The substantive topic of the thesis concerns ITE’s role in preparing trainee teachers to improve their students’ speaking skills. The ITE MFL course at Macadamia University is a case of that phenomenon and the thesis explores key aspects of the case by interpreting data from its participants
The research project was a case study with three overlapping components:
A three year study of the ITE course for teachers of Modern Languages at Macadamia University, using documents generated by three cohorts of trainees. This is referred to as the cohort study.
A study of an intervention within the MFL ITE course, involving changes to its curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. This is referred to as the ITE intervention.
A study of a classroom intervention in which two trainees prepared and conducted a group talk activity with their Year 8 classes, linked to the topic work which they had just completed. This is referred to as the classroom intervention.
The cohort study began as an examination of trainees’ work on their students’ TL speaking skills in a naïve realist (Dunne, Pryor and Yates, 2005) quest for some version of the truth about teaching speaking skills from analysing trainees’ experiences on placement. Blackburn (2008:244) writes of naïve realism that it is
…the view of people everywhere and of philosophers when they are off-duty, but it remains naïve until it is buttressed by explanations of how experience may change while things do not.
Blackburn (2008:244)
This thesis could be seen as an exercise in constructing the buttresses which explain trainees’ experience.
The study later widened to include analysing trainees’ planning for the input and opportunities for spoken output which would enable their students to speak in TL. It also sought multiple perspectives, those of trainees, students, mentors and tutor. The ITE
intervention evaluated the effects of changes to the MFL Curriculum Studies programme. The classroom intervention study analysed the outcome of a group talk activity which two trainees conducted in their respective schools.
3.1.1. The timeline of the research
The study spanned three years of the ITE MFL course at Macadamia. The input on teaching speaking skills in MFL was enriched from Year 2 onwards, as the key feature of the ITE intervention, and the assignments from the previous cohort were used as a comparison group. Trainees’ written assignments were collected from each of the three years and focus group discussions were conducted with the trainees on the last day of the course in years one and three. (The discussion planned with Year 2 trainees was not possible due to schedule changes on the last day). The classroom intervention lessons took place in two partner schools towards the end of the second year, after all assessments on the ITE course had been completed, and discussions among students in each of those classes were recorded shortly after the lesson. The lesson de-brief between the trainee and mentor was recorded in one school but had to be replaced by two separate conversations with me about the lesson in the second school as this unfortunately coincided with GCSE examinations making the mentor unavailable. The data analysis began at the end of year 1 of the study and generated some further data collection as new questions emerged from the analysis. In table form, the three years of the timeline were as follows
Year 1 Planning the interventions based on professional experience and prior study. Obtaining ethical approval from the university and consent from trainees in Cohort 1. Data collection consists of saving trainees’ written assignments and conducting a focus group on the last day of the course.
Year 2 Obtaining consent from trainees in Cohort 2, students, mentors, parents and schools.
Enriched input on speaking skills in Curriculum Studies sessions and increased us of small group work.
Data collection consists of saving trainees’ written assignments and conducting the classroom interventions in two schools. Preliminary analysis of trainees’ assignments and students’ classroom discussions suggested a fourth research question and revealed a need for emergent methods.
Year 3 Obtaining consent from trainees in Cohort 3.
Enriched input on speaking skills in Curriculum Studies sessions and increased us of small group work continue.
Data collection consists of saving trainees’ written assignments and conducting a focus group on the last day of the course. Data analysis and writing.
As my doctoral work was contemporaneous with my work as Curriculum Tutor, I was constantly re-engaging with the context of my research and reflecting on both the setting and my data while writing the thesis. The ITE and classroom interventions took place in the first cycle of the study while the changes in my use of data continued into the writing phase.
My work setting was not static and Drake’s (2011:32) comments about “managing time successfully” resonate strongly and painfully. My workload at Macadamia widened to include the roles of Admissions Tutor and Module Convenor for an undergraduate course, School Research Ethics Officer (SREO) for the School of Education and Social Work and Convenor for the university’s SKE courses in French and Spanish. It would require an extra chapter, unrelated to my research questions, to explore the contrasting identities, voices and power relations associated with each of those roles. The main effect of my wider responsibilities was to distract my attention from my research. However, there were also some major benefits; it was while attending a conference in Denmark as part of my work on the undergraduate course that I first encountered the work of Biesta and heard speakers linking developments in Danish early years education to the government’s neoliberal agenda. I had willingly accepted my new roles as part of my envisaged career progression from teaching fellow to lecturer after completing my doctorate so I must share responsibility for the competing demands on my time and energy.