Instalaciones y medios humanos y materiales del Servicio de Prevención Mancomunado Mancomunado

Previous studies found that learners working with self-paced CALL or MALL tools benefit from the accompanying support of teachers, are more likely to persevere, and make better progress given this support (Mitra and Dangwal, 2010, Nielson, 2011). The findings of this study strongly support this position. Teachers were an essential component in the success of this intervention.

This section discusses two aspects of teachers’ supportive role in the intervention. First, the teacher’s accompaniment complemented and supplemented the affordances of MALL and printed materials as Sarah and I both engaged, motivated, praised, guided, and redirected learners. These findings corroborate the essential role of teachers in technology-based learning (see Warschauer, 2007). Second, it was found that teacher commitment was vital to the intervention. Without a motivated teacher taking an active role, inertia and entropy dissipated learning efforts.

The role of teachers was changed by the use of MALL from designing curriculum and direct instruction to providing encouragement and feedback. Teachers heard learners read aloud from books, and Sarah also incorporated the material in her frontal teaching and assessments. The balance among MALL app, books and teacher accompaniment to

individuals or dyads was adjusted to suit each learner’s needs and support work within their ZPD. All three elements supported the affordances of the other two. Teachers provided clarification and feedback on individual learners’ reading issues as envisioned in the Vygotskian tutoring relationship. Some learners, who did not manage well with the MALL app, advanced almost exclusively through their work with teachers.

Sarah, the teacher of the two tenth-grade weak English classes, and Orna, the teacher of the weak ninth-grade English class, both maintained positive relationships with learners whereby teacher and learner were allies working for the student’s success (Vygotsky, 1978). Sarah felt that her role as a teacher when the learners used devices included explaining meaning of texts, providing feedback to correct their reading, ensuring that they read the passages in the app, and motivating them to make an effort when they worked alone. Teachers provided positive feedback and personally-suited scaffolding targeted precisely to the learner, as described by Wood et al. (1976). For example, students often left out vowels when encoding words they heard from the app, a common mistake for Hebrew-speaking EFL learners. A teacher repeated the word, enunciating each sound, drew the learner’s

attention to the missing sound, and demonstrated in the app how to remind himself of the encoding of the vowel sound. The teachers thus adjusted MALL instruction to the learner. Students who consistently used the app learned from it most of their new knowledge supporting English reading. Teachers accompanied, redirected, encouraged, verified and clarified students’ understanding of rules of English:

He read me the story from L6 twice…He reads haltingly and needs reinforcement with blending, mixes up d & p (a classic dyslexia directional issue, we discussed it, I wrote both down to show him how similar they are and try to find a way to differentiate), I asked him if he remembers what n't means from the tip video (he did) also the 's rule from the tip video (he did) (Field notes,

Dec. 7).

Frequent teacher attention to individual learners was critical. The main activity performed with teachers was reading word lists and story texts aloud, mostly from the books. Some learners who were impatient with the app, who had a briefer attention span, or who did not find the app intuitive needed a higher proportion of teacher attention. These students needed the warmth, encouragement, reinforcement, feedback, caring, and limit-setting of a human teacher. Reading aloud from the books, with success reinforcing motivation, was the main tool used during the tenth-grade class time, supplemented by independent use of the app/devices.

Sarah expressed positive attitudes toward the pedagogical approach and the MALL

technology. This chapter addresses the teachers’ attitude to the pedagogical approach while the next chapter addresses teachers’ attitudes to the technology component.

Sarah evinced a positive attitude toward the intervention and implemented it

enthusiastically. Her students actively engaged with the MALL, and all made significant progress. The ninth-grade teacher, Orna, was an experienced and effective remedial English teacher who spoke English fluently. She did not feel a need for the intervention and had only reluctantly agreed for her students to participate. As she later released the participants she had selected from attending the planned "special assistance hour" (it conflicted with the students hands-on workshops which they greatly enjoyed), she relegated the intervention to use by her two complete non-readers, Shalom and Vladi, in weekly tutoring sessions, which I taught in the English Department office during class time, a different type of intervention than planned. They made good progress using the books, and used the MALL app to a more limited extent due to Shalom’s iPod having been confiscated by a teacher-soldier who objected to his “playing catch” with it, and Vladi frequently

leaving his iPod home. Unlike the tenth-grade class, there were no available iPods to borrow during class. Orna assessed that my tutoring was responsible for the progress of Shalom, who had learning disabilities and BD. She maintained that Vladi, whose learning gaps she attributed to family neglect, would have progressed even if tutored by an

untrained teacher-soldier with other materials, albeit less. The other three students whom Orna told vaguely to use the MALL intervention on their own time, attended their regular English classes and did not use the MALL app at all, correctly perceiving that Orna did not care whether they used it. Orna made no attempt to restore Shalom’s iPod after its

confiscation.

The two teachers’ differing views of the intervention’s potential effectiveness cohered with their previous experiences. Orna had extensive formal training and experience in remedial EFL teaching, was older, openly skeptical of the intervention, and had had negative experiences with educational technology. She had learned the Hickey Method and liked it, but had developed her own methods of teaching and did not feel the need for an

alternative solution for any but her weakest students.

