Steve, By putting the course schedules in the library I mean the scheme of work, i.e. the Excel spreadsheet I e-mailed to Mark outlining the content of each lesson and giving the number of each article in the library that I was planning to use.
It wasn’t obvious to me (and so I don’t expect it to be obvious to the students) what the article number is or what you do with it, so putting a copy of each article in the same collection as the scheme of work, or a hyperlink to it, makes a lot of sense.
Annett, Anapaula, as you say, with beginner courses the material has to be assessed fairly carefully to make sure that the learning curve stays reasonably constant. The obvious (but perhaps tedious) way to do this would be to create a brand-new account, then one by one add the articles to the workdesk and mark them as read, keeping a note of the number of new words introduced in each article. We would be aiming for, what, 150 new words a week? Fewer? More? Definitely in the early days of “Who is She?” it would be several episodes each week, or else 3, 4 or 5 episodes could be amalgamated to form a week’s worth of study.
I agree Steve, intermediates are capable of understanding authentic texts and there is no reason that they should not use them, if the level is reasonable.
With intermediate texts it gets harder to assess complexity, because you can no longer make assumptions about which words intermediate students have already encountered. I seem to remember posting on the forum 4 months or so ago about this, ah yes, it’s here:
I’ve been taking texts from the library and running them through this tool:
…which gives me an idea of how complex they are, but it’s a slow process and not really definitive unless we all agree on a yardstick for text complexity for each language.
I thought I might re-start my advanced course running each month. I’m still thinking about what to offer intermediates. As I said somewhere up the page I think it’s appropriate for many tutors to offer different intermediate courses.
I’m sorry to have gone on so long about this, I hope it’s not been too boring to read!