ENG516 Grand Quiz Preparation

10. Selection and Developing Materials

•  Two types of materials can be used raw materials or authentic, e.g. newspapers, reports and published materials, e.g. course-books.
•  When using published materials, if they are part of a unit, then activities can be created according to learners' needs.
•  Raw materials are challenging, need effort to check suitability to be usable for the class. Adaptation and customization is needed.
•  In designing tasks, especially for lower level students, attention to language level’ is required so as not to ‘turn off’ the students.
•  The teacher has to balance suitability of raw and published materials in terms of:
•  Relevance to learners’ objectives  Quality of materials as learning tools  The time needs for customization and adaptation  Cost
•  Features of Materials - suitability remains criteria
•  In grammatical syllabus, its linguistic units and choose materials for it.
•  A Business English syllabus can be based on:
•  Identification of the elements that constitute the scope of Business English  Selection of materials that fit the syllabus template
•  Another approach sees classroom activities as the basis of material selection.
•  The medium of materials could be: print materials - newspapers, reports, audio/video materials and multi medium materials.
•  Equipment: The medium of materials could be audio which satisfies the above criteria, offers a wide range of choice in Business English courses and is cheap.
•  Videos are also catching up with audio in popularity as they combine sound and picture, however are considered expensive ELT materials.
•  The personal computer has revolutionized the way work is done.
•  The telephone line has traditionally been used for distance learning.
•  Video conferencing, email for feedback, Internet offers unlimited sources of topical and authentic material.
•  The teacher has to balance suitability of these for particular learning aims.
•  The most common ready-made material is course books, which are popular all over the world.
•  Course books are textbooks, of which the teacher and the students have copies, which are to be followed systematically as the basis for course design.
•  Disadvantages are that course books can get outdated easily.
•  Important factors for learners could include learners’ specific requirements: Clear layout and structure, relevance, regular progress checks, revision opportunities, entertainment, self-study sections, reference sections, up-to-date content, and authenticity. Price can also be a factor.
•  Teachers’ priorities could be the amount of guidance provided in a particular book, the extra activities, flexibility and ease of use.
•  Publishers’ priorities are to satisfy teachers and students and catering for the needs of a wide clientele.
•  Innovative teachers might feel using a course book is too conservative to go with new methodologies.
•  Companies might not want too daring approaches and will prefer safe, traditional methods.
•  A key issue when considering the choice of course book (or indeed any materials) is authenticity.
•  There are many advantages of using authentic materials – it brings the real world into the class and provides motivation to learners by making the task realistic and useful for their future workplace.
•  Authenticity could be of content and activities.
•  Authenticity of activities is related to professional work.
•  Presentation or negotiation is the main criterion for business success.
•  Sometimes institutions and teachers find it important to produce tailor-made material, designed to supplement the course book or the regular course.
•  This could be done by the training department or the individual teacher.
•  Experienced teachers can have a huge amount of material which they can adapt to suit learning needs/contexts.
•  Some of this adaptation can be merely cosmetic to make it look custom-made.
•  Material used for an in-company course for a group of engineers in a multinational electrical engineering company based in France, of the production department.
•  A KD router (a piece of electrical equipment) is a best-selling product can be used a group of property consultants based in Rome.
•  Vocabulary, dates and place names can be adapted for learners of two different contexts.
•  Generating Materials: Even if the teacher can get hold of genuine documents, the chances are they will need adapting, either because they may not be at an appropriate level, or they may only contain one or two ‘usable’ items, or because they are only relevant to a few people in the class.
•  Ploughing through an irrelevant document can be extremely tedious, and may alienate learners.
•  Materials are sometimes are so context-specific that they cannot be reused.
•  Preparatory Stage: Material adaptation at this stage has to focus on:
•  Assessment of the learners’ needs  Deciding on priorities  Identifying and analyzing language items  Working out pedagogical approaches  Deciding what sorts of activities to use
•  Making decisions about layout  Evaluating or piloting early or draft versions
•  Corpora (collections of real language data) can be an important source of material.
•  It is authentic, as it is drawn from real language in use.
•  A concordance is a list of phrases, each showing the same word or language feature taken from a corpus, which allows users to focus on a particular lexical, grammatical, or discourse issue (concordances are generated electronically, so they may be accessed via the Internet).
•  A typical concordance program can allow the user to isolate a particular language feature and analyze it in detail.
•  Teachers can extract a few items and then use them in class for activities, how words are used, to create gap-fills for their colleagues, complete the sentences and write similar ones themselves.
•  Open ended activities are helpful in allowing students to internalize language and professional content more than controlled exercises which focus on testing accuracy.
•  Using corpora has the advantage of making us aware of the real usefulness of teaching a certain language item.
•  Corpus studies can give information on the most frequently used business terms - single words as well as multi-word items such as compounds, collocations, noun phrases, and acronyms.
•  Corpora allow us to move away from intuition to objectivity in our efforts to develop appropriate and useful materials.
•  Sometimes teachers of Business English do not find prepackaged materials to suit a particular context.
•  The aim of using the learner themselves as a resource is to get content from the learner; the teacher remains the language expert.
•  Role-play can use real situations from learners’ workplace, meetings, telephone calls, and the like.
•  Basic procedure to follow is to discuss the background of the activity, followed by role plays where teachers and students take specific roles.

11. Selection and Developing Materials

•  Frameworks are explicitly structured contexts designed to help teachers and learners.
•  A framework usually consists of a diagram or a simple outline, or a list of key words which can be used as a prompt.
•  Course books are the major source of framework material which can be used extensively. The teachers use their own program but supplemented with other material.
•  They also serve as a syllabus. Other benefits are:
•  Ready-made texts and tasks: Available for appropriate level  Economy: Cheapest material available  Convenience: To use, easy to carry, pack, and stack.  Guidance: For inexperienced teachers.  Autonomy: Learners can learn, monitor, and review with autonomy.
•  Disadvantages are that they might be inadequate, i.e. cannot supply needs of diverse learners, topics might not interest everyone, and may inhibit teacher’s creativity.
•  Some frameworks work in homogenous classes and cannot cater to diverse learning styles.
•  They have their own rationale and approach.
•  The using of too many framework materials results in making the teaching process overly easy for teachers whose role might be reduced as just mediators of content.
•  The criterion for course book selection is generally applicable to all; however, for a certain course or learner population it can be specific.
•  General requirements are that it has a clear layout and is reviewed periodically.
•  One of the most important points to note is that a course book has clear stated objectives.
•  Other points are:  Coverage: Systematic  Authentic texts language  Topics: relevant Focus on communication  Specialist Vocabulary  Needs: Relevant
•  Teaching philosophy spells out the:
•  Cultural content.  Can be used as a self-study material, reference book.  Need of any special equipment.  Provides guidance for exam preparation.
•  Using a course book entails that the teacher knows the good and bad points about it, what a single unit or chapter covers in terms of coverage, texts, tasks and administration.
•  Coverage can be seen as follows:
•  Covers theoretical concepts  Language forms  Communication skills  Professional content
•  Texts can be seen according to their:
•  Difficulty level  Genre  Interesting/Boring  Varied
•  Tasks: (Activities)
•  Relevant, useful  Balance fluency and accuracy  Heterogeneous  Cover language items and skills
•  Administration: