Clase Echinoidea

Since pronunciation is not the skill that is given priority by Anita, naturally there were a lot of factors which she had mentioned that hinder her from teaching pronunciation. These factors were seen by Anita as factors that stop her from going beyond her norms of teaching the tested skills. Although at times she feels that pronunciation plays some part in learning a language successfully, she faced several challenges or Key Challenges to teach pronunciation. Firstly, pronunciation is seen as a burden not only for Anita, but for her students. In Anita’s case, her students are mostly

less proficient. This is evident during the researcher’s observations on her lesson where she conducted her lessons both in Bahasa Malaysia and English. This was later confirmed by Anita. According to her, the class that the researcher observed was the best class among the Form 4 classes. However the students are less proficient in English Language. Anita feels that the students are struggling to improve their English and adding another component will burden the students as they would not be able to cope with learning a new component which may be difficult for them.

“Interviewer: So are you saying that pronunciation should be taught in the classroom from the very beginning?

Interviewee: Yes.

Interviewer: Rather just emphasise for the oral examination?

Interviewee: Exactly. But the thing is that, we can’t blame the teachers in the classes

also because the level of the students. They can’t cope with the entire syllabus. And if you want to add in more, it’s going to be totally disastrous.”

(S1.2 – 82-92)

According to Anita, the English teachers including herself, felt that the existing components of the English Language subject are already very extensive. She finds that there are a lot of skills and areas of the language that need to be taught. Her goal of teaching English is to enable her learners to communicate using the language. This is, on its own, a very challenging task. Adding another component adds the burden of teaching.

“Interviewer: So, by adding another component, a pronunciation component, is adding to your work load?

Interviewee: To the syllabus, yes. It’s already excess so much and if they want to split

it and add another component, it’s going to be difficult for the teachers and the students. So, it won’t be like teaching them what they’re supposed to know. It’s just merely rushing to finish up the syllabus.”

(S1.2 – 94-100)

Perhaps the burdening factor of teaching pronunciation could be related to her claim that pronunciation is a difficult skill to teach. The difficulty in teaching depends largely on the training she received on pronunciation both in the theoretical and pedagogical aspects. The non-facilitation of teacher training led to the difficulty in teaching pronunciation. Anita admitted the lack of emphasis given on pronunciation during her teacher training due to the nature of the teacher training course which was a short preparation course to serve as bridging into the school environment.

“I don’t have a professional training because KPLI is a crash course; one year course. If you compare to teachers who went to Maktab; four years, five years, they are somewhere. They have the actual knowledge. I have the actual knowledge for I.T because I did it for four years.”

(S1.1 – 79-82)

Anita is aware of the lack of exposure and the advantages of a complete teacher training course. This could be interpreted that the one year teacher training course offered by training institutes in Malaysia also sidelined the teaching and learning of pronunciation. Teachers were trained to focus on important skills in examination. Even if communication was the purpose of teaching the English Language, the teaching and learning of pronunciation is embedded inside the language skills and not highlighted or dealt with explicitly.

Time is another challenge faced by Anita if pronunciation is included in her lessons. She felt that more time is needed if pronunciation is to be taught. The time allocated for teaching English had to be delegated for teaching the important or tested skills and administration work. This may appear to be a common reason for her excuse as not to include the teaching of pronunciation to hide the lack of knowledge both in the theoretical understanding as well as the skills in designing a pronunciation lesson that is integrated in other language skills and content.

“If you were to concentrate on that particular part; pronunciation, we need more time.”

(S1.4 – 408-409)

The second Key Challenges mentioned by Anita is the limitation of resources. To teach pronunciation, teachers need to have ample support from the resources.

are not accessible to all the English teachers. Therefore they find the limitation of resources a problem in facilitating them to teach pronunciation.

“We don’t have enough resources. The CD that the government has given us is a textbook CD and most of the times we get the textbooks without the CDs. And there is no,… you see for literature, for grammar and all, we have the CD-ROM that the government prepared. But for particularly the textbook, only that is given in the CD. And again, it’s not available to all teachers. And the facilities. We’ve only got two labs and most of the time the labs would be under repair or occupied by other teachers.”

