Designing TEFL Instruction: Using the ADDIE Model to Differentiate and Improve Learning Activities
Ryan Eller, US
Ryan Eller is an online TEFL instructor at iTalki and will be working for an internationally known language travel program in the near future. He is currently working on a Master’s Degree in Instructional Science and Technology at California State University Monterey Bay.
E-mail: reller@csumb.edu
Menu
Introduction
Background of ADDIE Model
Example course design
Conclusion
References
The ADDIE Model is one of the most widely used instructional systems models used to create and assess potential educational programs (Allen, 2003). However, you do not need to be an instructional designer to use this model with your students! In fact, by using the model with lesson plans, in the development of learning objectives and course goals, and your choice of learning activities for each student, you will be able to not only improve your course, but how it affects each of your students as well. (Peterson, 2003)
In order to make the model simpler to understand, I will provide examples and scenarios to show how quickly the ADDIE model can be implemented. The beauty of the ADDIE Model is that there are so many ways to arrive at the best decision for your students.
The ADDIE Model has five steps an instructor can use to design instructional materials. The first is the analysis phase. This step is followed by the design phase, which is then followed by the development phase. The next step is the implementation phase, after which the instructional material is evaluated by the teacher or subject matter expert.
Analysis Phase
The analysis phase is where three key things can be analyzed. Firstly, the student and course can be assessed in two ways: a needs analysis and a task analysis. (Peterson, 2003) Lastly, the teacher can evaluate him or herself to see what methodologies have worked with past students.
A learner analysis can be performed in a multitude of ways. A teacher could provide a preliminary exam to determine each student’s individual knowledge of the English language. Conversely, an instructor could have students fill out a survey, either using Likert or open-ended questions, in which students could share their perceptions of how well they use certain grammar forms, vocabulary knowledge, etc. Similarly, this could also be performed by talking to each student during an individual interview. In this example, not only would one get the information gained during the interview, the teacher would also get the chance to assess the student’s non-verbal communication for clues about how they can perform certain learning tasks.
Doing a task analysis allows the teacher the opportunity to itemize what they want their students to learn and to set up the “goals and objectives of learning.” (Jonassen, Tessmer, Hannum, 1999, p. 3) For example, a teacher could be planning an eight week course focused on beginning English composition. After performing a learner analysis, the teacher could surmise that pronoun usage, plural v. singular usage, and sentence structure practice would be the emphasis of the course. The teacher would then decide how to structure their learning objectives in such a way, that they would describe the task itself, how it would be taught, and at what level of accuracy it would be performed. For example, a learning objective could be written as follows:
Perform academic writing using plural and singular nouns with 80% accuracy when writing full paragraphs.
While broad, this sample objective uses the three key aspects of a learning objective. Firstly, it describes the task that the student will perform. Then, the conditions that are a major aspect of the task are explained (e.g. singular and plural nouns). Lastly, it allows the learner to know how well they are expected to be able to perform the task.
The last aspect of the analysis phase is the teacher doing a short self-reflection. Looking at what has, and has not, worked in the past is a great place to start. Also, how well can you perform the task yourself and how confident do you feel you can teach it? Do you need further training yourself? These are important clarifying questions to ask yourself before entering the classroom with an unused and untested lesson plan.
Design Phase
After completing your analysis, the next step is designing your new lesson. The design phase is where the teacher will create every objective, assessment, and all of the course activities (Wang, 2009). As explored in the analysis phase, learning objective design begins in earnest at this point. Some learning objective design will take place naturally during the analysis phase because major objectives will become clear quickly after reviewing your analysis notes. However, additional objectives will become easier to write after the analysis is completed. For instance, using our objective created above, a new objective might include academic writing with pronouns and when or when they cannot be plural. This sub-objective might not have seemed obvious at first, but presented itself after the initial objective writing phase.
Assessments are potentially one of the most important aspects of any learning task. Using your objectives, you will be able to determine how you want to assess your students in the most natural of ways. For example, with our above noun objective, you might assess your students by having them write a paragraph about their day while using five singular and five plural nouns and then checking them afterwards. Alternatively, you could give your students a basic fill-in-the-blank quiz where students would use a noun either in its singular or plural form based on the context of the sentence. How you assess your students is completely up to you, but you can always use your analysis notes and objectives to guide you to the best assessment option.
