Monday, October 11, 2010

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

Teachers make a difference in students learning and materials with effective learning strategies can support or impede their impact. It is important the kind, frequency, and intensity of active participation and lesson related tasks included with materials.
Motivational Strategies: Features that maintain students motivation include:
1. Positive expectations.
2. feedback
3. appearance.
Setting Positive Expectations
In addition to the clear statement of goals and settings expectations, development of the right climate for learning sets expectations and contributes to students' motivation, involvement, learning outcomes, and contentment. the learning climate must be intentionally designed into a course.
Factors that contributes to a learning climate include:
1. friendly, attentive, and encouraging communication.
2. Student collaboration assignments and group projects.
3. student communication and presentations.
4. Informative feedback on students progress.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Principles for Effective Materials Development

By  Teacher Stephanie Segura


 According to Brian Tomlinson, author of  Principles for Effective Materials Development, each principle needs to be derived from principle of language acquisition and should them be used to develop frameworks that link together procedures in an organized and coherence way.

Some principles of language acquisition mentioned that called my attention are:
  • A prerequisite for language acquisition is that the learners are exposed to a rich, meaningful, and comprehensible input language in use.
  • Students need to engaged both effectively and cognitively in the language experience.
  • Language learners who achieve positive affect are much more likely to achieve communicative than those who do not.
  • L2 language learners can benefit from using those mental resources that they typically utilize when acquiring and using their L1
  • Learners need opportunities to use language to try to achieve communicative purposes.
Some principles of language teaching mentioned that called my attention are:

  • The content and methodology of the teaching should be consistent with the objectives of the course and should meet the needs and wants of the learners.
  • The teaching should be design to help learners to achieve language development and not just language acquisition.
  • The teacher needs to be able to personalize and localize the materials and to relate them in different ways to the needs, wants, and learning style preferences of individual learners.