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.
1 comments:
Thank you for being honest with the posting date.
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