Question:

submitted by Matet Balaguer, San José Community College, Philippines

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using instructional materials in teaching ESL?

Dr Richards Responds:

In deciding on teaching materials there are a number of options:

• Choosing a suitable published course
• Adapting a published course to match the needs of the course
• Using teacher-made materials and authentic materials as the basis for the course.

There are a number of advantages to using institutionally derived or teacher derived materials for a course:

• Relevance: Materials can be produced that are directly relevant to students’ and institutional needs and that reflect local content, issues, and concerns. Develop expertise: Developing materials can help develop expertise among staff, giving them a greater understanding of the characteristics of effective materials.
• Reputation: Institutionally prepared materials may enhance the reputation of the institution by demonstrating its commitment to providing materials specifically for its students.
• Flexibility: Materials produced within the institution can be revised or adapted as needed, giving them greater flexibility than a commercial course book.

However there are also potential disadvantages:

• Cost: Quality materials take time to produce and adequate staff time as well as resources need to be allocated.
• Quality: Teacher-made materials will not normally have the same standard of design and production as commercial materials and hence may not present the same image as commercial materials.
• Training: To prepare teachers for materials writing projects, adequate training is necessary. Materials writing is a specialized skill and not all teachers area capable of writing good materials.

In many situations textbooks form the basis of the curriculum in language programs. Provided there is a good degree of fit between the textbook and the teaching context teachers use textbooks to provide the major source of input and direction to their teaching. Thus does not necessarily mean that the teacher plays a secondary role in the teaching process since teachers normally improvise around their teaching materials, moving back and forth between book-based input and teacher-initiated input. Hence even though a teacher may teach the same lesson from a textbook many times, each time he or she teaches it becomes a different lesson due to the improvisations the teacher initiates during teaching. These may result from on-the-spot decisions relating to timing, affective factors, and responses to learner difficulties. Experienced teachers hence use textbooks flexibly as a teaching resource.

Sometimes however adaptation may be required to reflect the needs of a specific teaching context. Various forms of adaptation are possible:

• Adding material to address an examination requirement: sometimes supplementary material may need to be added to address the requirements of a specific institutional or other exam. For example the reading component of an institutional text may make use of multiple-choice questions rather than the kinds of comprehension tasks found in a course book, so extra material to practice using multiple-choice questions may be needed.
• Extending to provide additional practice: a book unit has a limited number of pages and at times the teacher may feel additional practice of grammar, vocabulary or skills is required and sources additional materials to supplement the book.
• Localizing: an activity in the book may be more effective if it is modified to reflect local issues and content rather than the content that is discussed in the coursebook Localization also involves adapting or supplementing an activity to address the specific needs of a group of learners. For example pronunciation problems might reflect interference form the students’ first language and these might not be covered in the book. Additional activities can be added to address problems specific to the  learners.
• Modifying content: Content may need to be changed because it does not suit the target learners, perhaps because of the learners’ age, gender, social background, occupation, religion or cultural background.
• Reorganizing content: A teacher may decide to reorganize the syllabus of the book, and arrange the units in what she or he considers a more suitable order. Or within a unit the teacher may decide not to follow the sequence of activities in the unit but to reorganize them for a particular reason.
• Modifying tasks: Exercises and activities may need to be changed to give them an additional focus. For example, a listening activity may focus only on listening for information, so it adapted so that students listen a second or third time for a different purpose. An activity may be extended to provide opportunities for more personalized practice. Or some exercises within a sequence may be dropped.

While in many cases a book may work perfectly well without the need for much adaptation, in some cases different levels of adaptation may be needed. Through the process of adaptation the teacher personalize the text, making it a better teaching resource, and individualizes it for a particular group of learners. Normally this process takes place gradually as the teacher becomes more familiar with the book because the dimensions of the text that need adaptation may not be apparent until the book is tried out in the classroom.

Question:

submitted by Samantha Quintana, Copei-Casa Grande University, Ecuador

Do you consider that using reading aloud would help children to acquire better the language? How important is it?

Dr Richards Responds:

In considering the role of reading aloud we need to consider it in relation to the context in which it is being used. In the case of teaching reading skills per se, reading aloud can lead to inefficient reading strategies. A good reader reads silently without vocalizing the words he or she reads. Reading aloud encourages learners to vocalize words as they read and sends the message that every word is equally important in a text: it discourages skimming, scanning, reading for main ideas and so on.

