Reflection: Week 4

Hey people. So this is the reflection for week 4: Patricia Byrd - Evaluation for Selection and Analysis for Implementation. Here we go, again.

1) How it affects me?

At first, I would believe that textbooks are really just a regular, boring book that the students rarely use in the classroom. But then, I see that there are a lot of procedures and steps to be taken in order for a textbook to be a useful materials for learning. So, I think my perceptions for boring textbooks is a bit altered but for me, I still believe that we need to make changes so that textbooks can be a very authentic material for the learners to use.

2) How does it affect my current level of knowledge? & 3) How can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

For starters, I know that there are a lot of procedures and steps to be taken in order to create a textbook. It would seems that textbooks are not just created to be a workbook, but it is to used to facilitate learning for the students to the fullest. They used checklists to make sure that the textbooks to be used is appropriate for the students thus able to motivate and help them learn language better.

By using the checklist, we can make sure that the textbooks to be used are well-prepared and suitable for our students. I learned that checklists really help in determining what books to be used as well as their contents (whether or not it is suitable and the students can relate to). So in the future, I would be able to make the right decisions about whether or not the books can used. Different books have different priorities and by using the checklists, I can make sure the expectations I have for a book is fulfilled. Besides that, I would not want a book that the students can never understand.

Reflection for week 3: CLT

Hello and welcome to Week 3's reflection. Here we go.

1) How it affects me?

CLT is an influential theory that relates majorly with language learning in the classroom. The learning model in the typical Malaysian classroom is based on CLT, so I would be wise to revise and understand how CLT relates with learning. If I myself do not know about CLT and its functions in learning, I would not be able to implement it in the classroom, and that would be bad. CLT is very influential and is the basis of learning language in the classroom. 

2) How does it affect my current level of knowledge?

For me, I would think that by mastering and adapting to the theories of CLT, I am positive that language learning will be easier for the students as it relates to their real-life situations. The communicative part of CLT aims to teach learners in a real-life context so that they can implement it when they go out to the real world later. Language learning would be a lot easier if they can practice on it.

I learned about the theories behind CLT, and how can it relate to the syllabus in Malaysia. By understanding what theories that help the learners to learn as well as how it can be beneficial for future teachers, it is realistic to see the usefulness of CLT.

3) How can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

As a pre-service teacher, it would be wise for me to be able to adapt and adopt the CLT model as it is one of the most influential learning model that has been around for decades. The knowledge of CLT, will help me in preparing for lessons in the future for my classroom. As we know that the CLT model is used throughout the schools in Malaysia, if we can adapt CLT into our methods of teaching, surely our lessons would be effective thus helping the students to learn language.

Week 5 - Checklist Evaluation by Patricia Byrd

Textbook Evaluation Checklist

Patricia Byrd and Marianne Celce-Murcia

Evaluation of the fit	Yes (a good fit)	Perhaps (an adequate fit)	Probably (a poor fit)	Absolutely not (wrong for curriculum, students, and/or teachers)
Fit between the textbook and the curriculum
Fits curriculum goals		/
Has appropriate linguistic content	/
Has appropriate thematic content	/
Fits the pedagogical and SLA philosophy of the program/course		/
Fit between the textbook and the students
Explanations understandable and useable for students	/
Examples understandable and useable for students	/
Activities appropriate for students	/
Thematic content understandable	/
Fit between the textbook and the teachers
Fits the language skills of our teachers	/
Fits the knowledge based of our teachers	/
Provides explanation that can be used by our teachers	/
Provides examples that can be used and expanded by our teachers	/
Fits the needs and preference	/
Provides in-book or instructor’s manual support for teachers	/
Overall evaluation of the fit of the book for this course in this program
Should the text be selected

In our opinion, this checklist, by Byrd, is not appropriate for an in-depth chapter/textbook evaluation. Looking at this the holistic view, we can see that this checklist seems to be a good evaluation at first but after viewing this checklist analytically, we deduced that this checklist is suitable for the overview of the textbook/chapter. In lay man’s term, this checklist just focuses on whether the textbook/chapter meets the need of the students, teachers and the curriculum, as a whole.

A full analysis of the textbook/chapter is hard to be done because the checklist is too simple and a bit vague. Furthermore, this checklist does not include the micro-evaluation stage that is crucial, even though it contains the macro-evaluation stage.

Our suggestions would be to use this checklist as the overview evaluation and then complemented by another checklist that involves a more in-depth evaluation. Then we can consider the evaluation is good.

Evaluation Questions:

1)   How it affects me?

First of all, I learned about the different types of checklist and their uses in developing materials. When I came across this checklist, I would eagerly suggest to use this as one of the evaluation methods for our future works. But, as I go in-depth and tried using the checklist to evaluate a chapter, it occurred to me that this checklist is complete and incomplete at the same time. What I meant was this checklist was good to evaluate a chapter holistically, but not analytically. Pairing with another checklist would be the best option to evaluate a chapter thoroughly.

