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Designing My Worksheet

In this post, I would like to share the process of designing my worksheet which is my portfolio for the week 7’s class.

In the beginning, I took a look at 5 principles (Please see, 16 Principles for ELT Material Design post) that I personally value the most in material design.

1. Materials should help learners to develop confidence (Tomlinson, 2011)
2. Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use (Tomlinson, 2011)
3. Materials should be culturally relevance
4. Materials should stretch/challenge the learners
5. Materials should build intercultural awareness

After looking through my principles and others created in the group. I set the certain situation and took into account the students’ needs as follows:

• Target learners: Japanese senior secondary school students in Okinawa (1st year)
• The aims of the lesson: To review junior secondary English for a reading comprehension. To expose to authentic English use. To have a discussion about their city in pair.
• The objective of the lesson: To work on ‘Facts about Okinawa Project’ and create a portfolio (either a poster or infographic) with a partner.
• Learners’ needs: To improve listening skills for university entrance examinations (short-term goal). To improve speaking skills for communication with people from other countries (long-term goal).

In the process of identification of learners’ need, I referred to Jolly and Bolitho’s materials design steps and the process illustrated by McGrath.

Exploration of Language and Contextual Realisation

Since most Japanese secondary school students do not have a lot of opportunities to use English outside of a class, I want them to expose to authentic English use and learn from it. However, as an English teacher in Japan, I have to include the certain elements of the exam preparation. Hence, my challenge for the material design was how I could integrate authentic English into a Japanese English class, and encourage them to speak English in pair.

Pedagogical Realisation

After setting up the situation, I looked for some texts on the Internet. Actually, before I designed my worksheet, I had some ideas exploiting either podcast or YouTube and using the past entrance exams for senior high school. When I was looking for an appropriate text within the past exams, I found that there was a section about the presentation of introducing Okinawan hospitality in the exam of 2014. Like I mentioned my previous post, Okinawan students need to have presentation skills to introduce their culture and town to foreign visitors. Thus, I chose the text as reading comprehension for my worksheet. Furthermore, my favourite podcaster (Luke’s English podcast) who is an ELT teacher has also posed YouTube videos interviewing British people about London, so I decided to use one of his videos for the authentic listening text (The video link is here).

Physical Production

As I designed my worksheet, I referred to Jason Renshaw’s ELT material design tutorial on YouTube video (Links are here and here). I personally liked the way he designs a worksheet (because I have never though that the header and footer on Microsoft words can be useful and make your worksheet look even cooler!), so I did create mine like he did. This is my template as the first stage.

 

 

And, this is the second stage that I put the reading text, questions, the listening tasks and the pair work speaking tasks.

After creating my worksheet, I looked at the 5 principles above. Then, I reflected whether I followed the principles.

• Developing a learner’s confidence: if students could create their own portfolio, they would have confidence in learning English to some extent.
• Exposing a learner to language in authentic use: yes, I used authentic English use for listening tasks.
• Culturally relevance: I would say yes because I included Japanese educational values (preparing for university entrance examinations).
• Challenging to a learner: yes, they need to speak in English and work on their own portfolio. I also exploit inductive approach, which “they are given samples of language and expected to discover the rule for themselves”(McGrath, 2002:93). By watching the YouTube video, they could learn how they can ask and answer the questions to their partner in English in the speaking task.
• Building intercultural awareness: yes, students can see British culture by watching the interview video.

The first principle is difficult to evaluate unless I actually use the worksheet in a class. However, from my viewpoint, I personally think that I could reflect the 5 principles that I vale the most. My worksheet will be reviewed by my colleagues in the week 7’s class, so after that I will probably change several points based on their advice. Until then, this is the process that I took to create my worksheet.

Manami

References

2014年度 沖縄県公立高校入試（英語・問題）10/10. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://resemom.jp/feature/public-highschool-exam/okinawa/2014/

ELT Materials Design and Use (Part 1) – YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUOzai5yWOs

Jolly, D., & Bolitho, R. (2011). A framework for materials writing. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials development in language teaching (2nd ed., pp. 107– 134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luke’s ENGLISH Podcast. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://teacherluke.co.uk/

McGrath, I. (2002). Materials evaluation and design for language teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Teaching Materials Design Masterclass (1): Head to toe (creating great headers and footers) – YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd4TUrcc2y4