Research Questions

The following research questions about classroom activities conducted in ETA-led English co-teaching classrooms were addressed:

1. What are the common characteristics of classroom activities conducted by English Teaching Assistants (ETAs)?

2. From the perspectives of LETs, ETAs, and teaching advisors, what are the potential benefits of classroom activities conducted by ETAs?

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CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

This chapter begins with the study design. In the second section, annual reports as the data sources analyzed in this study are described, and in the third section, the procedure of data collection is illustrated. In the final section, the spaces are devoted to introduce the process of qualitative data analysis.

3.1 Research Design

As the aim of this study was to achieve a more sophisticated and comprehensive understanding of the common features of ETAs’ classroom activities and the potential benefits of these classroom activities conducted by ETAs, the activities or practices included in the annual reports of the past few years were the focus of data gathering and analysis. This study adopted a qualitative approach via document analysis to answer the proposed research questions. Qualitative research can be classified into interactive or non-interactive modes of inquiry (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001). In the present study, a non-interactive inquiry was conducted. Namely, the researcher in the study used an approach called historical analysis (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001), identifying data and analyzing documents to provide a more complete picture by which to understand past events. Qualitative research can be defined as “an inquiry process of understanding based on distinct methodologies within traditions of inquiry that explores a social or human problem. The researcher builds a complex, holistic picture, analyzes words, reports detailed views of informants” (Cresswell, 1998, p.15).

Inductively analyzing the data and interpreting participants’ perspectives and their meanings are two other characteristics of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003;

Richards, 2003). Focusing on participants' perspectives and the inductive analysis of data allowed the researcher to examine annual reports with perspectives deriving from

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the various stakeholders involved in the ETA program in order to achieve a deeper and holistic understanding of the common characteristics specific to ETAs’ classroom activities in the co-teaching classrooms.

According to McMillan and Schumacher (2001), authenticated documents are the major source of data in document analysis, and document analysis is a procedure involving the systematic review and evaluation of both printed and electronic

documents that describe past events. Similar to other analytical methods in qualitative research, in this study, data were investigated and interpreted so as to elicit meaning and gain understanding (Corbin & Strauss, 1998; McMillan & Schumacher, 2001).

Documents can take many forms as diverse as advertisements, agendas, books, brochures, diaries, journals, letters, organizational and institutional reports, and

various public reports (Bowen, 2009). Whereas document analysis has been employed to complement other research methods in most studies, it has also served as a

stand-alone method (Bowen, 2009). Thus, document analysis was appropriate for the present research in its analysis of annual reports such as ETA feedback reports, LET feedback reports, ETA biweekly reflection feedback reports, co-teaching lesson plans, teaching advisors’ lesson observation feedback reports, and their reflection on

observation, which served as the triangulation of qualitative data sources to identify the various stakeholders’ common perspectives. These perspectives could yield more in-depth information on the common characteristics inherent in the ETAs’ classroom activities practiced in the co-teaching context over the past seven years across five different regions and the potential benefits ETAs’ classroom activities bring. In addition to triangulated themes emerging from various reports from the perspectives of various stakeholders, the annual documents included in this study encompassed a long and wide span of time and space, which also helped improve the credibility of the study. That is, the present research data had the advantages of time and space

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triangulation. Time triangulation refers to data collected at different times, which allowed the researcher to identify persistent phenomenon (Denzin, 1989). With space triangulation, attempts are made to determine whether data collected from multiple sites yields consistent findings (Denzin, 1989), thus increasing the credibility of the research (Fielding & Fielding, 1986).

From 2011 to 2017, up to 156 elementary schools (students’ ages ranged from 7 to12) evenly located in the Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, and Central Taiwan and participated in the English co-teaching program. That is, up to 268 ETAs, 232

Common characteristics of various ETAs classroom activities and the potential benefits ETAs’ classroom activities bring

