Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:: Challenges and opportunities for material developers
    Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:: Challenges and opportunities for material developers
    Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:: Challenges and opportunities for material developers
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

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

    By Bertha Ramos Holguín, Jahir Aguirre Morales and Nancy María Torres Cepeda

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This book shows the paths student-teachers embark on the construction of their identies within the frame of a student-centered approach perspective. Understanding teacher identity construction suggests perceiving a broad and socially-driven dimension. In such a way , humansare contextual, political, and culturally situated to continually make sense of their"selves" on a daily-basis. Delving into teacher identity construction issues is a relevant constituent for the contininual professional development of English language teachers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEditorial de la Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia - UPTC
    Release dateFeb 5, 2018
    ISBN9789586604000
    Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:: Challenges and opportunities for material developers

    Related to Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:

    Titles in the series (27)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    ESL For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Great Reading Rethink

      Aug 13, 2022

      The Great Reading Rethink
      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Great Reading Rethink

      Aug 12, 2022

      The Great Reading Rethink
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Japan's 15-year-olds Can't String A Sentence In English Together. Is Rote Learning To Blame?

      Aug 3, 2023

      Plummeting scores in English-language tests among Japanese lower secondary school students have triggered concern that future generations will be unable to communicate in the world's lingua franca. In nationwide tests conducted in April, just 12.4 pe

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Spreading The Word

      Sep 11, 2022

      Spreading The Word
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Is Good Teaching?

      Sep 16, 2020

      What Is Good Teaching?
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Filling The Language Gap

      Apr 8, 2021

      Language communication can be difficult between different countries. There are differences in cultures, attitudes, beliefs, local phrases and customs. Understanding a country’s history is also important to develop good communication skills. All of th

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Engaged Education

      Jul 31, 2021

      An Engaged Education
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Get The Word Out

      Jun 5, 2022

      Get The Word Out
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Run on Numbers

      Jun 1, 2024

      Run on Numbers
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      With Good Reason

      Jul 30, 2023

      The delayed introduction to elements of the new NCEA framework can be interpreted as a confused (and confusing) landscape on which our next generation of students and teachers must walk. Mātauranga Māori, the new history syllabus, and the prioritisin

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Adobe Education Exchange

      Jun 24, 2018

      Collegiality and collaboration in education are vital to teacher success and wider school improvement: they’re big factors in professional growth, job satisfaction and job success. But … that’s not always possible in teaching. There are a number of f

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Baby Toys and Books Are ‘Springboards’ for Later Learning

      Aug 21, 2017

      Learning materials in the home, learning activities, and meaningful conversations as infants and toddlers make children more likely develop early cognitive skills that can help them succeed in school later. “…strong home learning environments arm chi

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Digital Solution When Children Can’t Find Books in Their Mother Tongue

      Dec 26, 2017

      Library for All is a nonprofit that provides young readers in developing countries with digital books in their mother tongue. Research suggests that children benefit from reading in their strongest language.

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings:

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Enhancing EFL speaking in rural settings: - Bertha Ramos Holguín

      settings

      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.

      ´

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1