1. Designing learning materials for students - A Gateway to teacher development

1.0 Introduction

With the evolution of knowledge base in every field, teachers need to keep abreast of those recent trends in the field of language teaching. Designing materials provide opportunities for teachers to explore and learn new information which takes shape in the form of tasks. In the context of training students for corporate work life, material design not only exposes students to various business scenario, but also helps teachers to develop their professional skills. In this paper, the author discusses the ongoing practices of designing course materials in language curriculum in her institution, B.S.Abdur Rahman Deemed University (status in 2009) and states the impact of those materials on students.

The need for preparing effective learning materials arises when students are exposed to career based training. Ehiyazaryan (2012) quotes McAndrew (2009) to mention that there is wider scope for students to access information from various sources and teachers too openly share and reuse teaching materials with students. With regard to target language acquisition, students need to master the language skills for which language teachers have to design appropriate materials and provide adequate training. Language learning promotes students’ performances in real life situations and teachers have to provide exposure to such situations through learning materials. With the growing demand of using English in technical and business related situations, it is more challenging for teachers to make students understand them effectively. Teachers need to facilitate, coach, mentor students (Cameron,2012). In order to do these, teachers can either use exclusively ‘Open educational resources’ or use ‘Open content’, which includes ‘Free content’. This ‘Free content’ could be used to design learning materials to suit the curricular needs and in order to do it, teachers have to update their knowledge of technical and business English, and make use of them effectively. Through these materials, teachers can provide corporate scenario for enhancing students’ use of language skills. Anderson (2012) refers to Open Educational Resources (OER) as “digitized materials offered freely and openly” (p.2). The open educational resources could include a combination of existing resources and teacher designed materials.

How does material design form part of professional development? Arechaga (2001) considers professional development as “a variety of activities in which teachers are involved to be able to improve their practice” (n.d). A teacher who aims at developing his professional skill has to constantly update his knowledge in his field of specialization, reflect on his teaching and share his ideas with others while working together on a project or program. Considering these points, it could be said that teachers would be able to share their knowledge by way of designing materials.

Learning to use the language skills requires knowledge of the content and practice. It is essential for students to gain a conceptual knowledge of the topic of discussion for presenting the ideas effectively. According to constructivist theory, the information which are provided to learners help them to conceptualize a new idea and that in turn helps them to perform efficiently. A Constructivist teacher knows to help her students construct knowledge by actively involving them in activities. He must give importance to the cognitive process of students while preparing for an appropriate way of instruction (Kristinsdóttir, 2001).According to Bruner (1996) an instructor has to modify the information to be learnt to a particular format in order to help students understand it. Thus it is more appropriate to apply Constructivist theory to teaching business English through appropriate learning materials in order to make students conceptualize the corporate scenario.

Many universities have been efficiently using learning materials like Open Educational Resources for teaching various subjects. The Open University has worked on facilitating language acquisition by providing a virtual learning environment based on Moodle platform with free educational materials and knowledge media tools for promoting open language learning. The project “OpenLearn” was sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, that is been offering free online learning material taken from Open University courses. Similarly,Thakrar, Zinn and Wolfenden (2009) talk about the professional development offered to school-based teachers by Sub-Saharan consortium. The ongoing research and development project (TESSA) aims at improving the quality of university-led primary education. Nearly 18 institutions have worked collaboratively to design and build a multi-lingual open educational resource bank and modular and flexible format.

2.0 Research Study

Most of the deemed universities in India encourage the faculty members to design their course materials to suit the curricular needs. One such institution is B.S.Abdur Rahman University which operates independently in South India. The language curriculum offered to engineering students promotes language skills for three semesters. While they are exposed to technical English in the first semester, business English is offered in second and third semesters. The business English certificate that is offered by the university in collaboration with Cambridge ESOL necessitates students to be familiar with the corporate scenario. This in turn helps teachers to train students for job placements. Besides this, a few teachers teach business English to students of Masters in Business Administration too. As mentioned earlier, the target language teachers design the course materials, which to a greater extent promote the professional skills of the teachers of the university.

2.1 Methodology

The learning materials are designed with the objectives such as

● motivating students to learn business vocabulary.

● training them to use the language skills in various situations.

● providing corporate scenario through materials and related tasks.

● integrating social media to provide additional learning material.

● motivating students to interact with the learning materials, peers and discuss topics with teachers.

● encouraging them to involve themselves in varied tasks.

The instruction focuses mainly on explaining business contexts, offering fundamental information, preparing topic related content, presenting a supporting file either in the audio or in the video form in order to teach language skills to students. In this context, it is worthwhile to state the language curriculum gives freedom for teachers to use various business English books and ‘Free content’ available in the web to design suitable course materials for students. The ‘Ópen content’ is used as they could be reused, revised, remixed and redistributed (Wikipedia, 2012).

