CAPÍTULO I: EL PROBLEMA Y EL PROPÓSITO
1.2 Planteamiento del problema de investigación
The percentage distribution of the total classroom time (180 minutes) structured around the textbook activities in Miss Landa’s classes is 86%. The remaining time (14%) was used to deal with class management and discipline issues, as well as to explain and reinforce grammar rules. Miss Landa, on two occasions, supplemented the textbook with accuracy-based activities. In one of her classes, she explained the grammar item by writing extra rules on how to use possessive pronouns on the blackboard. In another class, she revised the grammar by asking each student to read a sentence completion exercise and explain why he/she used the simple present or present continuous in that sentence. The rationale behind these actions was: I simply felt my students needed
more grammar explanations and reinforcement [Source: POI].
Miss Landa would like to supplement the textbook with drills and additional grammar and translation exercises because:
At the end of their study, students take a national exam that is designed to assess their knowledge of grammar. So, teaching and practising grammar is a must-do thing [Source: IR].
However, environmental factors seemed to have affected what Miss Landa did in her classes. She felt that the whole issue of not teaching enough grammar is a matter of time and money. She elaborated as follows:
Lack of time because (pause) the textbook provides so many activities, and I simply do not have much time to do other activities. Lack of resources because writing grammar exercises on the blackboard is very much time consuming, and (pause) handing out photocopies to students is out of the question because I would have to use my own money to photocopy handouts as there is no photocopier on the school premises [Source: IR].
The teacher used the textbook and workbook for support in teaching listening, pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, vocabulary, and speaking. The textbook was used in the classes observed to:
1) engage learners in the learning process. Miss Landa thinks the textbook is neither too
difficult nor too easy for students, so, generally speaking, they engage well with material
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learning process because it provides lots of opportunities for students to reinforce newly
learned concepts and demonstrated what they have learned [Source: IR].
In the classes observed, the teacher used one pre-listening and two pre-reading activities to prepare students for what they were going to listen/read about, although she believes that:
Doing pre-reading exercises can be a hindrance, particularly for low-level students who read at the limits of their abilities. Their comprehension of the text can be easily influenced by other students’ guessing. (Pause) As you saw this morning, Gladjol [one of the
students] was misdirected by his friend’s wrong guess; you know, when I asked the class to
predict, (pause) there was this one student who said that the woman in the picture was a banker because she was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. I did not correct his guess because I did not want to give the students the right answer. Anyway, Gladjol’s comprehension was pretty much influenced by this answer, because he circled banker as the right answer in the listening comprehension exercise [Source: LE].
However, Miss Landa also believes that pre-listening/reading exercises can be very useful for students when the activity provided in the textbook fails to provide a sense of relevance to fully engage the students [Source: IR]. She adds the following on this topic:
There are some topics, like holidays abroad, or I don’t know (pause) things like renewable energy or (pause) vegetarian meals, these topics are thousand miles away from the world where my students live. Some of them [students] are vegetarians because their families cannot afford to buy meat. So (pause), when they read a passage which talks about people who refuse to eat animal flesh, they might find it difficult to understand the text. (Pause) And that’s not because the text is in English, I guess they would have difficulties understanding the text even if it was in Albanian. Obviously, doing some preparatory work, like discussing with the students briefly the reasons why people might refuse to consume meat, might be helpful [Source: LE].
In the classes observed, Miss Landa did not omit any pre-reading/listening activity. She explains the why in the following passage:
This does not mean that I found all of them useful. If it was for me, I wouldn’t ask my students to complete the pre-listening activity today, and (pause) perhaps the pre-reading activity we did yesterday. You know, the one about professions. However, I asked them to complete the all the textbook activities because this shows the students that (pause) that they have to take learning seriously; they cannot neglect any part of the material. You know, I have realised that, when you [the teacher] skip an exercise or any other part of the book, students will do the same and they will particularly skip homework exercises [Source: POI].
The consistent use of pre-listening/reading activities to active students’ schemata seems to be a direct influence of the use of communication-based textbooks on Miss Landa’s delivery approach.
