Teaching Teachers to Evaluate and Design Materials

Carol Lethaby: http://clethaby.com/

Helping Teachers to Choose and Adapt Reading and Listening Materials

Ten Things Teachers Need to Know

Carol Lethaby clethaby@clethaby.com

The New School University - UC Berkeley Extension

1 What are suitable texts for learners?

• The difference between ‘authentic’, ‘adapted-authentic’ and ‘pseudo-authentic’ texts.

2 How long should texts for learners be?

3 How do we read / listen?

Sample Task

Discuss: What are the advantages and disadvantages of each type?

Sample Task

Find an authentic text and adapt it for a group of students to use for intensive reading practice. Write a rationale for

why you chose the text, who it's adapted for and how you adapted it. (750 words)

Include the original and your adaptation as appendices. The adaptation can be a pseudo-authentic text or a semi-

authentic text.

It should be of this approximate length depending on the level of student it is intended for.

Approximate text lengths to aim for:

Beginner - 50 -100 words

High beginner / pre-intermediate - 100 - 200 words

Intermediate - 200 - 300 words

Upper Intermediate - 300 - 450 words

Advanced - 450 -600 words

You do NOT need to design activities to accompany the text.

Sample Task

Discuss: How is reading /listening in L1 different from reading / listening in L2?

Teaching Teachers to Evaluate and Design Materials

Carol Lethaby: http://clethaby.com/

4 What does a receptive skills lesson look like?

Sample Tasks

Identify the staging from teaching videos and published materials

1 Watch a teacher working with a reading and identify the stages

New American Horizons (newamericanhorizons.org)

Developing Reading Skills for Intermediate / Advanced Learners

http://bcove.me/5p6grdyb

2 Find an example from a published coursebook and identify the stages.

Teaching Teachers to Evaluate and Design Materials

Carol Lethaby: http://clethaby.com/

[From: Harmer, J, Acevedo A and Lethaby, C (2015) Just Right Pre-Intermediate New Edition Cengage

Learning]

5 How are reading / listening tasks designed?

6 What’s different about reading and listening?

Sample Tasks

1 Look at tasks from published material and talk about the type of processing and

sub-skills they encourage / teach.

2 Design some tasks of your own based around a piece of published material.

3 Compare and contrast with the original.

Sample Task

Discuss: What’s the impact on text selection and task design of these differences?

• Importance of pre-tasks

• Design of tasks – less reading and writing

Teaching Teachers to Evaluate and Design Materials

Carol Lethaby: http://clethaby.com/

7 What kind of listening practice can learners get?

8 What does recorded listening feel like for the learner?

9 Can I adapt and improve published listening tasks?

10 How can I design a complete reading / listening lesson?

Sample Task:

Discuss: What are the differences between live and recorded listening?

Sample Task:

Try out a listening lesson. What things were challenging? What parts

were easy?

Sample Task

Improve the materials and adapt them for a particular group, using the same listening text.