In this final post, I would like to talk about what I have learnt first and then the new ideas I have developed. The material is defined “anything that can be used to facilitate learning”. The core message conveyed here is “be used”.  According to this definition, the purpose of “being used” is very clear, which is to facilitate learning. Who uses the material? How is it used? When is it used? Since “anything” is a very general even intangible concept, what should be selected as material? However, probably, before answering these questions, the fundamental one is what contributes to successful learning? Therefore, at the end of this module, these questions should have been addressed.

In retrospect, what we have done revolves these questions. The first thing I must bear in mind is that nothing is born to be material unless there are tasks accompanying it. In other words, it is the exercises, tasks and activities generated from materials make learning take place.  I have realized the context and learning theories mainly determine the criteria of making, adapting and supplementing material with proper tasks. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all or magic wand for creating perfect material. However, there are procedures to follow or elements to consider before using the material.

In my first post, I addressed the need for authentic language and communicative activities. Now, I have realized the ambiguity and controversy of the term “authenticity”. Language input might not be authentic but students can produce authentic output with well-designed tasks. Likewise, communicative tasks can’t play their role without teachers’ sophisticated understanding of the learners, contexts and language.  These principles are also applied to the digital world.

Much attention has been paid to digital material with its advantage of providing multimodality of language input and detecting learners’ needs to personalize the materials. Such apps as Liulishuo, Baicizhan; Fundubbing are now extremely popular in China, which I didn’t notice until the last seminar. But the interesting thing is that the most successful APP will involve a real teacher (study advisor) to ensure the commitment to the course and offer help for learners who struggle with some content in a Wechat group, which do trigger my thinking about what is the role of digital material in effective learning?“product/content” or “processes/tasks”? I will keep exploring this in the future as currently different views are held from person to person.

The assignment for this seminar was to design our own material. Here comes the first question why bother making our own material when teachers have course books or there are many published materials available. The greatest value of doing this probably lies in promoting a greater understanding of the learners’ need, context, language and culture appropriacy and gaining an empirical knowledge of learning theories (Jolly & Bolitho, 1998:111). By doing so, teachers will also develop the awareness of setting their own criteria for evaluating the produced materials.

The first step to designing the material is to find a framework to synthesize the whole process consistently. The one my college Bader and I chose was Jolly and Bolitho’s materials writing framework because we agreed to their view that effective material writing is a process, in which writers learn the process competence (Jolly & Bolitho, 1998). Besides, this framework seems more accessible to us, the novice material writers (see picture below).

To identify the learners’ needs, after the discussion about our contexts, both of us agreed that learners need to acquire some language beyond the course book and meanwhile broaden their horizons by linking learning to the real-life issues. Based on this concept, we decided to adopt the humanistic approach, which refers to “one which respects materials users as human beings and helps them to exploit their capacity for learning through meaningful experience and to connect what is in the book to what is in their minds (Tomlinson 2013; 139)”. In other words, with the materials, the learning experience of target language should be personalized, localized and made meaningful. Considering the fact that learners are students aged from 16 to 18 for China and Kuwait, we considered the learning objectives as to raise the cultural awareness and develop critical thinking. In this view, we need to find a common topic which could potentially engage the learners from both countries. “Silk road” could not be a better topic when students share the history and the “new belt new road” is currently a hot issue involving the two countries.  Therefore, there must be various media addressing this topic, which allow us to achieve authenticity of the material. Then, the first three steps seem to have been completed.

We also discussed students’ age, level, learning preferences and the classroom setting. In light of these, reading became the priority. As for the reading text, an article from The New Yorker was selected. The choice of genre reading allows the learners to engage in critical thinking about this hot topic and broadens their horizon about international and cultural issues. As for the task design, the material consists of a lead-in question of looking at pictures and the teacher can elicit the topic and relevant vocabulary. The next step is to read part of this authentic article from The New Yorker which talks about the new silk road initiative in China. A definition of some vocabulary is provided for some words we consider to be difficult for the learners. The teacher can ask the learners to refer to the definitions if they don’t know the meaning of the words.  In the post-reading phase, learners should address some comprehension questions about the article and try to identify some benefits and concerns about this major project.

Regarding physical production, the criteria for evaluating the use of visuals created by us two weeks ago were adopted when choosing the visuals. The video about making the layout of materials on the Youtube helped us produce the final version.

