I’ve decided to use my blog as a reflective tool while doing my dissertation project – the final component of my M.A. in ELT –  hypothesising that this will make it an even more effective learning experience for me, by mapping it, enabling me to look back on my thought processes and decisions and see what effect these have on the project development. (Other posts in this series can be found here) Once I get to the end (13th September is D-Day!), as well as looking back over the experience of doing the project, I plan to try and evaluate the effect of these reflective blog posts on it.

The homework I set myself at the end of the last post in this series was:

• Cross-reference justification to theory (either slides or texts)
• Synthesise my approach to culture
• Write a draft rationale

Cross-referencing my framework to the theory was definitely a useful interim stage. Whether it all makes sense is, of course, another matter! Part of doing this involved pinning down the whole culture strand. I haven’t read anything extra since last time, other than  Moran, P. (2001) Teaching Culture: Perspective in Practice Heinle and Heinle and more of Corbett, J. (2003) An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching Multilingual Matters. This is, I think, because I needed this phase of getting to grips with what I have already read and trying to make sure the theories I’ve selected are embodied in my materials, which was done through the cross-referencing stage.

Here is the updated framework, complete with cross-referencing to theory:

Materials Framework Draft 3

Having done that, I was able to get on and write the 5000 word rationale. This didn’t take as long as I had anticipated, perhaps due to the amount of intensive thinking/note-making/cross-referencing etc that preceded writing it?

Things I’m noticing about the process so far:

• Where I had anticipated proceedings following a funnel shape i.e. starting very broad and narrowing gradually down into the materials, it has been more of a stacked hourglasses shape (I cannot think of the word to describe this!), so, yes, starting broadly and then narrowing, but then broadening out again to explore and expand on what has been narrowed down, bringing in extra theory, ideas and insights, which must again be followed by synthesising these, making for more narrowing down and repeat.
• It’s a lot easier to complete the process of going through a task, clarifying each element (pedagogic goal, non-linguistic outcome, language focus etc etc) and cross-referencing to theory in discussion with H (as we did with Task 1), than it is to do it myself, but having gone through the process in the tutorial, it’s only difficult as opposed to impossible (which would be the case without the tutorial to scaffold it because I wouldn’t know so clearly what I was trying to do).
• Powerpoint is a really useful planning tool. I’m not sure why it should be any more effective than Word, but somehow for me it is. (And this I can thank my Methodology in Context tutor for – she suggested using it to plan our assignment for that module!)

There are probably more but my brain is actually too tired to think of them…

So far, I’ve found it very interesting going through the process of looking at all the theory associated with the approaches I’ve selected (i.e. Task-Based Language Teaching, Language Awareness Approach and Intercultural Approach) and identifying the overlaps, as well as how they complement each other by bringing different things to the materials party, then systematically linking this with contextual factors. I suspect this process will be a useful one to apply to any approaches I might find myself thinking of using in different classrooms, in different contexts.

I won’t be doing huge amounts of dissertation work between now and my next tutorial on Thursday, due to various commitments including my conference presentation in Warwick, but having produced a first draft rationale already at this point, hopefully I will be able to revisit it with a fresh brain and tweak it before I submit it on Tuesday: I’m pretty sure the more work I put into it, and the more complete a document it is, the more feedback H will be able to give me.

All comments etc welcome, just as usual… 🙂