Evaluation of Curriculum Materials (An ELT Coursebook)

Evaluation of Curriculum Materials (An ELT Coursebook)

Background

I used the Quest series to teach low-advanced 9^th graders who mostly wanted to go to foreign language high schools or go abroad for further study. The intensive English program aimed to develop students’ literacy and oracy skills in terms of four English skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. This book was used in a reading class together with other test preparation reading textbooks.

1. Description

Title: Quest 2: Reading and Writing (McGraw Hill)

Author: Pamela Hartmann

Series: 3 levels

Focus Areas: Reading and Writing

2. Students Profile

Course: Intensive English Course

Grade: 9^th grade

Level: High-intermediate to Low-advanced

Evaluation of Curriculum Materials

In determining the appropriateness and usefulness of this textbook as curriculum materials, I used both rubrics-one that I have developed myself and one provided by the professor to get a more precise and comprehensive picture.

1. Goals and Objectives

Goals and objectives are clearly specified under the title of Scope and Sequence of learning materials in a table in an introductory section. In addition, in a Welcome section, the book succinctly summarizes what kind of learning activities and skills the learners will practice for those objectives.

2. Instructional Content

1) This book presents learning materials in an integrative manner blending reading and writing skills within the academic context. Each chapter consists of five parts: 1) Introduction, 2) General Interest Reading, 3) Academic Reading, 4) The Mechanics of Writing, and 5) Academic Writing. In this way, the readings skills are not solely presented in isolation. This integrated approach merits serious considerations in that integrated and combined language skills suffice communicative, authentic language proficiency.

2) The contents include general materials from newspapers and magazines along with readings from academic textbooks such as anthropology, art, biology, economics, history, literature, and sociology. General materials seem to more focus on readability and readers’ interests whereas academic contents highlight authenticity of reading selections. Another thing to note is that readings and writing materials are presented in an increasing length and difficulty through the five sections of each chapter across the four levels. In this way, selection and layout of materials can reflect the students’ progress according to their ELD level.

3) This book is strategy-based. In each chapter, a variety of learning strategies including reading strategy such as guessing meanings, making inferences, using graphic organizers, test-taking strategy, and writing tips are presented to promote learning.

3. Materials Design and Instructional Delivery  
                                                                          

The teachers’ Edition is well designed and easy to follow. In each chapter of the Teachers’ Edition, a list of suggested website resources are provided for reference. The students can research these website resources to gain additional information about topics presented in the chapter when necessary. As this textbook deals with academic subjects, gaining in-depth knowledge will help the students strengthen their understanding and at the same time form a foundation that can allow for extended productive activities such as debate, group discussion, and presentation, etc. In addition, at least 10 optional expansion activities are also provided in each chapter; thus, it can be used as extensive guides for novice teachers. In light of design and layout of the students book, photos and graphics are used to capture students’ interests while introducing each academic topic.  

4. Instructional Resources and Learner Interaction

At least 10 optional expansion activities are provided in each chapter to facilitate students’ understanding and interactive learning. For each reading, the students are called on to be engaged in pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities to increase the comprehensibility of difficult academic texts. Most significantly, the book contains a range of reading activities designed to develop higher order thinking skills such as critical, analytical thinking skills, activating prior knowledge or schemata, and making inferences. It is highly noteworthy given that most reading textbooks currently used in secondary schools or language schools in Korea are focused on developing reading comprehension through test-taking skills, thus lacking in high level reading skills and reasoning. Pre-reading thinking and post-reading reflections can be modified into speaking activities such as group discussion and presentation. Vocabulary knowledge is mostly address in post-reading activities and syntax information is presented in a writing section. Through writing practice, the students not only learn the mechanics of writing such as cohesive ties, organizational skills and grammar, but they can practice expository writing. For increasing listing ability, the book also provides the students with audio files in MP3 format that can be downloaded from http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?isbn=0077196317&cat=270 with payment. For the sake of teacher’s convenience, EZ Test CD-Rom is also provided to create customized tests at a rather ease.

5. Assessment

The tests at the end of each chapter assess students on reading comprehension, critical thinking strategies, vocabulary, writing mechanics, and editing. Test items include multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and true/false for a total of 35 items per test along with essay practice. Thus, this book allows the teacher evaluate the students’ understanding and learning outcomes both formatively and summatively.

