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Readability of Instructional Materials

By: Teacher Cleopatra Noel Dummond

The readability of instructional materials depends on:

• Language style,
• Typographical presentation features, and
• Visual features.

Language Style written or narrative styles, as well as visual features, can influence the readability of materials. However, multiple features contribute to the flow of ideas. Features that interfere with readability (fragmented content, choppy sentences, and incoherent visuals).

Typographical Presentation Features that support readability are the following:

• Font style forms and emphasizes words and ideas such as (simple fonts, serif printed documents except for emphasis; type large enough for the reader to easily see; and use of words with their normal upper and lower letters.
• Text spacing separates and groups words, sentences, paragraphs, and sections. includes: (normal spacing, fonts with proportional spacing are easier to read; left justification and unjustified on right produces, and enough space between columns clearly separates content.)
• Simplicity avoids extraneous and redundant information and focuses attention includes (avoidance of "unneeded colors and details;" use of color for specific purposes; symmetry, simple lines; and plain shading such as gray, solid pastel, or black.)
• High, but not Sharp, contrast supports separation of letters, words, and sections include (avoiding Sharp contrast and glare to improve reading; and avoiding Sharp contrast because light letters over very dark colors appear to glow and blur.)
• Text and visuals focus information and concepts include (legible labels with names attached directly to parts; small messages and labels, still easy to read, placed next to data; simple explanations, important but not extraneous detail, and transitions and words to show logical connections between ideas.

Choosing a textbook and other printed materials.

Choosing a textbook is one of the most important tasks for the foreign language teacher at any level. In the elementary school the process is made much more difficult by the fact that there are few text series from which to choose. As the interest in elementary school foreign language programs continues to grow, publishers are producing textbook materials to add to the small number of contemporary elementary school foreign language.

Criteria for evaluating textbooks and other printed material.

As elementary and middle school foreign language teachers evaluate text series or curriculum materials developed in other districts. The following are criterias for evaluating textbooks:

1. Goals
2. Communication
3. Culture
4. Subject Content and Thinking Skills
5. Bias
6. Flexibility
7. Physical Characteristics
8. Support Materials
9. Budget

The elementary and middle school foreign language teacher works with the whole child in the whole classroom learning environment.

Priority Area: Presentation

Teacher: Licda Cleopatra Noel

A major part of presentation concerns how well the students and teacher resources work together. Visuals also play a role in readability. Too many visuals can distract learners from the learning process. But relevant visuals support readability when integrated with the text in a form different, but explanative, of the content.

Comprehensiveness of Student and Teacher Resources

This include a students resources and teacher resources.

Student Resources

Although flashy, eye-catching materials with easy-to-read lists and colorful illustrations may be attractive, students often consider them dull reading, especially when the materials provide simple tidbits of information without integration of subject matter.
Another danger is that those attractive features used to highlight key ideas often mislead students. Effective instructional materials generally integrate the use of reference aids (index, maps, graphic organizers, and pictures) with the topic studied.

Teacher Resources

Resources for teachers often include a massive teacher's manual that includes the annotated student text, lesson plans, enrichment activities, questioning strategies, tips for varying learning styles. These resources can be so comprehensive that nearly all instructional decisions are made for the teacher, and it becomes especially important to evaluate the quality and implications of those decisions, particularly for teachers who may be teaching a subject for the first time.
The teacher resources include:

• Components and materials that are easy to use.
• Materials to support lesson planning, teaching, and learning.
• Suggestions for adapting instruction for varying needs.
• Guidelines and resources on how to implement and evaluate instruction.
• Resources to use in classroom activities.
• Resources for building relationships with families.

Alignment of Instructional Components

This includes within students materials it has alignment of content, learning activities, tests, goals, and objectives improves learning and with teacher materials they emphasized the importance of alignment of a teacher's manual with students' activities of the content, sequence, pacing, and procedures for teachers. The materials must match in content and progression of instructional activities.

