Diseño de Materiales - Week 12 - Systematizing Materials Development

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 12 of the course Diseño de Materiales. In this class we will review the PWP and TDA activity frameworks for exploiting written and spoken texts. You will share your sample activity sequence based on an authentic video and we will also learn how to use McGrath's Ideas Grid as a brainstorming tool for lesson planning.

Today's Goals:

Propose an activity sequence following a text exploitation framework based on an authentic video.
Use McGrath's Ideas Grid to identify potential activities and language content to address in a short text.

Guiding Questions:

How can you make materials development be a more time efficient process?
What is text exploitation and how can McGrath's Ideas Grid help your planning process?

Warm Up: Say 3 Things

Let's take a moment to get to know each other a little better. We'll pick a category from the list below. Then one of our partners will say three items from the category.

One they like
One they dislike
One they don't have strong feelings about

Then it is our job to guess which one is which.

Click to view full size.

Task 1: Reviewing Text Exploitation Frameworks

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?

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 2: Sharing Our Authentic Video Cycles

For homework you chose a short (1-2 minute) authentic video and developed an out line of an activity cycle with it using either Pre-While-Post or the Text Driven Approach. Get in groups to share your video and walk your partners through your activity cycle. The DO NOT have to do the activities. For the sake of time, you will just explain it.

Task 3: 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 4 - 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.