Responsabilidades adicionales de los roles para la seguridad de la información

One of the ideas brought up in the literature review chapter (section 2.6) was teachers’ resistance to change when they lack the capability, knowledge, skills, or resources to embrace new policies (Butler, 2004; Hu, 2005b; Ahn, 2011). This seems to be the case of Miss Elona too.

Miss Elona, in 60%16) _{of the cases, was unable to think of alternative communicative teaching}

behaviours to the teaching approach she demonstrated in her classes when she was asked the question “Can you think of any other way/approach of doing the same activity?” (POI question Nr.3). An example of how Miss Elona answered to one post observation interview question N. 3 is given below.

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16) _{This figure presents the percentage from the negative answers recorded for question Nr. 3. See}

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Excerpt 5.2. Miss Elona’s post-observation interview 3.

(The teacher asked her students to complete two accuracy-based exercises on their own, and collected their work afterwards)

L1 Interviewer: Why did you collect their [students’] copybooks? L2 Miss Elona: (Hesitation) Eeee, to check how well each student did.

L3 Interviewer: In what ways was your approach similar or different to the guidance given in the teacher’s book?

L4 Miss Elona: Well, I am not sure, but (pause) I guess (pause) there was nothing in the teacher’s book about exercises 6 & 7, was there?

L5 Interviewer: Can you think of any other approach of checking how well the students did?

L6 Miss Elona: Well (pause) yeah, I can (pause) give them a short test, or I can (pause) ask them to say the rules orally; (pause) (laughter) and since I know you will ask me why (laughter) I can say that, well, my students don’t know and [do not] care about the rules. So, I don’t ask them the rules. Yet, if I continually correct their written mistakes, say a student writes “writed” instead of “wrote”, and I correct his mistakes for a couple of times, the third time he will get it right, hopefully, he is likely to say “wrote”. So, students can learn the rule by reflecting on their mistakes.

It is clear from this excerpt that Miss Elona possesses limited knowledge of instructional models other than the deductive teaching approach. Indeed, all the alternative approaches the teacher is offering in this excerpt are traditional teaching behaviours that seek to assess her students’ assimilation and application of knowledge of L2 rules. As claimed above, this was the case in the 60% of the teaching behaviours the teachers demonstrated in her classes.

There is also evidence to support the view that significant gaps in Miss Elona’s knowledge about student-centred teaching approaches resulted in misconceptions about communicative language teaching practices. To illustrate the point, on one occasion, Miss Elona used her own understanding of teaching reading and checking students’ reading abilities, based on deductive teaching approaches, to interpret the teacher’s book instructions (i.e. “ask students to read the text” and “check students’ understanding of the text”). Instead of asking students to read the text on their own and complete the reading comprehension activity that followed the reading passage (presumably, the way many CLT teachers would interpret the above teacher’s book recommendations), the teacher called out students’ names to read aloud one sentence each from the reading passage, corrected their pronunciation, and asked students to translate the sentences that contained difficult lexis. To the POI question, “In what ways were your instructions/your approach similar/different to the guidance given in the teacher’s book?”, Miss Elona gave the following reply:

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Well, actually, I do not think they are different, are they? I mean the instructions say “ask students to read the passage” (pause) and, that’s what I did. The instructions say check students’ understanding of the text, and that’s what I did. Anyway, (pause) instead of using the true and false exercise provided in the text, I used the sentences from the passage – so that students could understand it better [Source: POI].

Likewise, Miss Elona did not offer her students any preparation time to complete textbook activities. She asked them to complete exercises on the spot by reading a sentence aloud when she called out their name. Miss Elona was aware that this teaching approach was different from the teacher’s book suggestion “to give students two-to-three minutes to complete the task on their own”. She justified her decision as follows:

In real life, you do not have time to think of the right grammar form or vocabulary you have to use; you just have to think fast on your feet. So, giving students time to think does not necessarily help them to become communicative in English. On the contrary, asking them to complete the exercise on the spot can (pause) develop their fast-thinking skills. So, they can be better communicators [Source: POI].

Miss Elona’s belief that developing students’ fast-thinking skills will improve their communicative competence in English seems to be another misconception. As seen in section 2.8.1,L2 learners improve their communicative competence through language use in L2 classrooms and through applying strategies that worked in the past to their current learning situation, rather than through developing their fast-thinking skills.

Miss Elona is aware that she does not have enough knowledge of communicative teaching

approaches. She wants to attend conference presentations, and other teacher training events,

because she has interest in implementing teacher-student approaches in her classes. In particular, Miss Elona would be very much interested in:

Practical ideas that work with students who are not very much interested in learning proper English. You know, (pause) activities like getting students to do the things they like in the classroom, like (pause) listening to a song, but not asking them to listen for nothing, but

(pause) asking them to do something that can help them improve their English [Source: IR].

Overall, the data gathered by interviews, emails, and post-lesson reflections, and supported by Miss Elona’s classroom observations, indicate that lack of knowledge related to student-centred teaching approaches can influence to a great degree teachers’ decisions on how to use the communication- based textbooks in their classes. As explained in section 2.3, teachers take into consideration a variety of teaching approaches when they make instructional decisions in their classes. When teachers are unaware of certain teaching approaches (CLT teaching approaches in the case of Miss

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Elona), they limit they choices to the teaching approaches they are familiar with (deductive approaches in the case of Miss Elona). Therefore, one can conclude that, since Miss Elona did not know how to use textbook activities communicatively, she used the textbook in a particular way that reflected her own understanding of communicativeness in ELT classes.

This finding seems to contradict previous research claims, discussed in chapter 1 and chapter 2, that the textbook with the teacher's book can act as an agent of change and/or as as a medium of initial teacher training (Richards, 1993; Hutchinson and Torres, 1994; Ball and Cohen, 1996). I discuss this in more detail in chapter 6.