Organization of Instructional Materials

Clear organization of instructional materials supports:

1. Access to Content some features help in searching and locating information, such as a table of contents.
2. Visible Structure and Format placement of information can help students and teachers see structure.

Visual clues signal content and organization examples of these are (font style, symbols to concentrate attention, subheadings, summaries overviews, outlines, and section; color and highlighting, margin comments, text boxes, tables, and charts.

Objectives or a content outline may introduce main ideas provide guidepost to use in searching for key information, or serve as a checklist for self assessment.

3. Logical Organization students need organized knowledge structures to learn new information. Poor organizations is detrimental to learning, while an explicit and teachable content structure can double the amount remembered. Logical information must be unified and consistent.

• Unified the statement of a clear purpose with content organized around main ideas, principles, concepts, and logical relationships supports the unity and flow of information.
• Consistent the pattern  of organization of the content should be consistent and logical for the type of subject or topic. These pattern may include compare and contras, time sequence, cause and effect and so on.

Effective organization include:

1. Simple listing when order is not significant;
2. Comparison-contrast for concepts;
3. Time sequence when timing of events is important;
4. Cause-and-effect to express cause or reason;
5. Problem-solution for reasoning or problem-solving skills; and
6. The setting, characters, conflict, resolution, and inside view in a story.

the more consistent the material prepare for students need with the topic related it is better for the teachers to achieve the goals of a successful classroom.

Evolution of Instructional Mateials Design

By: Licda Cleopatra Noel D.

The objective of a teacher of ESL is to have students using the language as they make it more meaningful, that the reason way the use of materials is very important and effective materials include certain components or features:

• Instructional goals with adaptability to course requirements.
• Accurate, relevant, and relatively up-to-date information.
• Well-organized, coherent, and unified flow of information.
• Appropriate reading level and vocabulary.
• Effective layout visual presentation, and physical features.

Textbooks also is useful that is the reason why they remain as the main curriculum guides. They are the most frequently used instructional material for students and teachers at all grade levels beyond primary grades.

The Teacher's Manual

This is a key presentation feature than can be a strong selling point, especially if well designed. It contains instructional resources to support instructional strategies and activities, and its organization affects how well it can be adapted and used in the classroom. Teacher manuals work well when it has the following basic features:

1. Practically.
2. Alignment.
3. Coverage.
4. Readability.
5. Methods.
6. Assessment.
7. Management.

Technology Changes

The expansion of technology, even more specialization features, such as graphic design, photography, and typefaces, he¡ave emerged. These types of features as well as titles of materials have become increasingly important.

Visual Presentation

The visual material include two important aspects such as a presentation and an organization any materials presented in various media be more effective than conventional classroom instruction when they are organized systematically with a deliberate structure and sequence.

Challenges in Reviewing Content

These challenges are varied and numerous, including evaluating content that is controversial, inaccurate, or without scholarship; written by anonymous authors; or misleading.

Inaccurate Content

Previous research cited Florida's Evaluator's Handbook, reported that materials often do not give topics treatment they deserve, contain factual errors, or persist in presenting disproved concepts.

More rhymes for children learning English

Priority Area: Learning

Written by: Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

This reading is about the learning skill and according to what I read, it is important to have motivational strategies in the development of reading that can be positive expectations, feedback, and appearance. it also needs a setting positive expectations include a right climate for learning that takes friendly, attentive, and encouraging communication.

It is necessary in this area of learning to have challenge works not too easy, not too hard. In other words, the easy ones are not challenging enough; hard ones overload working memory so that students give up on making the effort to learn.  It requires also relevant helps as irrelevant hurts this means, that a relevant or familiar context helps, such as relating learning to students' previous experiences or knowledge. Adding unnecessary or relative features of media or content can create too much of a cognitive load and interfere with learning. The personal connections improve learning and it helps students make personal connections to the course content and improve their learning by the following:

• using examples from students life, current events, and popular culture.
• asking students to share personal examples, insights, experience, or interpretations related to what they are studying.
• asking students to answer self-assessment questions, to defend positions or controversial issues; and
• asking students to write personal essays, engage in role plays, analyze case studies, and deal with real-word problems.

