Conference+reflection+2+by+Alp+Kaan+KILINÇ

I will write my reflection on the conference by Darío Luis Banegas from the University of Warwick. He is one of the speakers in the 46th Annual International IATEFL Conference & Exhibition. His topic is “combining marketed coursebooks and teacher-developed materials: reasons, possibilities and implications”. He talks about his project called Car-CLIL which was conducted in a secondary school in southern Argentina on how to incorporate curricular content in the EFL lesson. He deals with language-driven CLIL and teachers’ principles for evaluating, adapting and developing materials. He mentions teachers’ perceptions: context-free curriculum, lack of systematicy in topic treatment, unchallenging activities (TASK), mismatch between language ability and cognitive challenge, good for planning and good for structuring grammar and vocabulary input. Afterwards, he tells us about students’ perceptions: Demotivating topics, predictable, the book as a straitjacket, unchallenging activities, poor listening - speaking opportunities and good for grammar - vocabulary learning. He gives examples from students and narrates their opinions to us. For instance, Student 1 says “What we did the last lesson was more dynamic, with more contributions from us” and Student 2 says “True and besides the teachers, even if they don’t like it, they can’t teach outside the course book. They have to teach us that”.

He asks a student how s/he found the teacher with her materials and the student says “And that makes the teacher much more participatory because otherwise she just grabs the book, she tells you what to do and each of us does it individually”. We can understand from these responses that students have mixed attitudes towards the use of course books. They think that a lesson with teachers’ own materials is more participatory and more dynamic but a course book is necessary despite it. He also shows us the principles of teacher-developed materials: Negotiation of topics, sources and activities, authentic audio-visual sources, shortness, comprehensible input, content relevance- complexity, and transferability potential. Lastly, he talks about students’ feedback and suggestions. Students think that teacher-developed materials are different, responding to their needs and context, complex, encouraging students’ and teacher’s participation but no good for learning new grammar. They prefer using a course book for grammar learning. They believe that teacher’s materials for engaging topics and skills work through authentic sources and a combination for more dynamic and participatory lessons is needed. As a conclusion, the presenter combines international publisher and local initiatives, thus reaching the context-responsive topics and authentic sources.

As for my comments, I think that course books may be necessary for some activities. However, focusing on the course book solely is boring and not engaging for students. Therefore, teachers should combine the course books with their materials and techniques. This is what this presentation shows us. This is what students think. I have also read an article on this issue recently and it had similar ideas. Course books, especially the ones published by the countries where English is the native language, are designed under the influence of the target culture and students who are not familiar with that culture and who cannot find any similarity or any similar example from their own culture have difficulties with engaging in the activities offered by these books. I liked this presentation. However, the information is a little limited and it could have been more elaborated.

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