Textbook Adaptation Rationale Anci Cao Professor Xiang LING 583 This paper presents a rationale for a textbook

adaptation (Textbook: NorthStar: Listening and Speaking Level 5 (3rd Edition)). It starts with the description of the teaching context and follows by the rationale of various aspects of the textbook adaptation and supplementation. The real unit adaptation and the in-class session handouts are included in the Appendix. CONTEXT The teaching context for which this class is intended is a typical pre-university intensive English program. Learners are thus presumed to come from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds and have low advanced to advanced English proficiency. Since the unit under adaptation is in the middle of the textbook, I also assume that the learners are familiar to the components of the textbook. This is a speaking and listening class, focusing on a controversial cross-culture topic, Feng Shui. The whole unit is supposed to be completed within two week (6 lessons, 75-minute/ lesson). The learning outcome of this course is to achieve students academic and personal goals on the listening and speaking skills through exploring diverse cross-cultural topics. The teaching unit, as a small part of the whole curriculum, the objectives of it thus have to be in accordance to the whole journey (Prabhu, P.226, 1992). As a result, the intended learning objectives of this unit are to improve the listening and speaking skills on the controversial topic, Fengshui. While the main focus is on listening and speaking, other substrands, such as critical thinking skills, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation are also integrated into the unit. SEQUENCING A well-sequenced unit can optimize the learning opportunities and maximize the learning outcomes. Throughout the whole unit, students are trained from receptive skill (listening) to productive skills (speaking). When expecting students to produce language by incorporating all skills learned in class, we definitely want to give them enough exposure to the input. Thus, the whole unit is sequenced from input to output activities. In order to correspond to students cognitive development, I also sequence the unit from light to heavier cognitive load activities. The students are supposed to initially finish simple tasks then to complete more complex and multi-skills initiated tasks. Additionally, Prabhu (1992) mentioned that as a curricular part, a teaching unit should be in relation to the earlier and latter unit. It has a certain cycle of the overall sequence. Each unit starts from presenting new topics and skills, practicing and producing target language, to reviewing and assessing. This unit is not an exception. Having in mind that the whole unit should be ordered in a certain way, the sequencing of each lesson

should also be related to one another to fit into the big picture. One can engage in a repeated encounter with no great sense of threat. Social routinisation is thus a necessary support in making the classroom lesson possible as a recurrent event (Prabhu, P. 229, 1992). Therefore, there is a stable routine for each lesson. Students start from schema activation, to new knowledge presentation, language practice and production. The assigned homework for every lesson is related to what the students learned and what they are going to learn in the next class. LANGUAGE SUPPORT As is known to all, the vocabulary and grammar preparation serves as a foundation of a language. This textbook, as many of other popular ones, also incorporates the language support. However, unfortunately, the recycle of the vocabulary and grammar is not sufficient enough. For instance, the vocabulary exercise under the preparation part ends up with the matching. I added an exercise to practice the target vocabulary in sentences level (See in Appendix A). I also created some speaking activities, asking students to consciously use the target vocabulary items in discourse level (See an example in Appendix C). Additionally, the presentation of the grammar is not effective. There is no example to show and further illustrate the meanings and functions of the discourse connectors. In order to make students better understand the target grammatical features, I created a worksheet with 12 sentences containing discourse connectors (See in Appendix D). Students should underline the target features and discuss the functions and formality of them with their partners. In this way, students can summarize the grammatical rules through inductive process. Moreover, though having provided numerous opportunities to practice the vocabulary and grammar, without clear and sufficient consciousness raise in the instructions, students might not use them at all. Avoidance is always a crucial problem in SLA. Thus, in my unit plan, I revised some instructions to ask students to consciously use the target linguistic features in the tasks. MEANING FOCUSING ACTIVITY Meaningfulness Meaning-focusing activity always plays an important role and usually dominates in a language class (Nation, P.8, 2007). This textbook contains a number of good meaning-focusing activities. However, some of them are not meaningful enough which need further supplementation and adaptation. First of all, some inputs are not meaningful. The cartoon on the first page of the unit tends to trigger students interests and introduce the new topics. However, the content does not make sense to the students, since it might require the perquisite knowledge of Feng Shui. Some of the Chinese students might be more able to grasp the meaning of the cartoon, while others might not. Therefore, I changed it to watch a short funny clip, which can be more engaging and meaningful to the students through multi-modality input. In addition, all of the meaning-focused input activities in section Listening One only include limited-response questions (Carr, P.26, 2011). They burden too much cognitive load to the students. I changed some of them to selected-

