Reflection on Tutorial Task Week 8

The lesson for this week was about Materials Adaptation. There were 3 different adaptation techniques learned from this week lesson which are Masuhara & Tomlinson's, Maley's and McDonough & Shaw's. We were required to identify the similarities and differences between each techniques. Adaptation techniques teach us to practice a few necessary steps before we want to adapt a certain material. Teachers need to know what are their students' necessity and sometimes not all materials are suitable to be adapted in the classroom.

There are 3 levels of materials adaptation that teachers need to adhere:
- First level: Macro adaptation
- Second level: Adapting a unit
- Third level: Adaptation of specific activities in a unit

All of these levels work as a guidance to teachers in order to perform materials adaptation. I believe that Materials Adaptation is crucial and a necessary to be performed as there are elements in the materials need to be omitted, evaluated, modified, extended and so on. As the person who is in charge of their students, teachers have the right to accommodate instead of just blindly adapting a teaching materials.

After learning this lesson, I found that it is a good exposure for all of us as future teachers. It really should be taken into practice in order to achieve our aims and objectives as well as the school's and the Ministry's.

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Reflection on Tutorial Task Week 3

First and foremost, I could literally say that the tutorial task for this week was the toughest. Out of other tutorials for this semester, this one was the most challenging as we need to read articles regarding the Communicative Teaching and Learning (CLT) by Spada & Sauvignon. Therefore, my group and I had to read the articles intensively in order to identify the theories included in the articles. However, as Anasuhah mentioned in her blog, we could at least grasp what CLT is and some of the theories involved in CLT as we have been exposed to it in the previous semester. With the help of our lecturer's slides, we managed to understand and relate the theories altogether. At least, we have been familiarized with CLT before, thus it is slightly easier for us to comprehend what we read.

From what I have learnt, CLT is the idea of studying/learning a language for communicative purposes. A learner should be taught with the methods of learning that is proportionate with CLT theories. There are 5 types of competence a learner should acquire which are communicative, strategic, discourse, linguistic and socio-linguistic. CLT is also letting learners to determine whether to use the language formally or informally, depending on to whom they are speaking to, and in what context does the discourse occurred, along with to what extent are they having the conversation. CLT is a very important theory as it supports the means of learning a language. That is:  To be able to use the language to communicate.

However, during this week, I admit that reading the articles was very confusing, and I had quite a hard time figuring what Spada & Sauvignon were delivering through the articles. The most probable reason to this matter is because some of the words used are seemingly uncommon, as well as the long sentences throughout the articles. As future teachers, I need to be not just familiar with CLT but also deepen my knowledge and understanding in it so that I would be able to create activities and lesson corresponding to CLT aims and theories. Continue reading →

Sample of DLLM

Hello readers!

Here is the sample of our DLLM. The activities ranged by bands which we intently created it as in a digital form of a workbook. In order to complete this task, we are asked to create something which can be used flexibly by the learners. The arrangement of the activities have to be sorted by bands from 1-6. When learners use the DLLM, they can move step by step depending on their level of proficiency.

Why DLLM?

Purpose and rationale:

a)  to improvise the current method of teaching and learning process into technology-based.
b)  to develop an approach in reducing teachers’ reluctance to use technology.
c)  to attract the learners’ attention to use the language in real-life.

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Theories involved: 

a) The Affective Filter Hypothesis
There are three categories of which were motivation, self confidence and anxiety. The students with high performance tend to get motivated to learn language as usage digital language learning material is very interesting when using Prezi as a platform and social networking sites as a site to submit their tasks or homework. Generally, students prefer variation in doing tasks and bulky textbooks to accompany the lesson are no longer applicable. Besides that, the creation of digital language learning material is very beneficial for learners with high anxiety due to shyness and self-doubt may find this way of teaching is more comfortable and create conducive environment to learn.

b) The Input Hypothesis 
According to Krashen (1981), in this hypothesis, the learner will acquire the language when they receive the messages that is understandable which is also known as comprehensible input. Thus, for the beginning we use video to give the students a gist on what will they learn for that particular learning. A short video regarding 10 signs of a good friends is being used as the content is simple and direct, which will able the learners to understand the context of the learning. Moreover, the video also provides important point that will expose the learners with the input that able the learners to learn and use the language.

c) Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Here, we use audio-lingual approach on the activities that involve listening and speaking activities. Furthermore, in order to carry this approach we use video where students later on will need to watch and listen to the contents of the video before proceed with the activities. Moreover, all of the activities that we designed are focused on the students-centered which means that students will do all the learning activities together with their peers most of the time whereas teacher only will guide them and observe their progression. Furthermore, through the activities the students also will learn the rules of grammar and the rules of language use.

