METHODOLOGY
Research Design
This study aimed to determine whetherunderachievers perform differently on vocabulary memorization and pronunciation after receiving remedial instruction in K.
K. phonetic symbols, and also to explore their vocabulary learning strategies. It is
widely known that there is a severe rural–urban disparity in education in Taiwan; in keeping with this situation, some students at the researcher’s vocational high school in
the southern part of the country had had less effective instruction in English as compared with students in other parts of Taiwan when coming into her class. The researcher has served as an English teacher at this high school for nine years, and has encountered many underachieving high school students who struggle to meet English requirements. This study was designed as action research to improve these students’
low proficiency in English.
The researcher found that much of the difficulty these students had in vocabulary learning was due to their unfamiliarity with K. K. symbols. Therefore, shedecided to design a remedial course in K. K. for them. After analyzing and evaluating their status at the end of remedial instruction, the researcher planned to reflect on the results of the course and improve and correct her approach; the
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experience would also allow her to give suggestions for future studies.
Subjects
The subjects were four underachieving students recruited from the same class of 39 freshmen, who are sixteen years old, at the researcher’s vocational high school, in Pingtung County. They were asked to attend a remedial instruction program in K.
K. phonetic symbols for six weeks—30 minutes a session, twice a week. The
researcher chose freshmen as participants because they had just graduated from junior high school and faced a sudden jump in expected vocabulary size and a required level
of vocabulary learning. These students should have already acquired basic vocabulary, specifically the ―Basic 1,000 Words for Elementary and Junior High School
Students‖as identified by the MOE. However, the researcher should make it clear that,
from her observations, most of the students at the school where she serves have been low-level students with very low motivation in English learning. This might be attributed to the remoteness of the school, the lack of English teaching and learning resources, the low socioeconomic status of the parents, and other such factors.
Instruments
This study employs an action research model, and the researcher counts herself as one of the instruments. In addition to the administration of two
questionnaires to investigate the underachievers’ commonly used vocabulary learning
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strategies, and their background learning and using K. K. symbols, the researcher also prepared teaching materials, testing materials, and interview questions for the
participants. All the remedial classes as well as the interviews were videotaped for analysis thereafter.
Instructor. The researcher has been serving as an English teacher in the same
rural national vocational high school for nine years. During the time, she has found that most of her students are not interested in English and usually get low scores on college entrance examinations. Many of them have told her that they had given up on English in junior high school. They have also often said that they do not understand K.
K. symbols, and have had difficulty memorizing vocabulary and pronouncing new words. Therefore, the researcher embarked upon this study to collect more
information on the problem and figure out solutions.
Questionnaires. In order to determine the participants’ background, favored
vocabulary memorization strategies, and experience and feelings about learning K. K., two questionnaires were designed by the researcher (presented as Appendices A and B). Due to their limited interest in studying English, the researcher speculated that these students might have no strategy at all for doing so. She therefore hoped that the questionnaire would provide her with more detailed information.
Testing Materials. A pre-test and a post-test were implemented for the
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underachievers (presented as Appendices D and E). The pre-test was meant to
measure their initial ability in word recognition,and the post-test, to examine whether remedial instruction in K. K. had a positive effect on their English learning outcomes.
Assessment was divided into four parts: listening to English vowels or consonants and writing down the relevant K. K. symbols, listening and selecting a
word from two choices, listening and finishing a word by filling in a blank, and pronouncing words from avocabulary list. In order to measure students’ pronunciation
ability, the last part of the test had two sections—one for pronouncing the words on their ownand one for repeating them after the researcher.
Teaching Materials. The teaching materials were designed by the researcher;
the content of the lectures was taken from the English textbooks published by Far East, English Reader for Vocational High Schools Book I and Book II (Lin & Brooks, 2011), that the freshmen were using in their regular English class at the time. Each week there were two classes; a teaching schedule was developed (presented as Appendix C).
Interviews. After the remedial instruction, the researcher interviewedthe
participants to determine how they felt about it (see Appendix F). This was a chance for the students to express themselves and for the researcher to gather their feedback.
There were ten questions asked in the interviews.
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Data Collection Procedure
The researcher tried ensure the reliability of this study by collecting several kinds of data: pre-test and post-test results, recordings of classes, questionnaire answers, and interview responses. On this basis, the researcher tried to identify the problems that the underachieving students encountered and develop appropriate solutions.
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Figure 1. Research design and process of the study.
Find out the problems of underachieving students in vocabulary learning.
Design a remedial course of K. K. phonetic symbols for the underachievers, and choose the underachieving participants.
Participants answer two questionnaires. One is for vocabulary learning strategies;
the other is for the background research.
Participants take the pre-test.
Carry out the 12-class remedial instruction course.
Paticipants take the post-test and be interviewed.
Analyze the collected data.
Find out the solutions to underachievers' problems.
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Data Analysis
Although the research sample was limited to four participants, which is less than is generally seen in quantitative studies, the students were asked to take a pre-test and post-testand to answer questionnaires; therefore, the researcher would define this study as both qualitative and quantitative.The more illuminating data are likely to come fromhow the participants acted in the test setting and how they answered the questionnaires. However, the pre-test and post-test results will be presented in the following chapter without statistical analysis.
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