Tutorial Week 6 ● Reflection

In week four and week five’s tutorial, each group gave a presentation on their respective checklist. It was interesting to see how many checklist we can use to evaluate a material. After the presentation, we were given an English textbook/course book by Miss JC. Our task was to use our respective checklist to evaluate and list out the problems we faced during the evaluation. “Easy job. Just follow the criteria/features given in Littlejohn’s checklist, tick the ones that the chapters have,” I thought. I was wrong.

Referring to the problems stated in the PowerPoint presentation, our group struggled quite a bit with how the tasks should be divided and with the meaning of some criteria. Despite the definition and examples given in the article, we still couldn’t fully understand the criteria. After some discussion with the group, we decided to evaluate based on our understanding of the criteria/features. It was a relieve knowing what we’ve discussed were correct after our presentation; and it was good that Miss JC further explained the meaning of different criteria/features.

I can’t say I enjoyed this task, but I know that I’ve learnt a lot through it. Materials evaluation isn’t as easy as it looks like, and it takes a large amount of effort in analysing each task. I’ve learnt that it is important to be open to other people’s opinion and feedback on things. Everyone is different in the way they think, and I realise it’s good to be able to listen to different interpretations and see things in other people’s perspective. With this, it is important that teachers also seek other teachers for different opinion on the tasks/activity in the textbook. The teachers will not only be able to share their own experiences with one another, they can also work together to produce better materials that are interesting and will be able to suit different learners.

Littlejohn’s checklist is a good checklist to be used as it is specific and it looks at every aspect of the material. However, I feel that it may be very difficult to use this checklist all the time. Analysing materials with this checklist requires patience as the analysis can be quite tedious. Teachers will not have sufficient amount of time to go through each tasks as they have other responsibilities and needs to cater to. Thus, I recommend that teachers try to allocate a time to at least analyse 5-8 tasks a day; other checklists can also be used too. 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.