Evaluation of Material: Design and Adaption of Materials

Luis Agustín García Muñoz

Universidad IEXPRO.

Master’s Degree in English Teaching

MPhil. Marcela Cardoza Pérez

July 3rd, 2022

The activity chosen to be adapted is number 5. Although it is a mechanized activity,
it can be modified in order to be more representative for beginners. Students can
manipulate language and make it communicative (somehow) according to their
language abilities at early stages.

In order to adapt this activity, I used TBL approach since students can learn a foreign
or second language efficiently by manipulating the language. Tasks can be from
sharing personal experiences, problem solving; in this case, I decided to use a
ranking task so students can analyze the level of usefulness of school supplies by
negotiation of meaning using easy questions to reach communication.
OBJECTIVE: By the end of the lesson and based on a ranking task, A1 students will
justify their ranking (regarding cost and level of usefulness of school supplies) using
short coherence sentences following a pattern regarding parts of the speech.
PROCEDURE.
PRE-TASK
Students are grouped in trios and asked to look around the classroom.
Each of them brings three different supplies (sharpener, eraser, pen, pencil,
notebook, marker, etc.) and put them in the center;
apart from that, the teacher mentions two more supplies that are in the classroom.
TASK CYCLE
Task
Students write down a list of the 6 most useful supplies in class; they must regard
the use of electricity, size, and cost.
In some cases, students may not know the names of some supplies but the teacher
will monitor the whole classroom as a language source in case they find it necessary.
Planning
Students use “classroom language 1” from box above so they exchange basic words
according to the activity; though the justification for rating is L1.
Report
Once they finish, a representative of each team is asked to write down their list.
The whole class selects the list which best ranks the most used supplies in the
classroom.
LANGUAGE FOCUS
Analysis
Now, teacher and students start giving their justification for the ranking; teacher
writes a sentence in Spanish and English.

After writing in English, teacher writes parts of the speech in order to show students
the elements to write a fully coherent sentence.
Practice
Students are asked to write two or three sentences justifying their ranking paying
attention to the patterns of parts of the speech needed to write basic coherent
sentences.
Argumentation.
Personally, I decided to use task-based because at this level teachers tend to drill
and make language boring for students to adapt to a second language. Also, I had
to take the activities, which are not enough suitable and rich in terms of vocabulary,
to make it as communicative as possible for students to practice language forgetting
about repeating and drilling in a mechanical way.
In the same way, even in our mother tongue, we are always aware of
when we need to be on our best linguistic behaviour. If we have to
speak in public, or present a case in a business meeting, we often plan
beforehand what we want to say. The variety of language we use,
then, depends on the circumstances of communication. (Willis, 2012)
On one hand, I used ranking and listing since they are suitable for beginners who
may not be quite proficient with TL. On the other hand, I let students use their mother
tongue and I contrasted it to English so they can see the parts of the speech and
how they syntactically can build up short meaningful sentences.
In conclusion, I can say all materials can be hugely adapted as long as we keep out
students’ needs and ways of learning in our minds. Adaptation should not come only
from the teaching planning process, but it also has to be something temporary and
the product of constant self-evaluation of our teaching practice to motivate our
students to use language as close as possible to real-life in an environment different
from a classroom atmosphere.

REFERENCES.
Universidad IEXPRO (n.d.). Design and Adaptation of Material, Curricula and
Materials. Materials and Resources in EFL (pp. 55-77).
Willis, J. (2012). A framework for task-based learning (Electronic book). Intrinsic
books.