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Format and presentation decisions are among the most common ones made
by a teacher. Every day teachers have to consider questions like the following:
" What activities will I get the learners to do today?
" Shall I get the learners to do this activity individually or in pairs or
groups?
204 Teaching and Curriculum Design
" Should I pre-teach these items before the learners meet them in the
reading passage?
" Shall I write this on the blackboard?
" Should I have a pre-reading discussion or should I get the learners to
talk about the text after the reading?
" Have I got a good balance of activities in this lesson?
All of these questions relate to format and presentation, because they involve
what the learners do in the lesson and the order in which they do these
things in the lesson. It is not too difficult to see how format and presentation
decisions are influenced by principles, needs analysis and environment
analysis.
The choice of a particular technique or activity can bring certain learning
principles into play. Does the technique provide an opportunity for retrieval?
Does the technique avoid interference between the items in the activity?
Does the technique provide an opportunity for fluency development or
meaning-focused input?
The choice of an activity also depends on environment analysis factors.
Does the physical arrangement of the classroom make it easy to do group
work? Is there enough time to complete the activity? Are the learners
well-behaved enough to be able to work quietly and independently? Have
the learners done this activity before or will they need to be taught how to
do the activity properly? Most teachers will make these decisions intuitively.
However, if the technique or activity is unsuccessful, it is always worthwhile
looking at the environment factors to see if changes can be made so that the
activity will work well. For example, group work might not be successful
simply because the learners are not sitting in a good group work arrange-
ment. Changing the seating arrangement could make the activity successful.
Similarly, pair work may be unsuccessful because learners are not working
with an appropriate partner. Changing the way the learners form pairs could
make the activity successful. Some activities may be seen by the learners to
be too much like a game and not serious enough to be considered as
opportunities for learning.
The choice of an activity also depends on needs analysis factors. Some
activities may be asking the learners to do things they are not yet able to do.
Some activities may be too easy. Fluency development activities should
involve easy material that the learners are already familiar with. This means
of course that learners either have to be aware of why they are doing the
activity, or there is some other challenge to the activity such as an increase in
speed which adds an element of difficulty to it. For each of the four strands
of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learn-
ing and fluency development, there is a proficiency condition which
must be met in order for that strand to truly exist. Meeting this proficiency
condition involves decisions which relate to needs analysis.
Teaching and Curriculum Design 205
Monitoring and Assessment
Every day teachers have to consider questions like the following:
" Is this activity going well?
" Are all the learners participating in the activity?
" Are some learners doing more work than others?
" Have the learners learnt anything from this activity?
" Should I give the learners a test to encourage them to keep on learning?
All of these questions relate to monitoring and assessment, because they
involve the teacher looking carefully at what learners are actually doing and
they may involve the teacher in some kind of testing or measurement.
Monitoring probably plays a much bigger role in most courses than
assessment does. Monitoring occurs whenever the teacher observes what the
learners are doing or what they have done in order to see if things are going
as they should. This happens many times in any lesson and can take many
forms. Most monitoring is informal and does not involve testing. Teachers
often develop a feel for what is going well. It is always good to check this
with some guided or focused observation. This guidance can occur in the
form of a question, for example,  Is each learner taking a turn in the activity?
How many times were the target words repeated by the learners in the
activity? Are all the learners completing the activity?
Teachers need to remember that assessment can be done for many
different purposes. It can be used to encourage learning, to find areas of
difficulty, to place the learners in the right group or class, to measure learn-
ing from the course, or to measure how much their language proficiency has
improved.
Evaluation
Every day teachers have to consider questions like the following:
" Is the course going well?
" Are the learners happy with the course?
" Am I happy with the course?
" Would other teachers think that my course is a good course?
" Can I see ways in which I can improve the course?
" Did today s lesson go well?
" Will I get through the course book by the end of the course?
All of these questions relate to evaluation because they involve making a
judgement on whether the course or some aspect of it is good or not. In
the curriculum design diagram, evaluation is a large circle which includes
206 Teaching and Curriculum Design
all of the parts of the curriculum design process. This is because evaluation
is very wide-ranging and can focus on any aspect of curriculum design.
Like needs analysis, evaluation is a kind of research. Typically it involves
asking a question about the course, and then deciding what will be the most
valid and reliable way of answering this question. Practicality can come
into this decision, but reliability and validity must be given prominence in
deciding the means of evaluation. If we are not really answering the question
(validity), or are answering it in ways which would give us a different result
tomorrow from what it does today (reliability), we are wasting our time.
By far, most evaluation of courses is done by the teacher and by the
learners, often independently of each other. Learners have opinions about
the courses they follow, and teachers similarly have opinions. These opinions
are important because they involve people closely related to the course.
However, it is always useful to check these opinions against more independ-
ent measures. Very enjoyable courses may be achieving very little in terms of
language development. Courses that students complain about with heavy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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