Can’t Always Get What You Want
As language teachers we can’t always get what we want in terms of materials that cater for the needs of the students and teaching aims and objectives. A quick evaluation of the course book and/or supplementary materials can be conducted by focusing on certain factors.
M Method: Does the teaching methodology that is adopted by the material suit your own teaching methods and overall aims?
A Appearance: Are the book’s design, lay-out, color and feel appealing? Is the layout learner friendly?
T Teacher-friendly: Is the book easy to use for the teacher? Does it help teachers to save time while they are getting prepared? Guidance? Answer key?
E Extras: Do extra materials (links, workbook, videos, and audio material) accompany the main teaching material? How beneficial and compatible are these?
R Realistic: How authentic is the communication? Do the content and language represent current real-life-related matters that the learners can identify with?
I Interesting: Are the topics and content of the materials attractive and interesting for the learner profile?
A Affordable; Is the course book affordable? Do you need to copy supplementary materials? How can you exploit them to cut down on paper?
L Level: Does the language of the input suit the learners’ level? Are the learning objectives organized in taxonomy, building on and recycling one another?
S Skills: Does the book tap into all the skills and encourage skills development and practice in a variety of tasks that cater for different learning styles? Does it match the syllabus?
Once we made a rubric for evaluating the coursebook that we could use and assigned grades to each based on the criteria we agreed upon. Of course piloting helps a lot, but usually you get to see the whole picture when you actually start teaching the material.
This simple formula may look simple but simple may at times work better, doesn’t it?
This song is from me, on a peaceful Saturday evening, to you. I hope that you enjoy…
Acknowledgement
Tanner & Green. (1998). Tasks for Teacher Education, Longman, Edinburg.
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