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Miss Landa also used textbook listening and reading passages, grammar explanations, focus-on-accuracy exercises, and freer speaking and writing activities to provide learning affordances for her students. There were cases when the textbook was arguably used in a way that authors intended, such as the use of pre-listening/reading exercises designed to activate the knowledge students bring to the classroom, and the use of accuracy-based exercises. The latter, most likely, are intended to prompt students’ use of separate sentences and phrases. As illustrated in the Excerpt 5.7, students did react to these exercises with a practised language (see Lines 2 and 6). Excerpt 5.7. Miss Landa’s classroom observation Nr. 3.
(After asking her students to use the textbook prompts to write sentences to reinforce the use of “has gone” and “has been” (see exercise 4, Appendix 31, page 2), the teacher is doing the activity orally with the whole class).
L1 Miss Landa: Bledi, are you ready? (Pause) Read the first sentence! L2 Bledi: John isn’t here. He has gone on holiday.
L3 Miss Landa: Excellent! Why not “has been”? L4 Bledi: Because John is there now.
L5 Miss Landa: Very good! (Pause) Tela, read the next please! L6 Tela: She has been to Hong Kong twice.
L7 Miss Landa: Has been, well done! [Pause] Is she in Hong Kong now?
L8 Tela: No.
However, there were also cases when the textbook was arguably used in a different way than intended by the authors. The teacher turned two textbook reading activities and five speaking tasks – arguably designed to engage learners in interpretation, expression, and negotiation of meaning - into oral focus-on-accuracy drills or reading aloud. To give an example, in one of her classes, after activating students’ previous knowledge by asking them to look at the pictures, read the title, and to write down three questions about each place (see exercise 1 – Appendix 5, page 1), Miss Landa called out students’ names and asked them to read aloud one sentence each from the reading passages. The teacher corrected their pronunciation promptly, and asked students to translate sentences that contained difficult lexis.
As seen in section 2.9, commercial CLT-based textbooks tend to integrate reading and listening passages to provide an opportunity for learners to discover new language in context with the ultimate goal of increasing their meaning-based communicative competence. Consequently, one could argue that using listening and reading texts to get students to analyse the L2, as Miss Landa did, is a misinterpretation of the textbook intended affordances.
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Another possible misinterpretation of the textbook intended affordances observed in Miss Landa’s classes is shown in the classroom Excerpt 5.8.
Excerpt 5.8. Miss Landa’s classroom observation Nr. 4.
(After asking students to read the grammar rules, complete a consciousness-raising exercise (i.e.
Put the verbs in bracket into the past simple or the past continuous), and a controlled practice
exercise (i.e. The pictures on the top right were taken at 6 o’clock yesterday evening. Use the clues –
e.g. Laura/read a newspaper/6 o’clock - to ask and answer questions), students are now working on a
freer speaking exercise. The textbook gives some prompts (7.00 am; 12.30 pm; 2.30 pm; 5.00 pm;
9.00 am), and students are supposed to ask and answer questions about what they were doing last
Saturday at the times given. Miss Landa asked students to write sentences about themselves, and is now checking their sentences as a class)
L1 Miss Landa: Well, (pause) let’s see the answers together. Linda, what were you doing last
Saturday at 7.00 am?
L2 Linda: I was playing with a friend at 7.00 o’clock.
L3 Miss Landa: Well done, Linda! (Interruption)
L4 A student: Playing? 7.00 in the morning?
L5 Mis Landa: It’s OK, Tani (student’s name)! What she was actually doing doesn’t make any difference (pause). Important is that you use the right form. Why past continuous here? Are we talking about a single moment in the past or have we stopped the time in the past?
L6 (three or four student simultaneously): Stopped the time.
L7 Miss Landa: Yes, stopped the time! (Pause) Okay, Tani. What were you doing last Saturday at 12.30 pm, afternoon – right?
L8 Tani : I was eating lunch with family.
L9 Miss Landa: Family?!
