Authentic Material and Cultural Content in EFL Classroom

By Prof. Karen Dennis Stewart

FeritKilickaya states that the material written in this document aims to answer the question of when and how authentic materials should be used in EFL, and how cultural content may be included in the curriculum.

Athentic Materials: Definition

Authintic materials is slightly different in literature. 

• They have a positive effecton learner motivation.
• They provide authentic cultural information.
• They provide xposurw to real language.
• They relate more closely to  learners' needs.
  
• They support a more creative approach to teaching

Desadvantages of Using Authentic Materials

The write Richards (2001, p. 253) points out that authentic materials often contains difficult language, unneeded vocabulary items and complex language structures, that causes a burden for the teacher in lower level classes. Also, another writer, Martinez (2002) mentions that authentic maeterial may be too culturally based and many structures are mixed.

Using Authentic Materials: At Which Level?

Guariento and Morley (2001) states that at post-intermediat level, the use of authentic material is available for use in the classroom. Matsuata states that the use of authentic materials is a burden for the instructors teching beginning students as they have to spend a lot of time to prepare for authetic materials regarding the hability level of the students. But, according to the survey carried out by Chevez (1998), learners enjoy dealing with authentic materials since they enagle them to interact with the real language and its use.

What Can be Done to Overcome Difficulties We Face?

The writer Martinez (2002) suggest that teachers may use authentic materials for the learners to listen for the gist of information presented and that by using authentic materials teachers will have the opportunity to encourage students to read for pleasure. Guariento and Moley (2001) suggest that authentic materials should be used in accordance with student's ability, suitable task can be given to learners in which total understanding is not important.

Cultural Content

Cultural content is a key to effective teaching and learning a language provided that problems arising from introducing culture into EFL classroom are dealt with effectively and teaching strategies and learning material are chosen appropiately.

Knowing a language goes beyond the knowledge of grammatical rules, vocabulary items and pronunciation. Succesful language learning requieres language users to know that culture underlying in order to get the meaning across. English teachers have a lot of choices in terms of text books, qand it is surprising that many of them rely on unintersting textbooks that focus student's attention on grammatical structures, and isolation practice.

McKay, (2000, p. 7) Said that the reson for the use of culturl content in classroom is that it will toster learners motivastion. She identifies three types of cultural materials: target culture material, learner's own culture materials and international target culture materials.

How can we introduce cultural content in our classrooms?

There are a lot of activities we can use,ut the key point is that we should create a relaxing environment where students can discuss their own culture together with the target culture in meaningful and communicative tasks and activities. Teachers can use sources such as newspapers, videos, talks/discussions, role play/dramatizations and culture quizzes/tests.

Authentic materials enable learners to interact with the real language and content rather than the form. Learners feel that they are learning a target language as it is used outside the classroom.  

Evolution of Instructional Materials Design

By Prof. Karen Dennis Stewart

Publishers attemp to develop instructional materials that meet the standards set for formal statewide adoption. They create prototypes and gather continual feedback from teachers about "quality of content, organizational structure, pacing, usability", and other features (Baughman, 2008, p.90)

Effective matreial include certain component. In addition, effective material usually include features, to mention some:

1. Instuctuinal goals with adaptability to course requirements
2. accurate, relevant, and unified flow of information.
3. appropiate reading level and vocabulary
4. real-world applications of informatical skills

Formats of Instructional Material:
The National Association of State Textbook Administrators (NASTA) provides network of support for publishers. Specialized formats in Braille, audio, digital text,and large print. for such materials, publishers must meet technical specifications in preparing and delivering instructional materials for review and adoption.

Textbook Dominance: Textbook reamin the main curriculum guides. They are most frequently used instructional material for students and teachers at all grade levels beyond primary grades.

The Teacher's Manual:  The teacher's manual is a key presentation that can be a strong selling point. It contains instructional resourses to support instructional strategies and activities. Teacher manuals and students materials work well whey have have the following basic features: practicality, alignment, coverage, readability, methods, assessment, and management.

Technology Changes: Changes in technology over the last seven decades have made visual presentations almost as important as content. With the expansion of technology, such as graphic design, photography, and typefaces, have emerge and become increasigly important.

Challenges in Reviewing Content: are varied and numerous, including evaluating content that is controversial, inaccurate, or without scholarship; written by anonymous authors or misleading.

 Controversies: Contoversy sometimes araises because of different beleifs about how beswt to approach a specific subject area. Contoversies  have also arisen because the polivcies of other adoptions states have created problems that affect instructional materials made available for review in Florida. Many instructional material have reflected based prespectives and avoided authentic controversies of the type that would activate analytical and critical-thinking skills.

Inaccurate Content: Material often do no give topics the treatment they desrve, contains factual errors, or persist in presenting desproved concepts. Publishers also make mistakes in respect to alignment to standards.

PRIORITY AREA: PRESENTATION

A major part of presentation concerns how well the students and teacher reasources work together. The teacher's manual should align with students' activities in the content, sequence, pacing, and procedures for teachers, and should be of high quality.

Presentation for attractiveness and durability are not generally among the flaws of instrucional materials. Research gives importance guidance on how mto judge other features of presentation, such as elements that make instructional material "readable" for students. Visual also play a role in readability, too many visuals can distract learners from the leaqrning process. But relevant visuals support readability when integrated with text in a  different form, explanative, of the content.

Comprehensiveness of  Student and Teacher Resources

Resorces must be complete enough to address the targeted learning outcomeswitout requiring the teacher to prepare additional teaching material for the course.

Student Resources: Although flashy, eye-catching material with easy-to-read lists and colorful illustrations may be attractive, students often consider them dull reding. 

