This first section of the first year mission reflects Erni’s ‘passage’ in classroom practice from the optimistic early stages, i.e. from coping with classroom reality and adapting what she asked the students to do, to what she felt it was realistically possible to do. Erni remembered that in her initial stage of teaching, she was quite ambitious with her students. She set tasks and expected her students to complete the tasks on their own. However, she had to deal with reality and adapted her classroom practice to suit her student’s needs. She recalled, “…so at the end of the day, I did not get anything. So, I changed to this… it’s easier… simple” (SRI4, L388) and later, she emphasized again, “Slowly but surely” (SRI4, L390).
Beliefs about good teaching: teach and reach. At the beginning of Erni’s teaching life, she shared the idea that as teachers, one should reach the students first, i.e. understand their student’s needs before he/she started teaching. She expressed that the first factor of good teaching was the classroom environment. At first, her students had difficulty in understanding English and later she shared that they started to understand slowly. She felt that it was because she was stern and they did not dare to play during lessons, thus focusing their attention on her lesson. Erni stressed that to a certain extent it was important for her to be stern in the classroom; however, it should not be all the time (SI1, L295).
The second factor is the pupils, which is also part of the classroom environment. She said that as teacher, “… we teach depending on their level, so we know their level... It’s easier for us to prepare our lesson, give them some kind of enrichment or remedial activity, it gives us prerequisite knowledge on how to teach them” (SI1, L301). As for the final Skype interview, it seemed that Erni still held similar views on what good teaching entails. For instance, she highlighted the third point from the first Skype interview, i.e. to conduct activities that could cater for all the students’ needs. In addition, she suggested that as teachers we have to be flexible to cater to students’ needs (SI2, L1-4). It is important to highlight that for Erni, having the kind of students who were very weak in English and needed extra support and guidance, her main concern was to ensure that she could cater to their learning needs. She recalled,
I think the subject of teaching of, the one that we studied before... help a lot to cater to students’ needs… like ‘Teaching of listening and speaking’. Actually, the students seemed to refuse to talk. They’re like… they're not confident to speak in English. So, it’s like I have to motivate them. I have to tell them I'm not going to ridicule or to scold them or not. So, it’s like slowly. I have to lower down their anxiety level first and then they can.
(SI2, L110)
Erni had a mission to be an effective teacher, she felt that she ought to have a grasp on teaching methodology, content knowledge and classroom management and she felt that these three things were important for anyone to be an effective teacher (L177). These three things mattered to her towards the end of her first year of teaching:
… because I think these are the major things that involve us everyday right? We want to teach... methodology if we just have the content… but our methodology is not very effective, the students will be bored… since the students… at the end of the day, they’ll learn something but would it be in memorable ways... meaningful.
(SI2, L183) She also realised that it was important to have sense of humour because when she saw that her students were the type who like to play, at times it was no use for her to be stern all the time. She suggested, “We can’t scold them, we have to soothe them. We have to use ‘a soft’ way and that's the thing, I still developing myself” (SI2, L191). She felt that they are human too and it was not their fault they are poor academically, hence she tried to find ways to make her students happy (SI2, L192-199).
It is all for them, my students. Compared with the other participants of the study, Erni’s classroom practices were the most affected by the students’ attitude, their readiness, and their level of proficiency (SRI5, L225 & L229). She made more effort to adapt her teaching to the students and these efforts actually affected how she delivered her lessons. She explained,
If we’re being too ambitious, they can’t do it, we don’t achieve anything right? Because I think as long as they can understand (the content of the lesson) they have adapt, they can learn something, they can understand, that’s enough… we don’t need… perhaps, we don’t have to use too much of ‘bombastic’ activity.
(SRI5, L332)
From the excerpt, she was suggesting that teachers did not have to use extra- ordinary classroom activities. At the end of the final Skype interview, she reflected that she learnt a lot during her ‘real’ first year of teaching (SI2, L471). For instance, drilling had been helpful, especially in teaching grammar (SRI6, L386-388). Erni highlighted again the importance of drilling in helping her deal with students who faced the greatest academic challenges (L424-425). She told me again that most of her activities were very guided: for instance, in grammar teaching, “…it will be pages and the words and guided sentences… for writing, it’s guided… for instance, they will write” (SRI6, L394-396, L402) and during SI2, she agreed that she had to describe
and explain each and every single thing (L31-32) to show that until the end of her first year, there was nothing much that she could do to help her students but to guide them. Erni had reported that as teachers one should consider student’s readiness for learning and try to conduct suitable activities for them. She kept on pointing out that she did not have to be ambitious in planning and delivering the lesson, she expressed that, ‘slowly but surely’, the students would progress gradually if the teacher is willing to guide their students and be able to adapt and adopt good classroom practices.