L10 Tani: Yes, family, not friends.
L11 Miss Landa: No, no, (pause) I mean, do we say “with family” or “with my family”?
L12 Tani: Oh, with my family.
L13 Miss Landa: Okay, so repeat the full answer.
L12 Tani: I was eating lunch with my family last Saturday at 12.30 pm o’clock.
In completing the above exercise, which is arguably conceptualised as a freer-speaking activity by textbook designers to provide possibilities for learners to produce the target language in unplanned, albeit controlled discourse, Miss Landa stuck with what she believed the intended affordances of the task were (i.e. to reinforce the use of simple past
and past continuous [Source: IR]). The teacher did not allow her students to deviate
from the grammar focus of the exercise. She claimed that she was doing her best to keep her students focused on the use of the grammar form, so that the rules get stuck in
their heads. Miss Landa has used this approach to teach speaking for as long as she
remembers. She stated that she was first exposed to this teaching approach when she attended Mr Dhimiter’s (her secondary school English teacher) classes. From these data, the theme “teachers’ previous learning experience” starts to emerge as a potential influence on Miss Landa’s instructional approach.
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When asked whether she believed the students were using English communicatively or not in this exercise, Miss Landa replied:
Certainly! They were using English, we were communicating in English (pause) they were using the target grammar. So, yes, the students were using English communicatively
[Source: POI].
Miss Landa’s reply to this question indicates that Miss Landa used the textbook in a particular way that reflected her understanding of communicativeness in ELT classes. The same theme was identified in Miss Elona’s case study.
2) assess students’ performance. Miss Landa used a number of expressions (i.e. You should
know how to use the past tense in English; We have already seen this; You need to reinforce the use of –“ing”; and so on) to inform her students about the details of their progress. Miss
Landa’s choice of words might indicate that the teacher based her assessment of students’ progress on the textbook input (i.e. what she taught in her classes, following the textbook content) rather than on the learning outcome (i.e. what her students had learned). The use of the textbook to assess students’ performance is also a theme identified in classroom observations. As seen above, Miss Landa used a number of focus-on-accuracy exercises, reading passages, and freer speaking and writing activities to assess her students’ knowledge of the linguistic items they were being exposed to, as well as their prior knowledge of L2 grammar.
In the classes observed, Miss Landa directed the content of the teaching sessions, made limited use of pair/group interaction patterns, and spent a considerable amount of class time on activities that pushed the students to process language more deeply. These teaching behaviours are discussed in more detail below.
The percentage distribution of the total classroom time spent on each of the four main interaction patterns is shown in Table 5.7.
Individual (S) Pairs (S-s) Group (Ss-S) Class (T-Ss)
29% 0% 0% 71%
Table 5.7: Miss Landa’s classroom interaction patterns (Percentage distribution of total time) Seventy-one per cent of Miss Landa’s classes were organised around teacher-led activities. This interaction pattern clearly reflects Miss Landa’s teaching belief that:
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Classroom learning should be provided by the one who has the knowledge and understanding of the subject. Obviously, students come to school, and parents send their offspring to school, to be instructed by someone who has the skills and ability to teach, not by a pair who lacks a thorough understanding of English himself [Source: IR].
Individual seat work accounted for 29% of the total time. Miss Landa used traditional exercises to provide space for students to consolidate their learning, as well as to meet her students’ needs. For example, on one occasion, the teacher asked the students to write down their answers, instead of getting students to pair with the person beside them and complete the task18) orally, because:
Most of them have neither been abroad nor witnessed any accident. So, (pause) if I don’t give them some time to think about what they are going to say, and what linguistic forms to use, for sure, they will repeat the same scenario they read in the reading passage [Source: POI].
Pair/group work was hardly used as an interaction pattern in the classes observed. Miss Landa never followed textbook directions when it came to the use of pair/group-work in the classroom. She explained her decision:
Pair work is something new for Albanian students and, (pause) obviously, they need to be shown how to work in pairs. As a teacher, (pause) I have little time to train my students to work in their pairs during the class time [Source: IR].
