Priority Area: Learning

By Teacher Sylvia Johnson

Learning review includes examination of strategies in instructional materials that supports motivation, including " big ideas," explicit instruction, guidance and support, active participation, and the instructional and assessment strategies that make sense for the targeted learning objectives.

Teachers role in the learning process of the students makes a difference, and when making use of materials with effective learning strategies can  either support or impede the impact in them.

Learning also has come short by the absence of meaningful explanations, connecting ideas,big ideas, underlying structures, and content for critical thinking. This is sustained by some well known authors, among them are: (Schoroeder,Scott, Tolson, Huang & Lee )...

Showing how research-based information works across disciplines along with few particular strategies.

Two special cases:

.The first is the expertise reversal effect.

.The second is the powerful resistance to learning.

Students require intense practice with the new concepts, showing themselves multiple times that the "new concepts" work to override the " old wrong concepts".

Some guided activities:

Motivational Strategies

. positive expectations

. feedback, and

. appearance.

Setting Positve Expectations

. friednly, attentive, and encouraging communication;

. student collaboration assignments and group projects;

. student communication and presentations; and

. infofrmative feedback on student progress.

The degree of challenge and relevancy of activities also influences positive expectations;

. Challenge works-not too easy, not too hard.

. " Relevant" helps; " Irrelevant" hurts.

. Personal connections improve learning.

. Adults need practical applications.

Feedback

Motivates students to be informed about correctness, incorrectness and how to improve learning.

Appearence

When materials shown only provides tidbits of information, students may find this to be non-appealing.

Teaching a few " Big Ideas"

. focus for students and

. completeness.

Students Responses

Here are some hints for some kinds of activities of how students learn effectively;

. generate their own charts or worksheets for study.

. identify similarities and differences.

. discuss controversial issues.

. relate, organize, and represent knowledge in a new way;

. construct their own knowledge.

. summarize and take notes.

They learn more when they do the following assesment activities:

. provide written answers to questions.

. give explanations.

. do case-based self-assesments to improve learning.

. take frequent quizzes.

. review feedback from test results.

4 Principles of Effective Materials Development

By Teacher Sylvia Johnson

This paper takes the position that language-leaning materials should ideally be driven by learning and teaching principles rather than be developed ad hoc or in imitation of the best-selling coursebooks.It reviews the literature which contributes positively toward the principled development of ELT materials and comments on its implications for materials writing.

In recent years there have been a  number of insightful publications which have concerned themselves with how authors typically write ELT materials.

There are present here, six principles of language acquisition and four principles of language teaching that the author thinks should be given a lot more attention in materials development.

This literature reveals that many experienced authors rely on their intuitions about what "works " and make frequent use of activities in their repertoire that seem to fit with their objectives.

.Expose the learners to language in authentic use.

.Help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input.

.Provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes.

.Provide opportunities for outcome feedback

.Achieve impact in the sense that they arouse and sustain the learners' curiosity and attention

.Stimulate intelectual,aesthetic, and emotional involvement

.Flexibility- so as to help teachers to make their own decisions.

.Moving from text to language ( focusing on the meaning of a text first before returning to it payattention to a language feature )

.Providing engaging content.

.Learner development ( in the sense of helping learners to further develop their skills as language learners through, for example, analyzing grammar for themselves and starting their own personalized vocabulary and grammar books )