Diseño de Materiales - Week 10 - Working with Authentic Materials

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 10 of the course Diseño de Materiales for the Licenciatura in English Teaching program at ULACIT. In this class we will talk about the concept of task authenticity and we will discuss some practical strategies to create your own authentic listenings and explore a framework for designing class activities with them. 

Today's Goals:

• Deliver an elevator pitch regarding the topic of materials and speaking skills.
• Explore the concept of task authenticity and propose task ideas for sample texts.
• Create a semi-structured interview recording and propose an activity sequence for students to follow.
• Clarify instructions regarding the didactic materials file and presentation.

Guiding Questions:

• What is task authenticity and why is it important?
• What are the benefits and challenges of using semi-structured interviews as a material design technique?

Task 1: Speaking Skill Elevator Pitch

This week you submitted your Materials and Macroskills Paper. Let's take a moment to share the highlights of your research in the form of an elevator pitch. You will have 3 minutes to prepare your pitch and 90 seconds to deliver it. Use the prompts below to organize your pitch. 

• Second language speaking involves...
• Speaking games involve... They are effective because ... 
• Problem-solving activities involve ... They are effective because ...
• Roleplays involve... They are effective because ... 

Task 2: Demo Activity

In this activity you will experience a demonstration of an activity sequence using an authentic text. This was originally designed for a group of intermediate adult learners. The topic of their unit was "People and Places" and it discussed reasons why people live where they do and why people move. Click your group link below and follow the instructions.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Demo Activity Processing

Now look back at the demo sequence and discuss the following questions from a teacher perspective.

• Describe the characteristics of the text (video).

• Was it an example of an authentic material? Why or why not?

• What were some potential or real strengths and challenges of using the video with intermediate learners?

• Describe the tasks that you were asked to do 

• What aspects of the activities facilitated the comprehension of the text?

• Brian Tomlinson says that learning materials should serve one or more of the following four functions. Did these texts and tasks serve any of these functions?

• Instructional: They inform learners about the language.
• Experiential: They provide exposure to the langauage in use.
• Elicitative: They stimulate students to use language.
• Exploratory: They faciliate discoveries about language use.

Principles for Working with Authentic Texts: 

Read the list of principles from chapter 6 of McGrath. How can you relate them to the previous activity? Can you give an example from your own teaching context?

• Help Comprehension: Students will find it easier to cope with "real life" listening/reading if they are exposed to authentic texts in class.

• Put the Learner in the Picture: In most real life listening and reading scenarios, we have context to help us. We are interacting in a conversation and understand the purpose. We are listening to two people talk in line behind us and we the situation informs what is happening, Learners listening to recording in the classroom are at a disadvantage because they are hearing the audio out of context. Before playing the audio, give the learners all the contextual information they would have if they were really there.

• Focus on Meaning: Natural (real life) text processing involves a primary focus on meaning.

• The meanings that we ask students to extract should be related to the meanings the intended reader or listener is expected to derive from the text.

• Give students support: If you want learners to cope with the challenges of the text, give them help.

• Focus on Language: After meaningful processing of the text has occured, you can then draw students' attention to language features, not before.

Task 4: Creating Your Own "Authentic" Materials

It can be extremely difficult to find an authentic video or audio file about the topic of the lesson that perfectly fits your students' needs, interests, proficiency level. You can save yourself the trouble by creating your own by using the technique of semi-structured interviews. 

• Readiness Tasks: Questions to put students in the right frame of mind to experience the audio.

• What was the last snack you ate?
• Why do you like that snack?

• Experience Tasks: Questions or tasks for students to do while they listen to help them connect with the audio and process what they are hearing.

• CLICK HERE to access the Jamboard.

• Personal Response Tasks: Questions to elicit a personal response from students after they hear the audio. These are not comprehension questions. Instead, they should be focused on eliciting students' thoughts and feelings about what they just heard.

• What do you think about the combinations the speakers mentioned? 
• Do any of them sound good to you?
• Have you tried any of the combinations mentioned by the speakers?

• Extension Tasks: Production activities that are inspired by the content of the audio. These can be discussions, debates, role-plays, writing prompts, etc. 

• Task 1: Tell your partners about your own weird food combination. 

• What is the combination?
• Why do you like it?
• How did you discover this combination?

• Task 2: Role-Play - Imagine you work for a fast food restaurant or snack food company. Create a marketing plan for a unique new combination that will catch people's attention, build their curiosity, and make them want to try it. Create your sales pitch and be ready to share with the group.

• Language Tasks: Bring students' attention to specific features of the audio by playing segments or showing quotes to help them make discoveries about the language or reinforce some linguistic aspect (grammar, vocab, pronunciation, etc.). Here are some sample quotes from the text you heard. What are some possible language tasks you could do with them?

• "I guess I just came up with it myself.
• "I've heard it's really good for hangovers."
• "He would drizzle honey all over the scrambled eggs."

• "You were telling us earlier about something weird your brother used to do." 
• "Yeah my brother used to eat this disgusting thing. He would make... or my mom would make scrambled eggs and he would drizzle honey all over the scrambled eggs." 

• "I'll start off with a food combination that I've always liked since I was a kid. 
• "I've been doing that for a long time. 

• Mark's Inverview Archive: CLICK HERE to access a playlist of semi-structured interviews your teacher has created over the years for use in the classroom. 

Task 5: 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! Reading the following extracts. After each one, summarize what you read and tell your partners what you think about it. 

• Authenticity of Text and Task: "With less proficient learners, we usually use simplified texts in order to make the appropriate in 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."

• "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 out 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?

References

McGrath, I. (2016). Materials Evaluation & Design for Language Teaching. Edinburg University Press.