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Pedagogical Usability that it fulfills:

1) Learner control
- Learning a new topic, learners’ memory should not be burdened to an optimal level.
- Divide the material into smaller meaningful units

The theme that we have chosen is Social Issues and the topic that has been selected is What Friends Are For. Based on the activities, we can see that the main component `Friendship’ has been broken into smaller meaningful unit. If we refer back to “Dokumen Standard Prestasi Tingkatan 2”, it has been mentioned that activity for band 1 should be designed to know fundamental skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking. Therefore, the activity 1 is designed in a manner that students were given knowledge or exposure regarding the topic by asking them to watch a video and answer simpler questions to check their understanding. Then, the activity 2 is designed in a way that the students have to identify and match the sentences based on what they listen and read from the video.

2) Learner activity
- Determined by the learners characteristics but learning material that support student activity by being interesting and based on real life.
- Introduced problem-based learning:- learners is presented with a certain amount of source material and constructs their own conception of the topic to be learned.
- Encourage collaborative nature of learning.

Friendship is one of the most important aspect in student’s life. The underlying benefit of the activity is to enable the students to distinguish the signs of good friendship in order to let them think and reflect on their own companion.

3) Goal orientation

- Goals and objectives should be clear.

- Best result -> learning material, teaching and learner are aligned.

- Goals can be concrete or abstract

- If goals do not originate from learner, the meaning should be explained to them.

The learning material is designed in a way that the activities progress from a level to another level. The goal of the material is to teach he students to differentiate between god friendship and bad friendship. Even though the goals do not originate from the learners, the material is designed in a way that the material speaks for itself and the video explains it clearly.

4) Applicability

- Approach taken in learning material should correspond to the skills that learner will need in everyday and working life.

- Learning material should be at an appropriate level from the point of view of a learner’s learning process.

Friendship is an universal issue and something that revolves around humans life from childhood till older age. The learning materials designed to suit the learners’ point of view.

5) Added Value

- In the form of creative use of possibilities that technology offers

- Computer assisted learning offer following added values:

• > Learning is controlled by learners, initiated by the learner and is in the form of that the learner desires
• > Interesting content
• > Learners’ active participation

- Offer the learners tools that are suited to control the learning material contents and effectively and economically make use of that material.

- Learners should feel it is best to learn using technology.

The software, Prezi is an innovative form of presentation compared to power point slides and it can be controlled by the learner themselves and able to do the activities on their own. The content is interesting because it associates with daily life and students will feel motivated and participate actively because it is something they do, understand and going through at the moment.

6) Flexibility

- Takes into account learners’ individual differences

- Should be given opportunity to navigate freely through the learning material

- Contains diverse activities

The material is designed in a manner that student can use it for their own purposes. It shows that the material is designed for self-learning purposes and it contains variety of activities based on friendship.

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Tutorial Task Week 3

(a) Identify the theory behind communicative language teaching approach.

Based on the article of Communicative Language Teaching by Nina Spada, CLT is an approach to L2 teaching where it is a meaning-based and learner-centered approach. Here, the fluency is being emphasized more compared to the accuracy of the language or in other words, it is mainly focus on the ability of the students to understand and produce messages and not the teaching or correction of language form. Other than that, there is also other view that purpose CLT as primarily meaning-based which includes both the fluency and accuracy aspect.

The audio-lingual method is an oral-based approach which is based on the behavioral psychology (Skinner). In addition, it is used in the language learning where it gives attention on the inductive learning of grammar. The learning is conducted through the activities that involve the students to do repetition, practice and memorization. This method will drill the students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns. For example, dialogue activities which can be carried out by the students in form of imitation and repetition. By conducting this activity, the students will be able to use the target language communicatively.