Qualitative approach via

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LETs, and 22 teaching advisors participated in the ETA program over the past seven years across five regions in Taiwan, and carefully recorded what happened during the co-teaching process and also reflected on the co-teaching practice in their annual reports. More specifically, qualitative data were obtained by analyzing different types of reports, which were the main sources of data in the present study, including

co-teaching lesson plans, ETA feedback reports, LET feedback reports, ETA biweekly reflection feedback reports, teaching advisors’ lesson observation feedback reports, and their reflection on observation. As Merriam (1988) has indicates, “Documents of all types can help the researcher uncover meaning, develop understanding, and discover insights relevant to research problems” (p.118). Diverse reports with viewpoints from different stakeholders also allowed the researcher to triangulate and observe whether similar themes emerged from various forms of qualitative data through thematic analysis. Identifying a convergence of themes from different data sources enhances the credibility of the qualitative research; this is termed person triangulation (Bowen, 2009; Denzin, 1989). As such, this yielded a detailed

understanding of the common characteristics specific to ETAs’ classroom activities at the elementary school level within the co-teaching context, and facilitated more specific investigation of how students might benefit from the classroom activities conducted by ETAs given the various perspectives demonstrated by different stakeholders on this issue.

Diverse annual reports actually perform different functions during the

co-teaching practice. In co-teaching lesson plans, lesson objectives, teaching activities, teaching procedures, and teaching materials are included so that the researcher can understand how a lesson is carried out. The ETAs discuss with LETs what students need, and design class lesson plans before collaborative teaching; then the lesson plans may or may not be realized in the classrooms. ETAs hold bachelor degrees of

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different majors. Although they were not English teachers in America, they all received teacher training before serving in schools.

In terms of ETA and LET feedback reports, their feedback on the co-teaching project is collected at the end of each semester to identify the advantages and

disadvantages of the project implementation. ETAs and LETs may make suggestions on how to improve the program based on their experiences and opinions. Furthermore, ETAs share their teaching practice and how they employ classroom activities to

involve students in their feedback reports, allowing the researcher to categorize characteristics common to ETAs’ classroom activities; LETs record anything related to teaching based on their observation of what ETAs actually do in the co-teaching classrooms. Therefore, the perspectives of insiders who performed the classroom activities are included. In the feedback reports, there remains flexibility for both types of teachers to write anything regarding collaborative teaching.

In the ETA biweekly reflection feedback reports, ETAs are to write biweekly reports reflecting on their teaching practices and how they conduct their classes in the English co-teaching classrooms. ETAs are to write anything related to their teaching or what happened in classrooms, including how they interact with students, what classroom activities they utilize for incorporation into the classrooms, students’

reactions to these activities, and how they collaborate with LETs to facilitate students’

English learning. These detailed records and rich description are all good evidence allowing for in-depth analysis of the common characteristics inherent in ETAs’

classroom activities and the potential benefits these ETAs’ classroom activities might have for students.

The teaching advisors’ lesson observation feedback reports and their reflections on observation are also important documents informing the researcher in terms of what the common characteristics of ETAs’ classroom activities might be and what

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potential benefits the ETAs’ classroom activities might bring, as once a semester the teaching advisors visit schools that participate in the ETA program to observe in the classroom how co-teaching classes are practiced. These observations facilitate the enumeration and recording of how ETAs employ classroom activities to engage students’ learning in co-teaching classrooms, and the students’ reactions towards these activities. As such, the perspectives of teaching advisors who observed the classrooms are incorporated. The teaching advisors consist of mostly college professors and elementary school teachers with expertise in TESOL or applied linguistics and more than 10 years of practical experience in teaching English. They are responsible for arranging and preparing a four-week orientation every August to familiarize ETAs with the teaching methods, the operation of the co-teaching program, the education system, and the teaching environment in Taiwan before their service. Workshops are also provided as training for ETAs and LETs to enhance their teaching competence by teaching advisors.

3.3 Data Collection Procedures

Due to the involvement in a research project, the researcher of the study had access to the annual reports which recorded the details of the co-teaching lessons implemented in the participating elementary schools across five regions in Taiwan. In the current research, annual reports, including ETA feedback reports, LET feedback reports, ETAs’ biweekly reflection feedback reports, co-teaching lesson plans, teaching advisors’ lesson observation feedback reports, and their reflections on observation, are all included in order to triangulate themes and gain a general picture of the characteristics common to ETAs’ classroom activities and the potential benefits of classroom activities employed by ETAs from different stakeholders’ perspectives.

