Self-reflection week 4/5

How it affects me?

For this week’s tutorial, we were given a task to analyse and present about the checklist of Andrew Littlejohn. We created out PowerPoint slides after we finished analyzing the article ‘Material Development in language teaching’ by Brian Tomlinson. At the beginning, it was hard for me to understand Littlejohn’s checklist as I was confused about the frameworks, levels and features mentioned. Also, we got confused with the blank checklist in the article as we did not know what criteria we should include in it, fortunately, the problem was resolved after our lecturer explained everything to us.

Basically, Littlejohn’s checklist has three levels that the teacher or analyzer needs to consider, which are ‘What is there’, ‘What is required of users’ and ‘What is implied’. These three levels are then put inside the checklist with different features making the analyzing of a textbook to be more specific. In our presentation, we were required to tell the problems that we’ve encountered during the analyzing of a textbook that is used in foreign country. Besides the fact that this checklist has too many things to consider, we also found out that it is difficult to be used by an inexperience teachers. They might not understand the features and will have a hard time to decide whether the features are related to the task in a textbook or not. To solve this problem, inexperience teachers can seek consultation to the experienced teacher or to use other checklist to analyse textbooks.

How does it affect my current level of knowledge?

As a future teacher who is going to use the textbook as a learning material, I need to consider about the features in the textbook itself. There are 2 things that I need to consider, which are, the explicit nature of the material (what we can see in the textbook), and the importance aspect of the material (the textbook’s activity). After that I need to come out with some general conclusion whether that activity is appropriate to be conducted in classroom or not.

 However, in our country, analyzing a textbook will not be necessary as we are only using one textbook and it is compulsory in lesson teaching. In my opinion, the learning based on textbook is quite boring. Maybe the teachers can’t use the checklist as a tool to guide them to choose a textbook, but it can be a guide for them to add or remove tasks/activity in the textbook to attain the goals of learning. Therefore, teachers in Malaysia should be more creative to modified or design activities in classroom.

How can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

I personally believe that a learning material, for instance, a textbook, is one of the tool that is needed to conduct a lesson in classroom. This is because each of the students in the classroom have it. Therefore, a teacher should be wise to pick an appropriate activity that suits their learner in classroom. Teachers can use the checklist to add on activities that lacks in the checklist in order to achieve the learning objectives. If there are no activities in the textbook that suits the learners’ proficiency level, teacher should modify the task to ensure students’ participation in classroom.