Sarah was a 19-year-old teacher-soldier with no formal training in teaching EFL, whose teaching experience comprised the previous year when she was “thrown into the water to swim” under the guidance of the school’s English coordinator. Sarah had been selected by the army for this job based on her leadership qualities and English Bagrut score. Her English knowledge was just sufficient to teach her students. Her entire teacher training had been one month in the army on class management and lesson planning. She had no

training in teaching EFL nor in teaching struggling readers, and had not succeeded during the previous school year in helping them systematically. She had been more successful with students possessing stronger EFL skills who were preparing for Bagrut exams.

Sarah adopted the intervention with enthusiasm, and utilized it actively in the weaker class where it was appropriate for all the learners:

I learned from [this method] a lot of techniques, … how to teach reading, generally; before what I did with them – I have no experience in it, it’s not something I learned, so I just taught them A, B, C – just according to the order of the alphabet – and vowels, and… I didn’t really have techniques, and ways to teach reading, and I think that it’s a very, very good way to teach a small group of letters and straight away to read a story… when they’ve hardly learned any letters at all, it’s excellent. That it progresses gradually is great (Sarah exit interview, June 7, 2015).

Sarah accepted me as an older expert, and had no preferred alternative. She put her full authority behind the intervention. It was a central focus for her entire tenth-grade class of

weak readers, and for the lone non-reader in her stronger class. Including material from the intervention on her tests signaled to the students that she took it seriously. She also printed supplementary materials, e.g. games and activity sheets, from the Hickey website (Levitt, 2017b).

Sarah was barely older than her students. She performed her job with good will and affection, was a positive, energetic and vivacious presence in the school, was skilled at forming relationships with the learners, and applied herself to instructing them in English. She was, however, not a trained English teacher. Her willingness to use the scaffolded MSL method enabled the class to make good progress in their English reading, writing and vocabulary skills because she was fairly diligent in keeping them on task for the majority of their available learning time. It was evident that the teacher’s firm commitment to keeping learners on task is essential to the success of the method.

Orna, who only nominally accepted the intervention, believed Hickey to be an excellent method but had reservations about using it with adolescents, as she thought they would find it childish, and believed it is better used one-on-one than in the classroom, common concerns about the Hickey Method. She thought “magic-e” should be introduced later and disagreed with teaching generalizable rules and patterns. Orna believed that the weak learners at this school, whom she differentiated from classically dyslexic students, would find rules that are broken by exceptions confusing and this would diminish their

confidence (agreeing in this with Clymer, 1963/1996 and Johnston, 2001). These beliefs reduced Orna’s support for the intervention.

As Orna was a strong, experienced teacher and English speaker she did not need the intervention for the majority of her learners. She felt that instruction by her own methods was working well. She did not want to experiment with a method that she feared might damage her learners’ confidence and her control of the class. Given her profile, this was a well-founded decision. The initial plan to work with five of her weakest students during an extra ‘assistance hour’ soon was abandoned. Two boys, Ovadia and Sami, had basic reading skills, and sufficient motivation to participate in class to avoid attending the assistance hour that conflicted with their favorite school activity, hands-on workshops. The intervention was therefore unnecessary for them. She told them to use the app independently at home, but did not follow up, and they consequently ignored it. Her role in the intervention evolved to sending out to me two non-reader students, Vladi and Shalom, for individual and pair tutoring, so I changed the hours of my weekly visit to the school to tutor them.

Orna taught her own material in class, including to Vladi and Shalom, who were below class level, on the days I was not present. She judged their progress by whether they could read her material, and mentioned to me several times that they could not. I only expected them to read words containing letters we had covered – by my standards, they were progressing steadily in decoding and comprehension. Thus, Orna and I applied different standards of success, and she concluded that the intervention was not very effective. Shalom’s comment “What's the good of reading long words if I can only read the words in this book?” (fieldnotes, May 10, 2015) reflected Orna’s opinion, which did not prioritize teaching this student within his ZPD. She often reiterated that Vladi “actually is very bright and doesn’t have real learning issues” and that Shalom was confused by the rules I had taught him. Orna was conflicted about how to acknowledge Shalom’s progress from the intervention, since he was uncooperative in class. She gave him an end-of-year grade that combined my assessment of his good progress with her own that he had not kept up with the class. It was evident to me that the class’s work was outside Shalom’s ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978). Unlike Yoav, Shalom did not have the self-management skills to work independently. This discussion of the two teachers, with contrasting profiles and commitment to the intervention, demonstrates the finding that teachers must be committed to an intervention to ensure its implementation, corroborating findings by Westbrook et al (2013).

Commitment to the scaffolded intervention equipped an untrained, inexperienced teacher to accompany struggling English learners in acquiring significant new literacy skills, despite having been unable to accomplish this previously. This section has shown that active teacher support is the key to students obtaining educational benefit from this intervention. Also demonstrated here is that MALL does not replace a caring, interested teacher’s support.