Selection & Adaptation of Materials and Activities - criteria for evaluation of material and task

•“Oh, this is a good textbook”

  or

•“Well, I don’t think my students will like this book”

What do these statements have in common?

•Evaluating materials (textbooks)

•What is the basis of these evaluations?

•Ad hoc / impression / intuition / classroom experience?

•Systematic evaluation?

•Normally we evaluate before we select materials

 

 Systematic material evaluation 

 

•An ideal systematic textbook evaluation would be a longitudinal one

•pre-use evaluation

•whilst-use evaluation

•post-use evaluation

•The core of systematic material evaluation is to examine how well a given material matches the needs of a language programme and how effectively and efficiently it can realise the objectives of the programme.

•Therefore needs analysis has to be done prior to textbook evaluation

•How can we evaluate suitability of materials?

•When they fulfill features of good materials

 

  Evaluating materials based on good features of the materials

 

Adapted from Tomlinson (1998):

1. Good materials should attract the students’ curiosity, interest and attention - materials should have novelty, variety, attractive layout, appealing content, etc

2. Materials should help students to feel at ease - layout of presentation, tasks and activities and texts and illustrations should all look friendly

3. Materials should help students to develop confidence -provide tasks or activities that students can cope with.

4. Materials should meet students’ needs – covers what is relevant and useful to what the students need to learn and what they want to learn.

5. Materials should expose the students to language in authentic use - authentic language are more motivating and challenging

6. Materials should provide the opportunities to use the target language for communicative purposes to the students.

7. Materials should take considered the positive effects of language teaching are usually delayed - important for materials (textbooks) to recycle instruction and to provide frequent and ample exposure to the instructed language features in communicative use.

8. Materials  should take into account that students differ in learning styles - provide a variety of  tasks and activities to cater for all students

9. Materials should take into account that students differ in affective factors - accommodate different attitudinal and motivational background as much as possible

10. Materials should maximise learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic and emotional involvement which stimulates both right and left brain activities - good Materials enable the students to receive, process and retain information through “multiple intelligences”.

 

•What kinds of materials can be used for writing activities?

1. Visual-based materials

•Pictures

•Clips / videos / films

2. Reading-based materials

•Reading texts

3. Auditory –based materials

•Listening texts

4. Combination of materials

•Visual auditory (clips, etc) / Pictures with texts (cartoon, etc)