Effective Text Selection for Language Instruction
Educational Resources: General Considerations
These guidelines are divided into two distinct and complementary sections. The first section addresses the criteria for selecting texts and speeches to be used in a course. The second section focuses on didactic exercises and reflection on the text.
1. The Selection of Texts
For a language course, text selection affects all linguistic samples students encounter and process. This means everything they read and listen to, as well as the written proposals and speeches that learners say or write in class (e.g., essays, debates, and presentations). Key criteria include:
- Texts appropriate for trainees: Search for topics that motivate them or are part of their lives.
- Varied texts: To learn best, offer various texts with great variety. This makes the course more enriching and inspiring.
- Authoritative, prepared, or plausible texts: Authentic texts are communicative but may not be suited to the students’ level and can have errors (e.g., bad copies). In contrast, prepared texts serve a didactic purpose and are clean, but they lack the spontaneity of authentic texts and are removed from the living use of language. It is important to prioritize authentic texts without discarding others.
- Full texts: It is important for students to work with texts that are easy to understand. If only a snippet of text can be read, the teacher can explain the rest with a few words, contextualizing the writing.
2. Exercises on Texts
For the selected texts, one must decide on the didactic exercise or activity for the student in each case. This includes determining whether they will be reading or listening, if they will analyze linguistic aspects of the discourse, and identifying what needs to be worked on with each text. Consideration should also be given to whether students will work in pairs, small groups, etc.
Receptive/Productive Skills and Text
The normal process of working with a speech begins with receptive skills and ends with production. This is the standard learning process: before producing or doing something, one must understand and interpret, as several models illustrate. Therefore, a logical sequence for working with didactic texts must respect these three steps:
- Understanding of the text.
- Interpretation of the text (linguistic reflection and comparison between various models).
- Production of text patterns.
These steps are complementary to the levels of analysis.
Text and Other Levels of Study
The text is not the only unit of linguistic analysis, nor does it have the most established didactic tradition. Teachers often have more experience teaching lower levels of study. In the language class, it is important to work with and integrate all elements in a balanced manner to facilitate the development of students’ communication skills. The hierarchy of each level of analysis within the whole language is as follows:
Letters and Sounds > Word > Sentence > Subsection/Sequence > Text
(It is important to start from the simplest and progress to the most complex.)
Exploitation of Texts
Both current advanced development in language didactics and the communicative approach focusing on the text promote the tendency to thoroughly work with texts in the classroom. Teachers might extensively analyze texts in class, but students may lose interest with such intense work on the same text. In short, this tendency to want to “squeeze all the juice” out of a text can lead to student exhaustion and burnout. On the contrary, for increased understanding and enrichment of models, it is more interesting and beneficial to work with a large and varied number of didactic texts, limiting the exploitation of each individual one.