This week’s task involved creating a worksheet. Rather than use Jolly and Bolitho’s framework, I used the ideas from the methodology module to help plan the lesson. I will compare my materials to Jolly and Bolitho’s framework towards the end of this post.
I decided to base my lesson around a two-minute BBC news item about a Brighton kite surfer who ‘jumped’ Brighton pier. In Bringing Online Video into the classroom, Jamie Keddie (2014) recommends using short videos between one and three minutes long as it allows students to get the whole narrative rather than an excerpt and ‘completeness means better comprehension’.
The lesson is divided into a pre-listening, while listening and post-listening stage and aimed at upper-intermediate/ advanced adult learners, studying in a private language school in Brighton.
Pre-listening stage
Worksheet 1
The pre-listening stage involves students identifying the names of the eight different water sports shown on the worksheet. For lower levels this could be turned into a matching exercise. The students then answer the discussion questions to help activate content schemata. In Teaching and Leaning in the Language Classroom, Tricia Hedge (2000) stresses the importance of contextualising the text and preparing the topic by activating prior knowledge. It may well be the case that students are unfamiliar with kite surfing, in which case the warmers serve to introduce missing prior knowledge.
The second part of the pre-listening stage involves a prediction task. Students are given the following excerpt from the text and have to try and guess what the clip is about:
“Luckily for me I have a really good team that come and follow me, so they’re all on the pier making sure that the public can’t get between the area that I’ve marked out where I wanna go. Safety is obviously a major concern about it, and I don’t wanna put anybody else at risk.”
The warmer activities that preceded the prediction task should hopefully provide students with some ideas. The benefit of setting a prediction task is that it gives students a purpose for listening which reflects a real life purpose for listening. In Doing Task-Based Teaching, Dave and Jane Willis (2007) explain that as soon as we read (or listen to) a story, we begin to anticipate what follows. We ask ourselves questions, which as we read (or listen) are answered, prompting new ones. In this way, prediction tasks help guide the listening process and arouse curiosity as students will want to know if their guesses are correct.
While-listening stage
After checking their predictions, students determine the different attitudes people have towards the stunt. For the first two speakers, this is quite straightforward. However, the third and fourth interviewees both give positive and negative remarks, and the student will have to decide the speakers’ main opinion. The benefit of an audio-visual is that students can benefit from paralinguistic clues to meaning. As Kellerman points out (cited by Hedge) speech perception is a bi-modal process. Both the exercises on the second worksheet involve listening for gist and involve very little writing so that students can focus on the listening and not have to do two things at once.
Post-listening
This stage focuses on bottom-up strategies such as inferencing and also looks at a couple of grammatical structures. Coursebooks often cover the third conditional and wish structures so it good to have examples of them being used naturally by native speakers. I have also tried to personalise the grammar activity.
At this point, It would be good to evaluate the material by adapting some of the criteria we used to evaluate coursebooks and also revisit some of the frameworks from earlier on in the course.
Evaluating criteria
Is the material easy to adapt?
As I have already suggested, it could be possible to adapt the warmer for lower levels by providing the names of the different water sports for students to match to the pictures. The third worksheet could be replaced with different activities but I think the gist activities would work with any level. John Field (2002) sees that one of the benefits of using authentic material is that students can practise dealing with texts where they only understand part of what is said.
Does the material have opportunities for personalisation?
The material begins and ends with personalisation activities.
Will students find the tasks and topics engaging/ motivating?
This is hard to tell, especially when the material is for an unknown class. I find the topic interesting. I hope that students will be motivated because the clip is about Brighton.
Does the material cater for students with different learning styles?
The material caters for auditory and visual learners. However, in our last SLA seminar, we discovered that nearly everyone is primarily a visual learner and that perhaps taking into consideration different learning styles was not as important as we thought.
Does the material encourage communication?
All the tasks can encourage communication if students work collaboratively.
Is the material relevant to learner’s needs?
Again this is hard to know when it is not your class. It could be argued that all students can benefit from extensive listening practice, and using different listening strategies.
Can learners supply their own ideas?
The prediction task allows for this.
Does the material contain some authentic texts and tasks?
Yes, the text contains ungraded, scripted and unscripted monologues and an unscripted dialogue.
Is the material culturally sensitive? /Does it help build intercultural awareness?
You could argue that kitesurfing is part of Brighton culture.
Is the material related to real life?
Yes, the events are real.
Is the content primarily form or meaning-oriented?
The content is meaning-oriented. For the grammar exercises, the questions start with meaning before moving on to form.
Does the material contain interesting/ up to date topics?
The event happened six years ago, but the sport is still quite current.
Does the material have a clear and logical layout?
Yes (in my opinion)
Does the material have clear instructions?
Yes (in my opinion)
Does the material have catchy visuals?
Yes (in my opinion)
Jolly and Bolitho’s framework for writing materials:
Step 1: Identification of a need or problem:
As I mentioned above this is tricky if you don’t know the class, but you could argue that all higher-level students can benefit from an authentic text containing colloquial accents, where the speed of delivery is fast.
Step 2: Exploration of the need or problem:
For this stage, I consulted my notes from the methodology module.
Step 3: Contextual Realisation:
I choose content relating to Brighton
Step 4: Pedagogical realisation:
This was helped by Tricia Hedge and the Willises.
Step 5: Production of materials:
The presentation of the worksheet was guided by Jason Renshaw’s YouTube tutorials.
Step 6 and 7: Use and Evaluation.
I haven’t used them yet.
Tomlinson’s checklist for selecting texts
- Does the text engage you cognitively and affectively? Not really, but hopefully students will find it linguistically challenging.
- Is the text likely to engage most of your learners in the same way? Not applicable
- Does the text connect to your learners’ lives in some way? Yes.
- Does the text connect to your learners’ schematic knowledge? Probably
- Will learners be able to make a mental representation of the text? Yes, during the prediction stage.
- Is the text likely to evoke different responses from learners? Yes, the text itself gives an example of this.
- Does the text present an achievable linguistic challenge? Yes
- Does the text present an achievable cognitive challenge? Yes
- Is the emotional level suitable for your learners? Not really applicable
- Is the text likely to add to the personal development of you learners? Not sure
- Does the text help expose learners to a range of genres? Yes
- Does the text help expose learners to a range of text types? Yes
From this exercise, it is interesting to see that all of our own criteria were met although this wasn’t the case for Tomlinson’s criteria. The material scored eight out of twelve for Tomlinson’s criteria, with one no, one not sure, and two not applicable.
Obviously, I need to deliver the material so I can complete step six and seven of Jolly and Bolitho’s framework. Until then it isn’t really possible to fully evaluate the material.
Bibliography:
John Field (2002) The Changing Face of Listening. In Richards, J. C & W. A Renandya (eds) Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tricia Hedge (2000) Teaching and Leaning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jolly, D., R, Bolitho (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nded) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jamie Keddie (2014) Bringing Online Video into the classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tomlinson, B. (2013) Developing principled frameworks for materials development. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury
Dave and Jane Willis (2007) Doing Task-Based Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.