In this chapter, the design of the present study is addressed. The first section states the rationale. The second section describes the research setting. The third section illustrates the participants including the teacher and the students respectively.
The fourth section introduces the descriptions and procedure of data collection. The fifth section presents the method of data analysis. Finally, the last section is
trustworthiness.
Rationale
The first focus of this study is to examine the role of teacher follow-ups applied in an elementary school English classroom. The second focus of this study is to investigate the students‟ preferences for teacher follow-ups. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to collect and analyze the research data. The qualitative research method is useful in analyzing video-recordings and the responses of the interviews. The qualitative research offered thorough and rich interpretations of the participant‟s use and perceptions of teacher follow-ups. For the quantitative research method, it is helpful in analyzing the frequency of the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups and the questionnaire results of the students‟ preferences for
teacher follow-ups.
The Research Setting
In this study, the data were collected in an elementary school English classroom in southern Taiwan. The school provides the teacher and the students with an English-friendly learning environment; for example, English phrases were posted on the staircases and the signs of offices and public places were bilingual. Besides, the school also held many English activities such as speech competitions and oral
reading competitions. Obviously, English teaching and learning receive great attention in this school. The formal English classes start from the third grade students.
Participants
The Teacher
This study aimed to explore the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups used by an elementary school English teacher. In order to find various functions and forms of teacher follow-ups in English classrooms, an experienced English teacher was preferred. In addition, the teacher had to be willing to be observed and also be recorded by a video recorder for several months. The teacher should have taught the class at least one year, because when the teacher and the students were familiar with each other, the classroom interaction between them was more conversant. It
helped get more language data to examine the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups.
The teacher was a female with 12-year English teaching experiences in
elementary school. Moreover, the teacher had taught English in cram schools and had been a tutor for more than 5 years before she taught in elementary school.
Therefore, the teacher had more than 17-year teaching experiences in English.
The teacher has passion on her teaching, attended different lecture courses of English teaching, and has good interaction with students in and outside the
classrooms. She was frequently invited to be observed and her class was often studied by teachers and researchers. English teachers often viewed her teaching as a model. As being often observed, she was not afraid of facing a camera which may influence the teaching process. The teacher always started her class with a daily conversation in English with the students. Both English and Chinese were used for her teaching. The atmosphere in her classroom was not stressful, because she always talked in a humorous way and applied many activities to help students remember the vocabulary and sentences in the textbook. When the teacher asked the students to give answers, she tried to give every student chances to provide utterance instead of always asking the same students. The class used “Rainbow” as textbook. During the observation periods, four units, “Do You Want Some Juice,”
“Does He Like Noodles,” ”I can jump,” and “Dragon Boat Festival”, were observed.
The students
One of the teacher‟s classes was observed. The observed class contained totally twenty-eight students, including 14 boys and 14 girls. They were
fourth-grade elementary school students. Because most students started to learn English since they were in the third-grade, they were considered as English learners of the beginning level. Only few students‟ proficiencies were higher because they also had English classes in the cram schools. Before joining this study, the students have been taught by the teacher for three semesters, and the observation period were their fourth semester. The students and the teacher were familiar with each other and had a good rapport in and outside the classroom. In the class, the students were active and always answered the teacher‟s questions enthusiastically. Their English levels were not high, so they always gave their answers in Chinese. Generally speaking, the students liked to interact with the teacher during the lessons.
Data Collection
In order to investigate the use of teacher follow-ups and the students‟
preferences for teacher follow-ups, three instruments—classroom recording, two interviews with the teacher, and the questionnaire for the students— were applied to collect the data. The detailed descriptions of the three instruments are illustrated in
the following.
Classroom Recording
Classroom recording can show the classroom interaction between the teacher and the students in a real time. They can reveal the patterns of teacher follow-ups used by the teacher in responding to students‟ utterances. In classroom recording, discourses delivered the use of teacher follow-ups contextually.
To attain sufficient language data, classroom recording was not end until the researcher could not find other new functions and forms of teacher follow-ups used by the teacher. The researcher videotaped the English classes two periods in a week and every period had forty minutes. Videotaping of classroom interaction was permitted by the teacher. To avoid disturbing teaching process, the camera was set in the back of the classroom. The classroom interaction was recorded from April to June in 2012. During the recording periods, two weeks were skipped because of the weather and the researcher‟s illness. In total, eighteen pieces of recordings were collected and transcribed verbatim as the language data (see Appendix A for a sample transcript of classroom recording). They were coded for further analysis. The coding scheme with detailed descriptions is explained in the section of data analysis.
The transcript notation was adopted from Yeh‟s (2007) system (see Appendix B).
When recording the classes, the researcher wrote down the teaching events, as
field note, in order to help review the contexts during the analysis to prevent from misunderstanding of the transcripts. According to Patton (2002), field notes should include everything that the observer thinks worthily to be noted and write in a descriptive way. Besides, field notes need to be arranged in a format that will help the researcher find needed information easily (Merriam, 2009). Following the form of field notes in Fernández Abarca‟s (2004) study, the field notes in this study contain the date, the time, the place, and the events in the teaching process (see a sample field note in Appendix C).
Interviews
In order to get more information that cannot be observed directly and to “enter into the other person‟s perspective” (Patton, 2002, p.341) about the participant and
the observed class, two semi-structured interviews were done in this study. For the first interview, the interview questions (see Appendix D for the interview questions of the first interview) were used to elicit background information about the teacher, including the teacher‟s teaching experiences, teaching beliefs toward class interaction and teacher feedback, and the teacher‟s insights about the interaction with the class.
