The school where Miss Landa works is located in the outskirts of a southern city. The neighbourhoods, which feature townhomes and recently-built inexpensive condominiums and rentals, are home to a mixture of middle-class and low-income Albanian migrants. Both working- class and middle-class parents, according to Miss Landa, place deep value on education. If they have
the financial means, they do support outside of the classroom learning by enrolling their children in private language schools. She elaborates further on this topic:
The parents are not often in the school environment. Some of them attend afternoon teacher- parent meetings, (pause) usually held once a month, and that’s it. Either because they do not speak English themselves, or because they work long hours, they can provide little help to their children at home with the schoolwork. This means that they turn all the responsibility of teaching to us [Source: IR].
Miss Landa teaches English to grade seven and nine students, aged 13 and 15 respectively. She meets her students three times a week, and each class lasts for 45 minutes. There are between 30 and 36 students in her classes. Some of the students take private classes and others do not. Hence, Miss Landa usually teaches mixed level classes. Most of her students are extrinsically motivated, Miss Landa believes, because they aim to score a good mark by the end of the year [Source: IR]. Since she was awarded a BA in ELT and translation from the University of Tirana in 1979, Miss Landa has been teaching English to high school students. In addition, like the majority of Albanian EFL teachers, Miss Landa offers afternoon classes in her home to supplement her inadequately remunerated state job [Source: EQ & IR].
Miss Landa has participated in a two-day teacher training seminar offered by the British Council in Albania. She describes this teacher development experience as follows:
There were loads of new things said and done during that weekend. I guess the teaching tips were practical but we were overloaded with information, and (pause) were not able to digest all of what was said. (Pause) One thing I learned from that course, though, which I often use in my classes, is: using my fingers to emphasise that there is a missing words in a student’s sentence [Source: IR].
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Rather than talking about her personality as a teacher, Miss Landa describes how she believes her students view her.
They are likely to see a middle-age woman who knows many things but is always eager to learn new things (laughter). You often find my students lecturing me about issues related to the use of computers, like how to turn a Words document into a PDF – this was the last thing I learned from them. The message I want to transmit to my student is: learning is not something that ends when you leave the class. It is something that you do as long as you live. I also believe in good manners. That’s why I continually make eye contact with my students, call them by their names, and make sure to have a neat appearance in the classroom. I also (pause) believe
(pause) that the teacher must have a command of the subject she teaches, that’s why I always
try to prepare myself thoroughly before each class [Source: IR].
During her career, Miss Landa has used several English course books, including “English for you”, “Headway”, “New Headway”, “Inside Out”, “Blockbusters”, and “Access”. They all seem the same to her. She argues: I have rarely seen my teenage students get really excited when they use any of these
books, and that is because the authors [of these textbooks] clearly have no idea what Albanian students want. In her view, “English for you” is the best textbook she has ever used because it translates difficult vocabulary in Albanian, it presents grammar explicitly – which is what Albanian students expect – and, above all, it contains topics that are about Albania and the Albanian reality
[Source: EQ&IR]. At present, she is using the course-book “Access” because it is the cheapest. As regards the use of the teacher’s book while planning the lesson, Miss Landa adds the following:
I belong to that category of teachers who used “English for you” [an EFL textbook made in
Albania during the communism epoch] for so many years; and, guess what? (Pause) (Laughter) There was no teacher book for that textbook. So, we did things in our way.
Nowadays, each modern textbook has its own teacher’s book. I guess (pause) consulting the teacher’s book does not harm. On the contrary, it helps you to understand the steps you need to follow. (Pause) The textbook is particularly useful if you want to do something new in your classes, like teaching reading or teaching grammar, differently from the way you have done it up to now. In short, I have to admit that I like having the teacher’s book on my desk when I plan a lesson [Source: IR].
She elaborates on this topic further:
The question is “Do I always follow textbook suggestions in my classes?” Well (pause), in all honesty, no! (Laughter) This is because I am inclined to think that I will still do in my class the same things. Things I am comfortable with (pause), no matter what the textbook says. I know when I am doing good teaching, and that has very little to do with the textbook
[Source: IR].
Miss Landa used the textbook “Access 3” in the classes observed. Examples of the pages she used in one of her classes are shown in Appendix 31.
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After presenting a brief teacher profile that helps readers to situate Miss Landa’s instructional decisions within the context in which they were taken, the discussion that follows in the next two sections answers the two main research questions for Miss Landa’s case study.