Self-reflection week 6

How it affects me?

In this week tutorial, my group has been given the task to analyse English foreign textbook by using Littlejohn’s checklist. Before the analyzing started, we already know that it will be hard for us because we have to understand the features. We picked 2 chapters from the textbook and analysed every tasks in each chapter. We discussed about the problems we encountered during the analyzing together and at the end, we managed to finish our work.

                Analyzing a textbook is really challenging for me. I could not do it if it was not because of my friends who helped me. I can’t imagine doing the analyzing alone, I will fail to do that. I need to work on that because it is really important for me to know all these things. This task really brought to my attention that analyzing a textbook will help on the teacher’s teaching in the classroom. By exploring the textbook using the checklist, the teachers are able to know what the textbook lacks on, what the teachers can modify from the task to suits the learners, and to choose another textbook that has more features in it.

How does it affect my current level of knowledge and use that knowledge to improve myself?

In this activity/task, we learned one of the ways on how to analysed a textbook. I think that using checklist is very useful although I did not use the other checklists given to my friends. Littlejohn’s checklist turned out to be specific or really in depth on analyzing textbook. Analyzing a textbook is not easy at all. After analyzing the textbook, we have another task to do which is to either use the textbook, modify the activity to make it fun and engaging, or to choose whether the activities suit learners’ proficiency level (or probably do the whole thing).

I realized that this checklist focuses more on what is the ‘inside’ of the textbook and not the ‘outside’. What I meant is, this checklist emphasis more on what can the learners get from the lesson but not about the minor things such as the color of the text and graphics included inside textbook. This minor things can be one of the factor that will make the learners to be motivated in learning. Therefore, I think that it should be used with other checklist that emphasis on the minor criteria. Different checklist might be different to other teachers, so it depends on the teacher themselves to use what type of checklist that they want. The most important thing is to always pick a checklist that is related to the syllabus because it will be easier for the teacher to just add or remove the activity in the lesson rather than have nothing on the checklist that is related on the textbook.

By analyzing the checklist, teachers can found out if the activity suits their learners or not. If it doesn’t, teachers have to modify the activity to accomplish the learning objective.