Furthermore, according to Hymes’ theory the knowledge of the rules of grammar (linguistic competence) and the knowledge of the rules of language use (communicative competence) gives obvious impact on CLT. According to Hymes’, the focus in L2 teaching is through the accurate use of grammatical forms. Besides that, there are also several components of abilities that the learners need to require which is (1) linguistic competence; (2) sociolinguistic competence; (3) discourse competence; and (4) Strategic competence.

(1) Linguistic competence: the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.
(2) Sociolinguistic competence: the ability to say the appropriate thing in a certain social situation.
(3) Discourse competence: the ability to start, enter, contribute to, and end a conversation, and the ability to do this in a consistent and coherent manner.
(4) Strategic competence: the ability to communicative effectively and repair problems caused by communication breakdown.

 (b) State the implications of communicative language teaching towards materials development.

Implication 1:-
Functional categories found in teaching materials which includes making requests, greeting, making suggestion enable the learners to be aware of communicative functions. It also helps the learners to understand the fact that communication could break down if they only focus on linguistic (semantic-grammatical) meaning and ignore the intended use of the utterance (i.e. function) by the speaker. For instance, a person whom struggling to open the door due to heavy luggage asks a random student for a help gives grammatically correct answer, without taking any action, may cause offense as the answer shows lack of the understanding of the embedded function of ‘making a request’. Traditional teaching materials tend to simplify the complex form function relationship into one-to-one correspondence. The interrogatives are used for asking questions, imperatives for giving commands and conditionals for making hypothetical statements. From a communicative perspective, this relationship is explored more carefully, and as a result our views on the properties of language have been expanded and enriched. However, there are number of pedagogic problems associated with this approach to materials design, particularly to do with the sequencing of the language to be practised.

Implication 2:-
The real world language in use does not operate in a vacuum. We need to aware that the language function and language form does not operate in isolation but as part of as network of interconnected factors, all of which need to be taken into account in materials that use a communicative concept as their design principle. Based on a large amount of data from spoken language known as a corpus, Carter et al (2011) and O’ Keeffe et al (2007)explain how spoken grammar is distinctly different from written grammar. There are also principles of conversation (McCarten and McCarthy, 2010) in which social interactions play an important role. There is often a stated requirement for authenticity- a term that loosely implies as close an approximation as possible an approximation as possible to the world outside the classroom, in the selection both of language material and of the activities and methods used for practice in the classroom.

Implication 3:- 
A communicative approach also implies a concern with behavior, with patterns of interaction as well as linguistic content. Morrrow (1981) makes a simple and useful distinction between the ‘what’- the contents of a language programme- ad the ‘how’- the ways in which that content might be learned and taught. This behavioural ‘how’ would cover the kinds of activities we carry out and the tasks we perform, such as writing a letter or an essay and etc. Recent materials have reacted in various ways to and against the communicative movement of the 1970’s. However the main principles, with varying degrees of change and modification have had a long lasting impact on materials and methods that should not be underestimated. Thomson (1996) highlighted few points regarding CLT which were:

- CLT means not teaching grammar
- CLT means teaching only speaking
- CLT means pair work- role play
- CLT means expecting too much from the teacher

Recent materials have reacted in various ways to and against the communicative approach of the 1970’s. However the main principles, with varying degrees of change and modification have had a lasting impact on materials and methods that should not be underestimated. Certain criteria of CLT is too important to lose for instance the concern with the world beyond the classroom, the concern with the learner as an individual and the view of the language as structured to carry out the functions that we want to perform.

(c) Locate principles supporting CLT within the KBSM English Language Curriculum and F1 English Language Syllabus. 

Aim of KBSM English Language Curriculum:
The syllabus aims to extend learners’ English language proficiency in order to meet their needs to use English in certain situations in everyday life, for knowledge acquisition, and for future workplace needs.

By referring to the KBSM English Language Curriculum, there are several objectives that support the CLT.

By the end of their secondary school education, learners should be able to:

- form and maintain relationships through conversations and correspondence; take part in social interaction; and interact to obtain goods and services;
- obtain, process and use information from various audio-visual and print sources, and present the information in spoken and written form;
- listen to, view, read and respond to different texts, and express ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings imaginatively and creatively in spoken and written form;
Principles that support CLT:-

(1) form and maintain relationships through conversations and correspondence; take part in social interaction; and interact to obtain goods and services: 

Principle #1: promotes cooperative and collaborative learning
- Through the activities that involves conversation; the students will eventually interact with each other and give opinions on the topic that is being talk about. Here, the students not only able to express their idea on certain things but they also will learn on how to give a right response. For example, in the role-playing activities where students can ask each other questions regarding certain topic (e.g. family or friend) where during this process, they will ask questions and respond politely. Moreover, through this activity the students also practice the sociolinguistic competence.In addition, the students also will collaborate with each other in order to make the process of communication of the target language can be carry out successfully. Thus, teacher needs to be the facilitator during the learning activities and promotes communication among students. 

