TOEIC Preparation: Week 12

Warm Up: Clap, Snap, Pop!

In this silly warm up, you will work with your partners to play a counting game. You will take turns repeating the numbers 1, 2, 3. Each person should say one number and the next person in line will say the next number. When you get to 3, you go back to 1 and repeat the process. Sounds easy, right?

Not so fast! We will make it more and more difficult by gradually replacing the numbers with the gestures clap, snap, and pop. Once you and your partners completing one round, you can go to the next one.

Task 1: Common Talk Types

Part 4 will contain different kinds of talks given by a single speaker complete the following exercises with your partners to become familiar with some of the most common types of talks. If you do not have access to your anthology, CLICK HERE. 

• Anthology pg 40: Match they type with a description and sample phrases.
• Anthology pg 41. Quickly skim the transcripts of the four talks and identify what kind it is. Underline key words and phrases from the transcript that let you know.

Task 2: Practice with Paraphrasing

In this task you will work with your partners to practice paraphrasing. You teacher put you  in a group. Click on your corresponding link below and complete Task 1. DO NOT click on the Task 2 tab until your teacher tells you to.

Group 1: CLICK HERE

Group 2: CLICK HERE

Group 3: CLICK HERE

Group 4: CLICK HERE

Group 5: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Focused Practice

Let's work in groups to practice two of the more challenging question types in Part 4: Questions about speaker intent and questions about graphics.

• Group Quiz: CLICK HERE

Task 4: Auditory Memory Practice

In this task you will read a text to your partner and he or she will answer some comprehension questions. Make sure you read the instructions in the presentation carefully before you start. 

• Student A: CLICK HERE
• Student B: CLICK HERE

Your Questions

 English V - Week 11 - Memory

Introduction: In today's class we will continue Chapter 11 by discussing the topic of memory. We will also begin peparing your final project on the topic of innovation in education.

Warm Up: What are you thankful for this year?

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, one of the most important national holidays of the United States. What do you know about this celebration?

• Jamboard: CLICK HERE

Task 1: Do you have a good memory?

Look at the list below. Which of these are difficult for you to remember? Which are easy for you? Why?

• People's Faces
• People's Names
• Directions to a Place
• Historical Facts and Dates
• Numbers, Passwords, Codes
• Activities you need to do 
• Other information (please specify)

Now, let's test your short-term memory by playing a game. CLICK HERE to take a quiz where you will need to remember people's faces and names. One person should share the screen and you should answer together. When you finish,  discuss these questions.

• Do you have a good memory? Why or why not?
• Why do you think we forget? Why don't our brains save all our memories like a computer?
• What would be the benefits of having a super-memory?
• Tell your partners about a time that you forgot something important?
• What are some techniques or strategies that you have heard can help you remember something?
• Have you ever suddenly remembered something from a long time ago that you had not thought about in years? What caused you to remember that?
• When you teacher was a child in the 1990's, he could easily remember the phone numbers of 10-15 of his friends. Now he doesn't know anyone's phone number except for his own. Is the same true for you? 

Task 2: Reading about Memory

Open your e-book and complete the expecises below with your partners.

• Pg 132 exercises 2, 3, and 4
• Pg 133 read the grammar box and complete exercise 8 and 9

Task 3: Group Discussion

If you finished discussing the poem, answer these questions with your partners.

• What is your earliest memory of school? 
• Describe a teacher from elementary school, high school, or college who is memorable to you in a good way. What can you say about this person?
• Describe a teacher who is memorable to you in a bad way. Why do you have negative associations with them?
• In what ways do you think the teaching-learning process in educational institutions has changed since you were a child? What about since your parents' generation?
• Do you think that the average student experience in high school and college in Costa Rica adequately prepares the student for personal and professional success?

Task 4: Your Final Project

For your final project, you will explore the question, What does innovation in education mean to me?

• Learning Objective: Create and apply a survey to collect data regarding public perceptions about the Costa Rican educational system and analyze the results in order to support the proposal of strategies for innovation.

• Evaluation Rubric: CLICK HERE to see the rubric for this performance.

Instructions: At the end of this project, you will give a presentation to the class with your proposal for ways of innovating the educational experience in Costa Rica. However, you must design your proposal and based on data collected from a survey. 

• Create a Survey: Create a survey using Google Forms to do learn about public peceptions about the educational system. The survey should have three sections:

• The Present System: satisfaction with different aspects of the traditional educational experience (content, methodolgy, rules, evaluation, infrastructure, etc.)
• Innovative Content: the life skills, knowledge and abilities that the public thinks should be included in an innovative educational curriculum
• Innovative Actions: the kinds of activities the public thinks would be enjoyable and effective for learners in an innovative educational experience

• Collect the Data: Your teacher will send the surveys to another group of students to complete.