Teaching English in Bahasa Malaysia? Turning the impossible into the possible. While the previous participants reported that they tried to use only English in delivering the lesson during the initial stage of teaching, Erni took a different approach. Although she began using only English at the start of her teaching career, she gave up very quickly because her students could not understand. One of the main challenges was to deal with the students’ language proficiency. Since the medium of instruction was Bahasa Malaysia (BM) and the majority of the students were Malay, the students could not see the purpose of using English, let alone learning English. Erni moved to BM to ease the teaching-learning process. During the first classroom observation, Erni shared that she would give instructions in English and translate them in BM (SRI1, L17). Furthermore, Erni highlighted that she had to use BM when disciplining the students since she said that there was no point telling the students if they did not understand (SRI1, L41-46). She also said that “I have the choice, I can speak English first, I can use English and translate but there’s no impact, the impact isn’t strong, the students will use BM straight away” (SRI1, L38). Erni suggested that one of the factors was the students’ backgrounds: they did not use English in daily life and the majority of them came from the nearby flats (SRI1, L64-66), which was a poor neighbourhood. Their academic performance was less favourably compared with those students from rich neighbourhoods and English was nowhere to be ‘seen’ in this kind of environment.
Emi used combinations of BM and English, considering the majority of her students were weak in English. Thus, later she tried to use other teaching aids to assist her students in learning. She would use pictures in the textbook and translated them. Her plan was to use English, then BM and later she would gradually use more English. Her aim was to ensure that at least her students could pass the exam and that would be good enough for her (SRI1, L122-124). Towards the end of the interview in SRI1, Erni pointed out her standpoint on her approach of having to translate:
If I were to say it is difficult, I think every school is difficult. Every classroom is difficult. So, I think we have to deal with it. So like this class I have to direct translate. I have to translate everything. Maybe certain words I don’t have to. For instance, they know what fish is. But when it comes to complicated words, I have to…
(SRI1, L132)
During the second visit, Erni conducted group work so as to invite her students’ participation. She explained, “…at least 1% will understand and she or he will explain to the friends…in the group” (SRI2, L35), and the good thing was, Erni said that there would be a student who became a “translator” (SRI2, L63). It was interesting to see the changes in the students when Erni shared that students started picking up the language. During this observation, I saw them using more English. A group of students were talking in English, basic English and when the teacher said ‘stop talking’, one of the boys said ‘keep quiet’, and it was good to know that they know another word for ‘stop talking’ is ‘quiet’. Erni said one of the reasons was because she used the word quite frequently in the classroom (SRI2, L65-67).
Over time, her students seemed to understand more English and that was when she decided to try to move from more BM to more English over time. During the third observation, things started to improve whereby the students used more English vocabulary compared to my first visit. She said that she would only use BM if the students could not understand and the students requested her to use it (SRI3, L279- 282).
However, I was quite saddened when I went for the next phase of data collection after a three-month gap, as BM was used widely in the classroom. In my fourth observation Erni pointed out that “…the students could not understand ma’am, that’s the thing, they forget easily, I don’t know the problem but maybe because I use Bahasa quite frequent” (SRI4, L2). On the other hand, she said that students were able to understand basic instructions like ‘meaning’, ‘repeat after me’. (SRI4, L6). In the fifth visit after another two-week gap, she was still using Malay and her reason was that she felt that the benefit of using Malay was to help the students to understand the content. She said, “…but then looking at my students, how they perceived after I use English, they don’t understand... I felt like… It can’t be like this” (SRI5, L244). It is important to note that she realised that “…to use English all the time is important but the children… it is better to use code switching” (SRI5, L254).
Ultimately, by the end of the year the situation was, she explained, that she still opted to use both languages (SI2, L384). She said,
Yes, after I seen they’ve improved, I slowly withdraw the… translations and then used English, I opted for that… It’s like I still choose the one that I’ve done last year [referring to using English and then translating to BM].”
(SI2, L386)
Moreover, Erni said, “I think using pictures, actions, could help the students to understand English, so it’s like we don’t have to opt to or depend too much on Bahasa” (L413). She seemed satisfied with her approach and said a few times, “Slowly but surely” (L414-423). By the time the study ended, I observed that there was still a lot of BM use needed. Since, in reality, the real role of English in their lives was almost zero, the students did not seem to see the purpose in learning the target language.
Managing the classroom: to win the hearts and minds of students
I felt that if we can’t manage a class, we couldn’t afford to complete what we wanted to teach. Most of the time, we need to manage the class. It’s quite tough though.
