Learning Materials
Scran Learning Materials
Case Study
1. Author details
| Name: | Carmen Gálvez Roser Vich |
| Job title: | Course Director for Spanish and Assistant Course Director respectively |
| Institution: | Institute for Applied Language Studies (IALS), University of Edinburgh |
About the authors:
We are both teachers of Spanish as a Foreign Language at IALS. This institution offers community courses for six Modern Languages. We have both taught Spanish for over 10 years, and we have created our own materials for different institutions in the past. At IALS, one of our main duties is the creation of in-house materials. We do not use textbooks in our courses. Our materials are word -processed us using different resources, to meet our students’ needs. Carmen Gálvez has also experience in creating teaching materials for Open University.
In addition to material development, we are also interested in syllabus design, and the provision of strategies for language learning. Lately we have also been involved in Corpus Research: how to create and store our own corpus of Spanish texts with the help of the Wordsmith computer programme, so that individual items of language can be easily accessed for teacher reference or material development. This programme has proved to be an invaluable tool for language learning and we hope to create our own Spanish corpus in the near future.
2. The materials
We have created two cultural activities aimed at adult students of Spanish.
| Activity 1: | Spanish paintings in Scottish Museums. |
| Activity 2: | International Brigades: The Life and Adventures of Three Scottish Volunteers fighting in the Spanish Civil War. |
| Subject areas: | Spanish paintings / descriptions Spanish Civil War / biographies |
| Audience: | Students of Spanish as a Foreign Language. To be used in the classroom. |
| Level: | Activity 1: Advanced (~264 hours) Activity 2: Intermediate (~ 165 hours) |
Why did you want to create these materials?
There is a lack of cultural activities in published materials, and this is an area constantly requested by students. It is also a challenge to create this type of materials: they are difficult to develop and more demanding than grammar or vocabulary activities.
How will your materials benefit learners?
These activities will allow students to learn more about two important aspects of Spanish culture and will also help develop reading, writing and speaking skills.
How will they improve on previous methods of teaching this topic?
Students’ personal contribution in cultural activities tends to be very limited, due to their not being familiar with the topic. The danger in the creation of cultural materials is, precisely, that they easily become long, boring lectures in which students play a very passive role.
Our activities are an attempt to challenge this situation. They are intended to be interactive and participative.
3. Creating the materials
- We first agreed that we wanted to create cultural materials, not grammar or vocabulary activities.
- We searched Scran for potential topics. We found that something could be done about two topics: Spanish Painting and the Spanish Civil War.
- We narrowed down possibilities and decided on the final three paintings for Activity 1. For Activity 2, we noticed that Scran provided good images of Scottish citizens involved in the Spanish Civil War. We thought that by incorporating Scottish people in the activity, students’ interest and motivation on the topic of the Civil War would increase significantly. So we decided to take the risk and embark on a difficult bibliography search for information about these volunteers. We eventually found relevant information and went ahead with the second activity.
- We made a plan of possible sub-activities, sequence and progression and developed the actual activities.
We are used to working together as a team, so we distributed and divided the work to be done evenly, with the same amount of responsibility.
What tools did you use?
- The Scran database
- Internet
- National Library and University Main Library
What are the main skills required in creating materials like this?
- To keep a constant awareness that our students are not specialist in the topics and therefore we have to adapt texts, language and content to their particular cultural context.
- To have a good knowledge of how to create interactive, communicative tasks, so that students play an active role in their own learning process.
- To be able to break down an activity into manageable chunks, into small sub-activities, and to be able to create a gradual progression, according to the level of difficulty.
Describe any difficulties you experienced and how you went about addressing them.
- Problems accessing the Scran database. Even after ensuring that cookies were enabled, and consulting with computer technicians, we had recurrent problems logging in.
- Access seemed to be quite temperamental: some days we would be allowed in, some other days we wouldn't!
- Problems accessing items in the Scran database. Entering very specific items wouldn't give us the results expected. On the contrary, entering a very wide item would provide them. For example, the best way to obtain El Greco's paintings does not seem to be by entering "Greco", but by entering "Spanish" or "Spain", even though you come up with a lot of images unrelated to El Greco. It is a bit time-consuming.
- Doing two different searches using the entries “Spanish” and “Spain”, provided us with different results.
- Also, the database didn't seem to be very selective either. The entry Spain, for example, does also render results that are not really related to Spanish topics: i.e. a picture / text giving an account of some famous personality who happened to travel in Spain, Italy and France at some point in his/her life!
- Problems finding materials to supplement the pictures chosen. But it is a problem related to the availability of bibliography on a particular subject.
What would you do differently next time?
To explore different searching methods more in depth.
What hints and tips would you offer to a colleague planning to create a similar resource?
Explore the possibilities of Scran first. Do not make decisions about topic beforehand. See what options the images allow you to develop. And do not stick to your original decisions if they prove difficult to implement. Be flexible enough to change the topic!