On the subject of pair work, Miss Landa added the following:
We keep hearing ‘pair work’ and ‘group work’ (laughter) (pause). However (pause), any experienced teacher knows that this idea, (pause) along with other initiatives that successive governments have tried to foist on secondary schools, simply does not work. Our students don’t come to school to study only English. They study (pause) mathematics, geography, history, and (pause) they never do any pair work or things like that in other classes. (Pause) Are they expected to be taught by each other just in one subject, English? (Laughter) That’s unrealistic, and I am not surprised, because these ideas originate from either politicians or educational theorists who are largely ignorant of classroom practice [Source: IR].
The theme “the influence of internal laissez-faire”, emerged from this informal discussion with the teacher and raised many time during my discussions with Miss Landa, is discussed in detail in section 5.5.3.2.
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18) The task was: “Use the prompts to make true sentences about yourself”. Textbook prompts:
While you were abroad on holidays, you witnessed a car accident. Tell your friend: Where and when the accident took place, who was involved, and so on.
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The percentage distribution of the total time Miss Landa spent on classroom activities associated with traditional teaching methods, communicative teaching approaches, and issues related to class management is shown in Table 5.8.
Activity Percentage
Non-communicative activities (i.e. passive listening, e.g. listening to a song; passive reading, e.g. reading aloud; passive writing, e.g. grammar and vocabulary drills; passive speaking, e.g. grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation drills; teaching grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation rules)
60%
Communicative tasks (i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing activities that involve students in interpretation, expression and negotiation of meaning)
29%
Other (e.g. class management, discipline issues, etc.) 11%
Table 5.8: Miss Landa’s classroom activity patterns (Percentage distribution of total time) Activities like greeting students, keeping records of class attendance and discipline-related issues occupied 11% of the class time. Miss Landa believes that the time spent on disciplinary issues is time well spent for the following two reasons:
Firstly (pause), if you speak English to your students while dealing with these issues, they improve their listening skills, and extend their vocab. Secondly, and most importantly
(pause), students should be taught how to be respectful members of the society at school, in
English, geography, math classes. This is one of the main missions of schools [Source: LE].
Miss Landa, in the classes observed, treated L2 mainly as a system by focusing students’ attention on particular linguistic features. As seen in Table 5.8, the teacher spent a considerable amount of class time (60%) on activities that pushed the students to process language more deeply, such as speaking, reading and writing in isolation, explanations of grammar rules, correction of grammar/pronunciation errors, and pronunciation drills. If students do not work on discrete
language items, Miss Landa claims, they will either not say the right word or not use the right form in a certain situation.
Nevertheless, on 26 occasions, the teacher also used the language in short dialogs with students to make meaning. The majority of those oral interactions developed through a teacher question/student answer type of exchange, following the typical initiation, response, follow-up (IRF) pattern of classroom discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975 in Fishman and Garcia, 2011).
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One of the many examples of IRF exchanges observed in Miss Landa’s classes is shown in Excerpt 5.9 below:
Excerpt 5.9. Miss Landa’s classroom observation Nr. 2.
L1 Miss Landa: Klara, what does this proverb [Better be born lucky than rich] mean? L2 Klara: It means (pause) is better be born lucky than rich.
L3 Miss Landa: Can you say it in your own words? How do you understand it?
L4 Klara: It means (pause) I prefer more lucky than rich.
L5 Miss Landa: Why?
L6 Klara: Because when I am lucky I am also rich.
L7 Miss Landa: Always?
L8 Klara: Yes.
Integration with equal emphasis on meaning/use, form/use, and form/meaning comprised 29% of the content in the observed classes. As seen above, the teacher, on several occasions, engaged the students in short meaning-based dialogues. In addition, despite putting more emphasis on the mechanisms of the language (i.e. grammar rules), Miss Landa also showed her students how, why, and where they had to use the language under investigation. For example, as illustrated in Excerpt 5.9 above, the students know that they have to use the past continuous in English when they give