• Analyze the Data: Look at the results of the survey and analyze the data. What patterns do you see? What discoveries do you make about public perceptions that will influence your proposal?

• Create a Commercial: Create an advertisement for your proposal for innovation in education. Your advertisement should be a 2 minute commercial which you will "perform" live in class. The commercial should be very well organized, have graphic support, and all group members must participate in the live performance. In the commercial we should learn the name of the proposed educational system, its characteristics, reasons why schools should adopt it.

• Present the Proposal: In class you will give a 10-15 minute group presentation about your research project. Your presentation will have five parts:

• An introduction describing the purpose of your research project.
• Description of your survey questions and why you asked them.
• Analysis of the data you collected.
• Performance of the commercial.
• 3-4 discussion questions to ask the audience about the topic of your presentation.

Planning Schedule

• Week 11: Create Survey
• Week 12: Analyze Results
• Week 13: Create commercial and presentation
• Week 14: Present the results of your project

How can we collect information about this? - Now that you have your research topic, you need to create your survey using Google Forms. This tool allows you to create many different kinds of questions. Look at the examples below. Closed questions will give you the best data to analyze. Consider the following options.

Agree or Disagree

Multiple Choice

Scale

Create Your Survey - To create your survey using Google Forms you need a Gmail account. Only one member of your group needs to have a Gmail account. If nobody has one, you can create a new account just for this exercise. Just don't forget your password! Follow these steps.

• Go to Gmail and open your drive.

• Click NEW or NUEVO and open Google Forms

• Click on the three dots and add collaborators. Here you can add the email addresses of your group members so everyone has access to edit the survey. Also, be sure to add your teacher's email address!

• After you finished creating your survey, click SEND or ENVIAR and copy the link. Send the link to your teacher.

Analyze Your Results - The teacher will post the links to all of the surveys in the Entorno Virtual. When everyone has responded to your survey, you will need to analyze the results. 

• Click RESPONSES or RESPUESTAS.

• Google Forms automatically generates graphics and percentages for you based on the data. You can take screenshots of these graphics to include in your presentation. 

When you look at the results of the survey ask yourselves the following questions:

• What do these results tell us?
• What generalizations can we make?
• What contradictions do we notice?
• What information did we expect to find? What did we actually find?
• Is anything surprising?
• What do we want our class to know about these results?

Prepare Your Presentation - Now you are ready to present your findings to the class. Create a PowerPoint presentation that includes the following information.

• Name of your research project
• Introduction: What is the purpose of your research project?
• Survey: What questions did you ask? Why did you think these questions will help you collect the data you need?
• Data Analysis: What were the results? Share the graphics and the analysis that you did.
Analysis of the data you collected.
• Commercial: How can you present your own original proposal for an innovative educational system in the form of an interesting and informative commercial?
• Discussion Questions: What are 3-4 questions you can ask the audience about the topic of your presentation?

 

  Materials Evaluation and Design - Week 11 - Frameworks to Systematize Materials Design

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 11 of the course Materials Evaluation and Design. In this class we will ... . 

Today's Goals:

• Propose authentic tasks students can do in response to different texts.
• Review several text exploitation frameworks: PWP, TDA, Ideas Grid.
• Define the concept of meta-materials.
• Consider Maley's 12 Generalizable Procedures as a framework for flexible materials development.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I make materials development a more time efficient process?
• What are flexible materials?
• What benefits and challenges does a flexible approach to materials development provide?

Task 1: Task Authenticity

Penny Ur in her book "A Course in Language Teaching" makes a very important point about authenticity in reading and listening. If we are using authentic texts, we should also consider whether we are asking our students to carry out authentic tasks! Read the following extracts. After each one, briefly summarize what you read and tell your partners what you think about it.

• Challenges for Beginners: "With less proficient learners, we usually use simplified texts in order to make the appropriate input level for our learners; and tasks also may not represent any kind of real-life reading purpose. This is because such materials on the whole are more effective at earlier stages of learning; indeed, the use of ‘authentic’ texts with less proficient learners is often frustrating and counter-productive."

• Task Authenticity: "However, ultimately we want our learners to be able to cope with the same kinds of reading that are encountered by native speakers of the target language. As they become more advanced, therefore, it would seem sensible to start basing their reading practice on a wide variety of authentic (or near-authentic) texts, and on tasks that represent the kinds of things a reader would do with them in real life rather than on conventional comprehension exercises. Answering multiple choice questions on a poem, for example, or filling in words missing from a letter would seem a fairly irrelevant response to these types of discourse: discussing the interpretation of the poem or writing an answer to the letter would be more appropriate. Obviously completely authentic performance cannot always be provided for – we are not going to turn our classroom into a kitchen, for example, in order to respond authentically to a recipe! – but we can, and should make some attempt to select tasks that approximate to those we might do in real life."