(S1.2 – 131-137)

Since Anita is an information technology savvy person, she relies on information on activities of pronunciation from the internet, however, she claimed in facing difficulties in finding activities in pronunciation in the internet. According to her most of the pronunciation teaching ideas had no integration in the other language skills and content. Perhaps Anita was looking into a complete lesson to be used in the classroom instead of looking for the pronunciation activities and then, using her knowledge and creativity to incorporate the pronunciation activity into her English Language lesson. Based on this, lacking of resources as well as her limited knowledge on the teaching and integration of pronunciation further frustrates her intentions of including pronunciation in her lessons. Thus, leads to the abandonment of the skill. In addition, to Anita’s understanding, using poems is also a resource to the teaching of pronunciation. Perhaps the fact that poems are usually read aloud lead her to believe that poems are useful resources for teaching pronunciation.

“Of course, a lot of sites for the poems and then, you have a lot of sites for pronunciation, I tried. I browsed through but it’s quite difficult. Difficult to find resources. And when they talk about pronunciation, the lesson plan is solely on pronunciation”.

The suitability of the materials was among Anita’s concern with regards to the

resources that were made available to most of the Language teachers. CD-ROMS were accompanied with the textbooks with pronunciation component included. However, Anita felt that the activities suggested were unsuitable where it was more suited to be used by the lower secondary students. Demonstration of sounds and mechanical drills at word level might appear uninteresting to the upper secondary level students. Anita perhaps felt that pronunciation itself is a basic skill and taught to the lower secondary students but if it were to be taught to the students of a higher level, a more mature and challenging approach would be more suitable.

“Even the textbook they’ve given me, the CD. I went through, they’ve got the pronunciation part. It’s very childish. Pronouncing it again and again and again, just words. At one point, they are going to find it very, very, very boring. Even when I looked at it, it was quite boring too; for their level. Form five levels. Unless you want to use it for form one, form two; fair.”

(S1.4 – 249-253)

These Key Challenges play a big role Anita’s decision in the inclusion of the pronunciation component to her teaching. She believes that pronunciation if taught, it is subconsciously added in the English lessons. The lack of knowledge in theory and pedagogy are sources of the burden and translated as an unwanted additional skill which warrants additional teaching time

4.1.5 Laily

Laily is a very low profile teacher. She often spends time doing her work alone at her very confined work area situated near the window facing a small serene garden as opposed to the other side of the windows where students stand to peep if the teachers they are looking for are in the staffroom and near where all the teachers’ cars are

parked. She is the second teacher that the researcher had contacted for this study through a recommendation from an old friend. She willingly invited the researcher to meet her at her school to discuss about the intention of this research. The meeting with her was really brief as she understood the purpose of this research and the requirements of the research. She immediately suggested the schedule for her English Language classes that could be observed and the discussion went on without much problem especially on the schedules to conduct the interviews. One of the reasons for the smooth negotiation was because she was the data entry teacher and had only one class to teach for the whole year. Thus, this explains the amount of free time that she could spare for the researcher without feeling guilty trying to get subjects to squeeze in their time to accommodate the researcher.

At the first impression, Laily seemed a quite reserved person. It was difficult to predict her personality especially during the first meeting and the ‘not much questioned’ negotiation. There was not much persuasion involved. However, there was one thing that attracted the researcher to get to know her better and at the same time have a feeling that the researcher could get some good information from Laily. It was her prominent foreign - British accent. Laily allowed the researcher to observe three of her lessons initially, however, the researcher only managed to observe only two double-period lessons as the students had to attend a talk by a guest speaker. Laily was not aware of the compulsory attendance of the students to the talk, so the second observation had to be cancelled. The cancellation on the observation was then replaced with a follow up interview of her first observed lesson. The interviews were conducted three times and they were carried out after each observation and at the end of the last observation. Laily was more comfortable in having the interview conducted at the staffroom as it was the only room equipped with air-conditioners, thus she found it more comfortable than other places. Although occasionally the interview sessions were disturbed by a few

teachers who consulted her for some matters, Laily and the researcherstill managed to focus on the interviews.

Laily spent most of her life in the U.K, this explains the thick accent that she has. She was born in the 1960’s and was part of the old education system where she was the last batch who sat for the MCE examination. Having scored her MCE with flying colours she left her twin sister to continue her A-Levels in the U.K.