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

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 8 of the course Diseño de Materiales in the Licenciatura in English Teaching at ULACIT. 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.
• Share your materials evaluation checklist draft and get feedback from your professor.

Guiding Questions:

• Why should I look for and create my own supplementary learning materials?
• How do structured-input activities help students become aware of how a language works?
• What changes do I want to make to create my final draft of the materials evaluation checklist. 

 

Warm  Up: Quick Speech

Take 60 seconds to give a quick improvised speech answering the questions below. 

• Vacation Spots
• What is a place you like to visit on vacation?
• What do you do when you go there?
• When was the last time you visited and who did you go with?

• Personal Hobbies
• What is one of your favorite hobbies?
• What do you like about it?
• When did you start and why?

• Context and Needs Assessment
• What school do you work for?
• What is the subject, goals, and schedule of the course you teach?
• What can you say about students' needs, abilities, and challenges?

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.

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Task 2: Input Processing and Structured Input Activities

Let's consider one popular theoretical model that has been proposed to explain the process of language acquisition and also to explore a grammar teaching strategy in alignment with that theory . We will look at Bill VanPatten's 1993 article Grammar Teaching for the Acquisition Rich Classroom to explore his idea of Processing Instruction.

• "...there are no cases of successful first or second language acquisition without some form of comprehensible input present during learning. Conversely, an absence of comprehensible input is consistent with unsuccessful first and second language acquisition.”

• “From second language research, we also know that the output of learners is not simply a reflection of the input. First, something happens to the input as it is processed. In addition, there is nonlinear development of the learner’s linguistic system over time. Thus, the output of learners at any given stage may bear only a partial resemblance to the input that they have been exposed to (pp. 435-436)."

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Based on these ideas, VanPatten presents a model of second language acquisition that consists of three parts:

• Input Processing: “...involves the conversion of input to intake. Intake is that subset of the input that is comprehended and attended to in some way. It contains linguistic ‘data’ that are made available for acquisition.”

• Accommodation and Restructuring: “Since the internalization of intake is not a mere accumulation of discrete bits of data, data have to ‘fit in’ in some way and sometimes the accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in the rest of the system.”

• Access: “...involves making use of the developing system to create output. Access may be totally, partially, or not at all successful, depending on task demands, previous experience (practice), and other factors (pp. 435-436).”

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• “If we recall that traditional instruction involves explanation followed by some kind of output practice, then in what way is the language acquisition system being provided with relevant input data that is both comprehensible and meaning-bearing?”

• “...traditional grammar instruction and practice actually works on those processes involved in accessing a developing system. In short, traditional grammar instruction and practice are akin to putting the cart before the horse when it comes to acquisition; the learner is asked to produce when the developing system has not yet had the relevant intake data (pp. 435-436).”

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• “...what would happen if explicit instruction in grammar involved the manipulation of both input and input processing in some way? What if the input were structured in such a way as to channel the processes responsible for the conversion of input to intake (pp. 435-436)?"

• “The type of instruction discussed here is called processing instruction, given that its aim is to alter the way in which learners process input. Put in other words, its purpose is to direct learners’ attention to relevant features of grammar in the input and to encourage correct form-meaning mappings that in turn result in better intake (p. 438).”


• The input used in processing instruction is called structured input. The term “input” is used because…learners are not engaged in producing language but are actively engaged in processing input. The term ‘structured’ is used because the input is not free-flowing and ‘spontaneous’ such as the input one might receive when involved in a communicative interaction. Instead the input is purposefully ‘prepared’ and ‘manipulated’ to highlight particular grammatical features based on the processing strategies described previously.”

Task 3: Analysis

Ellis gives some guiding principles for creating your own structured-input activities. Read them, then discuss which ones are present in the sample activities in the next section. Tell your partner 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.

• What are students asked to do with the input?
• How are they processing the form-meaning relationship?
• If there is an extension activity, what are they asked to do?

• Spanish Activities: CLICK HERE
• English Activities: CLICK HERE

References

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

VanPatten, B. (1993). Grammar Teaching for the Acquisition-Rich Classroom. Foreign Language Annals 26(4). 435-450. 1111/j.1944-9720.1993.tb01179.x