• Beyond Understanding: Our aims in real-life reading usually go beyond mere understanding. We may wish to understand something in order to learn from it (in a course of study, for example), in order to find out how to act (instructions, directions), in order to express an opinion about it (a letter requesting advice), or for many other purposes. Other pieces of writing, into which the writer has invested thought and care (literature, for example) demand a personal response from the reader to the ideas in the text, such as interpretation, application to other contexts, criticism or evaluation. Advanced reading activities should therefore see the understanding of a text only as a preliminary step on the way to further learning or other personal purposes.

• Combining Skills: Tasks that are based on more complex thinking are likely to involve a more complex process. Also, in general, more advanced language work of any kind tends to involve longer, multi-stage activities, in order to explore to the full the opportunities to engage with the language in different ways. It is therefore very likely that activity before, during and after the reading itself will entail extended speaking, listening and writing.

CLICK HERE to view a collection of authentic texts. What authentic tasks could you have your students do with them?

Task 2: PDP-PWP, the Gold Standard for Text Processing

For better or worse, Axbey's Pre-While-Post framework has become THE standard to follow for developing activities to help students process a listening or reading text. 

Consider the stages below and for each one say what you think the purpose is and state some example tasks.

• Pre: Before reading/listening to the text, students...because...
• During: While reading/listening to the text, students...because...
• Post: After reading/listening to the text, students...because...

CLICK HERE to see an outline of the stages and substages of Axbey's framework.

Why do you think this framework has the popularity that it does? What do you consider to be its strengths and challenges?

• Let's Try It: CLICK HERE to access the dialogue and follow the teacher's instructions. 

Task 3: Exploring the Text-Driven Approach

Brian Thomlinson's Text-Driven Approach provides a radically different approach to materials design. It uses texts as the primary building block of the syllabus. Although a full implementation of this approach is unfeasable to most of us because of curricular constraints in our schools, his framework can give us great ideas for developing a learning sequence around a single text. The list below outline the steps in his framework.

• Stage 0 - Select interesting texts! Without the "wow" factor, there is no potential for engagement. 
• Stage 1 - Readiness Activities - Pre-listening/reading activities designed to establish a connection between the learner's own lives and the text.
• Stage 2 - Experiential Activities - Help the learner to make concrete connections with the text and are given to the learners before they listen or read the text.
• Stage 3 - Intake Response Activities -  Focus on getting learners to reflect on what the text means to them, 
• Stage 4 - Development Activities - Encourage learners to use the text as a stimuls for a productive language task related to their own lives.
• Stage 5 - Input Response Activities - Are of two kinds, awareness and interpretation, and are intended to involve learners with the language of the text or the author's purpose on a deeper level.
• Stage 6 - Development Activity Extension - Cyclical approach where learners repeat or revise their previous development activities to incorporate discoveries from Stage 5.

Task 4: What is there to be exploited?

Think about a typical spoken or written text and answer the questions below.

• Think about the term exploitation. It basically means taking advantage of everything the text has to offer. Do you think that most reading response tasks in standard commercial textbooks do this?

• Going beyond simple comprehension questions, what kinds of information could the text contain that would be of benefit to the language learning process?

Task 5 - Brainstorming Systematically with the Idea Grid

McGrath suggests a simple template to guide the text exploitation process. Consider the short text below and all of the ideas he proposed to exploit it for use in the language classroom.

Now let's go back to the text from the PWP demo and use McGrath's Ideas Grid to brainstorm additional ways this text can be used: CLICK HERE

Task 6: Exploring a Framework for Flexible Materials

Click your group link below and follow the instructions in the document.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

References:

McGrath, I. (2016). Materials Evaluation and Design for Languge Teaching (2nd Ed.). Edinburgh University Press. 

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) (1998). Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Ur. P. (1991). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press. 

 Diseño de Materiales - Week 11 - Frameworks to Systematize Materials Development 

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 11 of the course Diseño de Materiales. In this class we will begin looking at some key concepts from Chapter 7 in McGrath to learn some useful frameworks to develop lessons or activity sequences based on a text.

Today's Goals:

• Particpate in two demo lesson sequences and analyze them to describe their potential use in materials development.
• Choose a sample text and propose activties to exploit it following the stages of the Text-Driven Approach.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I make materials development a time efficient process?
• What is the Text-Driven Approach (TDA) to materials development?
• What are the functions of Axbey's Pre-While-Post (PWP) framework for receptive skills development?
• How are TDA and PWP cycles similar and different?

Task 1: TDA Demo - Nasty School

You will participate in a demo lesson following the Text-Driven Approach. Follow the teacher's instructions and enjoy the activity sequence as a student. Later you will analyze what happened in the sequence from a materials design perspective.

