Practice Activities – M&R

SUBJECT PRACTICE ACTIVITIES:

MATERIALS AND RESOURCES

Name and surname(s): Miriam Lima Rocha

Group: 2019-06
Date: 03/12/2022

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 Practice Activities – M&R

Index

Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 3
Task 1 ………………………………………………………………………... 4
Task 2 ………………………………………………………………………... 5
Task 3 ………………………………………………………………………... 7
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………... 9
Bibliographic References ………………………………………………….. 10

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 Practice Activities – M&R

Introduction

Material designing and evaluation are must-have skills for teachers to possess in
order to adapt to the content.
In this practical activity, we focused on designing a communicative task and
evaluating it according to the steps Ellis in Tomlinson proposed for this area.

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Task 1 - (1 page)

Read chapter 4 and design a communicative task for the following educational
situation below:

You are an English teacher teaching the content of phrasal verbs to your pre-
intermediate to intermediate students.

Designing a communicative task

Level: Pre-intermediate to intermediate

Age: 16-17

Goal Use phrasal verbs in a small group

work presentation about the
environment
Input Read a text for a pedagogic task
using phrasal verbs.
Activity Presentation (real-world task)
Teacher Role Monitoring / Facilitator
Learner Role Active participant
Setting Classroom / Group work

1. Reading:

- Work in groups of four.

- Read the text paragraph assigned to your group in the handout provided.
- Highlight the phrasal verbs related to the environment studied in the previous
lesson.

2. Writing:

After the reading, do one of the suggested activities, ensuring the use of the phrasal
verbs according to the situation:

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- Write down the pros (companies’ point of view) and cons (environmentalists’
perspective) of deforestation.
- Develop an interview script with a global activist (e.g., Greta Thunberg)
- Write informative posters on Global Warming and present them to the class
- Write a script for a role-play about the impact of Pollution on the oceans.

3. Speaking

- Debate on Television about the deforestation

- Interview global activist Greta Thunberg
- Present to the class the informative posters on Global Warming
- Perform a role play on the impact of Pollution on the oceans in a beach setting.

4. Listening

- Listen carefully to every group.

- Relate the correct use of the content [phrasal verbs] and the overall message
through the presentations.

Task 2 - (1 page)

Evaluate your task by explaining each step proposed for Ellis in Tomlinson
(1998) to evaluate it:

1. Description of the task:

The task content is related to phrasal verbs, as requested in the instructions for the
activity in task 1. The input for the task is a handout about the environment which was
a follow-up to the previous lesson with environment-related phrasal verbs. The macro-
skills are the ones highlighted for the activity.
The learners are divided into groups of four elements and will work on an assigned
paragraph of the handout provided. After finishing the writing section, they'll have to
perform an activity to put into practice what they had just written. All of the groups will
have the same amount of scaffolding. This exercise will focus on meaning because the
listening section will be reasoning to the content presented by each group and the

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correct use of phrasal verbs. The task is pedagogical, but the outcome is to encourage
learners to use phrasal verbs in the real world.

2. Planning the evaluation:

The evaluation will be in-loco. Before reading the text, the evaluation method/criteria
will be communicated and discussed among the class. While listening, the groups will
evaluate each other with a rubric. The rubric is generalized and not specific for each
presentation. The group must meet and agree on the fairest evaluation. The teacher
will use the same criteria for each group and then evaluate the learners' ability to listen,
assimilate and retain the meaning to assess (Brown, 2016).

3. Collecting information:
The collecting of information occurred before, during and after the task.
The learners already know the phrasal verbs related to the environment since the
class is a sequence. During the task, an interactional analysis would happen because
the teacher, as a moderator, would "identify, observe, classify and quantify the learning
situation" (Ober, 1967). The goal is for them to gain greater insight into the content
because of the activity performed and the evaluation done by the other groups. With
that in mind, applying for an achievement test after the task will be the best way to
collect information.

4. Analysis of information collected:

As stated in the beginning, the learners had been in contact with phrasal verbs in
the previous class and reading and understanding the text is an achievement test pre-
task depending on the former.
The teacher focuses on interactional analysis while evaluating the process leading
to the presentations. It means the teacher understands the learner's development on
the two sides of conducting the task. The data collected provides the teacher with the
necessary information to finish the process with an achievement test post-task to clarify
any misunderstanding while performing the task. It would be an intentional follow-up to
wrap up every aspect of the communicative method.

5. Conclusions and recommendations:

The objective of this communicative task was not specified. It conveyed only a part
of what happened throughout the task. Learners did acquire fundamental input to

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perform the small group activity, however, they did much more, including participating
in the evaluation of their colleagues. It would be wise next time to present an objective
that included all goals projected for this task.
It would be welcome for more active participation on the teacher’s side, the
moderation didn’t occur during the task, only the evaluation aspects to collect data.

Task 3 - (1 page)

Read the comic presented below and answer:

In case you would have to work with mixed abilities, describe what kind of
activities you would propose for intermediate and advanced levels, using the
same comic as input.

For example, for beginner level:

Read the story in the comics and underline the words you do not know. Then, search for
these words in the dictionary and read the text again.

1. Intermediate: After reading the story, rewrite it again, replacing the phrasal verbs
with “put” to their real meaning.
I think that at an intermediate level, they are more prompt to guess the meaning by
the context in which to use it because they already have a good command of the

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language and a great variety of vocabulary. Thus, the students will be referring to the
Top-down process, as Lennon & Ball (2017) state: “we interpret what we (…) read
according to our purpose in (…) reading, and to our background knowledge”.

2. Advanced: Read the story aloud and write down the difference between the
phrasal verbs + infinitive and phrasal verbs + gerund.
At an advanced level, the students master the language and part of the vocabulary
from some specific contexts, meaning they should do a grammatical task. This aspect
can be tricky sometimes if you are inattentive to the clues left behind as an advanced
student. The exercise would probably be more challenging and engaging since their
proficiency in the language is at a higher level.

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CONCLUSION

Developing this task has been the most challenging assignment I've done so far. It
is an important and serious matter.
Looking back on the task, though, we see that despite the steps being the same, for
everyone willing to follow Ellis's criteria, the outcome will always depend on the
teacher's input and the learners' level to accomplish the target task.
Teachers must get used to exploring the skill of material designing or adaptation
because, through the exhausting yet rewarding process, a learner will feel more related
and engaged in his education.

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Bibliographic References

Brown, A. (2016). Book Reviews: Evaluation Pauline Rea-Dickens and Kevin

Germaine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1992. 175 pp. Paperback. RELC Journal.
https://doi.org/10.1177/003368829402500107

Ober, R. L. (1967). The Nature of Interaction Analysis. The High School Journal, 51(1),
7–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40366845

Lennon, A. & Ball, P. (2017). Materials and Resources in EFL. Madrid: Funiber.

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