Curricular Planning for the Improvement of Teaching Materials in ESL Reading

1. INTRODUCTION

Any academic and scholarly papers has been pre-dominantly contributing on English Language Teaching to the areas of identifying the topic, opportunities for collecting data, analyse and interpret the data, and then acting on results. Literally speaking, there has been barely no big efforts made to enhance, and improvise the teaching materials that are involved in the language teaching, rather there should be some determined attempt that are made to execute the preparation of English Language materials in reading.. Nearly 59% of fifth standard students and 89% of third standard class students are unable to read second standard class level textbook in rural Tamilnadu, the findings of the ASER 2018 survey have indicated and 96% of students in second standard class are unable to read a text meant for class two (Source- The Hindu Newspaper). There should be some creative English materials, to full fill the needs of best education to achieve the positive changes in student attitudes in reading and academic behaviours. Fisher (2004, p. 11) reports Research.... shows that when students are assessed in ways that recognize and value their creative abilities, their academic performance improves. Creative activity can rekindle the interest of students who have been turned off by school, and teachers who may be turned off by teaching in a culture of control and compliance. In particular, there should be some professional activity which requires the students to take a bunch of decisions, to make choices or opinions and to answer the questions correctly. The professional activity includes design of teaching materials, which adds to get a considerable and prospective student profiles. These materials design must increase the rate of success among students, which ultimately swings on the effective classroom. It is a map of how to achieve the‚ outputs‛ of desired student performance, in which appropriate learning activities and assessments are suggested to make it more likely that students achieve the desired results (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006, pp. 5-6).

The effective classroom is not just because of motivation and by learning of students, of course it is essential too, but also because of the design and curriculum involved in teaching material. The creative teacher does not simply present lessons from the book. He or she looks for original ways of creating lessons and using the textbook and teaching materials and seeks to create lessons that reflect his or her individual teaching style (taken from). These pedagogic activities which are created in this academic research paper will not primarily include the psychological and socio-linguistic theories in students‘ attention towards the material, consequently it incorporates and swoops down the theory of making the teaching material. by a starter. This paper tells an idea, of using pictures to improve the students reading capacity. The main areas that are focussed in this paper are: • How pictorial representation of a particular text can be used more effectively in a classroom? • How the process can be taught to the students gradually and carefully from one stage to another, in terms of bit -by- bit?

Pictorial representations are a set of pictures which tell about the content in a sequence of events, which would be very appealing to the readers. This representation is an amalgation of pictures, dialogues, quotations to narrate an anonymous event and to express knowledge about a text in their own pictorial terms. This pictorial representation depicts even a story-related event from various sources or self- created phenomena to express a message to the readers. The use of different types of visual aids can help teachers to reflect on the educational importance of visual literacy (Horn, 1998a). Moreover, it tells a complex picture of a text with a minimum number of images. It will help the students to elicit ideas from the pictorial representation which leads to a concluding statement. By creating the pictorial representation, the students are encouraged to think deeply about the characters, events and themes about the text, which will enhance and expand the critical thinking by centralizing the student‘s attention at the significance points. This is similar to Paivio‘s dual coding theory. Paivio‗s (1986) dual coding theory basically outlines the idea that the cognitive process of the human brain proceeds in relation to the processing of information derived through interplay of both verbal and visual elements.

In a result, students will be able to make up with that significant point to answer the questions correctly about the text. Pictorial representation can be considered as an effective tool in teaching to deliver the message exactly to the students. For language teachers, the use of different visual-verbal aids will hopefully help teachers seeking to improve student motivation and interaction in class as well as learning of particular language skills and knowledge (Danan, 1992). There are number of beneficial features about pictorial representation. They are: Pictorial representation narrates a composite and a complicated text with a few numbers of images; It evokes and generates ideas to the students, and to get motivated in answering the questions with a crystal clear insight; It aids to develop a chain modelled on the basis of primitive structure; it provides the details of nook and cranny of important ideas in the text, so that the students can easily grasp the idea. Although there has been much less research on the visual as distinct from verbal nature of learning, there is an interesting body of research evidence which supports the idea that student learning is positively affected by presenting visual and verbal aids together (Mayer &Sims, 1994). This reminds us of a popular saying: a picture is worth a thousand words‗. There are some few compact methods which briefly say to develop the reading capacity using pictorial representation.

Cut the picture of a story with each frame. Distribute the sets of story to students without narrating the story. Then allow the students to paste or arrange the story according to its sequence in a sheet. After that, the teacher can check the order, of their sequence and discuss the ideas prevailed among students. The teacher can remove the last picture of the pictorial representation of a story. The story with the removed picture can give it to the students. The teacher can ask the students to think of ending and give away the gifts to the artistic students, who ended the last frame with the best idea.

The more concrete a word is, the easier it is to find and uses a picture for its illustration (Anderson & Shifrin, 1980). Give the pictorial representation with a short paragraph, for each picture below it. Then the teacher can ask the students to deduce the paragraph with one or two sentences for each picture in a frame. This method can be repeated about a number of times, until the students attain perfection. Then estimate and compare the quality with the prior practice. Then the teacher can discuss the outcome and techniques for further summarising and increasing on the result, which they get on the final answer on summarizing the paragraph with one or two sentence.

