CHAPTER III: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE MATERIAL’S ADAPTATION
I. Situations: Small talks after introduction (Adding)
Avoid certain topics: Money; Age; Religion; Politics; Physical appearance and certain information about marriage.
Using common topics: Job, work; School; Weekend and vacation activities; Family;
Weather…
II. Topic: Ha Long Bay (Adding & Simplifying) 1. Vocabulary & structures
Words and phrases to describe a destination
Words and phrases to describe the beauty of a destination 2. Content
The information about Quang Ninh Province; Ha Long City; Ha Long Bay- A World natural Heritage… should be added to give students common knowledge on Ha Long Bay.
3. Practice
Task 1: Make short presentation on the above destinations.
Task 2: Make presentation based on video clip about Ha Long Bay
The purpose of this task is to help students to get similar to making tour commentary in reality about Ha Long Bay in particular and other destinations in general. Certainly, all students have time to prepare well for the presentation.
In summary, this part has presented some suggestions for the adaptations of the course especially in 5 speaking lessons of 5 units: Unit 2: Hai Duong’s attractions, Unit 3: Hanoi’s attractions, Unit 6: National parks in Vietnam, Unit 8: Museums in Vietnam and Unit 10:
Ha Long Bay. The writer applied all the adapting techniques and made use of her knowledge and experiences in the process of making adaptation the material. She hopes
that it will be useful for her students. The implication lays behind the study that evaluation is really necessary in language teaching and therefore, should be regularly implemented.
This is also the main content of the next part in this chapter.
3.2. Evaluation of the speaking lessons’ adaptation
With the hope of making the adaptation part more reliable and perfect, the writer continues to evaluate the suitability of the five adapted speaking lessons by conducting a class observation sheet for teachers and students in the scope of 5 these lessons. The evaluation criteria of Hutchinson & Water are still applied in this case. In the class observation sheet, teachers and students are required to give out their opinions on the suitability of 5 adapted speaking lessons in terms of the audience, aims, content and methodology.
The result of the class observation sheet is quite optimistic. All the teachers and students said that they paid much attention to the 5 adapted ones. Concerning the audience and the aims, these lessons are suitable because they can meet the demand of students who are really interested in learning speaking tourism English. The content part was added many useful information about situations and topics about famous destinations in Vietnam, which can solve the main problems of the old one. The methodology used in these lessons was evaluated suitable and effective. Students have many chances to practice speaking with various and interesting types of activities and modern teaching aids. They were excited when learning these lessons.
However, the content of the lessons are too long. They require students quite a lot of time to prepare in advance to have a useful and effective speaking lesson. This will be ok if students have time for preparation. Moreover, there is a shortage of illustration for the destinations which made the lesson less interesting. In general, the adaptation of 5 speaking lesson has met the demand of the students and the aim of the course. The result of the study, indeed, brings effectiveness for teaching and learning the materials.
PART C: CONCLUSION 1. Review of the study
Evaluating teaching materials is obviously a very important process in language learning.
The results from materials evaluation help to determine whether the set of materials is suited for a particular situation. Most often materials evaluation is carried out to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the materials so that changes need to be made to improve the suitability and enhance the effectiveness of the materials. This is also the reasons for carrying out this evaluation research.
The ultimate target of the study is to find out how the current textbook used for the 3rd year students at Foreign Languages and Tourism Department at SIC meet the demand of the students in terms of the objective, methodology, content and especially the content of speaking lessons. Besides document analysis, teachers’ and students’ opinions were gathered by two sets of survey questionnaires and informal interviews were also employed.
The analysis of the data collected actually addressed the issues investigated to find out the answer for the research questions.
The findings of this study show that this in-house textbook for the 3rd year students could meet some of the course requirements and suitable to the students’ level of English in terms of objectives, methodology and content.
However, the textbook has some problems with the content of 5 speaking lessons.
Particularly, the content of these lessons are not suitable because they lack of knowledge related to the destinations, lack of language competence used to practice speaking situations about these destinations. Moreover, the types of exercise are not various; the illustration for speaking lessons on destinations is not interesting.
From the results of this study, some possible suggestions to improve the textbook are proposed. In order to enhance the effectiveness of this textbook, the aspects of content of 5 speaking lessons need to be adjusted are exposed through providing more brief knowledge about the destinations to help students have basic and necessary knowledge on the destinations. Besides, the types of exercise are made more various focusing on training students’ speaking ability on these destinations. The illustration is made more interesting to motivate students’ interest. The two research questions in the study were answered completely.
2. Application of the study
It is believed that the findings of this research help to make a valuable contribution to the development of the in-house text-book to totally meet the objective of the materials and at the same time satisfy students’ need and interest at SIC.
This is also a good reference material for teachers in the school in particular and teachers interested in English for tourism in general.
3. Limitation of the study
Like other research thesis, this study also has some limitations. First, there was a limitation regarding the data collection of the study: because of the time constraint, and the condition of the 3rd year students at SIC, the survey questionnaires were administered to a small sample. Second, the system of English for Tour guide consists of 4 textbooks: English for Tour guide part I, II, III, and part IV, within the scope of the current study, the author finds it difficult to evaluate the three first set of textbooks.
4. Recommendation for further study
From what have obtained in the study, the evaluation on effectiveness of the materials and suggestions for adaptation, the further research may be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of using this adapted material.
From the limitation of the study, the recommendation for further research is about the evaluation and adaptation on the set of in-house textbook English for Tour guide part I, II and part III which can meet the demand of the students and suitable with the learning and teaching context at SIC.
Finally, the study has been completed to the best of my knowledge; however, mistakes and shortcomings are unavoidable. Therefore, I am looking forward to receiving comments and suggestions from any readers for the perfection of the course work.