Development Phase
The development phase is rather straightforward. This step is where the teacher will create all of the materials necessary for the course. (Wang, 2009) Do you plan to use computer modules? Do you plan to only use paper handouts that you develop?
After knowing how you want to deliver the learning content, you will go about creating it. For our example beginning composition course, you might develop flash cards of nouns, create sample plural v. singular practice sheets, examples of proper sentence structure, etc. After creating handouts, lectures, and all of the electronic files, you will compile them based on the course syllabus/plan that you develop.
Implementation Phase
The implementation phase is where you will use the new lesson or course with your students, or in an ideal world, with a test group (e.g. faculty, advanced learners above the current course content, etc.). If able to use a test group first, you can ask each to review your materials, comment on what does and does not work, and what activities they enjoyed on a more subjective level as well. However, you will most likely be unable to get a test group to sit through all of your lectures and lessons, which means your first group to see your materials will be your actual students!
During the implementation phase it is the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that the coursework is laid out in a way that allows the students to learn from it as intended (Wang, 2009). During the development phase, you will have laid out how to implement instruction, the amount of coursework given daily, and ultimately when and where you assess your students. Post-implementation, is where the final step of the ADDIE model takes place.
Evaluation Phase
After the lesson or course has been implemented, the final evaluation will take place. The evaluation phase takes place at two times. During instruction, you perform a formative evaluation, after instruction is complete, you perform a summative evaluation. A formative evaluation could be a questionnaire asking students about how they feel about how helpful the coursework is, or it could even be a well-designed quiz or test. The summative evaluation, much like the formative evaluation, could be a final assessment for students followed by a questionnaire focusing on the course design, schedule of assignments, enjoyment of lectures and class activities, and how helpful those activities and lectures were to the learner.
One of the best aspects of the formative evaluation is that it can be used throughout the entire ADDIE model (Wang, 2009). For example, during the analysis phase a group of students might mention that they dislike computer based exercises. Depending on the course content, you might get rid of two computer based exercises you were going to use and redesign these activities, or create new ones. In short, a formative evaluation can help you to hone your lesson/course materials down to the most useful activities to help students achieve the learning objectives created during the design phase (Hur & Suh, 2010).
Now, let us go through the ADDIE Model step-by-step using an example scenario. I recommend reading the scenario notes first, then designing a lesson by yourself. Then, you can come back and look at what I created to see what is different. My example lesson will be just a skeleton, (naturally because we won’t have real analysis data to work with) showing the basics of the ADDIE model in practice.
You were recently hired to work in Japan at a private English school. You will only be teaching one group of twelve, ten-year-old boys and girls about basic grammar and vocabulary that would be used in America. The goal provided by your Academic Director has you aiming to teach these children 100 new words and to solidify their usage of verbs, word choice, and present, future, and past verb tense. They are expected to pass your institutions post-course assessment with a 75% total, and at least 50% proper usage of all the above categories. You are expected to teach all of this in a one month course.
Analysis
During the analysis phase, I created a five question questionnaire as follows:
- Have you ever learned English in a school setting before?
- Are you nervous using English in front of a group?
- Do you think you know how to use different verb tenses such as past, present, and future well?
- Do you like learning new English words?
- What type of English do you want to learn?
These questions are focused on obtaining a few different key pieces of information. The first question will allow you to know how long they have been learning English, where they have been learning English, and if they have been learning at a private school in addition to their normal school. All of this information will allow you to gauge how long this group has been learning English. The second question allows you to see the perceived confidence of your students, but will also allow you to pick activities that will be helpful. For example, if as a group they do not enjoy giving presentations, then you can either not have the class do them, or have them record a video presentation, etc. The third question is the first to look directly at your future learning objectives. The fourth question will allow you to see if some students will need additional extrinsic motivation to learn English. If it is something they do not enjoy, giving additional praise, keeping instructional activities fresh, and/or finding additional ways to motivate your students will be important. The final question will allow you to see what activities interest your students. While simple, this question will give you invaluable information when designing the course.
One thing to note is to be careful when designing questions. It is best to leave them open-ended and to not lead students towards any given answer. In fact, my third question could be very well be questioned by a seasoned instructional designer. Instead of questioning my students on how well they can perform something, I easily could ask them to show a verb in its past, present, and future tense, or to explain what those term means. Also, quickly mentioning to your students that there is no right or wrong answers (on the entire survey) and that their feedback will help make the course fun will be indispensible to you later on.
