Introduction:
According to Nunan (1988) materials represent the essential parts of the curriculum. The textbook is the most popular source of conveying knowledge by all language teachers in their classrooms. A good EFL curriculum should meet students’ needs, expose the students to language in authentic use and provide the students with opportunities to use the target lan¬guage to achieve communicative purposes. The only way to ensure the existence of these features is through careful evaluations of textbooks and other curriculum materials. According to Sheldon (1988), there are several reasons to evaluate textbooks . First, the evaluation helps teachers in making decisions on selecting the appropriate textbook. Additionally, evaluation of the merits and demerits of a textbook will familiarize teachers with its probable weaknesses and strengths. This enables teachers to make suitable adjustments to the material in their future instruction. Moreover, a textbook evaluation can be very useful in teacher development and professional growth.
This paper provides an inclusive look to the Third Grade Intermediate English textbook, Say It in English, which was implemented in 2005 by the Ministry of Education. In fact, from my experience in teaching English to the intermediate grades, I have noticed that many teachers have criticized this textbook. They believe that it is beyond the learner's level and overloaded with too many structure and vocabulary items.
This paper examines the extent to which the third grade intermediate curriculum is appropriate for the learners in terms of layout and design, objectives, topics, skills, activities, structure and vocabulary, language type and culture.
Layout and Design:
Teaching materia...
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...llocated time. Some writing and reading materials are beyond the students' level. The textbooks need to be accompanied with supplementary materials. In general, this kind of syllabus needs teachers to use communicative language teaching. As observed, most teachers follow the traditional approaches to teaching, which depend greatly on translation, writing, and reading rather than speaking. Thus, it is necessary for teachers to be trained on linguistic competence and modern methodology.
In conclusion, Cunningsworth (1984) assures that no textbook is completely suitable to a particular teaching situation. Language teachers should be responsible to compensate any defects of a textbook since no textbook is perfect. Most importantly, they should supply the textbook with self-created materials or materials from other sources that reflect the needs of the learners.
In an effort to create a context for learning, one needs to define the language that will be used to teach a subject. So often in schools, from first grade through graduate studies, when teaching a new subject matter or concepts, it is necessary to teach the vocabulary that will accompany that subject. However, we often spend little time making sure that vocabulary is learned and consequently without the prerequisite knowledge of vocabulary of learning, the learning of information related to it is difficult. This need for definition of relevant language is seen in multiple sources, with textbooks being one of the greatest sources of it. The books highlight, bold, or italicize critical words and provide definitions of the word or within the text or margins.
The National Curriculum is split up into stages, these stages are determined by age groups, key stage 1 ranges from ages 5-7 which is the year group 1 and 2, then there is key stage 2 which ranges in ages 7-11 this is year groups 3-6. Key stages 3 and 4 are secondary stages, so at key stage 3 the pupils are 11-14. At the final stage of the pupils development through the National Curriculum, key stage 5 they are 14-16, at this stage they get more choice in which areas of the curriculum they want to continue in. However some subjects which are part of the National Curriculum such as, english, maths and science are compulsory. At each stage expectations are set as to pupils performance levels. Targets are laid out for programmes of study for pupils. The national curriculum helps the school create a working relationship, not only with the pupils but also with the parents. The curriculum is a way to create many more opportunities for all levels of achievement. It can help with building on certain strengths in a pupils ability. When we consider the different structures to which the curriculum can take on we must look at the way in which the information set out through the curriculum is put across to the pupils through content and organization. David Scott a Professor of Educational Leadership and Learning at the University of Lincoln?s International Institute for Educational Leadership. He is an expert in curriculum studies, David Scott identifies and depicts six curriculum ideologies. These are Foundationalism, Conventionalism, Instrumentalism, Technical Rationality, Critical Pedagogy and Post-modernism.
Our Session Long Project (SLP) for Module 1 transforms the evaluation essay into a job evaluation. The type of job evaluation used in this SLP identifies the responsibilities of the job and bases the individual’s performance on these responsibilities. What does this mean to the employee; it means that if they understand the responsibilities of their job they are better able to perform it to the satisfaction of the evaluator. However employees who are not informed of their responsibilities can invalidate your evaluation process very quickly and wreck havoc in any organization.
As it is demonstrated above, there were acceptable proportion of educators to stand for diverse school levels and grade levels. The stages from Kinder- High school are well represented. This encourages a great representation in aspects of feasibility toward oneself (instructional techniques, classroom administration and learner engagement). It is trusted that each age range has its own particular remarkable and element structure which will truly have diverse results relying on how the instru...
