ADAPTING COURSES

BY:
AULIA RAHMI
DAVID SANG PUTRA
IHSAN NUL’IBAD
RAMANDA RIZKY
ADAPTING MATERIALS
Many examples of materials produced for language teaching and learning purposes
seem to follow a very similar format
 Activities, such as drills, tests and tables
Topics, reoccur in low level books or for beginners and cause potential limitations
Objectives , Usually based on main format of Presentation, Practice, Production
approach
ADAPTING MATERIALS
 A teacher-centred approach to adaptation
Materials adaptation, is still left to the teachers’ hands, and it is largely based
on their experience.
 A learner-centred approach to adaptation
Clarke (1989) distinguishes:
 Negotiated Syllabus
 Externally Imposed Syllabus.
ADAPTING MATERIALS
 Adaptation as critical awareness development
• It supports a much more active learner’s role
• the learner is given the opportunity of sharing the ownership of the classroom and
materials
• learners provide classroom input
Adapting courses can be used as an awareness development activity
(Tomlinson, 2003)
1. facilitates learner involvement
2. promotes the use of materials adaptation
3. apply them also to teacher development
The above-mentioned approach to adapting courses can be considered in relation
to at least two:
1 The language classroom
2 Teacher development courses
Consider the following example of materials designed specifically for a multilingual
group of learners at an intermediate level.
The activities
a. Pre-reading
b. Reading
c. Post-reading
When planning the above changes, you can consider, more specifically, the
following elements in relation to your learners’ needs:
the instructions
• The text
• The order of activities
• The presentation
• The potential use of visual/audio aids
• The objectives
A Model For Adapting Courses

The process of adapting courses is inevitably based on an initial evaluation.

a. Learner-centredness and critical awareness development
The aims are at the development of learners’ critical awareness, linguistic
empowerment and therefore learner autonomy. Teachers should be facilitators
and coordinators and should provide a stimulus for language exposure as well as
for different approaches to learning.
b. flexibility and choice
– Materials should be flexible, in the sense that they should provide learners with
the possibility of choosing different activities, tasks, projects and approaches,
thus of adapting the materials to their own learning needs.
– Materials, then, should, on the one hand, provide choice but, on the other
hand, also enable learners to develop a variety of skills and learning styles by
encouraging them to experience a wide range of tasks and approaches, so that
they may also become more independent learner
c. open-endedness and aesthetic experience
– if materials are open-ended they can become more relevant to learners.
– Aesthetic Response refers to the process of reacting spontaneously when
reading literary texts, hence it involves interaction between readers, language
and texts
– materials for teaching and learning purposes should promote an aesthetic
experience, in the sense that they should, not only be based on right/wrong
testing and practice but, rather, they should also focus on open-ended tasks and
texts
d. relevance
– In an attempt to draw a link between the adaptation process and reading have
the potential to become relevant to the learners when they fill those gaps with
their ideas, interpretations and discussions.
– Adaptation is essential in making materials relevant and potentially more
effective for learning development.
e. universality
– Materials should be based on universally appealing topics, which are culturally
provoking in the sense that they are culturally specific but, at the same time,
they are present in all cultures.
authentic and non-authentic input
– Materials should be based on authentic texts, those texts which have been
written for any purpose other than language teaching. At the same time, there
should also be a combination of authentic and non-authentic tasks, based on
realistic scenarios, in order to expose the learners to realistic input
f. provocative topics and tasks
– Materials should include topics and activities that can potentially provoke a
reaction, hence an aesthetic experience (whether it be positive or negative) that is
personal and subjective
– topics are not to be considered intrinsically provocative but the activities associated
with them can potentially make the materials more or less provocative, thus more
or less engaging.
– students generally feel engaged when exposed to provocative topics, at first a few
may show some resistance to such personal depths. Students in general are used to
traditional ways of being taught; they are not always ready to be challenged and to
step beyond the usual safer topics