Assignment 9.2: Course Planning

Introduction
The course was planned for a group of five pre-Entry learners at South Tyneside College. The class met three times a week, with each session lasting three hours. The Scheme of Work covers the first six weeks of the course including time spent on diagnostic assessment. After the first four sessions, tutorials were held with each learner during which I elicited responses to the topics covered in the Scheme of Work.

Rationale: Learner Needs and Weaknesses

The diagnostic assessment identified some literacy needs in three of the learners and a wide mix of abilities, both as a group and individually. All of the students were able to provide basic personal information (orally and, to some extent, in written form), to write the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case, to extract basic vocabulary relating to days of the week, transport and places of work from a short listening, and to recognise, if not spell, some common classroom objects. Weaknesses included an inability to form sentences using basic grammatical structures (be, have), to ask for clarification or repetition or to use capital letters appropriately. With the exception of Young-suh, the learners’ speaking ability was of a higher level than their reading or writing. In particular, Mohammed and Abdus were able to speak at length about familiar topics such as family and place of work. The initial emphasis of the course will, as a result of this and feedback received from the learners following diagnostic assessment, be on punctuating written work (including capitalisation and the spelling of familiar words), reviewing basic grammatical structures (written and oral), and learning functional expressions used when asking speakers to clarify or repeat information.

Reading skills such as whole word recognition and reading simple sentences will be incorporated into classroom activities. Likewise, listening practice will initially comprise the learners being able to understand and respond to social interaction occurring in pair and group work.

Despite not forming a major part of the diagnostic assessment, the learners had clearly apparent difficulties with areas of phonology, including intonation, word stress and phonemes. Therefore, pronunciation work including drilling and minimal pair discretion exercises will be included in the Scheme of Work.

Pacing is extremely important with basic learners, particularly in mixed-ability classes. Progress will be influenced by previous educational experience, literacy skills (including L1) and confidence in using language. Accordingly, course planning needs to incorporate time for reviewing and reinforcing topics. Above all, pacing should be responsive to the needs and abilities of the learners.

Although it is often difficult to consult low-level learners on their precise language needs, it is obviously important that classroom topics include practical skills to aid their social integration, enabling learners to communicate more effectively outside of class. For this reason there will be a lot of work on communicative exchanges involving basic personal information. As three of the students are asylum seekers with children, specific attention is needed on form filling and understanding written information in addition to oral work.

Finally, as the class are generally below Entry 1 level, Skills for Life materials will have to be adapted, and supplemented or replaced by the tutor’s own materials.

Rationale: Theories of Language Acquisition

Although they have lived in the UK for over ten years, Mohammed and Abdus have had very little formal education in the English language. Much of what they know has therefore been acquired naturally via out-of-classroom interaction as opposed to being consciously studied – what Krashen calls the Acquisition-Learning distinction (Krashen, 1983). To a lesser extent, this is also true of the other three learners. In Krashen’s view, classroom work should be communicative, low in stress, comprehensible and relevant to the learners. The focus should be on acquiring “conversational competence”, enabling learners to work independently outside of the classroom. Correction and the study of grammar are largely to be avoided.

However, as seen in the evaluation sessions, students often hold far more traditional views about the learning process, valuing dictation, oral drills, immediate correction of mistakes and the explicit teaching of grammar rules. Evidence of fossilized errors was provided during diagnostic assessment by both Abdus and Mohammed, who are able to communicate effectively with native speakers at work but are keenly aware of their grammatical limitations. The best approach is therefore likely to be one that prioritizes the learners’ individual needs rather than any one methodology. In the words of Lightblown and Spada, "accuracy, fluency and overall communicative skills are probably best developed through instruction that is primarily meaning-based but in which guidance is provided through timely form-focused activities and correction in context" (Lightbown and Spada, 1993)

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment was checked in a number of ways, starting with the monitoring and marking of classroom activities and homework. Given the small size and low-level of the class, I was able to monitor individual students while they were working and use this as a basis for assessment, feedback and further planning. Feedback slots and informal testing were built into lesson plans and the Scheme of Work. Short spelling tests, for instance, often with the words to be tested given as homework, were used to reinforce prior work and provide the learners with a sense of achievement. Speaking was assessed using tutor-designed board games and questionnaires, or extended with written activities that allowed scope for further checking of progress. Activities at the beginning of each lesson were planned to link back to topics studied in the previous session, providing an opportunity for assessment and review. Where possible, learners were encouraged to assess their own progress in conversations with the tutor.