Charts, Diagrams can be considered as a powerful tool in comprehending a text. Understanding visual images may take place defined as in two sequences (Messaris & Moriaty, 2005). The first is to understand a sign, an image, or a graphic representation through basic perceptual standards of what we see to acquire the meaning from the

representation or a visual image, one should insight his/her view critically. A critical view of the visual image may involve understanding how the visual images are created and distributed historically, culturally and aesthetically and also understanding how the audience are supposed to catch the meaning of the image (Burch, 2005).

• How can you describe and explain the words meaning in other phrases? a) Erupts - b) Tremors – c) Series - d) Craters –

Source: Taken from ―The Indian Express‖

• Classify the Active, Dormant and Extinct areas?

• What is the height of the eruptions and the Last major eruption of the volcanoes Mt. Etna, Vesuvius & Stromboli?

• Mark the places in the respective areas? a) Stromboli b) Mt. Etna c) Vesuvius We can give a map to the students and ask them to mark the areas in order to test the cognitive ability.

• What is the difference between ACTIVE, DORMANT and EXTINCT and describe it in your words? The students must be equipped with a partial knowledge, in equal with mathematical notation to compare the height and attitude of the eruption.

The picture assists the learners to go beyond the printed information in the picture, which means to know the other aspects of the given information. For example a) Explain the terms ―Eurasian plate‖ and the‖ African plate‖? b) Where is it situated? c) Does the plate refer to the ―eating plate‖? The student has to get background knowledge about the usage of ―eating plate‖ and ―Tectonic plate‖. The student has to make a connection, with the subject matter to his/her own awareness, and should tell the differences between the two similar things such as homophones with their critical thinking skills. Warren, Memory, & Bolinger (2004) described that students improved their critical thinking skills effectively if critical thinking was not taught in isolation, but rather taught through examining and understanding the content of what students were studying. Students develop their critical thinking skills effectively if the content of the course were more emphasized than just the development of critical concentrate on critical thinking skills. The teaching materials must be carefully chosen as being the most suitable in terms to the level of the learners critical thinking levels, age level, meta-cognitive skills including some other criteria.

The main aim of the starter is to associate the knowledge with the previous and the existing knowledge. The main objectives the starters are: • To equip the readers with the start-up ideas before starting to read a text. • To help the readers to know about the need of the starters in a text. The purpose of a starter is to contextualise the knowledge being studied (Hutchinson and waters, 1981).The teacher must be creative and flexible in their start-up materials and he must differ from one another in generating many ideas in it. The start- up materials must be flexible and it should get the students to think deeply about the material which leads to creativity in answering the questions.

8. FIFTH METHOD:

This article headlines should persuade the readers to focus on the text, and to follow the course of action involved in the text. In this text, students should have background knowledge about salinity range to determine the amount of salt in water. The student has to find his/her own solutions to the problem, which is given in the picture. In the given picture for this task, he/she has to collage the geographical terms such as ―archipelago‖ with the language knowledge.

Source: The Indian Express

they should be practiced with these types of events. Hence, there is a moderate movement in this language development, through one can see that this task transforms from guided to more open-ended task, in respect to language and content. The teacher can make the students to fill the flow chart. There is a flow chart below. Complete the flow chart.

Here are some suggestions, for the betterment of English language materials in reading: the teaching materials can be integrated with technological aids implementation with fun interaction among students, to keep the class interesting, so that the students will engage at all times; the teachers and the students should not be over-loaded with class hours and work, so that they cannot emerge with creative materials; it is a need for the teachers and the institutions to go for the detailed discussion of designing teaching materials will satisfy the need of the hour in the classroom; it is advisable to give more focus on developing creative materials rather than on assessment.

words in context. In R. Spiro, C. Bruce, & W. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension . Hilldale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Danan, M. (1992). Reversed subtitling and dual coding theory: New directions for foreign language instruction. Language Learning, 42, pp. 497-527 Fisher, R. (2004). What is creativity? In R. Fisher & M. Williams (Eds.), Unlocking creativity: Teaching across the curriculum (pp. 6-20).New York: Routledge. Dornyei, Z. (2001). HUTCHINSON, T & WATERS, A 1981 ―Perfomance and competence in ESP‖, Applied Linguistics, Vol.2/1, OUP. Mayer, R. & Simes, V. (1994). For whom is a picture worth a thousand words? Extensions of a dual–coding theory of multimedia learning. Journal of Educational Technology, 86, pp. 389-401. Paivio, A. (1986). Mental Representations: Dual–coding approaches. New York: Oxford University Press. Warren, W., Memory, D., & Bolinger, K. (2004). Improving critical thinking skills in the United States survey course: An activity for teaching the Vietnam war. History Teacher, 37(2), pp. 193-209 Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by design. Virginia: Ascd.

Research Scholar (Full-Time), Rajah Serfoji Government, College, Thanjavur, Tamilnadu-5