Diseño de Materiales - Week 8 - Designing Supplementary Activities and Worksheets

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 8 of the course Diseño de Materiales. In this class we will discuss some key concepts from Chapter 5 in McGrath regarding the selection and creation of supplementary materials and worksheets. Then you will work in groups to explore two activity types that you can design to supplement your coursebook to help students focus on meaning as well as focus on grammatical form.

Today's Goals:

• Discuss reasons to find and create supplementary materials.
• Review a framework for designing communication focused and language focused materials.
• Collaborate with your partners to design and share your own sample material.

Guiding Questions:

• Why should I look for and create my own supplementary learning materials?
• What are the key features of communicative tasks?
• How do structured-input activities help students become aware of how a language works?

 

Community Builder: Solar System

Click the link below to access the Jamboard and follow the teacher's instructions.

• Jamboard: CLICK HERE

Group 1: Communicative Tasks

Task 1: Theory Input

In chapter two of English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice (Harwood, 2010), Ellis tells us that tasks are a special kind of activity that require students to focus on the meaning of what they are hearing, reading, or saying rather than focus a particular grammar structure. The idea is that tasks replicate the way language is used in real life and for that reason, they are helpful for students' language development. Even though students are not focused on grammar while participating in the task, tasks can be designed to help students practice particular grammar forms. There are two kinds of tasks.

• Focused Tasks: Ones that are designed to elicit or require a specific linguistic feature
• Unfocused Tasks: Ones that elicit general samples of learner language but are not designed with a specific feature in mind

However, Ellis also lists the following criteria that must be fulfilled to consider an activity a task and not a contextualized grammar exercise:

• There is a primary focus on meaning.
• Students choose the linguistic and nonlinguistic resources needed to complete the task.
• The task should lead to real-world processes of language use.
• Successful performance of the task is determined by examining whether students have achieved the intended communicative outcome.

Task 2: Is it a Task?

Look at the following two materials for classroom activities and decide if they meet the requirements to be considered a task. If so, decide whether they are focused or unfocused tasks.

Click to see full size image.

Click to see full size image.

What does the author say? CLICK HERE to read the author's comments on the two activities.

Task 3: Create a Task

Now it's your turn to create a communicative task. Click your group document below and follow the instructions.

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

Group 2: Structured-Input Activities

Task 1: Theory Input

In chapter two of English Language Teaching Materials: Theory and Practice (Harwood, 2010), Ellis tells us that SLA research shows that learners can acquire structures incidentally, meaning that they do not need to be intentionally focused on the target structure with the intention of learning it. However, they do need to notice it. In this way, a teacher might mark all the examples of an important structure in a text in bold to help students notice this feature. This is what Ellis calls input-enriched activities. A teacher might have students read and discuss a text like this first with a focus on the meaning of the text and a personal reaction of the students and then later go back and focus on the highlighted grammar forms.

Structured-Input Activities go a little farther. They give students enriched input containing a target structure and then require students to do different activities to process that information explicitly to come to a better understanding of how the language works. Look at the sample structured-input activity below. Read the instructions and some of the examples.

Click to see full sized version.

Task 2: Analysis

Ellis gives some guiding principles for creating your own structured-input activities. Read them, then discuss which ones are present in the sample activity. Then tell your partners how you could include or modify or extend the sample activity so that it includes some of the other principles.

• The input can be in spoken or written form.
• The student's response can take various forms (e.g.mark true/false, check a box, select the correct picture, draw a diagram, perform an action), but in each case the response will be completely nonverbal or minimally verbal.
• Student’s actions can be sequenced like this: first understand the meaning, then notice the form and function of the grammar structure, and finally error identification.
• Learners should have the opportunity to make some kind of personal response to relate the input to their own lives.
• Learners need to be made aware of common errors involving the target structure as well as correct usage.
• Students get immediate and explicit feedback on their responses to the input because the teacher can check if they got the right answer.

Task 3: Create an Activity

Now it's your turn to create a communicative task. Click your group document below and follow the instructions.

• Group 3: CLICK HERE
• Group 4: CLICK HERE

References

Harwood, N. (2010). English language teaching materials: Theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.