Material Adaptation

 First-Glance Evaluation

I would like to provide knowledge and experiences to my students in learning about asking for and giving services, things, clarification, asking and expressing opinion, and giving personal responses. I tried to evaluate activities of unit 7 of English book. I need to predict whether activities (dialogue, exercises, etc) are relevant or not to first grade of junior high school.

I planned to teach this material for six meeting (12 hour). Asking for and giving things and services was taught in the first meeting, asking for and giving services in the second meeting, asking and expressing opinion in the third meeting, giving interpersonal responses in the fourth meeting, creating short functional text such as greeting card and lost notices in the fifth meeting, and evaluation in the sixth meeting.

Section 1: asking for and giving things, services, clarification; asking and expressing opinion; and giving personal responses

These sections are divided into three parts of activities: presentation, practice and production activities but I tried to combine them because I think that my students need to practice directly after learning material of a topic. Their new knowledge about new topics of language will not work effectively if they need to learn all of topics in this unit before put them into language practice and production. 

I decide to adopt activity 1 and activity 2 in presentation activities, because I think that my students should be familiar with some vocabularies which are related to ask for and give things and they should learn some examples how to ask for and give things before they put it into practices. In these activities, students need to listen and repeat after teachers to train them how to pronounce and stress words or sentences.

 After learning some vocabularies in activity 1 and examples in activity 2, students need to practice it in real situation. I tried to adapt task in activity 3 and activity 4. Students take turns with their partner asking and giving something. In related to learning principle “starting from now and here”, I would like to change required things in these activities. Students are required to ask something that their partner has, and their partner express to give something that he/she has or refuse to give it. They are not directed to use the model in these activities but they could use some expression that they have learnt in activity 2. These activities are linked to practice activities (activity 1 and activity two) and production activity (activity 10).

In activity 5, students will learn from three types of dialogue about how to ask for and give services. Students are required to listen and repeat after me as a teacher. I think they should not only listen and repeat but they need to practice these dialogues then they can ask a partner to ask give services based on the task of activity 2 in production activity.

In activity 6 to activity 8, students will learn how to ask for and give for opinion. I decide to adapt the material in activity 6 and 7. In activity 6, I need to take some pictures of animal that my students are familiar with such as monkey, lion, elephant, and find others picture from internet, then I change the name of animal of the dialogue in activity 7. Students are required working with a partner and try to ask and give opinion about animals in picture by using some expression in task 7. I will give my students a space to practice the material through role play after study the dialogue in activity 8. If we have sufficient time, I will try to adopt activity 3 and 4 in language production. I think the topic in these activities is very necessary to discuss.

Students will learn how to ask for and give clarification in activity 9 to activity 12. I think they need some examples as model (dialogue 1 and dialogue 2) in activity 9, information of language pattern in activity 10 and activity 11. These activities will strengthen their knowledge and ability to practice in language production. They could test their language knowledge in activity 12. Students need to practice their language in real situation. They need to write perform the dialogue about asking and giving clarification in activity 5 in language production page 160.

Giving interpersonal responses will be learnt in activity 13 and activity 14. I decide to adopt these activities to guide my students in learning how to attract others’ attention and how to give interpersonal respond. I will give them a chance to practice their language about this expression by doing activity 16 and activity 17 in page 158. I considered adopting these activities because their language usage is easy for my students and this topic is attractive.

Section 2: short functional texts (greeting cards and lost notice)

In this section, students will guide to be able create short functional text such as greeting card and lost notices. I think I am going to adapt activity 1 to activity 6, to let students learn some vocabularies and examples of short functional text before trying to create in their own way.

I think that practice activities are skipped and students are directly required to create greeting card and lost notice in production activities. I think Exercises in practice activities will be very easy for them; they only need to look carefully in these tasks as a guide to do in production exercises.

In production exercises, students will write a notice to publish at the public information board about their lost cat (activity 1), to write a notice for the school- magazine about picnic and to write a short letter. In these activities, I thought that students need to create class board information, and publish their notice there. The topics are not restricted to textbook. They can create it in their own creativity. The most interesting creativity will be given reward.

At the end of meeting, students need to practice in their home. The exercises on homework activities in page 167 are relevant.

2. In - Use Evaluation

In use evaluation, I observed how the activities in my prediction were performed and done by my students. I observed the respond of students to every activity than they performed. In activity 1, 2 and 5, students learnt actively, but when they directed to take turn with their partner, some students confused to take a part in these activities (activity 3 and activity 4). They needed to write down it first before they practiced, but it was easy for some students, therefore  they directed to write 4 or 5 dialogue based on the roles of A and B in practice activity 2.

In activity 7 to activity 8, students looked enjoy to perform these activity, but it took longer time than I planned. There was not sufficient time to perform activity 3 and activity 4 in language production in classroom, so students should do these activities at home (homework).

 In activity 9 to activity 12, students learnt asking and giving clarifications in order to learnt language features (past form). It spent much time to do and perform these activities because it was difficult for some students. There was not time for students to practice activity 5 of production activity. Students were required to learn more about past form and do activity 12 at home.

Students learn how to give interpersonal responses in activity 13 and activity 14 in presentation activities, and activity 16 in practice activities. Students did well this activities.

When they learnt how to create short functional text such as greeting card and lost notices, they worked actively on every task on my plan, but some of them still needed help from their students. They needed to work in group when they were asked to write a notice.

3. Post – Use Evaluation

            Most activities in this unit were good resources for students in my classroom with different learning styles and for encountering language skill and supporting language communicative learning. Language usage eased the level of my students to work in every activity. The authors have been provided appropriate activities in every stage of learning/ language acquisition (easy to difficult, listening and reading to speaking and writing) but we had limited time in language classroom to perform and do all these activities. Therefore some activities should be modified. I mergered some activities in a task but in some way I find that some students found difficulty in that task.  Many students had strong reliance on book and teacher. They needed to follow activity in their text book. They confused moving from presentation activity to production or to practice activity (presentation, practice, and production activity are separated in different part in this unit).