English language learners are at different levels of proficiency. Listening, reading, verbal, and writing skills of ELLs will require a variety of instructional levels to meet their varied needs. Understanding the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the learners, will enable the teacher to develop lesson plans that meet and challenge the skill levels of each student. Writing is one of the most productive activities for ELLs (Saville-Troike, 2012). Writing is a common method for testing knowledge and is used frequently for academic
Teaching students a language that is foreign can really be challenging for students as well as for the teachers. The dynamic rule for implementing instructing in a diverse class to English-learners is to use resourceful life skills such as diligence, hard work and patience. There are also methods that are involved in teaching English as a second language that can be creative for the teacher, yet beneficial to the student. First building a strong foundation that is essential to English learners will promote the language acquisition process. To do this teacher’s should always start with preparation. Advance preparation is essential in order to provide necessary adaptations in content area instruction and to make content information accessible for second language lear...
• Before the class, the teacher should have prior knowledge so they already know the background and culture of their students. When they teach the new knowledge, it can be bridged with the knowledge the ELLs already know by using their primary language. • “ Scaffolding” is a good guidance for ELLs to learn content under Teacher’s instruction and teacher uses modeling ,bridging to help them go through at the beginning. Later on, teachers will slowly release more responsibilities to students make them more
Overall, I have really enjoyed doing book presentations this year. I think that the aspect of being able to read and share a book with the class has been effective in opening my eyes to all of the different types of literature in the world. There are so many more books than just the popular young adult fiction genre out there, and these book presentations helped me learn that. Before these, I was never really interested in books that were older than me. But as a result of book presentations I have learned that older books can be just as good as newer ones.
Because of both language and classroom social skills can be learned from peers, it would be important to build a community of dynamic grouping and provide them to participate in a reading activity within a familiar classroom routine rather than pull out ELLs from the main classroom. Teacher’s underestimation of students’ ability to read and comprehend English text is very dangerous. Instead of focusing on surface features of language, teachers should respond to students at the level of idea and model the use of Standard English. Then, they will have confidence to express their idea in a conventional way.
Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Plat, H. (2000). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
Since then, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been a standard reference for anyone working with curriculum development. Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned.
Thus, the book answers numerous practical questions that teachers have often struggled with; for example, how to increase the chances of academic success for language learners, how to use technology to teach language effectively, or how to teach language and content material concurrently. From the preface, the author makes it very clear that the book is designed to support language teachers in their journey as new teachers and throughout their teaching careers. In total, the book contains eleven chapters, which have been divided into four parts. The first part, "What Do Language Teachers Think About?" includes topics of foreign/ second language acquisition theories and language teaching methodologies. This part introduces the background knowledge readers will need in their journey as language teachers. The second part, "How Do You Teach a Language?" introduces approaches to teaching and learning that improve students’ writing, listening, speaking and reading abilities. Each chapter in this part includes suggestions for how students can be motivated and describes teaching and testing approaches to assess students ' language skills and academic literacy. The third part, "How Do I Know What to Teach?" is instrumental in helping teachers adopt teaching practices to particular teaching settings. The fourth part, "Where Do I Go from Here?" helps teachers gain a clearer perspective of what language teaching is all about; this section also considers teacher 's self-assessment and personal
Long, M, H. & Doughty, C, J. ( Eds.).(2009). The Handbook of Language Teaching. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
In most institutions of learning today, the classes are made up of students from different ethnic backgrounds. These have different traditions and also speak different languages. In a typical classroom, the majority of the students will speak the same language. The teacher must then employ strategies which will accommodate all the students in the class. This will ensure that every learner gets the best quality of education. This will enable them to be better prepared for career and expressing themselves. In this paper, strategies to assist learners of the English language in their literal development for third grade learners. In the paper, three strategies that can be used by the teacher will be discussed. New strategies and research that will help the English language learners to gain in depth mastery of the language will also be discussed. Due to the widespread learning of the English language in most schools, addressing issues of the language learners is of vital importance. Teachers should have the understanding that cultures are what give someone identity and therefore no student should leave their culture for another. Instead, there should be the blending of different cultures so that students can appreciate and learn from each other.
As a teacher, is very important to use a wide range of learning and teaching resources, from books or other printed materials so, that students are encouraged to explore issues of interest,