2)   & 3) How does it affect my current level of knowledge and how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

I now know that different researchers have their own opinions about materials evaluation. Thus, that is what differs their concepts and thus, different checklists were created. Now, I am not saying that some of the checklists are bad, but if they were accompanied by other checklists, the evaluation would be complete and authentic. Experimenting with checklists would be the best way to find out the best evaluation method.

Week 4 - Material Development by Patricia Byrd

Week 4 - Material Development

CLT Week 3

Week 3 - CLT MD by Shyazzwan Wan

Tutorial Task 9

This is our discussion about the listening task.

In this activity, students are required to listen and understand a talk. Question (A) is asking about what are the changes that happen to the teenagers and the counsellor’s role in helping students to solve the problems. Question (B) will be about what effects that growing up have on teenagers. Firstly, students will be discussing about the questions based on the audio recording. The question starts with a bottom-up process where students have to listen to the topic in the talk and later on they will have to answer a question about changes that teenagers are facing now, activities that involved in this question are answering and duplicating. First, the listener will listen to the topic and then they will answer the question, other than that they are actually duplicating what is mention by the speaker in the audio. Next, the question which can a counsellor help them to solve those problems actually involved top-down process, students have to discuss the question based on what they know simply saying that they will have to utilize their schemata. We would say that the extending activity involved in the question because they have to think beyond the text by continuing whether talking to a counsellor can help students solve the problems.

Question C need the students to use both top-down and bottom-up processes. To understand what they have to do, first they have to listen the audio recording and recall back a situation where they seek for someone advices and then they will have to relate the experiences to their friends. The audio recording acts as a guide for them to recall what information that they can use in relating the experience to their friends. This guide or scaffolding, become the base of their knowledge and they can get access to it. This is the combination of both top-down and bottom-up processes, often called the hybrid process.

The listening process play a crucial part in this activity because they need to be able to understand the text to be able to answer the questions. To be able to understand this, they need to listen properly to the audio recording. Picking up the major points from a text is the most crucial ability to master and by training them to listen properly, little by little, they would be able to pick up the points from a recording. This contributes to generate meaning from what they heard. With the information they collected, it is now possible to answer the questions by referring back to what they heard and thus comprehension is established.

Reflection

Evaluation Questions:

1)      How it affects me?

I would have to say that listening was never a strong belief of mine. I would always consider eliminating most of the listening tasks and would focus more on writing/reading. But, I just noticed that if there is no listening, the students wouldn’t understand. In other terms, no listening, no learning. I have to consider that listening is the fundamental of learning. In order to learn or in fact imitate, we need to listen to the lesson, instructions or information, now would we? If we cannot listening properly, we cannot learn effectively.

2)      How does it affect my current level of knowledge & how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

In learning the importance of listening, it would be wise to say that I wouldn’t eliminate the listening tasks from future lessons in my future teaching life. Listening is in fact crucial and by taking into account of the processes of listening, I can see the importance of listening. There are a lot of processes involved in listening, from the cognitive processes (top-down, bottom-up or both processes) to the listening stages themselves. To be able to integrate the effective teaching by involving the listening processes mentioned, it would be possible to teach effective listening skills to students. With their listening skills improving, it wouldn’t be hard for them to succeed in the future.

1)      How it affects me?

I would say that listening is one of the trickiest elements for me to learn but in the end we still have to learn it because we know that for a normal human being without listening you cannot interact to each other.  As I mention before listening is a bit difficult for me and as a future teacher I have to overcome this problem so that I can give my lesson smoothly to my future students.

2)      How does it affect my current level of knowledge & how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

Listening activity is not just listen and simply answer a yes or no question but it is more than that. In listening activity it triggered our cognitive process which involved bottom-up and top-down processes. Bottom-up is process which is the lower level and it is triggered by the sounds, words, and phrases which listeners hear as they attempt to decode speech and assign meaning. While top-down process is the higher level process that required listeners to utilize schemata or background knowledge and global understanding to derive meaning and interpret the message.

This knowledge will be useful when it is time for me to conduct listening activity in my class in the future. 

  

Digital Language Learning Materials (DLLM)

Hello fellow TESL-ians! So this is our discussion about the Digital Language Learning Materials (DLLM). Here we go!

Examples of Digital Language Learning Material

-          Facebook

-          Twitter

-          Blogger

-          Prezi

-          Wordpress

-          Tumblr

-          Youtube

-          Edmodo

-          Schoology

List down SLA theories and principles

-       -  Interactionist theory (Long, 1985; 1996)

-       -  Sociocultural theory

-       - Communicative language teaching

-       -  Comprehensible Input theory (Swain, n.d.; Krashen, 1991)

-       - Affective Domain (Krashen, 1991)

Principles:

- - Materials should help learners develop confidence

- - What is being taught should be perceived by learners as relevant and useful

 -- Materials should require and facilitate learner self-investment

  - Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use

 - Materials should provide the learners with opportunities to use TL to achieve communicative purposes

-- Materials should take into account that learners differ in learning styles and affective attitudes

 - Materials should provide opportunities for outcome feedback

 - 

Criteria of technical usability:

-          Errors

(i)                  Less serious errors = affect the work of the user

(ii)                More serious errors = endanger the preservability of users’ outputs

-          Efficiency

·         Refers to how well experienced users can operate an application after they have mastered it.

