Tutorial Week 9

• Preview extracts from a local textbook
• Form 2 Textbook Chapter 3: Famous Faces

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•  How closely do you feel that the listening process is mirrored in these materials?
• Learners are required to converse with a partner in classroom. One of them can take the role of a famous personality. The roles of a fan and a famous person can be reverse so that both the learners can have the chance to express, listen and react.
• To what extent do they assist in developing the listening skills of our learners?
• Authenticity exist in this task as the language reflect real discourse when they are giving compliment and congratulate. Language used is not difficult. For example ‘You sang the song beautifully.’ The other partner has to listen for the compliment and give acknowledgement.

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• How closely do you feel that the listening process is mirrored in these materials?
• Learners are required to listen to the conversation in order to fill in the blanks to complete the statements given in the task. It is a must for learners to listen attentively to given conversation, if they fail to do so, they will not be able to answer the questions correctly.
• In task B, the situation is the same. Learners are to listen to the conversation again to answer the questions given in task B.
• To what extent do they assist in developing the listening skills of our learners?
• Learners are to listen to the conversation attentively in order to understand and also identify the answers. Learners are listening for a purpose, with this, they will pay more attention to the conversation given.
• Not only that, learners have a background knowledge regarding the theme of the conversation as they have learnt it in the previous tasks. This allows them to be familiar and have a rough idea on the conversation where top-down processing occurs.
• The more exposure the listener has to them, the greater the ability to comprehend.

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• How closely do you feel that the listening process is mirrored in these materials?
• In activity A, learners are required to say words after the teacher. This activity focuses on the consonants of /v/ and /w/.
• In activity B, learners are required to pronounce words that they have learned in activity A.
• To what extent do they assist in developing the listening skills of our learners?
• In activity A, it is a bottom-up practice activity. Learners have to listen and repeat to the words after the teacher. Learners have to pay attention and listen accurately to the sound in order for them to get the pronunciation correctly.
• In activity B, it is a top-down activity since learners have to use their schemata of correct pronunciation of the words so that they can say the sentences aloud. This encourage learners to discuss what they already know about.
• We noticed that this activity has both bottom-up and top-down approach. Correlation between two approaches can help the learners to sharpen their listening skill.

• Preview extracts from a local textbook.
• Form 2 Textbook Chapter 13: Our Green Heritage

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• How closely do you feel that the listening process is mirrored in these materials?
• For task A, the learners are to listen to a recording and then pay attention to the sequence of the story. After that, they need to sequence the picture given in the textbook.
• For task B, the learners need to listen to the recording again and then they need to sequence the sentences given in the textbook.
• To what extent do they assist in developing the listening skills of our learners?
• For task A and B, the learners are listening for a purpose, they need to listen attentively to details from the recording.
• The task relates to top down process as it requires learners’ background knowledge to enable them to relate the description of recording with the picture given.  

Reflection Week 8

This week’s lecture was e-fied, and it looks at materials adaptation. My position as a future teacher feels that this week’s topic is closely related to what we have faced and are facing now. My experience of adapting materials such as textbooks in both my teaching and learning has made me realise that there were a huge differences depending on who we are looking at the textbook as. In this topic, it made me recall back the experience of teaching History where the same textbook was used as a material for teaching and the fact that I have used the textbook before as a student in my secondary school years. The way the materials is used has given me the idea on the reasons why the materials are created that way. There were certain confusion when reading the articles, whereby, many techniques were included and suggested by quite a few authors, but after reading again and referring to the slide given, the confusion managed to be overcome. I believe that teacher knows best what are their abilities in teaching their students, thus, when evaluating and creating a new materials, teachers’ views and opinions should be taken into consideration and not to be ignored. Based on my readings, there are many techniques proposed that can be used as a reference in evaluating a materials in order to improve them. Looking at the connection of this week’s tutorial with my knowledge I can say, it is now has been showed clearly. I now understand better on why does certain materials do not work out as expected because it does not meet certain criteria that suits ones learning styles. Therefore, by having to know the techniques in evaluating materials, as a future teacher I can make full use of a given materials to ensure that my students’ learning opportunity will be maximized.