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.