-          Learnability

·         How long beginners’ use of a system before they learn the essential skills necessary to perform their tasks

-          Memorability

·         Ability of an occasional user who previously used the system to remember its operational system

Criteria of pedagogical usability

-          Feedback

(i)                  The system or learning material should provide the student with encouraging and immediate feedback è encouraging feedback increases learning motivation; immediate feedback helps the student understand problematic part in their learning

(ii)                Learning is based on the fact that mistakes are corrected immediately and progression cannot happen when corrections are not done.

-          Motivation

(i)                  Affects learning and makes people behave the way they do

(ii)                Motivation = the way to do things by reference to instincts, desires and reinforcement; support the direction on one’s general behavior

(iii)               Motivation affects alertness and vigor

-          Goal orientation

(i)                  When the goals of teacher, students and LM are closely aligned, best results are obtained

(ii)                Goals should be clear cut and able to motivate them to achieve them

(iii)               When the students themselves do not set their goals, their meaningfulness should be justified from the point of view of motivation

(iv)              Students should be able pursue their own interests in relation with learning goals

-          Learner control

(i)                  Learner’s memory should be pushed to the limit when learning a new topic

(ii)                Materials should be broken down to be learned into small meaningful units

-          Applicability

(i)                  The approach taken in learning material should correspond to the skills that the learner will later need in everyday and working life

(ii)                The skills or knowledge acquired should be able to be transferred to other contexts

(iii)               Learning something new can be accomplished effectively by relating it to practical tasks

(iv)              LM should be at appropriate level from the point of view of learner’s learning process

-          Added value

(i)                  Induce creativity in learners when using DLLM

(ii)                Other kind of added value: adaptability to individual needs, number of flexible options, learning is controlled and initiated by learners, interesting contents, development of communication, active participation of students

-          Learner activity

(i)                  Learners’ independent activity may increase when a teacher stays in background; a facilitator

(ii)                Learning materials can support learner’s activities by being interesting and based on real life

-          Cooperative/collaborative learning

(i)                  Studying with others to achieve common learning goal

(ii)                Instead of just acquiring personal knowledge, learners construct knowledge as members of community in practice

-          Valuation of previous knowledge

(i)                  Previous knowledge from the learners are assumed to be possessing some skills that previously been presented

(ii)                LM that respects learner’s previous knowledge takes account in differences of skills and knowledge in learners and encourages them to take advantage of it in learning.

-          Flexibility

(i)                  Learner’s learning differences should be taken into account.

(ii)                Information gained in pre-test can be used to provide learners with different routes or methods of studies.

Rough outline of DLLM

-          Using Prezi as a platform to develop the DLLM

-          Includes 6 activities; each according to the levels or bands according to the School-Based Assessment (SBA) that the MOE developed

-          Using a chapter from the English Form 2 textbook; making sure the chapter is interesting and relatable to the students thus relevant to be used in their everyday and working life

-          Each activities are different from each other; might include one language skills, might be more than one (e.g. reading and writing in one activity)

-          Might be focusing on linguistic, thematic or both types of content

-          Each activity is a progression of the previous one; the first activity (band 1), increasing with each activity progresses

-          Making sure the materials follow the criteria of technical and pedagogical  usability

Visual design

a) Harmony - the manner elements of a display interact together in a pleasing manner. - it pulls the pieces of visual image together. - can be achieved through repetition and rhythm, where rhythm is the flow depicted in a visual and helps direct eye movement. -to ensure harmony 3x3 grid must be used. -rhythm should either be a clockwise or counter clockwise.

b) Balance and symmetry - we can bring balance to the elements of different sizes by either moving them closer of father from the center of the page. -symmetry is when one half of a visual display is a mirror image of the other half. -types of symmetry: horizontal, approximate horizontal, radial and asymmetry.

c) Emphasis - create dominance and focus in their work. - it emphasize colour, value, shapes or other design elements to achieve dominance. For example “facebook” page used dark colour as their background and the symbol “f “for “facebook” in light colour. d) Alignment - alignment of elements within a screen is important part of organizing and grouping. -should visually maximize differences between text, label and pictures. e) Unity - relationship among visual elements that helps all elements to work together. - gives a sense of closure or oneness to a visual image. - can be achieved through use of similar shapes, common pattern or use of a common background.

REFLECTION

In my opinion, this really expands my knowledge about how digital language learning materials (DLLM) should consist of and how DLLM can affect our students. There’s a lot of criteria to be taken into consideration like acceptability (practical and social acceptability) and usability (technical and pedagogical usability). Using these criteria, we can ensure that our product; our own DLLM can be created in correlation with the students’ level of knowledge and skills. And with all these criteria, we can understand why the students cannot perform and we can overcome that problem in making a material. That is all.

So sorry I didn’t post about the other tutorials. Will upload it later. :D