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.

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.