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 ... .
- 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.
- 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
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.
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