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Reflection of the whole process:

Having been given the feedback from other colleges, I realized we didn’t fully understand the linear process of creating material. Particularly, we missed two key elements: learning theories and the differences in exercises, activities and tasks, together with how they inform each other in material design.

Regarding the purpose of reading, readers expect to understand what they are reading. In this sense, exercises, activities or tasks should be designed to achieve this initial goal.  Before the reading material design, 4 elements need bearing in mind: (Vaezi;2006)

Text characteristics: Examine the text and identify learners’ linguistic difficulties.

• Words and grammatical structures
• Appropriacy of the topic

Pre-reading tips: Take the following into consideration to make the process of reading more comprehensible

• provide the necessary background
• raise language awareness (deal with linguistic difficulties)
• lighten students’ cognitive burden

During-reading tips: Encourage active and dialogical reading to achieve comprehension.

• Predicting
• Reacting
• Guessing
• Questioning
• Arguing
• Evaluating
• Summarizing
• Placing a text within one’s own experience.

Post-reading tips: Check students’ comprehension and then lead students to a deeper analysis of the text.

It can be seen from above that linguistic barriers should be identified and overcome with proper task designs before reading. Meanwhile, strategies for developing reading abilities should be embedded in instructions to facilitate learning during reading. Besides, comprehension-checking and the readers’ cognitive engagement in the text should not be overlooked.  Hence, effective design of exercises, activities and tasks could be the focal element. However, how are they different?

Exercises, activities & tasks: (Richards 2014)

An exercise is a teaching procedure that involves controlled, guided or open-ended practice of some aspect of language. A drill, a cloze activity, a reading comprehension passage can all be regarded as exercises.

The term activity is more general and refers to any kind of purposeful classroom procedure that involves learners doing something that relates to the goals of the course. For example singing a song, playing a game, taking part in a debate, having a group discussion, are all different kinds of teaching activities.

A task is normally defined as follows:

• It is something that learners do, or carry out, using their existing language resources or those that have been provided in pre-task work.
• It has an outcome which is not simply linked to learning language, though language acquisition may occur as the learner carries out the task.
• It is relevant to learners’ needs.
• It involves a focus on meaning.
• In the case of tasks involving two or more learners, it calls upon the learners’ use of communication strategies and interactional skills.
• It provides opportunities for reflection on language use.

Clipped from: http://www.professorjackrichards.com/difference-task-exercise-activity/

From the definitions, we can see the three terms are intertwisted but each has its own focus. Exercises are suitable for raising language awareness, which focus on “forms” while tasks require the use of the language to convey “meaning” in discourse. Activities are the least controlled, which covers almost every aspect of the learning process.

As mentioned above, linguistic features are the focal element of achieving comprehension. In our text, much rhetoric language is used, particularly metaphors such as: streamlining the transport, arteries of the modern world etc. In this case, we should have made some exercises to raise learners’ language awareness in pre-reading part. The definition from the dictionary doesn’t necessarily contribute to the understanding of the meaning between lines let alone beyond lines in reading. On the contrary, without a knowledge of the rhetoric language, the definitions may confuse learners. Also, we should have designed more collaborative activities to check the comprehension of the text while reading. For example, we could ask learners to discuss the real meaning of some metaphors first, and then swap the partners to exchange opinions. Another deficiency of our design is that we didn’t instruct learners to adopt certain strategies to reading, which could slow down the reading speed, especially for learners who haven’t fully aware of using reading strategies. There are also some flaws in the layout such as the waste of space, the mismatch of visuals and lead-in tasks.

In the whole process, we should have employed the evaluation criteria for the material design we already made but for some reasons, it totally slipped our mind. Making materials is a dynamic process which entails a lot of knowledge and patience. This is a valuable experience, from which I have learnt a lot.

References:

Jolly, D and Bolitho, R. 2011. A framework for materials writing. In Tomlinson, B. Materials Development in Language Teaching. 2nded. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp107-135.

Richards, J.C. (2014) Difference Between Task, Exercise, Activity. Available: https://www.professorjackrichards.com/difference-task-exercise-activity [Accessed May 13 2018].

Vaezi.,2005. Theories of reading. IranianLanguage Institute Language TeachingJournal Volume 1, Available: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/theories-reading [Accessed May 16 2018].