The course material prepared for every module included a list of objectives, learning content based on ‘Open web content’ and an additional task for students to perform after going through the content. A sample is given below:

While teaching business English to students, it is essential to provide exposure to case studies of reputed organizations. Case studies normally give an overall idea of the organization that they deal with, discuss the way various issues are handled in the organization, the organizational structure and so on.

Module 1: Marketing a product (Case Study)

Skill Involved: Reading and Speaking

Objectives:

● To educate students about marketing skill.

● To provide exposure to case studies.

● To develop reading skills among students.

● To encourage students to role-play for marketing a product.

Read the case study on BMW given below carefully:

Quality in a consumer and manufacturing world has many dimensions. The dimensions of quality is defines in David Garvin's article as "Competing on the eight dimensions of quality", where eight separate dimensions of quality are used to increase consumenr satsifaction and stay competitive within a service and product market. Quality is used as power in the automobile industry market, specifically when a consumer purchases a new vehicle. A competitive automobile firm that bases their image off quality and customer satisfaction is BMW. Within BMW's firm, the 5 - series of automobiles exemplifies the eight dimensions of wuality that the manufacturer produces and the consumer wants. (Adapted from http://freecasestudy.wordpress.com/2012/10/27

The case study highlights the unique qualities of BMW, which has earned a wide range of customers across the globe. It is essential to know that customers buy a product only after learning its features. In other words, when a new product is manufactured and launched in the market, the manufacturer would focus on the marketing skills. What are the points to be highlighted while marketing?

1. The unique features of the product.

2. The way in which the product differs from other products.

3. The varieties available.

4. The price range.

Remember, a marketing person must have a clear knowledge of the product that he is marketing, which will help him to clarify all sorts of queries put forth by the customers.

Now having understood the essentials of marketing, do a role-play to market any one of the products that you are familiar with.

As mentioned earlier, students need to be given adequate input with the help of technology when they are trained to make presentations and involve themselves in discussions. In the following modules, audio files are being used for familiarizing the contents to students.

The above mentioned module is provided in lab sessions for students to access and learn by doing various activities.

2.2 Result:

The success of a program relies on the satisfaction of end-users. Here in this context, the end users are engineering students and Masters in Business Administration. At the end of this semester, a feedback questionnaire was given to 60 students out of which 56 responded. The questionnaire focused on finding out in general the effectiveness of the learning content offered to them and its adequacy for developing their proficiency.

Focusing on specific skills, students were asked to respond to questions like, whether they have learnt to write for BEC Vantage level, the extent to which they are confident to handle listening skills and the effectiveness of the BEC reading material provided to them. Besides these questions, they were asked to suggest the type of inputs that could be provided to students, in addition to what is provided. They were given options like, providing more number of tasks, more input on reading, audio files designed by Indian speakers, additional tasks on writing and self-instructional tips for students to follow while given training. Students had to tick as many appropriate options as they can.

Teachers, who work towards professional development, always reflect on their teaching ability, their efficiency in handling the curriculum, the amount of scholarship in a particular field, the extent to which such knowledge influence their material contribution and so on. Arechaga (2001) quotes Richards (1990) to state that in a critical reflection a person recalls a past experience consciously, examines to evaluate himself, which in turn serves as a source for planning and action. As mentioned earlier, language teachers in the university are actively involved in preparing the course material, which in turn help them to develop their professional skills. It was decided to find out the experience of material design from teachers. A survey was conducted with the help of survey monkey and the responses were collected online. The questions included the number of years that teachers have been involved in material design, the end-users of their materials, their practice of modifying the materials to suit the needs of the students, students’ contribution to preparation of learning content and whether teachers have used Open content prepared by other professionals. The other questions asked were relating to the integration of technology within the materials, the way of presenting the materials, their impact on students and their rating of students’ language proficiency. Finally the teachers were asked to spell out the advantages in preparing and offering the educational resources for their students.

2.3. Discussion

Analysing the responses given by 56 students as feedback, it was found that nearly 86% of them felt that the materials provided to them was effective. For the related question on the adequacy of input provided, 86% of them felt that the input was adequate. 70% of students said that they had learned to do the written tasks given in BEC Vantage with the input given through lab course materials. However, the remaining 30% of them felt that they need to improve their writing skill. Similarly, nearly 70% of students responded that they were confident only to some extent, to do listening tasks. While 14% felt very confident, the rest 16% felt not confident to do listening tasks. For the question on the effectiveness of the reading materials provided in the lab, 79% felt that it was effective, 14% found it to be very effective and .07% found the materials to be ineffective.