Teachers Resources: Often include a massive teacher's manual that includes the annotated student text, lesson plans, enrichment activities, questioning strategies, tips for varying learning styles, support for special neeeds, instructions on how to use the book, worksheets, test, and diagrams. 

Alignment of Instructional Components

All components of instructional package must align with each other, as well as with the curriculum. Alignments of instructional components refers to alignment within students material and with teacher materials.

Organization of Instructional Materials

The structure and format of material must have enough order and clarity to allow students and teachers to access content and explicity identify ideas and sequences. Clear organization of instructional materials supports: access to content, a visible structure and format and a logical organization of content and activities.

Logical Organization

Students need organized knowlege structures to learn new information. Poor organizations is detrimental to learning, while and explicit and teachable content structure can double the amount remembered.

Logical organization must be unified and consistent.

Readability of Instructional Materials

Narrative and visual elements should engage students in reading or listening as well in understanding the contnet at a level appropiate to the students' abilities.

Readability of instructional materials depend on: language style, typographical presentation and visual features.

Little Miss Muffet

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

By: Prof. Karen Dennis Stewart

Priority area: Learning

Research-based information will show what works across disciplines along with few particular strategies for selected subjects and students. But, two special learning strategies deserve special attention:

Ø  The expertise reversal effect. This refers to finding in several studies that students who possess high levels of expertise in a subject do NOT benefit from the same strategies that work for average students that possess a low expertise.

Ø  Powerful resistance to learning, which is due to students’ misconceptions in a subject area.

Motivational strategies:

Ø  Positive expectations

Ø  Feedback                                                      

Ø  Appearance

Setting Positive Expectations

Factors that contribute to learning climate:

Ø  Friendly, attentive, and encouraging communication

Ø  Student collaboration assignments and group projects

Ø  Students communication and presentations

Ø  Informative feedback on students progress

(Fisher & Baird, 2005; Kassem, 2006; Reio & Crim, 2006)

Feedback

Students are motivated by informative feedback about correctness, incorrectness, and how to improve what they are learning (Fisher & Baird, 2005; Rei & Crim, 2006).

Appearance

Materials should have features that make them appealing.

Teaching a Few “Big Ideas”

“Big Ideas” or “major themes” provide

Ø  Focus for students and

Ø  Completeness.

Focus for Students

“Big ideas” include major themes, core concepts and principles, or a few “powerful ideas” for the subject being studied, they help students organize what they are learning, follow the sequence of learning, and make sense of the information, facts, and concepts. (Ornstein, 1992).

 Materials organized around "core thinking skills" could be one approach to "major themes" for a course, such as:

• definding problems
• setting goals
• gathering, observing, formulating questions about information
• encoding, recalling
• comparing, classifiying, ordering, representing
• identifying attributes and components, relationships and patterns, main ideas, errors
• ifering, predicting, elaborating, summarizing, restructuring
• evaluating

Instructional materials must contain clear statements of information and aoutcomes.
instructional materials nust include guidance and support tohelp students safely and successfully become more independant learners and thinkers.
Guidance and support most often come from a good teacher, but instructional materials can support or interfere. The literature has estblished the various modalities of learneing styles, so it makes sense to include a variety of apporiate activities.


Adaptability of Guidance abd Suppot


Guidance and support are not "one size fits all". For particular subjects areas, certain types of guidance and support may be listed as having high importance.


The type of guidance and support that have been efective in supporting student learning include:

• goals at the begining of an assignment;
• organized activities and routines;
• explicit organizational schemes and explanations;
• examples of finished products, sample problems and models.

Targeted Instructional and Assessment Strategies

Instructional maerials should include the instructional and assessment strategies known to be successful for teaching the learning outcomes targeted in the curriculum requirements. successfully teaching the targeted outcomes depends upon alignment of strtegies and completeness of strategies.

Principles of Efective Materials Development

By Prof. Karen Dennis Stewart

Writer Brian Tomlinson and others, made studies about ELT materials. Material should not be random ctreations from repertoire of other materials that was successfully used. For Tomlinson material should be coherent and princile applications of:

• theories of language acquisition
• principles teaching
• our current knowledge
• the result of systematic observation and evaluation.

Tomlinson proposes 15 principles for material development, here are four principles:

• exposse the learners to language in authentic use.
• help learners to pay attention to features of authintic input
• provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to acheive communicative purposes.
• provide opportunities for outcome feedback

Also he agreed with the importance of:

• flexibility
• moving from text to language
• providing engaging content
• learners development

PROPOSAL FOR PRINCIPLED APPROACHES TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL

Tomlinson proposal for principles approaches are based on his 40 years experience of teaching English, developing language-learning materials.

• 
  
  a prerequisite for language acquisition is that the learners are exposed to rich, meaningful, and comprehension input of language in use.
• 
  
  in order for learners to maximize their exposure to language in use, they need to be engaged both effectively and cognitively in the language experience.
• 
  
  language learners who achieve positive affect are much more likely to achieve communicative competence than those who do not.
• 
  
  Second language learners can benefit from using those mental resource that they typically utilize when acquiring and using the L1
• 
  
  language learners can benefit from noticing salient features of the input.
• 
  
  learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes.

When developing classroom materials we should consider principles of language teaching. Some principles followed by Tomlinson are:

• 
  
  the content and methodology of the teaching should be consistent with the objectives of the course and should meet the need and want of the learners.
• 
  
  the teaching should be designed so as to provide the learners with learning opportunities that will help then to develop educationally in the sense that they become more mature, m0re critically astute, and more confident as a result of the course.
• the teacher needs to be able to personalize and localize the materials and to relate them in different ways to the needs, wants, and learning-style preferences of individual learners.

There are many other principles of language teaching, and there are also language teaching realities to cater to in designing materials.