Principal #2: practice of using the language
- As the students get involves in the interaction process obtaining the goods and services, they will be exposed to discourse competence. Here, they will learn to start, contribute to, and end the conversation on the topic being talk about. The students will start to learn this in a consistent and coherent manner as they will take turn in order to participate in the conversation. Moreover, they also will be taught on how to ask questions and responds in a polite manner whenever they want to make enquiries. - Apart from that, the students also will learn the linguistic competence as they get involves in activities such as writing simple instruction or simple invitation. Here, the students usually will participate collaboratively and at the same time they will learn on how to use the simple grammar and vocabulary.

Principal #3: focus on form
- It is an approach to explicit grammar teaching, emphasizes a form-meaning connection and teaches grammar within the contexts and through communicative task. Thus, it is very important for the teacher to find activities that is related to their real life situation so that they will understand the context more easily. Here, teacher should encourage the students to express their idea by making the students get involve in interaction and focus more on the meaning and allow the learners to figure out the rule themselves naturally as they having a conversation with each other. During the activity, the students eventually will communicate by negotiation of meaning and gives feedback as well.

(2) obtain, process and use information from various audio-visual and print sources, and present the information in spoken and written form: 

Principal #1: input needs to be rich 
- The activities that involve the use of authentic materials are very essential to reflect real-life situations and demands. Thus, teacher should design activities that use various audio-visual and print resources for the learning. For example by using audio-visual such as videos, the students not only will listen to the spoken texts but they also can take a look at the visuals presented in the videos.This is very good as teacher can attract the student’s interest. Moreover, teacher plays an important role in maximizing the use of the target language and this can be done through giving an instruction during the learning. Furthermore, teacher should give students greater amount of input so that they will gains greater information on the target language.

Principal #2: input needs to be meaningful, comprehensible and elaborated.
- The materials that are used in the activity of the learning should be meaningful and comprehensible to the students so that they can use the language in their real life. Thus, teacher needs to design activity that is authentic. For example, teacher should choose passage that is meaningful and able the students to give view on what the text is all about. Here, the process of learning can be in the form of writing or orally where here the students are encourage to elaborate their thought on what they have learn.That is why; teacher must be able to choose appropriate materials, as the proficiency levels of the students differ.

(3) listen to, view, read and respond to different texts, and express ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings imaginatively and creatively in spoken and written form:

Principal #1: promotes collaborative learning 
- As the students are exposed to different texts, this can enhance their understanding on different usage of the language. The students will get involves in a group activity where they need to collaborate and interact with each other to complete their task. For example, storytelling activities during the discussion which ask the students to use their own words in order to express their ideas. Here, the process of negotiation of meaning can be seen during the discussion process.

Principal #2: focus on fluency over accuracy 
- As the students express their own ideas, the focus will be on the fluency of the language use. Here, teacher also will emphasize the students with the discourse competence and sociolinguistic competence as the students get involves in the interaction process regarding the topic being discussed.

Principal #3: learner-centered approach 
- Teacher should encourage the students to participate actively in an activity that use the target language which allow them to work on themselves, for example role-play activity that needs the students to cooperate with each other creatively. Thus, by conducting activity that focus on learner-centered, the students able to express their ideas and opinions freely. Moreover, in order for the learner’s linguistic knowledge to be automatic, students’ needs to be put under the real condition or situation of communication.

Principal #4: provide error corrective feedback 
- When the students presenting their works, teachers will either give positive or negative feedback to the students. In order for teacher to make correction on the language used by the students, teacher can used direct error corrective which involved teacher’s help such as providing clues or clarification requests. In addition, error corrective and positive feedback is necessary in support of the learning process. Moreover, during the feedback, the students also will be exposed to the strategic competence that allow them to communicative effectively and repair problems caused by communication breakdown.

