Tutorial Week 4 & 5 ● Reflection

This week’s tutorial task was interesting, I must say. I never knew there were checklists in evaluating materials till I joined this course, so it was something new for me. J We were required to give a presentation base on the checklist we were given, chose. We were given a choice on which author’s checklist we would like to present on; not knowing that it’d be one of the toughest checklists to understand, we chose the author with what we thought had the most interesting name, Andrew Littlejohn.

I struggled really hard the first time I read the article on Littlejohn’s checklist, I couldn’t understand what it was about and I found it hard to focus while reading. I realised just reading the article didn't help; so I decided to highlight important points and make annotations. After that, re-reading it for around four times really allowed me to understand the main points, and I realised it wasn't as tough as I thought it would be.

As I was trying to understand Littlejohn’s article, it was interesting to see how he introduces the framework and how there are different levels in analysing the materials. I felt that it was helpful that he arranged it in a way that there are different levels in analysing, first the explicit nature of the material, then he slowly moves in to a more specific/deeper level of analysis. I really like this checklist as it looks at every aspect of the material. However, seeing so many criteria/features in the checklist, I do think that it can be time consuming.

Through this tutorial task, I found out the importance of evaluating a material. Teachers will be able to see what the material lacks, they can also improve the materials to suit the classroom and to achieve learning objectives. However, I feel that the checklist can only do so much in how effective a material can be, the rest belongs to the effort a teacher puts in order to produce a good material. I would definitely try to use this checklist in the future in hopes of providing my future learners a better language learning material. J

*This reflection was written on the 5th of November. The date was changed because I thought it'd be better if it was posted after the respective task.