Perspectives of instructors using innovating language learning materials in collegiate US classrooms

This presentation reports the results of an exploratory study on the perspectives of instructors teaching with an innovative textbook within a task-based framework at the university level in the USA. In addition to instructors' perspectives, the study also reports in classroom-observations of two instructors as they use the textbook to implement the final task of the chapter. The research questions were: 1. What are the perspectives of instructors on using an innovative, task-based Spanish textbook? 2. In what ways is the intended task-implementation carried out by two instructors? 3. Are instructors' perspectives reflected on the techniques and strategies in their task-implementation? Instructors were 27 lecturers and Teaching Assistants teaching a total of 48 sections of first and second-year Spanish. All of the instructors had either worked with a textbook that followed a Present-Practice-Produce approach or had never worked with the current materials. Informed by research done on materials use and curriculum ergonomics (e.g., Choppin et al., 2018), instructors answered a survey whose purpose was to gather information on their perspectives towards the transition to a new curriculum, textbook use, and challenges using it. Instructors also reported on whether and how the new materials have impacted their perspectives on language teaching. Following methods of classroom observations and materials use (e.g., Guerrettaz & Johnston, 2013), there were two 50-minute class recorded observation whose purpose was to identify actual materials use of two different instructors as they used the textbook to implement the same final task. Class observations were followed by a short, semi-structured interview, where instructors explained the rationale of their practices as they use the textbook to implement the final task. As the results are currently being gathered, it is hoped that this study sheds light on the instructors' perspectives and materials use on a task-based curriculum.