Guidelines for the production of in-house self-access materials

Lum Yoke Lin and Ray Brown

This article describes some practical guidelines evolved by staff in a large- scale self-access project in Malaysia. The guidelines concern the production of self-access materials in a situation where staff are often very hard-pressed, where both quantity and quality are required, and where there is a felt need to give an in-house look to the materials. The writers hope these guidelines may be of sufficient generality to interest those developing self-access materials in other parts of the world.

The value of in- A self-access project could rely on using only commercially-published house materials materials, and indeed many do. But there are problems in following this

road. Firstly, it is likely to be costly in financial terms, for if copyright laws are to be respected, and you are going to cut up and paste materials onto learner cards, you will normally need to purchase three copies of every publication you use - two for the cutting and pasting and one as a reference copy. Secondly, commercial materials, even when they are advertised as ‘self-study’, do not generally offer the guidance and presentational clarity required of self-instructional materials, so the mediation of a teacher is often indispensable. And thirdly, most commercial materials in ELT tend to be Euro-centred or America-centred and do not contain themes that are culturally familiar to learners in, say, an Asian or African environment. For reasons such as these, and to a greater or lesser extent, many self-access centres produce in-house materials.

However, as already stated, though the final product may be useful and appropriate, there are problems in producing such materials, and in the project we have been working on we have had to face some major ones:

- lack of time (on the part of a busy staff) for the writing of materials. - the need to evolve an ‘in-house look’ so that the materials would have a

recognizable identity. - the task of ensuring both quantity and quality. This implies aiding staff

to manage their time effectively, to set objectives, and to monitor the quality of the product.

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Through dealing with these problems over an extended period of time we believe we have learnt a few lessons about the kind of in-house materials that can be successfully produced within existing constraints, as well as ways of ensuring quality control of those materials. However simple and humble they may be, we would like to share these lessons with readers of

ELT Journal Volume 48/2 April 1994 © Oxford University Press 1994

this article. We present them under the headings of the three major problems outlined above.

Shortage of staff Although the Self-Access Project in Malaysia has been supported by central time for materials educational authorities, it is the responsibility of teacher trainers in

writing individual colleges to produce their own self-access materials. These teacher trainers, besides having their own often busy timetables, have to perform many other duties, such as observing trainees in their teaching practice, counselling, conducting extra-mural activities, preparing national examinations and national syllabuses, and other non-academic duties. Under such constraints the teacher trainer can produce only a limited number of materials for the self-access centre and often, sad to say, his or her full enthusiasm is not engaged in this work. The pull towards adapting commercially-published materials is strong. Very seldom do writers have the time to experiment with the exploitation of authentic materials.

However, authentic materials - a piece of written, audio, or video ‘text’ , a picture or a newspaper cutting - used as input for materials writing have a great deal of potential. The secret lies in applying creativity and ingenuity, and in finding time-saving ways of achieving that potential.

Source material can be exploited through a number of exercises of different levels and types which develop different skills. This could save time in the search for suitable source materials since the same piece is ‘recycled’ a number of times. Because such a system would guide the writer towards developing a choice of exercises or activity types - a typology - ‘pencil-chewing time’ could virtually be eliminated.

This approach is illustrated in Figure 1, which presents a wide range of possibilities for the materials writer to refer to when he or she intends to fully exploit a piece of authentic material.

Figure 1: Ways of Input Skill Level Exercise/activity exploiting source

material Source Listening Elementary 1 multiple choice material (e.g. Speaking Intermediate 2 true/false text, picture, Reading Advanced 3 yes/no tape, etc.) Writing 4 gap-filling

Grammar 5 matching Pronunciation 6 listing

(others) 7 sound discrimination 8 shadow reading 9 sequencing

10 cloze exercise 11 completion exercise 12 parallel writing 13 letter writing 14 report writing 15 composition writing 16 simplification 17 transformation exercise 18 summary 19 communicative activity 20 open-ended questions

(others)