In addition, the annual reports examined in this study also facilitated triangulation of themes across different times and regions around Taiwan. All in all, this study

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incorporated annual data collected and obtained from reports of ETAs, LETs, and teaching advisors from 2011 to 2017 across Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, and Central Taiwan. The ETA program was first implemented in Northern Taiwan in 2003;

in 2008, the program began in Southern Taiwan and was then expanded to other areas.

In this study, the researcher did not analyze earlier annual reports from 2003 or 2008, but instead limited the analysis to annual data from 2011 to 2017. This did not seem to hinder the investigation of common themes. As Flick (2007) has maintained, the focus of qualitative studies should be on core cases that are highly relevant to the purpose of the study. He has further expounded his view on the concept of sampling in qualitative research by explaining that “our sample should be representative－not in a statistical way or in representing the reality in a basic population. Rather, our cases should be able to represent the relevance of the phenomenon we want to study” (p.29).

Liamputtong and Ezzy (2005) likewise have contended that sampling in qualitative research aims to “identify the cases that will provide a full and sophisticated understanding of all aspects of the phenomenon” (p.45). In this light, the annual reports from 2011 to 2017 are sufficient documents providing rich and comprehensive information that facilitated the triangulation of common characteristics specific to ETAs’ classroom activities and the potential benefits that these classroom activities might have for elementary school students.

3.4 Qualitative Analysis

This study employed a qualitative approach based on document analysis. While analyzing qualitative sources, the researcher proceeded in a cyclical circle rather than in a fixed linear order (Creswell, 1998), which involved all the following steps given that analyzing qualitative data was an iterative process.

3.4.1 Foreshadowing Problems

While collecting materials, the step of foreshadowing problems (McMillan &

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Schumacher, 2001) regarding the present research was initiated by the researcher. The tentative research problem was associated with the key stakeholders involved in the ETA program or students learning in the co-teaching context. The research problem, for instance, what is the impact of the ETA program on English curriculum at the elementary school level, guided the researcher to analyze the subsequent data.

Nevertheless, with research questions, there was still room for modification while analyzing the annual reports.

3.4.2 Immersion in Data

After collecting all the annual reports as the data sources which described the details on co-teaching practices in the ETA program, the researcher began to skim the set of documents, read, and re-read the data thoroughly to become familiar with it.

Also, the researcher meticulously located relevant data and excluded irrelevant data to ensure the trustworthiness of the study (Corbin & Strauss, 1998). For example, the researcher excluded a section in the annual reports on ETA’s highlights of living and cultural experiences throughout the week, as this was not related to the research focus.

3.4.3 Organization of Data

When reading the annual reports, the researcher first organized the collected data. For a better understanding of the collected data, the researcher reviewed the selected information from annual reports several times; searched for represented ideas from each data set of text descriptions in the ETA feedback reports, LET feedback reports, co-teaching lesson plans, ETAs’ biweekly reflection feedback reports, teaching advisors’ lesson observation feedback reports, and their reflections on observation; recorded key ideas in the margins next to data segments (Bogdan &

Biklen, 1992) of various types of annual reports; arranged the data geographically to triangulate whether consistencies could be found systematically in emerging patterns in multiple sites (Denzin, 1989); and organized key ideas into no more than 25 to 30

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categories (Cresswell, 1998) for later retrieval.

3.4.4 Generating Categories and Themes

When analyzing the selected data from the annual reports, the most important and intellectually challenging task was thematic analysis (Marshall & Rossman, 1999).

Generating categories was the preliminary step in the coding process of thematic analysis. In this case, different types of annual reports were coded respectively for the identification of categories relevant to the two research questions－the characteristics common to ETAs’ classroom activities and the potential benefits these classroom activities might bring. The researcher determined what the data really meant and constructed categories using data-driving coding, which is also termed open coding (Gibbs, 2007), ensuring that categories were “carved out of the data” rather than predetermined (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001, p.468). Data sets with similar

meanings were combined under the same category (internal homogeneity); differences among categories (external heterogeneity) were made clear as well (Patton, 2002).

