Every teacher looks for ways to bring more value to his lessons and keep students motivated. In order to do that, we often need to adapt teaching materials to use in the classroom.
Today I am going to look at the following text and try to adapt it to make sure that it is suitable for students with certain language skills.
At first, I thought about using this text in one of my lessons (I help students to prepare for IELTS). One of my students is aiming at IELTS band 5 and she is taking a general module. In the writing task 1 in general module there are certain types of tasks such as writing an email to make a complain, express opinion or concern. After analyzing it, I came to a conclusion that it would be more reasonable to use another excerpt as this text might take a lot of time to adapt and I would just end up re-writing it, which is very time-consuming. I also ran the text through the Readable app and it turned out that it’s a lower band (IELTS band 3) and would not be suitable for my student.
Let's take a look at another scenario. How might I adapt this text if I was teaching LINC level 4 class with mature students?
The first step I would take is to identify the CLB level of the class. LINC level 4 would be comparable with CLB 4.
At this benchmark students can understand simple, short paragraphs where the topic is familiar to them. Are the paragraphs in my text short and simple? The first two paragraphs are quite short but the third one is a bit lengthier. So, I would just leave two short paragraphs with a bit simpler language not to overwhelm my students. I would also change the “story” of the email a little, making it more relevant to my students’ situation. My students are new immigrants, and I can reflect this in my text. Fran could be a newcomer in Canada who has just arrived and is settling down.
In my analysis I am following three criteria (Nuttall, 1996), which are:
- Suitability - the text will be interesting for them and appropriate for their goals in learning English when I will turn Fran into a newcomer.
- Exploitability - students will learn about the structure of the email, opening and closing. This will be handful as they will need to write a lot of informal emails in the new country. This exercise can also be a good refresher on using some grammar like, for example, Present Simple and Present Continuous tenses.
- Readability - by reducing the number of words in the text, making sentences shorter and simpler we provide students with the resource that will bring value without overwhelming them.
Now let's take a look at the original text and the adapted version of it.
This is the first paragraph in the original text:
“Hi, Simon,
Sorry, I haven’t written till now. Since I got here, I have been really busy with the course and making new friends. I am speaking all the time and going out in the evenings with my classmates. We’re real mix of nationalities: Chinese, Russian, Thai, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian… We all talk in English, but I am learning loads about other languages and countries too.”
This is how the adapted paragraph might look like:
“Hi, Simon,
Sorry about my late reply! Finally, I am in Canada! I found a nice place to live and already made friends with our neighbours. They come from different countries - China, Russia, Spain and Brazil. I am learning a lot about other cultures!”
Yes, adapting texts takes time and could be quite challenging, especially for the new teachers, but in the end it's definitely worth it ( and, hopefully, gets easier with the time!) as it helps you focus on your students' interests and keep them motivated!
References:
Brown, H.D., & Lee, H. (2015) Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. 4th ed.
Reading skills practice: Foreign exchange email - exercises ( 2015). British Council.
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