Reflection on Tutorial Task Week 6 (Materials Development)

This week, my group got the task; Evaluating the English textbook in the US for Intermediate level using Cunningsworth’s checklist. We picked 2 chapters; chapter 4 and 6. In each chapter, there were 5 sections each. Eg: Section 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D and 4E. In each section, there were 3 to 4 parts of exercises namely A, B, C and D. We had decided to evaluate each section. So, in total, we evaluated 10 sections. From our evaluation of the 2 chapters, it can be said that the coursebook did not have an obvious “outline” indicating communicative as one of its aim.

However, there is a small part of activity requiring students to communicate among themselves by having discussion in a small group or doing pair works. Out of all the 4 parts in a section, there might be only one exercise that required the students to tell/express their opinions and views on the current topic they are learning to their respective partner. As for whether the activities are linked to real-life communications, it is undeniable that there are some activities that do. For instance in chapter 4, students are to tell their partner the type of music they like or the movie they like. This is a form of communicative activity. By sharing this information, it is similar to a real-life situation; a casual conversation between two friends.

In this task/activity, we evaluated a coursebook using Cunningswort’s checklist. It was quite simple as it focuses only on CLT. However, there were problems faced as the checklist is too limited. We can only focus on the (CLT) criteria throughout the whole evaluation. It was hard to determine whether the activity is communicative or not. The term ‘communicative’ is defined only by our understanding and our group member each has different opinions on the term ‘communicative’.

In addition, we sometimes had our doubts whether that particular activity should be considered realistic or not. For example, the conversations that students had when deciding which restaurant to go could be considered realistic but also not-realistic at the same time. This is because in real-life, they will not use proper grammar/sentences and there will be fillers or pauses but the situation do reflects a real-life situation, just different in terms of language context. We had to go through each and every single exercise in order to determine whether it is communicative or not.

All in all, me, myself do find the checklist useful. But, I will only think of it as a ‘side checklist’. This is because I will not fully depend on Cunningsworth’s checklist only when evaluating a coursebook. Instead, I will use it together with other checklists. I find this particular checklist should be part of any other checklists when evaluating a coursebook. It contains important criteria that should be taken into consideration but, it does not help much when it comes to being used as a single and the only checklist in evaluating a coursebok.

After doing the evaluation, I realized that the task of evaluating a coursebook is not easy at all. It is important and crucial for teachers to evaluate a coursebook before using it so that students can have ‘the best’ aid in learning. Choosing a checklist that is suitable is also important. When it comes to the term ‘suitable’, I am sure each and every teacher has their own opinion/view on which checklist suits them best in helping them to evaluate a coursebook. However, there is one thing that a teacher should not forgets; always choose a checklist that ensures the criteria listed are those in the syllabus. This is to ensure that the learning outcome and objectives/aims can be achieved through the particular coursebook. Besides that, i hope all the future teachers will be able to achieve the learning objectives through usage of different learning materials and not depending only on the textbook. The textbook used in schools are boring and from my experience as a student,teachers who teach only using the textbook as the main source will continue to fail in attracting students' attention. So, all the future/pre-teachers should equipped themselves with lots and variety of learning materials, be it digital or 'non-digital' (games, books, magazines).