Guidelines for producing self-access materials 1.51

To illustrate how this framework can be used, a piece of authentic material, a cartoon strip taken from a local newspaper (see Appendix), was given to a group of materials writers to exploit during a self-access materials writing workshop. The participants were asked to come up with a number of exercises and activities using the table in Figure 1 as a guideline. Although the input was a simple cartoon strip, numerous exercises and activities were generated (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Exploiting a Input Skill Level Exercise/activity

cartoon strip for materials production Source Grammar Elementary 1 gap-filling (contractions, e.g. You’ve,

material Intermediate I’m) (cartoon) Advanced 2 transformation from direct speech to

indirect speech 3 use of adjectives to describe

appearances 4 use of adverbs to describe action 5 error identification (punctuation)

Speaking

1 practise intonation 2 identification of language form and

function 3 dialogue between: - maid and friend - maid and employer - employer and husband - officer and colleague 4 discussion - to predict outcome 5 description of facial expressions,

feelings, attitudes

Writing

1 dialogue between: - maid and friend - maid and employer - employer and husband - officer and colleague 2 narrative of event 3 story completion 4 letters 5 filling in speech bubbles

However, we may also choose to produce materials on a smaller scale, by concentrating on one particular skill. Using this more restricted approach we managed to produce five pieces of self-access material based on one skill-listening-and using one piece of input-a short story (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Exploiting a Input Skill Level Exercise/Activity text for listening practice

Source Listening Elementary 1 listening for pleasure material 2 shadowreading

3 dictation 4 listening for gist

Intermediate 1 true/false statements 2 listening for gist 3 summary writing

Advanced 1 open-ended questions

152 Lum Yoke Lin and Ray Brown

‘In-house’ look Apart from wanting our material to be attractive we also wanted it to have its own style, to be recognized by others and by our own people as ‘our’ product. We felt that in a project where staff were working hard to generate

materials it was important that the materials should be ‘theirs’. We found eventually that four features combined to make our materials identifiable:

1 statement of aims 2 provision of feedback 3 a single focus for each piece of material 4 keeping material short.

Statement of aims The purpose of stating the aim at the beginning and at the top of the page is to enable learners to see very quickly what the material contains, and whether or not it may relate to their needs. The aim could be stated in a formal way, e.g.

This unit helps you to identify present tenses and the contexts in which they are normally used.

But more and more we came to prefer an informal style, e.g.

How good are you at making words? Try this material and find out how good you are at forming words from base words.

Or: Do you have problems with prepositions? Are you uncertain which preposition to use sometimes? If so, this material should help you.

Learners can check the level of the material by referring to its classification number.

Feedback Feedback is provided on the back of the last sheet of the material. No serious difficulty has been encountered due to learners cribbing answers, and though this could be a problem with younger learners it could be easily overcome by having separate answer sheets. We were still faced with a problem, however, when it was not possible to provide definite answers, for example with open-ended activities. Our solution has been to

devise awareness-raising checklists, so that learners are encouraged to reflect upon and assess their own performance. We see this as a potential tool for developing greater learner responsibility, and also coincidentally as a way of promoting the reflective practice they are encouraged to develop as teachers. An example of a checklist for assessing a speaking activity is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Speaking Feedback for individual work Feedback for pair work assessment Listen to your recording. If there is no Listen to your recording. If there is no

recording, reflect on what you have recording, reflect on what your partner said and answer the following said and answer the following questions. questions.

1 Was it difficult to do the activity? 1 Could you understand what your 2 Could you keep talking without a lot partner said?

of pausing? 2 Did your partner pause a lot when 3 Did you have problems with talking?

pronunciation? 3 Was it difficult to understand your 4 Were there any words that you didn’t partner’s pronunciation?

understand? 4 Did your partner use the right 5 Can you remember any grammar words?

mistakes you made? 5 Did your partner make any grammar mistakes?

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A single focus Usually each piece of material has just one focus. This enables a learner to target a particular identifiable weakness. We are aware that there is a loss of integration here and a loss of ‘communicative reality’, but self-access work is only one means available to our learners and we do have other materials, in the form of reading, audio, and video materials, which are not discretely presented in this way: we remain convinced of the value of single-focus material for self-access learners who have been trying to identify their particular problems and who are keen to improve their ability in specific points of language.

