Analysis of pedagogical materials for online additional language teaching: guidelines for task design

• Published in: Revista Horizontes de Linguística Aplicada Vol. 11; no. 1
• Main Authors: Gabriela da Silva Bulla, Fernanda Cardoso Lemos, Margarete Schlatter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de Brasília 01.01.2013
• Subjects: ead; educação a distância; elaboração de tarefas; ensino de língua adicional; tecnologia; TIC; uso da linguagem
• ISSN: 1677-9770; 2237-0951

The objective of this paper is to study online additional language teaching materials aiming at proposing guidelines for the analysis and for the design of pedagogical tasks based on the concept of language use as a form of social action. The analysis focused on the tasks that constitute the five teaching units of the Spanish-Portuguese Course for Exchange Students (CEPI-Portuguese), designed to prepare Latin American undergraduates for their academic experience as exchange students at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. The teaching materials were analyzed according to (a) the adequacy of the lessons designed (in terms of themes, genres and sequence of tasks) to the course objectives, (b) the adequacy of the tasks (in terms of genres, interaction and linguistic resources) to the theoretical assumptions of the course concerning language use and collaborative learning, and (c) the appropriateness of the task (tools used) to online language teaching. Examples of tasks that were considered adequate, partially adequate and inadequate are discussed, and the criteria used in the analysis are proposed as guidelines for the design of instructional materials for online language courses.