Adults need practical applications they learn better when they are told why they need to learn something and experience an application of its value.

The feedback is important for the students because they are motivated by them when it is about correctness and how to improve what they are learning. The appearance the materials should have features that make them appealing. Instructional materials should thoroughly teach a few important ideas.

The process of learning must be focus on the students with powerful ideas which are important because they help students organize what they are learning, students learn more when given big ideas or major themes before they study; or when they area asked to build their own way of representing ideas and relationships, such as their own conceptual maps, outlines, analogies, hierarchies; or when they are asked to brainstorm what they think they know about a topic.

Completeness is necessary for the area of learning because the teaching of the big ideas must be focus on developing  a deeper and more complete understanding of a discipline's major themes.

The learning needs an explicit instruction that depends upon clarity of directions and explanations, and exclusion of ambiguity.

The clarity of directions and explanations includes explicit instructional communication of the skills to be learned, similarly, the development of learning skills requires explicit directions about when and how to do different types of learning activities. Students benefit from knowing and practicing active learning strategies for remembering and using new information, such as:

• explanations and examples of learning processes;
• directions on how to preview, questions, read or listen, reflect, recite, and review;
• directions on use of learning techniques such as note taking, outlining, paraphrasing, and so on,
• encouragement to use persistence and personal control for learning how to learn.

Clarity also is influenced by the progression  of complexity in the materials. Students are more successful when their learning tasks increase in complexity of content and diversity of applications.

Exclusion of ambiguity and guidance and support instructional materials must include guidance and support to help students safety and successfully become more independent learners and thinkers. This guidance and support depends on level and adaptability.

Level of guidance and support most often come from a good teacher, but instructional materials can support or interfere. Some activities can be an organized routines for orderly learning and future searching of information, and they make learning time more productive. This organized routine would be to give the structure for a task followed by practice before moving on to production.

Another activity is better thinking skills that students develop when provided guided instruction in the form of names and definitions of the targeted thinking skills.

The feedback is a key part of guidance is the kind of periodic feedback provided to students. students who receive constructive feedback about the accuracy and adequacy of performance become more interested in the class and learn more.

Other forms of guidance questions provide powerful guidance, and it is particularly effective to vary timing, positioning, or cognitive levels of questions.

Adaptability of guidance and support

1. Lectures help advanced students; average students need scaffolding. Students with less expertise require more structure, active learning, and guidance. Scaffolding needs to fade as students  gain knowledge and skills.
2. Scaffolding supports advanced learning. Asking focused questions, giving prompts or tips, modeling the thinking process and explaining it, and giving informative feedback moves students toward higher levels of learning. Scaffolding includes just enough guidance and support with gradual transfer of responsibility for learning from teacher to student.
3. Too much feedback interferes. Feedback can be overdone. Too much explanation can interfere with learning.
4. Materials should accommodate differences in learning styles with a variety of activities and modalities.
5. Guidance and support in online learning. Student characteristics also can influence how much they benefit from the use of technology in learning.
6. Differences for low-ability and high-ability students online. Animations help both low-and high-ability students. High achievers seek to understand the content rather than memorizes the terms, symbols, and formulas. Low-ability students benefit from illustrations. Low-achieving students benefit from clear instructions, guidelines for self-assessments.
7. Summary of types o guidance and support. Includes the following features: goals at the beginning of an assignment; organized activities and routines; explicit organizational schemes and explanations; examples of finished products, sample problems, and models.

Students responses. Students learn more when they do the following kinds of activities:

• generates their own chats or worksheets for study;
• summarizes and take notes;
• explain concepts and problem-solving steps to each other;
• participate in peer tutoring
• relate, organize, and represent knowledge in a new way;
• generate and test hypothesis; and
• construct their own knowledge.

students learn more when they do the following kinds of assessment activities:

• provide writtr¡en answers to questions
• give explanations
• do case-based self-assessments to improve learning
• take frequent quizzes
• review feedback from test results.