[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.4The learners wish to cover every part of the course book.The greatest areas of flexibility for a teacher when following a course book closely are in how the material is presented (format and presentation), and monitoring and assessment.The techniques that are used to present theAdopting and Adapting an Existing Course Book161material can be varied to suit the interests and proficiency of the learners.At its simplest this may involve varying the speed, number of repetitions, whether the learners have to use their memory by closing their books, assigning some parts of the lesson as homework, or getting learners to act out parts of the material.With more adaptation this may involve the teacher adding a game-like challenge to some of the activities by using competing teams, or by creating parallel situations to those in the course book to provide extra practice.Teachers who want to make the classroom activities more task-like can ask themselves the six questions proposed by Willis and Willis (2007) that were introduced in Chapter 4.For any question that gets a “no”answer, the teacher then considers a way to adapt the activity so that the answer becomes “yes”.Most course books do not provide a lot of guidance on monitoring and assessing progress, and teachers following a course closely may need to design tests to do this.Teachers also need to be aware of other ways of monitoring their success and their learners’ success, such as watching learners as they do activities, asking learners how they did certain activities, and looking at the results of an activity.Adapting a course bookOnce a course book has been chosen, teachers may wish to make substantial changes to it.There are several reasons for doing this and these could be classified as responding to the environment, taking account of needs, or putting principles into practice.Here are some of them.1The course book does not include all the activities that the teacher has used successfully before.2The course book material does not fit comfortably into the time available for the course.3The course book contains content that is unsuitable for the learners’level of proficiency or age.4The learners’ knowledge and skill do not match that involved in the course book (Prabhu, 1989).5The course book does not include language items, skills, ideas, discourse or strategies that the learners need.6The course book does not apply principles that the teacher feels should be applied.7The course book does not involve the learners in the curriculum design process (Allwright, 1981).Because of these reasons or reasons like these, the teacher may wish to adapt the course book.In this example, the teacher does not have the option of abandoning the course book, perhaps because it is the required text for the162Adopting and Adapting an Existing Course Bookcourse, the learners have already bought it, or overall it has more positive features than negative features.The teacher can do the following things to adapt a course book.Note how the suggestions relate to the three parts of the central circle of the curriculum design diagram.1Add or omit content.The teacher adds exercises to give extra practice to items that are frequently used in the language or which require extra time to learn.The teacher skips over confusing or unimportant parts of a lesson, for example teaching only one item in pairs of words that might interfere with each other.2Change the sequencing of the content.The teacher introduces some items earlier in the course because they are needed to do added activities.3Change the format.Instead of beginning the lesson with a dialogue, the teacher puts it towards the end of the lesson and uses the other exercises in the lesson to prepare for it.4Change the presentation.The teacher uses different techniques than those used in the book.For example a 4/3/2 fluency activity is used to practise some of the dialogues.5Add or omit monitoring.The teacher encourages the learners to make tests to check each other’s learning of what is in the lesson (Clarke, 1989).6Add or omit assessment.The teacher introduces weekly tests to encourage learners to do homework or to let them see their progress.An example of the teacher adding content may be through the addition of an extensive reading component to the course.The teacher may decide to do this because she does not feel the course book is applying principles that the teacher believes are important.In this case the principles (from Chapter 4) are: Comprehensible input: There should be substantial quantities of interesting comprehensible receptive activity in both listening and reading.Fluency: A language course should provide activities aimed at increasing fluency with which learners can use the language they already know, both receptively and productively.Time on task: As much time as possible should be spent focusing on and using the second language.Tanaka and Stapleton (2007) describe the implementation and the results of this type of addition in a Japanese high school.As a means of preparing them for graded readers, students read teacher-made reading materials for a short time in class over a period of about five months.Reading speed gains wereAdopting and Adapting an Existing Course Book163recorded for all students, and for those who also read graded readers reading comprehension also improved.Progressive adaptation of a course book over several courses can be a safe way for a teacher to develop professionally through a modest amount of action research.As we have seen in Chapter 9, it is also a useful way of beginning to design your own course.Using source books instead of course booksThe proper role of course books in courses is a matter of debate (Richards, 1985).Prabhu (1989) suggests that learners would be better served if teachers did not use course books but assembled their courses by drawing on a variety of source books such as conversation books, timed reading books, intensivereading books, listening texts, as well as teacher-made material.There are several reasons for doing this.They may be classified according to the outer circles of the curriculum design diagram [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.4The learners wish to cover every part of the course book.The greatest areas of flexibility for a teacher when following a course book closely are in how the material is presented (format and presentation), and monitoring and assessment.The techniques that are used to present theAdopting and Adapting an Existing Course Book161material can be varied to suit the interests and proficiency of the learners.At its simplest this may involve varying the speed, number of repetitions, whether the learners have to use their memory by closing their books, assigning some parts of the lesson as homework, or getting learners to act out parts of the material.With more adaptation this may involve the teacher adding a game-like challenge to some of the activities by using competing teams, or by creating parallel situations to those in the course book to provide extra practice.Teachers who want to make the classroom activities more task-like can ask themselves the six questions proposed by Willis and Willis (2007) that were introduced in Chapter 4.For any question that gets a “no”answer, the teacher then considers a way to adapt the activity so that the answer becomes “yes”.Most course books do not provide a lot of guidance on monitoring and assessing progress, and teachers following a course closely may need to design tests to do this.Teachers also need to be aware of other ways of monitoring their success and their learners’ success, such as watching learners as they do activities, asking learners how they did certain activities, and looking at the results of an activity.Adapting a course bookOnce a course book has been chosen, teachers may wish to make substantial changes to it.There are several reasons for doing this and these could be classified as responding to the environment, taking account of needs, or putting principles into practice.Here are some of them.1The course book does not include all the activities that the teacher has used successfully before.2The course book material does not fit comfortably into the time available for the course.3The course book contains content that is unsuitable for the learners’level of proficiency or age.4The learners’ knowledge and skill do not match that involved in the course book (Prabhu, 1989).5The course book does not include language items, skills, ideas, discourse or strategies that the learners need.6The course book does not apply principles that the teacher feels should be applied.7The course book does not involve the learners in the curriculum design process (Allwright, 1981).Because of these reasons or reasons like these, the teacher may wish to adapt the course book.In this example, the teacher does not have the option of abandoning the course book, perhaps because it is the required text for the162Adopting and Adapting an Existing Course Bookcourse, the learners have already bought it, or overall it has more positive features than negative features.The teacher can do the following things to adapt a course book.Note how the suggestions relate to the three parts of the central circle of the curriculum design diagram.1Add or omit content.The teacher adds exercises to give extra practice to items that are frequently used in the language or which require extra time to learn.The teacher skips over confusing or unimportant parts of a lesson, for example teaching only one item in pairs of words that might interfere with each other.2Change the sequencing of the content.The teacher introduces some items earlier in the course because they are needed to do added activities.3Change the format.Instead of beginning the lesson with a dialogue, the teacher puts it towards the end of the lesson and uses the other exercises in the lesson to prepare for it.4Change the presentation.The teacher uses different techniques than those used in the book.For example a 4/3/2 fluency activity is used to practise some of the dialogues.5Add or omit monitoring.The teacher encourages the learners to make tests to check each other’s learning of what is in the lesson (Clarke, 1989).6Add or omit assessment.The teacher introduces weekly tests to encourage learners to do homework or to let them see their progress.An example of the teacher adding content may be through the addition of an extensive reading component to the course.The teacher may decide to do this because she does not feel the course book is applying principles that the teacher believes are important.In this case the principles (from Chapter 4) are: Comprehensible input: There should be substantial quantities of interesting comprehensible receptive activity in both listening and reading.Fluency: A language course should provide activities aimed at increasing fluency with which learners can use the language they already know, both receptively and productively.Time on task: As much time as possible should be spent focusing on and using the second language.Tanaka and Stapleton (2007) describe the implementation and the results of this type of addition in a Japanese high school.As a means of preparing them for graded readers, students read teacher-made reading materials for a short time in class over a period of about five months.Reading speed gains wereAdopting and Adapting an Existing Course Book163recorded for all students, and for those who also read graded readers reading comprehension also improved.Progressive adaptation of a course book over several courses can be a safe way for a teacher to develop professionally through a modest amount of action research.As we have seen in Chapter 9, it is also a useful way of beginning to design your own course.Using source books instead of course booksThe proper role of course books in courses is a matter of debate (Richards, 1985).Prabhu (1989) suggests that learners would be better served if teachers did not use course books but assembled their courses by drawing on a variety of source books such as conversation books, timed reading books, intensivereading books, listening texts, as well as teacher-made material.There are several reasons for doing this.They may be classified according to the outer circles of the curriculum design diagram [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]