The first interview was held on 28th March 2012, one week before the classroom observation, in the teacher‟s office. For the second interview, the researcher inquired about the teacher‟s own awareness toward the use of teacher follow-ups in
class and seeks for suggestions about adoption of teacher follow-ups for novice teachers. The interview questions of the second interview were presented in Appendix E. It was held on 27th June 2012, one week after the classroom observation, in a coffee shop. Each interview, conducted in Chinese, was audio-recorded and lasted around 30 minutes. The interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and used to realize the teacher‟s insights and her choices on the use of teacher follow-ups for further analysis.
The Questionnaire
Although the researcher intended to investigate the students‟ preferences for teacher follow-ups, the data were not collected from the students by interviewing for three reasons. First, because the researcher was a stranger for the students, they may feel uneasy about telling me their real thought. Second, since they were fourth-grade elementary school students, they were not mature enough to express their notions appropriately and properly. Finally, the homeroom teacher did not permit to interview with the students in fear of interruption.
In this study, a questionnaire (see Appendix F) was designed to understand the students‟ preferences for the teacher‟s use of follow-ups in the English classes based on the categories of Chang‟s (2004) study on teacher follow-ups. Each function and form of Chang‟s categories was restated in a statement. In total, there were
eighteen items, written in Chinese to help students answer the question easily. The questionnaire was distributed to the students on 27th June 2012, one week after the classroom observation. Before the students answer the questionnaire, the
researcher explained how to do the questionnaire and told students to feel free asking any questions if necessary. They used around fifteen minutes to finish the
questionnaire.
Data Analysis
In this study, the collected data were analyzed both quantitatively and
qualitatively. The data under study were collected from three instruments which are classroom recording, two interviews and the questionnaire. The major data were the recordings of classroom interaction in order to reveal the ways in which the teacher used teacher follow-ups to facilitate the students‟ language learning.
Interviews with the teacher were applied to supplement the interpretation of the teacher‟s use of follow-ups. The questionnaire data were used to show the students‟
preferences for the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups. The researcher found the frequency of functions and forms of the teacher‟s follow-ups and the students‟ preferences for teacher follow-ups and presented the results quantitatively.
In addition, the researcher attempted to interpret how the roles of teacher follow-ups work in the classrooms in a qualitative way by examining the transcriptions from the
classroom recording and interviews. The detailed descriptions of analysis on each instrument were described in the following.
First, the recordings of classroom observation were transcribed verbatim in order to find the exact patterns of teacher follow-ups. After transcribing, the researcher adopted the IRF exchange structure to sort out the IRF moves and then used a coding system to analyze the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups.
As reviewed in Chapter two, in Taiwan, Chang (2004), Hsieh (2008), and Yang (2009) had studied the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups and classified the findings into different categories. In this study, the researcher modified the three researchers‟
categories and classified teacher follow-ups into six functions, which are acceptance, rejection, asking for clarification, response elicitation, modeling language and
building-up discourse, and seventeen forms, which are repetition, praise, affirmation, elaboration, translation, ignorance, rebuke, check, completion, giving clues,
encouragement, demand, reformulation, demonstration, correction, denial and comment. The definition of the functions and the corresponding forms of the functions are shown in Appendix G.
The researcher used the quantitative method to find the frequency of the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups rather than to account for the statistical significance of the data. Moreover, the researcher used the linguistic data to explain
for every function along with the forms in the qualitative method. The linguistic data used to exemplify every function and form of the teacher‟s follow-ups.
Second, the data of the two interviews were transcribed verbatim and used to provide a clear interpretation for the teacher‟s use of teacher follow-ups. The linguistic data from interviews helped the researcher get more information about the teacher and the class and provided a supplement to explain the teacher‟s selection on using the functions and forms of follow-ups.
Third, the questionnaire was used to investigate the students‟ preferences for the teacher‟s follow-ups quantitatively. The researcher presented the results with the percentages of the students‟ preferences for the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups. Besides, a comparison between the students‟ preferences and the teacher‟s actual use of teacher follow-ups were discussed.
Trustworthiness
To establish credibility of the results, triangulation is a method used to create the trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). According to Merriam (2009), there are three strategies of triangulation: the use of multiple investigators, sources of data, or methods of data collection to confirm emerging finding. Among them, using different data collection methods was applied in this study. Three different methods were used to collect the research data, including video-recordings, field notes, and
interviews. The researcher video-recorded the authentic classroom interaction between the teacher and students that took place in an elementary English classroom.
More importantly, the field notes of classroom observation and interviews with the teacher helped the researcher give sufficient interpretation of the results.
Moreover, the researcher also tested the inter-coder reliability for the coding of IRF moves, and functions and forms of teacher follow-ups. The researcher invited one graduate student of English Department, who had taken the course of discourse analysis, as another coder to code a randomly selected data of a forty-minute period of a lesson. Before her coding, the researcher trained the coder in identifying the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups. Holsti‟s (1969, cited in Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001) reliability formula was used to measure the reliability coefficient between the two coders. The coded data reached 87.5%
agreement on the functions and forms of teacher follow-ups by the two coders.
Through applying triangulation and testing inter-coder reliability, reliability of this study was built.