Access-self Materials

Material Development for High School

A.      Introduction

The stereotypical image of self-access materials is of exercise which enable the learners to work on what they need in their own time and at their own pace without reference to a teacher. Typically they are used to supplement classroom learning activities and usually they focus on providing extra practice in the use of specific language items or language skills which are problematic for the students.

Self-access materials have consisted of controlled or guided practice activities which have used cloze, multiple choice, gap-filling, matching and transformation activities to facilitate self-marking and focused feedback. 

The prevailing learning styles are analytical, visual and independent. If you are a studial learner (a learner who likes to focus on discrete bits of language, who likes to see the language written down and who is happy to work alone) then self-access material is for you. The learner probably fit the stereotypical image of the ‘good language learner’ and it will make a good progress.

The narrowing tendency described above has been reinforced recently by the economy led demand for cost effective open learning in institutes of higher education in the UK ( for example, some of the new universities currently stipulate that 10-15 per cent of courses be delivered through ‘open learning’). Of course, in order to be cost effective, open learning has to be closed enough not to require the participation of teachers during or after student activities. Self-marking keys are cheaper and more reliable than teachers and thus closed activities rule.

B.       Principles of Access-self Materials

Access-self material should:

1.    Be self-access in the conventional sense of providing opportunities for learners to choose what to work on and to do so in their own time and at their own pace.

2.    Be open-ended in the sense that they have correct and incorrect answers but rather permit a variety of acceptable responses.

3.    Engage the learners’ individuality in the activities in such a way as to exploit their prior experience and to provide opportunities for personal development.

4.    Involve the learners as human beings rather than just as language learners.

5.    Require a personal investment of energy and attention in order for learner discoveries to be made (as recommended in Tomlinson 1994a and exemplified in Belitho and Tomlinson 1995).

6.    Stimulate various left and right brain activities at the same time and thus maximize the brain’s potential for learning and development (as recommended in Lozanov 1978).

7.    Provide a rich, varied and comprehensible input in order to facilitate informal acquisition (as reommended, for example, in Krashen 1981) as well as providing opportunities for selective attention to linguistic or pragmatic features of discourse (as suggested by Schmidt 1990).

C.      Features of access-self materials

1.         The materials provide extensive exposure to authentic English through purposeful reading and or listening activities.

2.         Whilst reading listening activities are offered to facilitate interaction with the text(s).

3.         The post-reading/listening activities first of all elicit global, holistic responses which involve interaction between the self and the text.

4.         The focus of the main responsive activities is on the development of such high level skills as imaging, inferencing, connecting, interpreting and evaluating.

5.         There are also activities which help the learners to fix selective attention in such as a way that they can discover something new about specific features of the text and thus become aware of any mismatch between their competence and the equivalent performance of target language users.

6.         Production activities involve the use of the target language in order to achieve situational purpose rather than just to practice specific linguistic features of the target language. These activities offer involvement in various types of personal expression (e.g. analytical, aesthetic, imaginative, argumentative, evaluative).

7.         The learners are given plenty of opportunities to make choices which suit their linguistic level, their preferred learning style, their level of involvement in the text and the time they have available.

8.         Whereas self-access activities are typically private and individual, access-self activities include the possibility of like minded learners working together without reference to a teacher. That way the learners are able to choose between the tailor-made benefits of private work and the opportunity to pool resources and energy with fellow learners.

9.         Feedback is given through commentaries rather than answer keys. The commentaries give the learners opportunities to compare their responses to those of the material developers and other learners. They can be consulted at the end of the activities to gain summative feedback or during activities in order to help learners to modify or develop their responses as they proceed through the unit.

10.     Learner training is encouraged through activities which involve the learners in thinking about the learning process and in experiencing a variety of different types of learning activities from which they can later make informed choices in determining their route through the access-self materials.

11.     Suggestions for individual follow-up activities are given at the end of each unit.

D.      Suitable texts for access-self materials

There are many types of text which can provide abase of access-self materials. What is common to them all is that they have the potential to engage the learners both cognitively and affectively. The narrative text can engage the reader in interaction with characters, events and themes which are meaningful to them have the potential to utilise and develop personal experience as well to provide ‘positive evidence’ for language acquisition. And, as Ronnqvist and sell (1994) say in discussing the value of literature in language education for teenagers, ‘the reading of literary texts in the target language gives genuine and easily available experience in the pragmatics of relating formal linguistics expression to situational and sosio-cultural contexts’. Of course, in order for this potential to be realized the learners have to want to interact with the text and therefore have to be provided with a wide choice of texts to choose from. Other genres and text types with similar access-self potential are newspaper report, editorials and articles and television and radio news broadcasts, advertisements, magazine articles and television discussion and documentary programmes. Ones of the obvious advantages of narrative though is that it can be written for any level or learner without any loss of authenticity.

E.  How is an Access-self material

Access-self materials consist of:

       1.      Introduction

Introduce the materials to the learners and explain what they will learn about and how it will be learned.

An example of access-self material

Introduction

This one of a series units which is based on modern literature and which is designed for learners who are at an intermediate level or above. Each unit indroduces you to extracts from a book and aims to give you access to that book in such way that will help you to develop your language skills and to acquire new language.

 

        2.      Activities

1)   Read the tittle of a text

The student asks to interprete about the contents of the text.

2)   Read the first paragraph

The student asks to interprete about the contents of the text..

3)   Ask the student to check the interprete about the contents of the text for the first activities and second activities.

4)   Read all of the texts, ask the learners to imagine in their mind the people and setting as they read.

5)   The learner asks to draw a picture based on the content of the text.

6)   The learners try to make a dialogue based on the content of the text.

7)   Write the answers to the following questions (e.g what, why, when, who, and how).

8)   The learners try to find the tense which is used in the text and explain about that.

F.       Conclusion 

             It is possible in self-access material to:

·      Give learners the responsibility of deciding what and how much to do.

·      Ask open-ended question.

·      Encourage experiental reading

·      Use previous learner’ answer for comparison and feedback rather than imposing teacher answers.

·      Make use of creative drama.

·      Set open-ended activities.

·      Ask ‘think’ question.

·      Use extended texts for language awareness discoveries work.

·      Provide opportunities for teacher feedback.                             

    In addition, Access-self Material can engage the learner both affective and cognitive response. So, it will give the good improvement for the learner.