(d) Identify the general categories and specific items to evaluate chapters in a Malaysian English Language textbook. 

Checklists are the systematic evaluation for course books. There are various checklists proposed by different authors such as Tucker (1975), Haycraft (1978), Daoud and Celce-Murcia (1979), Cunningsworth (1979, 1984) , Williams (1983), Grant (1987), Sheldon (1988), Harmer (1991), Skierso (1991) and Ur(1996). The most detailed checklist is Skeirso’s checklist.

The checklist of each and every author varies from one another from the aspect of scope, form, criteria and the terms used to describe the criteria. Almost all checklists share the similar general categories for evaluation of the chapters in course books which were design, language content, subject matter and practical considerations. Precisely, design of the course book is an important or main key for the evaluation of the textbooks which includes the layout of the materials on the page and it also involves the overall clarity of organisation whereas language content involves the coverage of linguistic items and language skills. Subject matter is related to the topic whether it is related to the theme of the course book. Last but not least, practical considerations are vital for evaluation of the course book and it can be explained as availability, durability and price. It is better if the course book is designed to be `reachable’ for all walks of people in the context of availability and price.

The specific items for the evaluation of the course book are transparency of the criteria. Transparency of the criteria can be explained as whether the concepts stated clearly and able to understand by all teachers and students with different potentials. Teachers, course designers, and materials writers must be aware that the input provided by them will possibly are processed by learners in ways different than intended. For instance, look at the words below. Can you understand these phrases? It has been used in course book.

* Sequencing of the grammatical patterns ( appropriateness)
* Sentence length ( matches to students proficiency of that level)
* Spiral approach
* Communicative activities
* Balance in language skills
* Usage of Authentic language
* Encourages learners to develop their own learning strategies
* Range of Vocabulary

The grading and sequencing of the materials is also comes under specific items for the evaluation of the course book. It can be explained in terms of the organisation of the language content. As far as we concern, language can be divided into structures. For instance, the American course book which is targeted for Upper Intermediate level seems to be easily interchanges and there seems to be no sequence. The chapter 6 of the book is entitled `Life essentials’ which talks about health problem or which is more related to healthy lifestyle however the chapter 7 is entitled as `The natural world’ which describes about remarkable places which requires travelling. It shows there is no sequencing in terms of lexical items. In contrast, Malaysian English Form 2 textbook shows correct sequence and 3 chapters clustered under one main theme, for instance `People’. The chapter 1 entitled `What people do’, the second chapter entitled as ` Villagers and their livelihood’ and followed by chapter 3 entitled as `Famous faces’. It clearly shows the lexical items are related to people and there is proper sequencing of the materials.

In addition, the presentation of the skills in the materials also has equal impact in evaluation of the course book. The course book must emphasize and integrate four skills which were speaking, reading, writing and listening. However, some course book fails to give equal importance and seem to be narrowed to focusing on writing skills only. As a teacher, we have to be aware that writing skills alone is not being used in communication. The activities of the course book must be more communicative so that it can benefit the students to improve their proficiency and boost their confidence level.

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Reflection on Tutorial Task Week 4/5

For this task, we are asked to choose one article regarding to the checklist for evaluating materials and the article title is “Choosing & Evaluating Textbooks” by Neville Grant.

This is what I can conclude from the lesson:

1. Textbook evaluation is crucial as it gives teachers the opportunity to adjust what they want to distribute to the learners. Different learners require different approaches. Therefore, teachers need to know who their students are, what are their levels what kind of approaches that are suitable for them and so on. From this lesson, I realize that we need to evaluate textbooks or even any materials that we want to adapt in our classroom. This is where we expect the effectiveness of the material or precisely, the textbook.

2. Teachers need to become aware of the range of textbooks and also evaluations available out there. There are abundant textbooks and also evaluations that we can pick and adapt. During this lesson, I realized that there is a need to choose the suitable evaluation checklist in order to end up adopting the right book. There is always a right book for the learners, teachers just need to figure it out.

3. I personally liked the evaluation because it is really easy to use, it is not complicated compared to other checklists. It is also quite moderate and user-friendly in terms of its arrangement. There are also stages where we need to look at the surface, and also in-depth.

There is a lot that we gained from this week lesson as we can apply it later in the future especially the exposure that we get about the importance of textbook evaluation and how to evaluate it critically. Continue reading →