Length and Our material is generally short: two or three pages. This is to allow our timespan trainees some discretion about the time they spend in the self-access

centre. Even if they only spend fifteen minutes, they can nevertheless do something. Also, we believe that shorter material is better assimilated, as it makes fewer demands on the student’s concentration span.

Attractiveness To enhance the appearance of our materials while still working within the constraints of our budgets we have made use of:

- paper of different colours for different language areas, or for different levels

- bold lettering and varying typefaces, when available - careful layout - simple hand-done highlighting devices, e.g.

It seems to us that the need for attractiveness in materials is in inverse proportion to the closeness of the producer (or teacher) to the learner. In a situation where the teacher produces self-access materials for his or her own class the material can be much more informal, and may even benefit from being ‘unpackaged’. In the case of a large project, however, packaging is important. And this is closely bound up with quality control.

Quantity and We required quantity because a self-access centre serving a whole college quality needs a considerable amount of material to be effective in catering for

every learner’s needs. But we also required quality. Some of our earlier materials were found to contain defects, and concerted efforts had to be made to maintain quality. Quality-related problems were evident in pedagogical content and in presentation.

As a general strategy to ensure quality in the project we gradually developed a modified system of total quality control. What was essential was to get quality control as far back into the early stages of the process as possible. Too often we had seen material go through conception, composition, and final draft, only to discover serious defects at the very

Lum Yoke Lin and Ray Brown 154

end of the process - many of them having crept in at the early stages. So the answer was to have quality control at different stages of the production process, starting from the very beginning. We found that, in general, materials production followed this route:

1 choice of source material 2 decision about what to use material for 3 manipulation of material to suit intent 4 writing and re-writing 5 final presentation 6 proof-reading

We realized that quality control had to be implemented at each of these stages, initially by the writer and his or her peers, and later by a central quality control group. In our residential materials production workshops we now have a system of:

1 Peer-group quality control in which peers from the same writing group vet material at stages 1 to 5.

2 Inter-group quality control to monitor stages 1 to 5 already controlled by the peer-group.

3 Final quality control by a limited and experienced group, followed by proof-reading: a very important but sometimes underestimated task.

The material might be returned to the writer at any of these stages but hopefully and in practice, that tends to happen at the peer-group quality control stage. In this way, as a general rule, only good material reaches the final quality control stage. Time is saved; face is saved.

To have good quality control we need to train the quality controllers. In the early stages there was a tendency to concentrate on trivia and offer alternatives that were no better than the original. This was time-wasting. So we saw a need to train the vetters which, in effect, meant everybody involved in the peer-groups. They were trained to see the writer’s point of view and not only their own, to be tolerant of styles and approaches that might not be to their own taste, while at the same time seeing every piece of material through the learner’s eyes to check that it was:

- clear (aim and content) - appropriate (to priorities, needs, levels) - correct (in terms of explanations and answers) - well-presented (all possibilities for attractiveness exploited)

Concluding Each self-access centre is unique. It is not possible to reproduce a number remarks of self-access centres according to a set model or template. Thus, in the

project that we have been working on, all twenty-eight centres have their unique local problems and preferences, and this gives them their individual characters. What we have tried to convey in this article are guidelines of a generally applicable nature, which we hope will apply to other centres as well.

Received April 1992

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Acknowledgement The authors and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the cartoon ‘New deadline for illegal maids’ by Reggie Lee, from the Malay Mail, 12 November 1991.

The authors Lum Yoke Lin lectures in TESL methodology and language proficiency at Gaya Teacher Training College, Sabah, East Malaysia. She has been involved in the Self-Access Project in Malaysia since its inception in 1989 and is particularly interested in

self-access learning materials. She did her first degree at the University of Malaya and spent a period training at the College of Saint Mark and Saint John, Plymouth, UK.

Ray Brown is an English Language Teaching Officer working for The British Council/ODA as Consultant for the Self-Access Project in Malaysia. He has previously worked in Egypt, Sri Lanka, Mali, Algeria, and the UK. His professional interests are in teacher training and in self-directed learning.

Appendix

156 Lum Yoke Lin and Ray Brown