EDGT391: Assessment Task 5
Justification of Choice of Materials
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 1
In this short essay, I justify the materials I have chosen in creating learning tasks for my unit,
“Finding a Job,” sequentially, in terms of the replication of real-world situations,
authenticity, appropriateness and variety. I suggest that consideration of appropriateness
to the learner group’s ability be given precedence over authenticity of texts and argue for
well thought-out use of adapted materials. I then briefly elaborate on the advantages of
providing students with exposure to a variety of materials in presenting learning tasks.
Robinson and Selman (1996, p.57) differentiate between two kinds of learning tasks, “realworld tasks and enabling tasks,” where real-world tasks replicate real-world situations and
enabling tasks “help students develop the knowledge to achieve authentic goals.” I have
chosen the tasks described in previous assessment activities with real-world situations
relating to employment in mind, with the aim of developing student knowledge, and
replicating situations they will encounter outside the classroom. One way of replicating
real-world situations and ensuring that materials have relevance to student’s lives is to use
authentic texts.
The use of authentic texts in the English language classroom has both advantages and
disadvantages. Harmer (2007, p.273) defines authentic material as “language where no
concessions are made to foreign speakers.” Authentic texts contain all the features of the
target language including its context, pragmatics, syntax and grammar. The danger of using
inauthentic texts, such as those commonly provided by commercial course materials, is that
they remove the multiple aspects of language use that produce meaning and fail to prepare
students for real-world situations. Harmer (2007, p.273) goes on to say that authentic
language is what students encounter when they come into contact with native speakers and
cautions that it can be “extremely demotivating for students since they will not understand
it.” I have chosen my material with the aim of developing the students’ knowledge to
achieve authentic goals (for example, listening to telephone conversations) and, where
possible and appropriate, the opportunity to practise in situations replicating the real world
(for example, speaking in telephone conversations). When selecting and adapting authentic
texts, I believe that the teacher’s choice of material should be determined by its
appropriateness for the learner level, over and above considerations of authenticity, to
avoid the danger of demotivating and demoralising students.
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 2
Hedge (2000 p. 253) notes that many learners are anxious about listening to a foreign
language, and undoubtedly, they are equally anxious about speaking, reading and writing it.
To develop learner confidence, knowledge and skills, the material needs to be appropriate
to the learner level. Hedge (2000 p.253) cites Brown and Yule’s (1983) definition of four
factors that teachers can take into account when selecting material appropriate to the
learner level. The first factor relates to the speakers, how many, the speed of their delivery,
the degree of overlap and variations of accents. The second factor relates to the text itself,
its structure and the amount of prior knowledge required by the learner when inferring
meaning. The third relates to the listener, their motivation and the level of response
required; and the fourth to the degree of support provided to the learners.
Although Hedge acknowledges there are strong arguments for using adapted texts for
learners at lower levels he advocates the use of authentic material to enable them to deal
with real life situations. However, Hedge uses the example of a lecture to illustrate his
argument, and this suggests that he is referring to a different student demographic than
that of the students my tasks are designed for, who often have multiple barriers to learning.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the ultimate purpose is to provide students with the
ability to deal with listening outside of the classroom, nonetheless it is ultimately defeating
to provide students with texts that are outside their comprehension. In my teaching
situation, it is necessary to provide students with scaffolded steps towards comprehending
authentic texts outside the classroom. With this in mind, I will now discuss the ways in
which I have used Brown and Yules’ factors to ensure that my tasks are appropriate to my
learners’ needs and levels of comprehension.
I have aimed to help students develop the knowledge to achieve authentic goals by using
carefully chosen texts that provide for opportunities for success and reduce the danger of
my students losing confidence in their abilities. With respect to the factor of speakers, the
listening texts I have chosen as appropriate for my group of learners mainly consist of DVDs,
texts spoken by a real person and interactions between students and students/teacher. I
have reduced the complexity of chosen listening materials by selecting texts that have a
limited number of speakers, with little overlap, and formal, reasonably predictable
structures. Indeed, this is realistic, since certain phone conversations, such as phoning
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 3
about a job, are formal in tone and do follow a reasonably predictable structure. Where
students are likely to be unfamiliar with material, such as the structure and delivery of oral
presentations, I have provided scaffolding to support students in developing the required
knowledge. Where the content is likely to be familiar to students, I have tried to ensure
that they have every opportunity of bringing their own knowledge and experience to the
learning activities and the texts themselves contain as much extraneous support as possible.
In addition, I have paired and combined listening and speaking activities so that students
have listened to models on which they can base their speaking practice.
Hedge (2000 p.242) points out that “in most situations, listening is not just an aural activity”
and many course book and curriculum governed activities separate out the aural activity of
listening from the multitude of non-verbal cues. This creates an additional barrier to
student comprehension by removing the paralinguistic signals that help students to make
meaning, even where they do not understand every word. For this reason, I have chosen
listening texts with non-verbal cues present over isolated aural texts for beginner learners
and removed that scaffolding when presenting similar material for more advanced learners.
There are, of course, situations in which listening is purely an aural activity, for example,
announcements, listening to radio programs and telephone calls. Given that telephone
conversations are one of the few isolated aural texts it may seem a strange choice to use a
DVD as the medium for the listening activity of telephoning about a job. However, DVD
material provides a rich and stimulating source for prediction activities and increases
students’ confidence by allowing them to feel that they have comprehension of the text
before listening. The advantages of having students activate their prior knowledge of the
situations outweigh the disadvantage of providing a more realistic text. This disjunction
between the text and the real world situation is not such an issue with the DVD of people
telling recounts and anecdotes, where, in real world situations, we most often see the
people we are in conversation with.
