Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:: Challenges and opportunities for material developers

INTRODUCTION

Speaking is one of the most intimidating, complex and demanding skill for foreign language learners (Celce-Murica, 2001). Teachers and students should strive to achieve progress in the foreign language learning process. This situation becomes even more difficult for students who attend rural institutions because they try to use the foreign language to communicate orally in a context where the foreign language is only used in the school setting.  Hence, the teaching and learning process need to be supported by appropriate material that encourages students to start developing the speaking skill by expressing feelings, thoughts, and emotions in a less intimidating way. From the previous statements and situations, the idea to design contextualized workshops to foster the speaking sill emerged.

In this book, we present the results of a research study Instructional Material for Rural Schools: Design, Implementation and Evaluation, supported by the Research Division at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. The qualitative action research aimed at analyzing what the design, implementation and evaluation of workshops, based on rural students´ needs, reveal about their speaking skill development. Three instruments were used to collect data: field notes, surveys, and structured interviews. Because of the nature of the study and the instruments we used, we present participants’ voices through the analysis of the information.

We expect that the findings of this study can support more studies in the area of rural education and materials development. In fact, we agree with Canagarajah (1999) when he states that pedagogies need to be appropriated to different degrees in terms of needs and values of the local communities. In the same thread of thought, Tomlinson, (2003) adds that there is an increase in attempts to personalise the learning process by getting learners to relate topics and texts to their own lives, views and feelings (p.7). Thus, this study presents primary results to understand how instructional materials can be used to address local needs and then, support students’ English learning in rural areas.

This book is essentially divided into seven chapters. The first one is related to background for the study. It encompasses the problem statement, the research question, and objectives. The chapter of literature review encloses the main theories and studies underpinning the nature of this paper.  The instructional design depicts the procedure followed to develop the materials (in this particular case, workshops). The research design includes the type of research and methodology, setting, population, and data collection instruments. Subsequently, the data analysis describes and exemplifies the categories and subcategories that emerged from the information collected, and analyzed in the light of the Grounded Theory proposed by Urquhart (2013).

Regarding the conclusions, this chapter presents the final assertions that emerged from the whole document, but especially, from the one about data analysis. The last chapter, challenges and opportunities for material developers in rural settings, entails aspects regarding what material design and the skill of speaking demand the educational community when learning English in a contextualized way.

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CHAPTER I

1.1 Problem Statement

The lack of contextualized resources for teaching English Language at schools is one of the challenges that teachers in Boyacá face out. Some educators claim that the available resources they have do not include the genuine academic needs students have in rural schools. Teachers usually select materials that, in many instances, are not created for rural school conditions. Accordingly, there is a huge distance between materials producers and users. Consequently, from one place to another there are some variations in terms of cultural and socio-linguistic norms. Because of this, those materials lack of relevance and engagement for the users (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2010). In this sense, it is necessary to develop relevant material that responds to users´ local needs. 

In our experience, providing support to teachers in rural areas, we found that students in rural areas did not have any contextualized material that included local background information for learning English that responded to their needs and preferences. The material that is available for sale, in many cases is focused on presenting a foreign culture which is not acquired by students because they do not have the opportunity to live those daily experiences. In this case, the workshops we designed accounted for students´ voices and preferences when learning English. The workshops included information related to daily activities they do at the countryside when they are inside or outside the school. This means they could find information related to agriculture, local festivals, local sports and music, among others. In this sense, they had previous experiences and knowledge regarding the topics which were approached in the workshops and it motivated, fostered, and facilitated students´ oral skills development in English.

One of many reasons to design contextualized workshops was because the material used by teachers at rural schools was usually limited to copies taken from Google ™ at random and those copies were designed for grammar learning only with no emphasis on speaking. Likewise, there was a need to use more humanizing material in the EFL classes, so contextualized workshops were a possible strategy to engage students in a social and meaningful learning process. Another motive was because students stated the necessity to use materials that favored learning English communicatively. Students felt the material selected by teachers did not account for activities that promoted oral language skills and it relates to what Derakhshan, Khalili, and Beheshti (2016) assert regarding speaking, one of the obstacles of learning speaking is contradiction between class materials and courses, so that most of the teachers do not facilitate situations for real practice in speaking (p. 178) Thus, we proposed the following research question to guide this