Creatively Tailoring Materials to Address Student Needs

Creatively Tailoring Materials to Address Student Needs

By: Mariana Gisler

For 16 years now I’ve been working as a Spanish instructor at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and for the past 11 years I’ve co-led our team of Spanish instructors. A while ago I finished developing an exam for students just beginning to learn Spanish (CEFR A1) and, as usual, I sent it to all my Spanish colleagues to try out the exam and give me feedback. The feedback was unanimous: the exam was very easy! Since my exams are known to be challenging, we were all expecting high results and even joked about having to add one or two extra A2 courses to the following semester’s schedule. 

To our surprise, a high number of students failed the exam! And we lecturers were all quite shocked. What happened? How come the results were so bad?

These questions led me to discover important things about materials writing. We started analyzing the students’ answers and found out that the majority of students had either not read or not understood the task questions properly. Students didn’t realize some of the questions were easy and that, for the more difficult test items, they could have used their knowledge of other foreign languages to understand both the tasks and the reading and listening texts. I even analyzed exams from earlier semesters, and I could see students were comprehending less and less in the texts they were reading and listening to in the previous two or three semesters. My colleagues also confirmed this trend based on the exercises they did during their lessons.

We concluded we needed to emphasize different reading strategies directly after finishing our first unit in the semester, much earlier than we had done in past semesters and long before the exam. I found a text about the world of the Spanish speakers which was easy enough for a beginner, but still challenging, and wrote up step-by-step instructions in German to guide students through approaching an unknown text (See Appendix 1 here).

When I tried this out the first time, it was amazing to see students’ faces but, most of all, they were surprised by how much they could understand after one unit if they faced the challenge of understanding a text in different, more positive way, namely “What do I understand?” instead of “I don’t understand that word, or these other words, etc.”

In this case, my starting point was students’ lack of global strategies to comprehend a new text using the own acquired experience and knowledge. But it was also a valuable lesson for them to not reach for the translation apps on their mobile phones as soon as they were confronted with an “unknown” word.

Last but not least, I had to recall the basics of teaching and writing materials, namely that we cannot assume the learners will already have the study strategies they need. Some students will need instruction in those strategies as well.

That said, many roads lead to Rome, so I would like to present a few other approaches that I use when I develop new materials.

Transforming boring materials into new friends

Another important aspect of materials writing is where you start. There are different starting points when I develop material for classes: the topics, what I want the students to practice (some kind of strategy, vocabulary, communication, summarizing information, etc.), the level of the group, and the kind of people I have in a group.

Next, I will give three examples (CEFR A1-B1) illustrating how I proceed.

Sometimes textbooks propose good topics but are missing profound reading or listening materials that would not only deepen students’ understanding of these topics but also encourage students to talk about them. For instance, in our CEFR A2 Spanish courses, we usually introduce the simple past (indefinido), and normally the textbooks offer the biography of a famous or important figure from the Spanish speaking world to introduce this grammar point. It is a very straightforward and good way to do so, but generally the students do not know who this celebrity is. I have found that it’s generally easier for students to talk and write about things that interest them, that move them, or that they like than things they know nothing about. Therefore, after the students have read the biography of somebody they don’t know, I give them this task:

Of course, the “panel of judges” are the students themselves who have to read as many texts as possible and decide which ones are the most interesting. (Alternative: in large classes, the teacher can divide students into four “panels of judges” and give each “panel” a certain number of biographies.) The student-written texts are rich sources of fresh input of vocabulary and information.

A funny thing happened on the way to the publishers!

Visiting a new country, I saw a book euphemistically called, English for Peacekeepers. One of the drills was, literally, “one Kalashnikov, two Kalashnikovs, three Kalashnikovs.”

Stephen M. Ryan, Think Tank editor

This task is actually also possible in a CEFR A1 course, but at the A1 level I prepare the input myself. I choose two different personalities, a man and a woman, and prepare a short presentation of each of the celebrities: a listening text as introduction with some questions to answer and perhaps a text or link to give students more information about the celebrity. The students have to work in pairs; each partner receives the information and tasks for only one of the celebrities. After working individually, partners exchange information. The final task is to choose one of the celebrities and write together questions they would like to ask the person if they had the opportunity (See Appendix 2 here).

My last example is from a CEFR B1 course in which one textbook chapter about social codes and habits was so boring that the whole team of Spanish language instructors disliked using it. The 24 students in my class were very open-minded and easy-going, so I decided to skip the textbook chapter and instead have them analyse their music and beverage preferences. Their task was to figure out something about a person’s personality and use the information to “analyse” guests in different bars (See Appendix 3 here).

First, I gave each of them a list of 30 adjectives, and individually they had to choose at least three positive ones and three negative ones that describe their character. As a follow-up, they had to explain their choices to a fellow student.

Then they received a table and marked what kind of music they listen to when they’re in a certain mood or at a certain hour of the day.

Afterwards, they visited two links: an amusing online quiz about the relationship between their taste of music and their personality, and a BBC article reporting on a study on this topic. They had to compare the new results with their initial ideas and exchange that information with their partner. What did the new material reveal about their character? Was it the same as they had assumed at the beginning? etc.

The next step was to think about what they drink when they go out with friends, hypothesize with a partner about what this could reveal about them, and finally read an article about beverages and personalities. I connected this step with a vocabulary task, as you can see in Appendix 3.

After doing all these tasks (90-140 minutes in total), each pair got together with another pair to form six groups of four students to share with each other what they knew or “their new information” about themselves after analysing their habits and tastes. Then, the class received the last task:

As you can see from the examples above and the linked tasks in Appendix 3, I simply searched for and found a lot of ideas on the World Wide Web. Some of them I had to adapt a little to fit my purposes or my courses, but others I could use without changing them. And this is a very important point in materials writing: center the activities on the learners’ world and their interests.

By now I also think that you can imagine the laughs my CEFR B1 students had while they were working through the materials in class, how involved the students were the whole time, how they got to know each other in a different way, the new friendships that were formed in the class, even couples emerged after those nights in the bars (!) and above all the laughs I had while correcting the reports. Because it is also very important in our daily work to challenge the students but also to challenge ourselves, to search for new subjects and ways to work, to create new materials to vary our everyday work, and to have fun while working. We spend a great deal of time in our lives working, so our work should be satisfying and fun!

Mariana Gisler is a Spanish instructor at the University of Göttingen and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her mission is to challenge her students and herself and not stand still while life passes her by.

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