However when working with other skills (e.g. speaking and listening), reading aloud can help students focus on problematic features of their English (e.g. such as pronouncing final consonants, linking sounds etc.) So sometimes I ask students to look a text, find examples of consonant clusters, linked sounds, final consonants etc, and then to read the text aloud to focus on these sounds. In pairs students also take turns reading a short text aloud, monitoring their partner’s production of certain sounds. This activity has nothing to do with reading per se but is a speaking activity, using a written text as a source of input.

Question:

submitted by Paul van Wessem, Language Teaching, Australia

Given some limitations of the text based approach which is based on social learning theories, is there evidence that practitioners of language teaching are moving away from this approach …to something else… something more eclectic perhaps?

Dr Richards Responds:

Text-based instruction is more familiar to teachers in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, than other parts of the world. For those unfamiliar with it, text-based instruction shares some features with Task-based language instruction, since it focuses on preparing learners for real-world uses of English. Rather than organizing instruction around tasks, however, texts are chosen as the framework for teaching. “Text” here is used in a special sense to refer to structured sequences of language that are used in specific contexts in specific ways. According to a text-based approach, learners in different contexts have to master the use of the text types occurring most frequently in specific contexts. These contexts might include, studying in an English medium university, studying in an English medium primary or secondary school, working in a restaurant, working in an office, working in a store, or socializing with neighbours in a housing complex. It is based on an approach to teaching language which involves:

• Teaching explicitly about the structures and grammatical features of spoken and written texts
• Linking spoken and written texts to the cultural context of their use
• Designing units of work which focus on developing skills in relation to whole texts
• Providing students with guided practice as they develop language skills for meaningful communication through whole texts.

As its name implies, the core units of planning in TBI are spoken and written text types. These are identified through needs analysis and through the analysis of language as it is used in different settings. Text based teaching thus has much in common with an ESP approach to language teaching. However the syllabus also usually specifies other components of texts, such as grammar, vocabulary, topics and functions, hence it is type of mixed syllabus, one which integrates reading, writing and oral communication and which teaches grammar through the mastery of texts rather than in isolation.

Text-based teaching involves explicit teaching of the structure of different text types and an instructional strategy in which the teacher introduces the text and its purpose features, guides students through the production of texts though the process of scaffolding. Text-based teaching focuses primarily on the products of learning rather than the processes involved. Critics have pointed out that an emphasis on individual creativity and personal expression is missing from TBI, which is heavily wedded to a methodology based on the study of model texts and the creation of texts based on models. Likewise critics point out that there is a danger that teaching within this framework can become repetitive and boring over time since the teaching cycle described above is applied to the teaching of all four skills. So I think it is probably true that it is currently being used more flexibly than in the past. The most recent syllabus for the teaching of English in Singapore for example, includes text-types as just one strand within the syllabus framework.

Question:

submitted by Ali Matour, Iran

What is your opinion about using translation or the mother tongue in an EFL class?

Dr Richards Responds:

There are really two questions here, one about the use of the mother tongue in the English lesson and one about translation. To respond to the first question, the mother tongue is an obvious reference point for learners in learning a new language. In my experience of learning languages (French, Indonesian, Chinese characters) in a one-to-one learning situation, I asked my tutors to use English to facilitate my learning. I also made use of translation activities (bilingual vocabulary cards) to facilitate my acquisition of vocabulary. Similarly in a classroom situation it makes sense for the teacher to use the mother tongue when introducing new vocabulary or presenting difficult concepts. The difficulty occurs when the class ends up being conducted largely in the mother tongue with very little use of English. So I would support intelligent use of the mother tongue to facilitate learning when necessary, while encouraging the maximum use of English that is possible.

In the case of translation, this activity (together with the use of the the mother tongue) has been discouraged since the grammar-translation method was replaced by the direct method (a target-language based method that does not allow translation) at the end of the 19th century. There has been little rational discussion of the use of the mother tongue and translation until relatively recently, at least in the English-speaking world. I have no experience using translation in teaching, however I assume it has a role to play in developing grammatical awareness – particularly at the sentence level. I do not see it as facilitating the development of fluent language use but as contributing to knowledge of target language grammar.

Two excellent recent books on this topic are:

• Translation (Oxford Introduction to Language Study) Juliane House. Oxford University Press 2009.
• Translation in Language Teaching Guy Cook. Oxford University Press 2010.

Both of the above are reviewed in the journal Applied Linguistics, Vol 33, 2, 2012.