Summary

Having evaluated the material using both rubrics increased my awareness of the desirable criteria and the components of evaluation. Both rubrics focus on instructional resources, delivery, and assessment. While my own rubric also evaluates instructional delivery, yellow rubric was more specified in detail. For instance, the components of extension of learning time through assignments as instructional content and providing additional practice for struggling students or condensing instruction so that advanced students can concentrate on new materials were not considered in mine. It provided me an insight into the importance of correlation between the quality of instruction and student achievements. In addition, five evaluative rating scales seemed more effective to precisely assess the overall materials than three rating scales. 

Conclusion

Quest is an effective book to teach the EFL students both academic contents and language skills-reading and writing. Especially, an integrative approach combining reading skills and writing skills are highly recommendable. The fact that this book is designed to facilitate higher order thinking skills through an extensive use of graphic organizers and learning strategies are also noteworthy. Finally, by providing a variety of methods of assessment, this book allows teachers both for formative and summative assessments. However, all of these merits may disservice to certain EFL teachers who are not acquainted with this integrative strategy-based approach with its focus on reasoning and critical thinking and process-based assessment. Albeit this possible drawback, I highly recommend this textbook for EFL a reading and writing class as second language learning should be integrative and authentic. The traditional English textbooks that contain de-contextualized materials dependent on one or two discrete language skills will merely help vocabulary development and grammar rules or test-taking skills at best.  

 

Curriculum Evaluation Rubric (Revised)



Rubric Criteria

1. Course Organization                                                                        18 points

2. Resources and Materials                                                               18 points

3. Instructional Delivery                                                                    18 points

4. Learner Interaction                                                                         18 points

5. Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning                 18 points

Total                                                                                                         90 points

Overall Curriculum Evaluation

Point values are equivalent to:

90-68                                                                                     = Exemplary / Well Thought Out

67-45                                                                                     = Satisfactory

44-22                                                                                     = Needs Improvement

21 - 0                                                                                     =  Not Recommended

Reflections on Graves, Ch. 5& Burns Ch. 10

In chapter five, Graves addressed understandable concerns of in-service teachers over formulating goals and objectives beforehand in managing their actual lessons. I agree that teaching is organic; thus evolves upon students’ needs and responses as lessons proceed. In that sense, setting up goals might restrict the dynamic nature of teaching and learning as well as the creativity and freedom of teachers. However, as Graves (2000) aptly noted, “Goals provide guidelines and should be flexible enough to change, if they are not appropriate” (p. 74). Graves added that stating goals will help the teachers make priorities where they see the greatest need in a planning phase among a range of choices about contents, materials, approaches, and a form of assessment. After all, it is a matter of choices and flexibility that teachers make over the entire course with regard to its focus and specificity in relation to subsequent objectives. It was also insightful to note how closely setting goals and objectives is linked to teacher’s teaching principles and educational philosophy.

Among several frameworks for setting goals, I take Stern’s framework that merits serious consideration. Stern’s framework is categorized into four domains: 1) Proficiency, 2) Cognitive including language functions and cultural aspects, 3) Affective including motivation and confidence, and finally 4) Transfer that includes how learning in the classroom will be transferred to actual situations outside of the classroom. What I take most is that the teacher can specify socio-cultural aspects and affective outcomes when formulating goals and objectives. Although socio-cultural and affective domain, in particular, is hard to assess as an outcome of students’ learning, those domains, I believe, are the essence of language and language learning.

As an EFL language educator, I view language mostly as a social phenomenon. One prominent socio-cultural theorist Vygostky (1987) argues that human being s use language as a tool for thought (along with other social artefact such as music, art, numbers) to mediate our relationship with others. According to Gee (1999), language always contains the cues and clues that trigger specific situated meaning in certain social, cultural context, or discourse. Without such socio-cultural consideration along with language, our understanding of learning language might be limited.

From a sociocultural perspective, language learning is a mediated process, one that is not only mediated by mental tools but also by social factors. In other words, people learn languages by exploiting the mental tools that are available to them in their interaction. Learning can be facilitated through scaffolding and Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). When learning includes the supportive, collaborative activities by the experts, learners are enabled to operate within their ZPD to achieve the desired outcome. The importance of scaffolding and ZPD to language learning well accords with my pedagogical focus on collaborative and negotiated activities in which peers and teachers have opportunities to co-construct meaning and in which learners, through feedback, can appropriate the targeted language. 

Albeit my great concern over socio-cultural implications of second language learning , I have been hesitating to apply those approaches into my actual teaching as such constructs were vague and hard to be implemented and assessed. The article of Burns provided an excellent framework for realizing my ideal teaching philosophy. The article demonstrated how skilfully and successfully a teacher can develop a course responding to learner’s actual, authentic needs in a situated context. All in all, teachers need to take the initiatives in their own teaching as well.