When it comes to the use of videos in English learning and teaching in my context, I have to mention the 3 types of teaching objectives required to achieve by the national English curriculum standards for full-time compulsory senior high school students in China. They are knowledge objectives, skills and abilities objectives and affection, attitude and value development. Knowledge objectives refer to knowing the information in texts and mastering the words and grammar. Abilities goals include skills needed for language learning such as skimming and scanning. Other than acquiring language knowledge and skills in English class, cultivating students’ interest in a certain area and a positive attitude in life need to be embedded in students’ learning process, which is the third teaching objective, namely affection, attitude and value development.

As far as I observe, videos are usually selected and used by teachers to achieve the third type of objectives. At the beginning of class, the video is played as a lead-in with the aim of stimulating student’ interest in a certain topic by offering information or target language. Normally, the video is very short, maximum 1-2 minutes because the entire class is only 40- 45 minutes long. Additionally, videos are frequently used in the last few minutes during a class. The videos may contain more information relevant to the topic in class. With its strong visual and auditory effects, certain emotions can be created to respond to the learning materials and develop attitudes and values in real life. For example, today’s reading is about how a disabled person overcomes his disabilities to live a colourful life as normal people do. After students get the key information by learning words and expressions and practising different reading skills, students are required to develop a positive attitude to life and treat the disabled equally. To achieve this goal, students may have a discussion first and then watch a video about other disabled people, making them value their present life and respect the disabled more.

When talking with other teachers in my school, they do realize the benefits of using videos in class, as research has found. First of all, videos compensate for the deficiencies in our course books. Learners can be exposed to realistic situations and real living language which provides a dimension that is missing in textbook-orientated teaching. (King, 2002) Secondly, the video uses modalities of communication which other materials don’t. Visuals and sounds can “provide a range of paralinguistic clues”, which facilitates successful comprehension and accurate understanding(Hill, 1999: 2). Nevertheless, from my observation, few language-related activities are created based on the video, except for speaking. The speaking activities are more based on the lesson topic than the video itself, which means teachers seldom make use of the language in the video as input. In this case, the students do not necessarily benefit from the video in terms of language learning.

This phenomenon may be caused by the following factors. Firstly, the video with appropriate language input is hard to get. Teachers in China have no access to video websites such as Youtube where English is the dominant language. Secondly, lack of technological skills confronts teachers with challenges of shortening the video, adding captions or subtitles, etc. Last but not least, most teachers have little knowledge or training of designing language-related activities based on videos.

However, with easier and more affordable access to video-making, especially the wide use of smartphones, some changes about video use have taken place. In my school, it has been a new trend that students are required to shoot a video in English to present the target language. For example, students learn the target language themselves, either vocabulary or grammar, and then record how they use the words or grammar in real-life communication. Students’ participation and involvement can contribute to a great enhancement of motivation and the learning autonomy. Nevertheless, the overwhelming study load in Chinese high school and the argument about the use of smartphones in school seem to be great barriers to promoting such video projects. Moreover, the principles of group organization and students allocation should be taken into account based on these elements, such as the participants’ levels and personalities、the content of the project and the language learning targets etc. But, from time to time, teachers make short videos to produce micro-learning for students. The one below was created by me two years ago.

All in all, there is much potential for the use of video in the language class. More collaboration among teachers in my context may make more use of video for language learning.

reference:

A few days ago, a snowstorm hit my hometown and my friend sent me 2 pictures of her garden with a written message “see how heavy the snow is. The one below was taken 24 hours later than that above”.  Suppose that without the pictures, how difficult it would be for me to interpret the “heavy snow”. This just reminded me of a Chinese old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. And vice versa, without the text, I would never know such heavy snowfalls took place in 24 hours. In this case, the text rescued the image by avoiding ambiguity or distinct interpretation and the picture gives the information of “heavy”, which can only be provided by the image.

Current situation

As for language learning, it is rare to find no visuals in language materials especially course books. Visuals can be photos, illustrations, cartoons and diagrams etc. Here comes the question why visuals become an integral part of most of the materials. The research was conducted by Hill (2013) to examine what use is being made of the pictorial material with regard to British course books and the finding shows that 55% of all illustrations are merely decorative and space-filling. Obviously, the “ornamentation” that Harmer (2001) terms these pictures can appeal to learners. However, there is a moot point whether the strong appeal can translate to language learning benefits. If yes, how?