Having received students’ inputs, it was decided to get suggestions from them for improvising the course materials. The following Pie chart would provide the data.

As mentioned earlier, students were given five options to suggest to the teacher. Nearly 95% of them have felt the need for listening to a non-native speakers’ audio files as they are more comfortable with the Indian accent and pronunciation. Since these students have been exposed to Indian accent and the way of pronouncing words, there is more probability to understand the audio content with less effort. Next to this, the response given by number of students (60%), who have suggested the provision for self-instructional tips, indicates that they prefer to be self-reliant in their learning process. With regard to the number of vocabulary tasks given, 30% suggest that more tasks have to be given for acquiring business vocabulary. Similarly 25% of them have suggested the need for providing writing tasks. The reason is that, normally these ESL students find writing tasks, particularly BEC writing tasks to be very challenging compared to other skills. This fact is evident in their response to earlier question that focused on their writing ability (30% felt the need to improve). With regard to the reading tasks, only 15% of them expect the teachers to provide more reading passages.

Considering teachers’ responses relating to their experience in designing learning materials, out of 7 teachers, 5 responded to the questions. For the question on the number of experience in preparing the learning content, while 80% of them have been involved in this for 1-5 years, only 20% is involved for more than 10 years. It must be stated that those who are involved within 1-5 years, have been exposed to material designing only by virtue of working in the deemed university. In the case of the teacher, who works on material design for more than 10 years, had started working on it while serving in other universities. Similarly, for the next question on end-users of the materials, 75% of teachers have said that their materials are being used by undergraduates and for the 25% the end users are post graduate students. 80% of the teachers modify their materials based on the needs of the curriculum. However, when it comes to students’ contribution to designing materials 60% of teachers say that they take their input occasionally. 60% of teachers use the resources prepared by other professionals. It is worthwhile to state that when the university was functioning under the affiliation of Anna University, Government run institution, the language materials were offered by them. Now as a deemed university, the freedom is given to teachers to design their course materials and at the same time additionally use the Anna University modules. Moreover, this has facilitated the integration of technology within the course materials designed. Nearly 80% of teachers design materials with the integration of social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Web 2.0 tools like Blog and Podcasts. Considering preference to present the materials to students as reading materials, as CDs and as a combination of reading material and CDs, 60% of teachers have opted for reading materials and 40% for presenting a combination of materials and CDs. Considering the effective presentation of the materials, 60% of teachers have believe that students have shown creativity in handling business related tasks. However, 40% of teachers have felt that students show creativity only in few occasions. It must be stated that students would be able to analyse the tasks provided as part of learning material and handle them efficiently, if the materials give a clear picture of corporate work culture. This is quite evident in the materials designed, as all the teachers (100%) consider that the materials offer adequate exposure to corporate scenario. When the teachers were asked to rate the proficiency of students, the following responses have been given by the teachers.

While 20% have felt that students are very efficient in using the language skills, 60% of teachers have mentioned that the students are proficient, and the remaining 20% consider that students need to improve. This rating reflects the different levels of students’ performance in the examinations. It must be stated that in the Indian institutions students who are admitted in various engineering disciplines exhibit different levels of language proficiency. While a quite a few have had school education in convents, a considerable number of them come from semi-urban schools. The training given in the language lab is aimed at redressing that gap and enhancing students’ performance in examinations.

The final question was framed with the aim of finding out the extent to which the language teachers have realised the advantages in designing materials. The responses received from them are given in the following diagram.

It is evident that teachers enjoy the experience in designing learning materials and that the responses show their interest to develop their professional skills. Hence the responses given by teachers are attributed to Professional development, as presented in the above diagram.

2.4 Conclusion

The description of the experience of designing materials and students’ feedback stress the importance of teachers developing their professional skills. It must be admitted that the classroom experience that teachers have, would greatly help them to judge students’ needs and design materials to fulfil those needs. Though teachers realize this, there are few teachers in every institution who need to be trained in material design. The teacher training could include the following aspects:

1. Teachers have to be given hands on experience in using the available Open web content while preparing the learning contents.

2. Teachers must prepare their students to take responsibility for their learning and Sheerin (1989) has stressed the importance of training students the concept of ‘learn to learn’. Students could be introduced to open learning communities because as Alexandra (2008) mentions, the involvement helps them to develop their efficiency in choosing extra and relevant learning materials and managing their own learning. It must be admitted that students get a good quality educational experience through open resources.

3. Teachers must enjoy a sense of ownership while using a material in the language classroom and that would happen only when they design the materials.

Thus it must be said the combination of classroom experience, teaching skills and designing appropriate materials lead to professional development of teachers.