• Introduction: You are going to hear a poem about children behaving badly in school. Before you listen to the poem, discuss these questions with your partners:

• What are some rules that kids typically have to follow in school?
• What are some ways that kids misbehaved when you were a student?

• Listen and Read: You are going to hear the first part of the poem called “Nasty School” by Shel Silverstein, a poet who was very popular with children when I was young. As you listen, imagine you are a 3rd grader in this elementary school. Try to visualize the answers to these questions. (CLICK HERE to access the poem)

• What are you wearing?
• What and who do you see around you?
• What are you thinking and feeling?

• Share some of the images that came to your mind. Did you ever do any of the behaviors mentioned in the poem?

• Now you are going to hear the second part of the poem where you will hear about what students learn at Nasty School. As you listen, imagine you are a naughty child in Nasty School. Visualize yourself doing these naughty things.

• Discussion: Discuss the following questions with your partners:

• What do you think of the poem?
• What is an image that stays in your mind related to the poem?
• Why do you think this poet was popular with children?
• Do you agree that it is sometimes fun to break the rules?
• Some people think that one of the primary functions of school is to teach children to control their impulses and learn how to be obedient. Do you agree with this perspective?
• What role should school shave in the formation of values and good behavior in society?

• Writing: Now you are going to write your own poem about one of the following imaginary schools. Choose your school and write a brief poem discussing what happens in this school, how students behave, and what they learn to do. CLICK HERE and go to your section of the document.

• Pleasant School: A utopian school where children learn to be model citizens

• Tico School: An academy where foreigners learn to think and behave like Costa Ricans

• School of Life: A school where children learn essential non-academic life skills that will prepare them for the real world

• Speaking: Re-read the first part of the poem with your partners and then read the roles information below to participate in an improvised roleplay with your group members.

• Student A: You are Johnny, a very misbehaved 3rd grader. You have been very disruptive in class for several months. You are a good kid but being naught is just so fun. Now it is time for the semester parent-teacher conference. You know that your teacher is going to tell your parents about all of the bad things you have been doing. Try to minimize your behavior to avoid punishment from your parents.

• Student B: You are Johnny’s mother or father. You know your son can be a little hyperactive but you think he is a good kid. Now it is time for the semester parent-teacher conference. Ask the teacher questions to find out how Johnny has been behaving.

• Student C: You are Johnny’s teacher. His terrible behavior has made your job a nightmare for the last six months. Now it is time for the parent-teacher conference. You want to explain to Johnny’s mom or dad all of the bad things that he has done and get their support to help him change his behavior.

• Language Focus: Now let's take a moment to look at the poem again. What do you notice about he verbs after the word "how"?

• Finish this sentence about you: "In school I learned how to ..."

• Let's Try: Let's go back to the school poems document and complete the final task as a group.

• Group Document: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Exploring the Text-Driven Approach

Now that you have learned about the structure of the Text-Driven Approach, discuss the following questions with your partners. CLICK HERE to view the lesson plan. 

• How did the text influence the activities that occured at each stage in the lesson?
• What language skills (listening, reading, speaking, writing) were addressed in the lesson sequence?
• Tomlinson says that texts and tasks used in class should be cognitively (intellectually) and affectively (emotionally) engaging for students in order to provide the ideal conditions for langauge development. Where you cognitvely or affectively engaged by the text or any of the tasks? If so, how?
• TDA depends on finding or creating texts with a high degree of potential engagement, what are some kinds of texts that your learners would find engaging? Why?

Task 3: An Alternative View of Textbooks

CLICK HERE to view a sample unit from a textbook series called Searching that was developed for Norwegian elementary school children to be used with a Text-Driven Approach. Skim the unit and discuss these questions.

• What do you notice is different about this textbook compared to the standard EFL textbook?

• The activities and tasks of a TDA lesson are inspired by the text itself and the teacher should use their creativity to develop their own activities to help students make a personal connection with the text. Choose a text and tell your partners what you could have students do in the following sections.

• Readiness Activities: Learners think about something personal which will help them connect with the content of the core text.

• Experiential Activities: Learners link the images and thoughts from the readiness activities to the text when first experiencing it.

• Intake Response Activities: Learners develop and then articulate personal responses to the text. These are not comprehension questions. They are interpretation and opinion questions.

• Development Activities: Learners develop the text by continuing it, relocating it, changing the writer’s views, personalizing it, responding to it, etc.

• Input Response Activities: Learners focus on a specific linguistic, pragmatic, discourse, genre or cultural features of the text in order to make discoveries about its use.

• Additional Development Activities: Learners revise what they wrote or said in the first developmental activities as a result of the discoveries they made in the input response activities.

Task 4: Exploring Axbey's PWP Cycle

CLICK HERE to access the dialogue and follow the teacher's instructions.