Reflections on Graves, Chapter 4, 8, 9

First Mind Map for Project-Based Learning

Reflections

As Grave (2000) indicated, the way teachers who are organizing courses conceptualize content and set goals and objectives depends on their educational beliefs and their past experiences as a teacher and a learner. Most importantly, in conceptualizing content, teachers need to know who the students are, what their needs are, and how they will learn it. One very efficient way to conceptualize content is using mind maps, which I have never used in a planning stage of course design. I have mostly used the grid form so far; thus, I did not seem to fully utilize the non-linear way of thinking of mind maps this time. Nevertheless, completing an initial mind map for future assignment of course design provided me with insight into the flexible feature of mind maps as an effective tool for demonstrating the relationship among various elements of the syllabus. “A mind map enables one to see the course as a whole, the component parts, and the multiple relationships among the parts” (Graves, 2000, p. 57). One area I have not given much thought at this stage is developing materials that can embody the goals I established. As designing a course is a recursive work, I expect that I will have more concrete ideas of what kind of materials I will use and how I utilize them through revision. Above all, the whole process of designing a syllabus requires careful and resourceful decision making in every step of the process to meet the needs of students.    

Teacher Curriculum Interview

Interview Questions

1.      Could you briefly introduce yourself as an EFL teacher?

2.     What are your target teaching level and main teaching areas?  

3.     What are the features of the curriculum of your school

4.     How do you assess your students’ performance?

5.     Are you following textbooks and methods prescribed by the curriculum of the school? Or do you have any freedom to make the decisions relating to content, materials, and assessment?

6.     What is your guiding philosophy of education?

7.     What suggestions would you provide to your school to improve the current curriculum?

8.     In teaching, what kind of challenges or problems do you encounter and how do you deal with them?

9.     In related to Question 4, could you explain more about the evaluation system of your school?

10.  In developing a curriculum or designing a course, what aspect do you think is the most important?

The Original Interview File

http://violet04.podomatic.com/entry/2010-11-07T17_31_33-08_00

(Disclaimer: The last part of a file was deleted for some reason I was not aware of at all. Thus, the report about Question 9 and 10 was basically based on my memory.)

Summary of Interview

I have interviewed Ms. Hanna Lee who has been teaching English to middle school students for about three years in Korea. She earned a BA in secondary education in the US, and her current main teaching areas include speaking, writing, and listening. She and her colleagues used to work for one of the major English institutes in Korea, but they quit their job to run their own school three months ago. The motive behind such decision was my greatest concern in conducting this interview.  

Ms. Lee said that it was her dissatisfaction with the curriculum solely scribed by the institute that made her leave the school. The school used the same American textbooks for American 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th graders to teach EFL middle school students, with which she mostly disagreed seeing that those textbooks were too high and difficult for her students to follow. She said that curriculum of the previous school did not match what she thought a good curriculum should be like. The curriculum failed to reflect the situation of Korea, and the ELD level of Korean students.

Ms. Lee and her colleagues collaborately designed the current curriculum, specifying it into four areas; Listening, Reading, Grammar, and American textbooks. American textbooks are incorporated into the reading class. Although the curriculum offers some basic guidelines to the teachers, there is no fixed syllabus of each class. Rather, each teacher tries to provide more individualized lessons reflecting the ELD level of her students. She is, in particular, interested in using a range of audio-visual aids such as discovery education videos and national geographic channel videos to motivate her students.

In light of her philosophy of education, Ms. Lee emphasized that “Students should put to use what they really learn..they have to fully understand it ..should have to utilize it as a member of a global society”. Thus, she suggested to the school that they make full use of computers so that they can provide richer audio-video materials and find more ways to incorporate offline classes to online classes to increase students’ interests in the subject. 

The biggest challenge she encounters as a teacher is to motivate her students, she added. “The only way to get them to really study is not by forcing them or coercing them into studying, but to actually make them have fun in class, make them feel that English is not just a subject you need to learn to go to a college, but make them actually appreciate English, and just get them interested in it”.

Upon my request to elaborate the evaluation system of the school, she said that at the end of every semester, the students are supposed to take a comprehension test. The students are also asked to submit an essay on a weekly basis and revise it reflecting teacher’s feedback. However, their writings are only used as reference indicators of students.  

Finally, in developing a curriculum or designing a course, she maintained that selecting textbooks and defining the context are of great importance. She said that the textbooks should correspond to the proficiency level of the students, and to that end, the teachers should be accurately aware of the reality and the context of teaching and learning English in Korea.

