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.