A more formal kind of assessment takes place in tutorials, when measurable targets are negotiated with each learner. In practice this is not always possible in classes where students have low-level speaking skills or little experience of formal education, as they are unable to identify or articulate their specific needs. Official tutorials are scheduled once per term, during which ILP targets are checked and evidence of learning collected.

Evaluation After 10 Hours’ Teaching

The original scheme of work was composed in response to areas of weakness identified in the diagnostic assessment and included topics standard to the initial stages of the Entry 1 Skills for Life materials. While the work covered was appropriate to the level of the learners the pacing of the first sessions was too slow for the stronger students, with an over-emphasis on accuracy and the review of basic structures. It was apparent that, with appropriate support, the learners could move at a faster pace.

After four sessions the dynamic of the group altered due to the arrival of two new learners. The first, Wannida, a 46-year-old Thai woman who had lived in the UK for two years, fitted into the existing class profile in that she was able to compose legible text, respond to questions and give basic information. However, the second, Rubi, was a much less confident speaker and was unwilling to work with the two male Bengali learners, meaning whole class activities had to be adapted.

Coupled with this, Mohammed and Abdus requested more basic literacy work, in particular more emphasis on spelling and sentence construction. Mohammed also asked for more dictation work in class, both on individual words and whole sentences. Young-suh and Min-jae both expressed an interest in using computers to help their writing.

Following these changes and requests, as well as ongoing classroom assessment, the initial Scheme of Work was amended accordingly.

Suggested Changes in Response to Evaluation

First and foremost, a greater amount of differentiation has to be built into the remainder of the course. While Rubi and Halima still need work on basic functional structures, the focus for Mohammed and Abdus will move more towards reading and writing. In order to achieve this, lesson plans could be adapted to include initial speaking practice for the whole class followed by written extension exercises for Mohammed and Abdus while the remainder of the students concentrate on oral work. An alternative to whole class mingling exercises would be to divide the learners into two groups for speaking activities, with Min-jae or Wannida joining Abdus and Mohammed. Less time should be spent on simple oral drills – remedial work can be done with individual learners where necessary.

A separate session teaching basic computer vocabulary, showing the learners how to log-on to the system and practising some simple word processing skills would be a suitable addition to the Scheme of Work, having the benefit of varying written practice and allowing greater differentiation due to the number of online resources available for stronger learners.

As tutors become more aware of their learners’ needs and interests, language experience lessons, where the tutor copies down a learner-generated text and divides it into individual words for the learner(s) to reconstruct could also be used to provide motivating and meaningful literacy work. More emphasis on reading could be provided by the use of written texts prepared as a result of interviews with the learners. Listening scripts could be produced by recording learner responses to questions asked by the tutor or classmates. This would have been a good way to utilise the stronger speaking skills of Abdus and Mohammed.

Conclusion

Initially, the biggest factors influencing course planning are the requirement to map Schemes of Work to core curriculum descriptors and, in LSC-funded institutions, the need for tutors to use the nationally produced Skills for Life materials. These materials have the advantage of being pre-mapped to the core curriculum but are also based very heavily around chunks of functional language and lack any substantive grammar input or supplemental activities. As with all mass produced materials they are often unsuitable for particular groups of students and need to be adapted or supplemented to varying degrees by individual tutors. Thus, schemes of work, while broadly following the standard curriculum, will differ markedly in the time and focus given to individual topics, skills and language points.

The main requirement of good course planning is that it should be flexible and responsive to the needs of the learners, individually and as a group, both in terms of the work to be covered and the methodology and materials to be used. A Scheme of Work provides a guide to what the tutor would like to achieve at the outset of a course but is best viewed as a starting point to be informed by what happens in the classroom thereafter. Overall, I believe that schemes of work should serve as the basis of a flexible learning programme, with the teacher amending, adding or replacing work as new interests, gaps or strengths in knowledge are identified during lesson activities, formative assessment, tutorials and discussions with learners.

Bibliography

Ellis, Rod (1997) -Second Language Acquisition, Oxford University Press

Lightbown and Spada (1993) – How Languages Are Learned, Oxford University Press.

Scrivener, Jim (1994) – Inside Teaching, Heinemann

Krashen, S and T Terrell. (1983) The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom, Pergamon

DfES (2003) - Skills for Life, DfES Publications
Richards, J. C. and T. S. Rodgers (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language
Teaching, Cambridge University Press

Krashen, S and O’Neill, R - On Learning and Acquisition
http://www.eslminiconf.net/april/oneillreply.html

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