In addition to selecting material that is appropriate to the learners’ level, I have selected
material that is appropriate to learners’ ages and cultural backgrounds. I have avoided
material designed for children or adolescents, which is never appropriate for adult learners,
since students are quick to take offence. Equally, material designed for adult with English
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 4
speaking backgrounds is often not appropriate for ESL learners, as the content often draws
on cultural knowledge that migrants do not share. Likewise, material should not be
culturally offensive to any group or exclude any students. I hope that my materials provide
no examples of this, but an example of inappropriate material might be a pork recipe used
for cooking in a class with Muslim students.
Brown and Yule’s (1983) four factors for selecting texts is less useful when it comes to
selecting texts for speaking. Here, as Harmer (2007, p.176) asserts, “[b]y far the most useful
resource in the classroom are the students themselves.” Students self-regulate their
communications with the aim of achieving their communication need and therefore,
consider all the factors that teachers attempt to cater to in the design of their tasks. They
all use paralinguistic cues, speak at different speeds, have a variety of accents and, in this
multi-level class, demonstrate a range of abilities in being able to control prosody,
phonology, morphology, syntax, genres, semantics and pragmatics. The teacher’s job is to
make the best use of this resource by providing tasks and materials that motivate students
and encourage them to interact with each other.
Materials that facilitate group work are a good way of making effective use of the students
as a learning resource. Gibbons (2002, pp.17-18) suggests that group work benefits
language learners in a number of ways. In listing the benefits of group work, he cites
McGroarty’s (1993) observations that group work increases student input and output
through peer interaction and contextualises language so that students is hear it and use it in
appropriate contexts. Gibbons (2002, p.18) adds that group work “offers considerable
message redundancy” and increases opportunities for students to ask questions out of read
need. Examples of materials I have used to facilitate group work are the information gaps
and the problem solving activity modelled on the dilemma posed by Robinson and Selman
(1996, pp. 71-72).
While it is important to appreciate that students are an important teaching resource, it is
equally important to support them in discovering that they are their own best learning
resource. Web quests and other activities using computers and the internet as a resource
develop independent learning techniques. In the same way, self-assessment activities
encourage learners to take control of their own learning and move toward autonomy rather
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 5
than merely being the receptacle of teacher knowledge and judgements. Another way of
supporting students in their own learning path is to provide a different tasks and materials
so that they can explore different learning styles and strategies.
Providing students with a variety of materials has two positive learning outcomes. Firstly, a
variety of materials promotes different styles of learning. Pictures, such as those used in
telephoning, conversation and direction activities, support a visual learning style as well as
aiding understanding and prediction. In the directions activity particularly, pictures and
furniture are used as to simulate a real environment in order to aid students in
understanding, based on the recognition that we remember and understand better when
we act. Activities like these, that encourage students to move and act (such as group
writing of the telephone script) have value in themselves, as Harmer (2007, p.180) asserts,
purely because they get students out of their chairs. A variety of materials provides
motivation and stimulation for students in the classroom.
The second advantage of providing a variety of materials is that it exposes students to some
of the many different genres they will encounter in real life. Of course, often the time and
space constraints within a curriculum and teaching situation limit the variety of genres and
likewise, the space constraints of these assessment tasks limited the variety of genres I
could present as examples. Nonetheless, I have endeavoured to provide materials that, at
the very least , give opportunities for transactional and interpersonal listening and speaking.
Telephoning, asking for and giving directions, problem solving and casual conversation are
just some of the occasions for speaking and listening students are likely to encounter in the
workplace. With greater freedom, I would have liked to include some occupational health
and safety, instruction and interview activities.
In concluding, I will allude to one last common type of teaching material, the course book.
As Harmer (2007, p.181) points out the use of course books provide benefits and
restrictions. In selecting and creating tasks and materials to support my students’ learning I
have selectively drawn on some well presented and sometimes inspired material found in
course books. However, I believe that to follow a course book from beginning to end would
fail to account for the principles of material selection that I have discussed. While some do
provide suitable real-world material and even authentic native speech, no course book has
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 6
been written specifically to suit the particular needs and levels of my learners. Moreover, a
course book, even with supplementary DVD and audio material, would be likely to have the
restriction of a unity in presentation, which would fail to provide students with the variety
of simulation that promotes learning.
EDGT931 Assessment Task 5
Mahon 7
Works Cited
English for Employment: Finding Work: Beginner (2008) [DVD] Surry Hills, New South Wales
AMES.
Gibbons, P 2002 ‘Classroom talk: Creating contexts for language learning,’ Scaffolding
Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Language Learners in the Mainstream
Classroom, Heinemann, Portsmouth NH, pp14-39.
Harmer, J 2007, How to Teach English: An Introduction to the Practice of English Language
Teaching, 4th edn, Harlow, Longman.
Hedge, T. (2000) Listening. In Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. (pp. 507535). Oxford, Oxford UP.
Robinson, J and Selman, M 1996, ‘Developing tasks,’ Partnerships in Learning: Teaching ESL
to Adults, Pipin Publishing, Toronto, pp. 56-74.
Thornbury, S, 2005 How to Teach Speaking, Pearson-Longman, Harlow.