(SRI5, L366)
Erni repeatedly mentioned, “classroom management” was her main challenge (SRI5, L197-200, L302-304, L364-369). It was a major concern for her right from the start of her teaching career until towards the end of her first year of teaching.
Discipline. The biggest concern for Erni was classroom management, particularly discipline. Discipline is a real problem to her as she had to work out how to deal with discipline on her own, since other teachers were not able to provide help; physical punishment was not usually an option according to the MoE, although minor physical punishment was fine with parents’ consent. Over time, Erni developed other strategies; however, the strategies were more along the lines of ‘psychological torture’, based on shaming the students. Generally, most teachers would ask the children to recite short prayers before class started and she pointed out that the
function of short prayers was to arouse her students’ readiness (SRI6, L3-8) and it became part of the school culture since the students are Muslim (SRI6, L10-14). However, it did not solve the matter.
During the initial stage, Erni chose to implement quite a strict discipline in her classroom. Most of the time, she said the ruler was used just to threaten them as an equivalent of ‘the cane’. She stressed that “…that’s the way it is” (SI1, L50-53), in that there had to be threat of physical punishment. She experienced different types of students’ behaviour, from lazy, stubborn, low achievers, day dreamers, to only a few ‘good’ students (SRI2). Using vulgar words and calling their friends “stupid” were common among them too (SRI3, L322-323).
Erni had also consulted her colleague on that matter but she received similar reaction i.e. they did not know how to handle this particular class. Towards the end of the first year, during the final Skype, Erni continued to express her opinion with regards to classroom management. She explained,
…it's still the same, same because we have to avoid… wasting my time and to increase… learning times… ya… because it's only one hour period. So, it’s like you have to know how to manage your time. They shouldn’t expect me to tell them about this discipline and the things that matter everyday… all about the discipline matter... it takes time… almost 15/30 minutes… even if they’re playing at the back, we have to cater all that too… So, it’s like we have to establish ground rules so far.
(SI2, L203)
From the excerpt above, she had to figure out how to make sure that there was time for learning during the lesson.
She was left alone to work out what to do and she tried out a different range of possibilities:
1. Regular changes to seating arrangements, especially when she encountered a discipline problem in a particular group. There were changes in the student’s behaviour when she moved the students to a different group (SRI2, L115-118).
2. ‘Attention getter’ strategies - ‘Eyes on me’, ‘Look at me’ or calling out students’ name (SRI2, L71).
3. During SRI3, she tried to encourage them to learn but failed, so she decided to punish them (L210-212).
4. During SRI4 and SRI5, the naughty students were asked to stand at the back of the class and normally she would ask them to do written work while they stand. Since MoE does not allow teachers to punish the students physically, ‘standing’ was the only solution that she could think of (SRI5, 152-156).
Later, she decided to take a different approach because she felt that whatever classroom approaches she used before were not effective (SRI5, L170).In the end, she developed a “psychological approach” in which the monitor and his assistant were punished for other’s behaviour to elicit sympathy from their classmates (SRI5, L47-53). She reflected on this latest approach and shared, “so far, so good…I mean we can see the responsibility among them… maybe they would sympathised their friend, the class monitor” (SRI5, L71). Towards the end, in SRI6 Erni stated that the approach adopted seemed to work and the students did not dare to make any noise (L443-447). She highlighted, “…so far, I would say that it is successful in a way because the class monitor is their friend… they would feel guilty if they make noise” (SI2, L122) and “…it helps so far” (L129).
Apart from the several classroom management strategies described above, Erni would also advise the whole class when the need arose, and only when she felt that a certain matter had become worse, would she advise her students individually (SI2, L282-291). This section on discipline seemed to reflect how the real context of the classroom made it hard for her to live up to the ideas about teaching and learning that she shared earlier. This scenario is another sad reality that she needed to cope as an NQT.
“Exam results and LINUS do matter – I want them to pass.” For Erni, she admitted, “… at least I want them to pass ma’am… that’s enough” and this was one of the reasons she used Bahasa Malaysia in the classroom, to ensure that the students understood the lesson content so that they could pass the exam (SR1, L122-124). It is interesting to note that even with low achievers, the role of examination and ensuring that the students pass the exam is the most important
aspect of education. During the second phase of data collection in SRI4, Erni highlighted that she was delighted to see that her students had improved academically. She said that only two students failed the exam. Their grades during the mid-year school-based exam were mostly ‘B’ and ‘C’ (SRI4, L402-414). She continued to explain that she still adopted a similar teaching style and her belief in teaching was still “Slowly but surely”. During SRI5, Erni highlighted the importance of exams:
… passing an exam is important and their ability to apply what they have