The power of visuals

As Dubois and Vial (2000) put, the more educational materials promote connections between the two methods of coding (visual and verbal), the more learning takes place. In other words, images which have the same message as the words can illustrate an interactive situation with the target language, which allows more effective learning and memorization by building redundancy into a multimodal message and thus benefits students of visual learning style. Besides, visuals can bring the real world into the classroom and the genuine audience to communicate with, generating emotional impact and creating a void which needs to be filled with language. Nevertheless, Sless (1981) points out the absence of guidance on choices of visual material makes it challenging to know what specific educational value illustrations in texts may have although there is no shortage of illustrated texts at all levels. Since visuals do have benefits for language learning, such guidance or principles need developing to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of visuals.

Evaluation of the use of visuals in course books

Based on Duchastel’s taxonomy (1978) and Hill’s research (2013), my colleague Bader and I developed our criteria of assessing visuals in texts (see the picture below) and evaluated some visuals used in Face2face.

Duchstel’s taxonomy identifies the purposes of using visuals as follows:

1. affective: provided to enhance interest and motivation;
2. attentive: intended to attract and direct attention;
3. didactic: intended to facilitate learning by showing something difficult to convey in words;
4. supportive: provided for less able learners
5. retentional: provided to facilitate memorisation.

We decided to assess the effectiveness in terms of the link to the target language, integrity to an activity or task and the possibility of distracting the learners. We also considered the other aspects of improving the use of visuals.

Then I evaluated a section of Face2face 3A p28, which is about listening and vocabulary. The 2 photo of real humans can meet learners’ expectations by catching their eye. However, these visuals have nothing to do with the target language and the tasks, which is more decorative than effective to facilitate learning. Moreover, both of the women wear in red, which is appreciated in Chinese culture but I am not sure if it is a taboo in other culture. Then I moved to the cartoons which are designed to illustrate the meaning of the vocabulary in a task of matching the words with each cartoon. The body language, dressing and setting help convey the meaning and generate dual-coding in mind, which is highly likely to produce redundancy and facilitate memorization. However, to make the most of the pedagogical value of these cartoons, the tasks can be modified to talk with the picture in groups so as to illustrate an interactive situation with the target language and allow differentiation and create more learning opportunities.

Reflection

This seminar evoked my memory of the demo lessons given in teaching competitions in my context, where the use of PowerPoint is graded and I never saw a slide with no visuals. In retrospect, most of the visuals are used by teachers to impress the judges and students with ‘Wow’ effects. These visuals even videos act as being more attention-catching than being relevant to language learning.  In fact, it is the lack of understanding of how visuals enhance language learning that leads to the misuse of visuals in most cases.This reveals the importance of elaborating on material evaluation in teacher education and how learners benefit from developing visual literacy to enhance language learning.  All in all, it is the effective design of the task with visuals incorporated as facilitation that maximizes the educational value of visuals.

References:

Dubois, M. & Vial, I. 2000, “Multimedia design: the effects of relating multimodal information”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 157-165.

Duchastel, P. C. (1978) Illustrating instructional texts. Educational Technology18 36-39.

Harmer, J. 2001 The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman.

Hill, D. A. (2013) The visual element in EFL coursebooks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd edn) London: Bloomsbury. pp. 157-166.

Sless, D. (1981) Learning and Visual Communication. London: Halsted Press.

This seminar began with the metaphors teachers and learners have for the use of course books, one of which caught my eye as it reflects the social-cultural beliefs embedded in education in China. I would like to talk about the implications of this metaphor and discuss the adaptation and supplementation of course books within my context. Finally, my own understanding will be provided.

“There is value in verbalizing attitudes and metaphoric language is particularly revealing of the subconscious beliefs and attitudes that underlie consciously held opinions.”

McGrath, 2006: 173

In China, the value of education can be best informed by this saying “golden mansions and Yan Ru-yu (a legendary beauty) are both to be found in books” or rather “as long as one studies hard and achieves success in education, then wealth, high-paying jobs and beautiful women will all come his way”. Obviously, this metaphor indicates education is regarded as a jumping board to achieve social mobility. The mentality originates from the feudal imperial examination system in dynastic China, a method to recruit learned talents into the government in a society where the government service was considered the most honourable and worthwhile occupation of all.  The openness and social mobility it facilitated attracted talents from all walks of life and focused the nation’s intellectual resources toward examination and bureaucratic activity. This system existed for around 1300 years and has generated long-term persistence in the development process through the cultural elements embedded. Therefore, despite the change in educational institutions from one deeply embedded in Confucian classics to Western-style education, such belief that the academic success through the intense competition in national examinations makes one’s promising future life is still firmly held by Chinese people.

