Abstract
The Malaysian government has announced the use of CEFR aligned English textbooks imported from the United Kingdom in schools. However, the use of imported textbooks faces much oppositions. The proponents of Malaysian based textbooks believe that English textbooks written in English should give due consideration to contents based on local setting. Thus, the researchers worked collaboratively with thirty, Year 3 Teaching English as a Second Language student-teachers who have enrolled in the course, Teaching Reading Skills in English as a Second Language. One of the course objectives is to produce an English supplementary book which consists of oral history texts with local context for lower secondary students. The research objective is to find out to what extent the student-teachers have gained from creating the oral history texts. This study employed a qualitative research approach adopting a case study method. Data were collected from a purposive sampling of 30 TESL student-teachers, who wrote the oral history texts. The research instruments employed were reflective journals, document analysis and interviews. The main findings show that the student-teachers gained valuable experiences in creating oral history texts for an ESL reading classroom. Besides some challenges faced, they gained a better realisation of the principles of teaching reading and material development in an ESL context. It is hoped that this study could give insights to the educators, policy makers and textbook writers in developing and using English textbooks with local contexts. Keywords: Oral history text; Teaching reading skills; Material development; TESL student-teachers
Highlights
The government of Malaysia has announced that starting from 2018, both primary and secondary schools in Malaysia would use imported English textbooks from the United Kingdom (The Star, 5th October 2017)
We provide the answers of this study research question (RQ): How did the Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESL) student-teachers’ experience on the development of oral history texts help them to understand the principle of material development for teaching reading in an ESL context? The answers for the RQ are divided into 3 stages namely pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing and implementation stage
The TESL student-teachers expressed that they gave great importance for the needs and interests as well as the values they wanted to instil onto the targeted students even before writing the oral history text
Summary
The government of Malaysia has announced that starting from 2018, both primary and secondary schools in Malaysia would use imported English textbooks from the United Kingdom (The Star, 5th October 2017). The imported textbooks would be used to teach the Standard-Based English Language Curriculum for Secondary (SBELC) curriculum. The SBELC has been aligned with the newly introduced Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The Council of Europe has developed CEFR as a guide to gauge foreign language users’ proficiency. This move is part of the reform taken by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to ensure secondary school students achieve international standards’ proficiency level. An education activist and a professor at UCSI University, Malaysia, lauded the government’s move as he argued that the
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