response questions (T/F), in order to lighten the cognitive load and also add variety of the exercises. By means of that, the students can pay more attention to some other aspects of the listening materials instead of the short-answer questions themselves. Moreover, some of the meaning-focused output activities do not really ask for the meaningful information exchange. I designed some information-gap activities that better facilitate the meaningful interaction. Relevance Apart from meaningfulness, a language activity should also be very relevant to the students. Adults need to be able to see the immediate relevance of what they do in the classroom to what they need to do outside it (Nunan, P. 58, 1989). In order to establish the association with the inclass knowledge to a students personal life, I added some activities to establish the connection between the content and language skills to his/her life. For instance, students are supposed to either apply the Feng Shui principles to design their own houses, or presenting an argument by using vocabulary items and grammar studied in the class. FLUENCY-BUILDING ACTIVITY Being that this is a listening and speaking course, fluency development definitely should be one of the essential skills that needs to be taken into consideration. Based on Nation (2007), through the fluency building activities, the learners are helped to make the best use of what they already know. After finish learning all the materials, the students are going to have a repeated 4/3/2 speaking task. They have to record their answers to retell the main ideas of the Listening Two. Afterwards, we will discuss the strength and weakness of one to two selected speaking samples. This is also an auto-input and peer-editing activity, in which students can be more engaged and relevant to the task. CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE Learning a language should not only understand the language itself, but also be aware of the cultural knowledge, especially for the advanced learners. Besides, due to the fact that the students are from diverse culture and background, we can probably address and make connections between their home cultures to the western cultures. In this unit, the focused topic is Feng Shui-Ancient wisdom travels to West. The students from China might be familiar to the topic, while others might not. For the purpose of establishing and tagging their own cultures to the western cultures, I assigned a project to investigate other ancient traditions that traveled to the west. Please see the detailed information and descriptions in my follow-up project design. ASSESSMENT Language learning assessment can always tell us what students have learned. It can be both formative and summative (Graves, P. 208, 2000). No matter which type of assessment we select, we do need some to guide our teaching, to understand what the students have achieved, what

they need to further work on, and what the overall efficiency of the course. In my unit plan, I created both formative and summative assessment. The formative assessment always happens during the course. The supplemental vocabulary competition game and the oral reports can tell me how much the students already mastered and what, if any, I should especially work on. On the other hand, an end-up-unit quiz comes at the end of the session, which serves as a summative assessment. It clears out the overall efficiency of the course. CONCLUSION The unit plan is only the first part in the cycle of adapting a textbook. It still needs the same cycle as course development: planning, teaching, replanning and reteaching (Graves, P. 204, 2000). A good textbook serves as a strong pedagogical device, but the way you implement it can reflect your methodology and impact the students learning performance. The textbook adaptation is definitely an iterative process. However, always keep in mind who the learners are and what their needs are can inevitably facilitate our implementation of the textbook.

References: Carr, Nathan T. (2011) Designing and Analyzing Language Tests, Oxford. Graves, K. (2000) Designing Language Couse: A Guide for Teachers, Heinle, Cengage Learning Nation, P. (2007). The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 2 13. doi:10.2167/illt039.0 Nunan, D. (1989). Chapter 3 in his Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prabhu, N.S. (1992) The dynamics of the language lesson, TESOL Quarterly 26 (2) Preiss, Sherry (2009) NorthStart 5: Listening and Speaking, Pearson Education