Maotanchang: China’s Biggest ‘Exam Factory’ for ‘Gaokao’

Thousands of people see off middle school graduates to take Gaokao college entrance exams, in Maotanchang township, Anhui Province. [youth.cn]

Adapting and supplementing in my context

1.Why and what?

Majority of teachers agree that adapting and supplementing materials is necessary but they have different reasons for doing these. Two most frequently cited purposes are “to maximize the appropriacy in the context by changing some of the internal characteristics” (McDonough and Shaw, 1993; 85) and to compensate for the intrinsic deficiencies in the materials such as out-of-datedness (Madsen & Bowen, 1978). In my first post, I addressed the needs in the exam-driven context especially when the public examinations are incompatible with syllabus and course books. In this case, which syllabus to follow can be mainly determined by the teacher’s beliefs which constitute “the information, attitudes, values, expectations, theories, and assumptions about teaching and learning that teachers build up over time and bring them to the classroom (Richards 1998; 66). What’s more, the teacher’s beliefs are also shaped in a social constructive environment where some teachers’ individual characteristics, as well as contextual requirements, may constrain certain types of behaviour or habituate those allowed forms of behaviour (Richards & Pennington 2016).

Considering the social-cultural value in education mentioned above, it is not surprising that majority of teachers follow the exam syllabus by only teaching the linguistics knowledge such as vocabulary and grammar required by the exam syllabus and replace the communicative activities in the coursebook with standardized examination exercise format (see the picture below). Worth mentioning here is that 3 types of course books produced by different national publishing houses are imposed on regional schools in my province but the identical examination paper is nationally applied, which inevitably raises the question among teachers which coursebook helps achieve higher marks and therefore could undermine the authority of course books.

reading material in our course book 

standard reading assessment in the examination paper

To compensate for the deficiency caused by out-of-datedness of the content in the course book because they have remained in use for more than 10 years, teachers tend to use extracts relevant to the topic from media as supplemental materials such as newspaper articles or videos. But the most frequently used supplement materials are worksheets in the form of standardized exam paper or past exam papers aiming to memorize the linguistic knowledge and develop exam skills.

2.How and when?

As the process of adaptation and supplementation inform the evaluation decisions in teachers’ using the course books, it makes sense to teachers that they adapt materials when planning a lesson by selecting, deleting, adding or changing some tasks or sequence of tasks, task input and expected output (McGrath 2013). Besides, research (Richards 1998b) indicates that experienced teachers can be more capable of adapting planned materials, particularly tasks spontaneously in class for the sake of time management or as a result of responding to learners’ needs. In a word, the process of adaptation and supplementation can be proactive and reactive depending on practitioners’ understanding of the learning objectives, learners’ needs together with the perceptions of themselves and self-efficacy (McGrath 2013).

3. My reflection

This seminar was thought-provoking as I realized the ideas of adaptation and supplementation are too narrow in my context either due to much focus on exams or for lack of clear objectives. I have noticed some teachers almost totally abandon the course books. They develop the linguistic competence by only teaching the vocabulary and grammar in the course book, which McGrath (2002) considers as a high-risk strategy because large-scale cutting of course books may make learners feel at a loss. Regarding the 4 skills, they tend to rely on massive drill and practice with past exam papers to improve marks on reading, writing and listening assessment. Systematic and comprehensive training of enhancing skills and developing strategies seem to be neglected. The kind of adaptation and supplementation could possibly cause boredom and demotivation among teenagers.

Such beliefs as developing learners’ values and attitudes are imposed on language teaching and highlighted by the educational administration. Most supplement materials, which have little to do with language learning, are used to achieve this goal. For example, there may be no communicative or linguistic-related task accompanying the video played in class but simply to arouse learners’ emotional responses to patriotism. Hopefully, more training about the material use will be given in my context to fulfil such goals as personalization, individualization and motivation.

Reference list:

Madsen, H. S. & Bowen, J. D. (1978) Adaptation in Language Teaching. Rowley, MA.: Newbury House.

McDonough, J. & Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.

McDonough, J., et al. (2013) Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher’s Guide. (3nd edn) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

McGrath, I. (2002) Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

McGrath, I. (2006) Teachers’ and learners’ images for coursebooks. ELT Journal60 pp.171-180.

Pennington, M.C. & Richards, J.C. 2016; 2015;, “Teacher Identity in Language Teaching: Integrating Personal, Contextual, and Professional Factors”, RELC Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 5-23.

Richard, J. C. (ed.), 1998. Beyond Training. Cambridge University Press.