Lastly, I would design a quick a quick pre-assessment to gauge each student’s vocabulary and word knowledge using things such as writing opposites of words, using fill-in-the-blank picture verb worksheets, and verb tense fill-in-the-blanks as well. Using these two sources of data, I would begin the design phase.
Design
After collecting my data I have decided to create a four week course based on the timeline provided to me by my Academic Director.
Week 1
Action verb practice.
Verb tense fill-in-the-blank practice (Past, Present, and Future only).
Writing a story about yesterday.
Writing a story about today.
Writing a story about tomorrow.
Buddy sharing of stories.
Assessment.
Week 2
Vocabulary practice with picture flashcards.
Vocabulary walk and talk.
Vocabulary workbooks with fill-in-the blank questions with a word box.
Using synonyms of a word you know.
Words you can use at school presentation exercise.
Assessment.
Week 3
Which sentence seems weird?
Short writing about something you like exercise.
Which word is better exercise.
Metric system Vs. United States Units.
Correct the teacher’s vocabulary!
Assessment.
Week 4
Verb Review.
Vocabulary Review.
Word Choice Review.
Institute Assessment.
Objective 1: Be able to use present, past, and future verbs in a sentence with at least 50% accuracy as tested during the final assessment.
Objective 2: Be able to determine the opposite of a word with at least 50% accuracy as tested during the final assessment.
Objective 3: Be able to use new vocabulary learned in the course based on a word choice assessment at the end of the course. The student is expected to pass this assessment with at least 50% accuracy.
The design shown here is a mock activity schedule and three overall course objectives. In a real-life situation, you may have your students create their own goals based off of your learning objectives, etc. You most likely will have more than three objectives, and will have additional sub-objectives as well.
Development
In this course, I would use computer-based games, quick and fun activities and tie-in as much class collaboration as possible. Due to their age, I would want to quickly move from one activity to the next. I would also make my lectures on PowerPoint and use animations, sound effects, and large colorful text to keep each student engaged with the learning materials. I would assign minimal homework if I felt it was necessary.
Implementation
In this step, I would try my course out with my students. I would have all class handouts and materials prepared and available to students on the first day of class. I would also have all computer programs on class computers or have my students download the required applications to their own computers, tablets, or smart devices.
Evaluation
During the course, I would ask my students to share their subjective feelings (with me) about activities and note them for future reference. If possible, I would also have a colleague view my learning materials and learning objectives to check their validity and usefulness to the learner. I would also use short quizzes to check course content mastery for each student.
After the course was complete, I would have the students fill out a likert scale questionnaire. Examples questions might include:
Did you like the course activities? (1 not at all - 5 definitely)
Do you feel like you know more about verb forms? (Same scale)
You can also ask open-ended questions such as:
What activity have you done before that you wish was in this course?
What else would you like to learn in the future?
Your questions should focus on finding out what did and did not work for your students. You can also use this time to question about the setting, learning aids, your lectures, and your learning materials. By performing both a formative and summative evaluation, you will be strengthening future versions of this course, which ultimately will make your job easier!
The ADDIE Model is but a bevy of instructional design models you can use to create your course with. However, I find it to be one of the more streamlined models that will allow you to tackle course creation in a new way.
When using the model, don’t be afraid to use only one step or just a few steps. Many will find the evaluation piece, alone, to be of great value. In fact, when teaching with any lesson plan, I always ask how my student enjoys it, what they learned, etc. This quick subjective data helps me to get a slight feel for how the student would respond to similar lesson plans in the future.
Hopefully, the ADDIE Model will be a new tool for you to use in your teaching tool bag. You now will be able to create a course from scratch, then evaluate it, and make changes as needed. The guideposts of the ADDIE Model can make course design a breeze, leaving you more time to focus more on your students!
Allen, W. (2006). Overview and evolution of the ADDIE training system. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 8(4), 430-441.
Jonassen, D., Tessmer, M., Hannum, W. (1999) Task Analysis Methods for Instructional Design, Routeledge.
Hur, J. , & Suh, S. (2010). The development, implementation, and evaluation of a summer school for English language learners. The Professional Educator, 34(2), 1.
Peterson, C. (2003). Bringing ADDIE to life: Instructional design at its best. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 12(3), 227-241.
Wang, S., & Hsu, H. (2009). Using the ADDIE model to design second life activities for online learners. TechTrends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning, 53(6), 76-81.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English Language Improvement for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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