Regarding the research questions, the categories identified covered themes such as different types of cultural learning, how kinesthetic-oriented students learn through hands-on activities, opportunities for contextualizing learning, the use of games and activities to maximize student participation, and so on. Furthermore, the researcher were constantly comparing the categories identified to group similar and recurring ones (McMillan & Schumacher, 2001). Combining similar categories helped to uncover relationships among categories and thus yielded salient themes which

occurred frequently. The process of identifying text descriptions to corroborate themes was repeated and revised if necessary. Eventually, themes were generated to portray a more general and holistic picture of the common characteristics of ETAs’ classroom activities and what potential benefits these classroom activities might bring in co-taught lessons, because the emerging themes were obtained via person

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triangulation, time triangulation, and space triangulation (Denzin, 1989). Namely, data triangulation demonstrated the internal consistency and convergence underlying the themes in this study.

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CHAPTER 4

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS (RQ1, RQ2)

The aim of this study was to investigate the common characteristics typical of classroom activities conducted by ETAs in the co-teaching process from the

perspective of ETAs, LETs, and teaching advisors by examining their annual reports over the past seven years across different regions in Taiwan. It was hoped that after having recognizing the multidimensional nature of ETAs’ classroom activities, the potential benefits of ETAs’ classroom activities could then be explored, which might help to portray why students enjoyed learning English in the ETAs’ lessons. The following paragraphs reported the results obtained from qualitative data via document analysis.

4.1 Contextualizing Language Learning Materials

4.1.1 Different Manifestations of Contextualizing Language Learning Materials After data analysis, various means of contextualizing language learning

materials by ETAs was found to be one common theme mentioned by LETs, teaching advisors in annual reports over the years, which seemed to make students’ English learning more meaningful. This finding has corresponded to the literature, which indicates that when English words are taught in context, students would be better able to understand and use the words and sentences. Brown (2007) has attributed students’

better retention of English words and sentence patterns to the teachers’ providing of authentic contexts. Shrum and Glisan (2015) have also cogently demonstrated that through a contextualized approach, English words and structures are integrated naturally within authentic situations; learning thus becomes meaningful to students.

As such, students need not rely on rote learning, which is considered a less effective way of retaining a newly-learned word (Carter & McCarthy, 2014).

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It was then found that different stakeholders of the ETA program from various regions have noticed this influence on English teaching in Taiwan. Indeed, examples such as the implementation of a pen-pal project, the initiation of a letter exchange program, the employment of a Taiwan map, the sharing of past trip experience, the creation of a simulated earthquake scenario, and the experiment of a food tasting activity were identified from the annual reports in different periods of time and in different regions, illustrating that the contextualization of English learning materials has been multi-faceted. In the following paragraphs, a detailed description of how English vocabulary words and sentence patterns were incorporated naturally into these authentic contexts would be offered to help students to relate the English learning to real-life situations.

4.1.1.1 A Pen-Pal Writing Project

Students in traditional EFL classrooms in Taiwan, for instance, spend much time learning English vocabulary words. However, students often find that they have few opportunities to use the English words they have learned in class (Lu, Goodale, &

Guo, 2014). Interestingly, when examining the various data sources, many regions reported that the ETAs had situated and contextualized the learning so that students were able to use the words they have learned for real communicative purposes. The pen-pal writing project in Excerpt 1 was an ETA-initiated classroom activity which allowed Taiwanese students real and unique opportunities to use English words and sentences to practice communicating with people from different cultures around the world. Even though the writing of the letters proved to be more time-consuming, requiring multiple drafts, ETAs still insisted on giving it a try and considered such intercultural communication practically worthwhile, because this cross-cultural interaction among countries such as Greece, Italy, America, and Cameroon also drove students to sharpen their writing skills simultaneously, including learning how to

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choose the correct use of sentence structures, how to follow writing convention, and how to practice revising the many drafts.

Excerpt 1

.... First, on Saturday last week we finally got our first set of pen-pal letters sent out to New York. I’m so happy that American students will get to read letters written by the Taiwanese students … Even though we dedicated three to four

.... First, on Saturday last week we finally got our first set of pen-pal letters sent out to New York. I’m so happy that American students will get to read letters written by the Taiwanese students … Even though we dedicated three to four