My Reflections

The interview with Ms. Lee provided me a valuable opportunity to see interrelatedness between teacher’s philosophy and curriculum development. Ms. Lee highlighted the importance of motivation in learning a second language, the need for defining the context  and in turn selecting textbooks appropriate for students’ ELD levels in designing a course, which eventually made her start running her own school to offer a program that mirrors her conviction . She aptly raised concern over the blind obsession with the content-based programs in EFL curriculum context, which actually match the level of mainstream learners.   Most EFL teachers are required to follow a required curriculum of the school; thus the dilemma between what a teacher values and what he/she has to teach is prevalent in EFL education.

Faced with such dilemma or challenges in teaching, teachers are encouraged to adapt their teaching resources to accommodate the needs and interests of the students. More fundamentally, as McKay (2007) noted, “Teachers need to analyze the curriculum context, and weigh their own beliefs and theories in relation to the innovation” (p. 4). With regard to changes in teaching programs, it should be noted that any change into a curriculum requires “teacher commitment, and works best as a collegial and collaborative process with others” (White, 1993, as cited in McKay, 2007, p. 11). Through a process of sharing, teachers are more likely to increase their awareness of language education. They will get better understanding of the importance of examining context. In this sense, hearing what other professionals think about teaching, proper methods and what a good curriculum constitute provides an opportunity for professional growth.

Reflections on Graves, Chapter 2 & 3

Graves (2000) highlighted the organic process of teaching by positing “ Designing a language course is a work in progress in its whole, in its parts, and in its implementation” (p. 9). As a first step, defining the learning and teaching context for a language curriculum project provides teachers with opportunities to know students’ actual needs beforehand. Teachers can decide where to start and what to focus on by challenging taken-for-granted contexts and knowledge through the process of problematizing (Freire, 1973). Defining a challenge is doing great service to teachers to produce a feasible solution. In this way, “how problematizing often shapes teacher’s approach to designing a course” (Graves, 2000, p. 21).

Graves also indicates the interrelatedness between teacher’s beliefs and their choices they make. Teacher’s beliefs about language, the social context of learning, learning and learners, and teaching all impact every step of course design. Thus, it is noteworthy that teachers need to design a course that matches their educational beliefs reflecting on students’ needs with a careful consideration to the context of learning. As an EFL educator, I highly value learner-centeredness promoting learner autonomy; thus, hope to make continuous endeavor to develop learner-driven curriculum in a way that ensures the students actively negotiate to solve the problems based on shared decisions and eventually participate in making meaning of the world themselves and discovering knowledge as more autonomous learners.

More importantly, teachers need to consider the broader social, cultural, and historical implications in defining the context in designing a course. As the focus of teaching has been shifted from product-oriented teaching to process-oriented teaching in the TESOL profession, teachers are encouraged to produce a more flexible curriculum. Brown (1991) explains that these trend-setting shifts had created a new state of awareness in this profession. Thus, teachers are encouraged to develop their own theory, “awakened to the multiplicity of learner identities, awakened to the complexity of teacher beliefs, and awakened to the vitality of macrostructures-social, cultural, political, and historical-that shape and reshape the microstructures of our pedagogic enterprise” (Kumaravadivelu, 2006, p.75). Above all, “Curriculum emerges from the interactions between teacher, student, and world” (Miller, 2006, p. 3).

 

My Teaching Experiences

I earned a B.A. in public administration from Inha University in 1992. Since I was admitted on honor - The top student of the college, most people around me expected me to pursue the administrative career. However, the constant fervor for English was intense enough to convert my career from an aide for a congressman to an English teacher.  

As an English teacher, for over a decade I have mainly taught junior high school students who mostly intended to go abroad or go to foreign language high schools, highly sought after prestige schools in Korea. Since I took charge of test preparation courses, my classes were focused on getting higher scores on the standardized tests rather than enhancing students’ overall language proficiency, which contributed to draining my energy and withering enthusiasm as a language educator to a great extent.

While working for the school, I took charge of designing a test-preparation course for the middle school 3^rd graders, which includes establishing a committee consisting of 5-6 teachers to consult over syllabus design, textbook selection, teaching manuals and other related administrative issues on a quarterly basis. I also designed a writing course for entrance exams for foreign language high schools for which I collaborately published three books with other teachers.

CALL is one of my main interests, and I highly value the enormous opportunities Web 2.0 can bring. However, I am not quite good at using sophiscated mobile technologies. To me, the cell phone is a convenient tool for communication.  

As a future curriculum developer, I hope to learn how to skillfully incorporate my best interests, understandings and beliefs into the reality of the context in a way that can promote students creativity, critical thinking skills, and learner autonomy ultimately.

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