2017. A history of video in ELT. In: K. Donaghy & D. Xerri, eds. The Image in English Language Teaching. Malta: ELT Council, pp. 23-32.

Guichon, N. & Cohen, C., 2016. Multimodality and CALL. In: F. Farr & L. Murray, eds. The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. s.l.:Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 660-676.

Keddie, J., 2020. A video prediction activity: “Things that could go wrong at a wedding”. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMNzF-9Qro
[Accessed 15 March 2021].

Tankovska, H., 2021. Average YouTube video length as of December 2018, by category(in minutes). [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20report%2C%20the%20average%20video%20length,as%20of%20December%202018%2C%20by%20category%20%28in%20minutes%29
[Accessed 10 May 2021].

TED, 2020. Organize a local TEDx event. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ted.com/participate/organize-a-local-tedx-event/tedx-organizer-guide/speakers-program/event-program
[Accessed 10 May 2021].

Witcher, A. & Donaghy, K., 2014. A Visual Manifesto for Language Teaching. [Online]
Available at: https://vimeo.com/113420504
[Accessed 10 May 2021].