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CHAPTER 4
FINDINGS AND CASE ANALYSIS
The purpose of the study is to gain an in-depth understanding of two senior high school English teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and practices on writing instruction and how students’ characteristics may influence their instruction. The analysis of Shelly’s and Jocey’s pedagogical beliefs and practices is presented in the following sections.
Also, students’ opinions are included to realize how they viewed the instruction.
Finally, factors that would influence teachers’ instruction will be discussed.
Shelly
In this section, Shelly’s pedagogical beliefs on writing instruction and the way she taught in the classroom will be discussed.
Course Preparation
Shelly used the textbook and several articles extracted from English magazines as materials. In her first year of teaching, she spent a great amount of time reading the textbook, analyzing texts, searching the supplementary information from reference books or the Internet, such as synonym, relative word groups, and derivatives. After years of teaching, Shelly has spent less and less time on the textbook, for she had been familiar with the content in the textbook, and the content has been taught over and over again. However, the preparation of supplementary materials was another story. Since Shelly hoped that the materials could make students realize the events happening in the world and connect what they have learned in class with their daily lives, she found the related articles from the latest magazines. After reading them, Shelly pinpointed certain key points, such as word usage, sentence patterns, and derivatives for students to notice.
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In sum, the textbook was used as the main source of writing instruction, while articles related to the current events served as the supplementary materials to improve students’
writing abilities.
As for the development of the instructional procedure, Shelly admitted that she did not spend much time on that because of her years of teaching experience in high school. Before stepping on the platform, she completely had in mind what she was going to teach. The only thing she insisted on was that sentence patterns must be taught bottom up, which meant they should be disassemble at first, and then each segment would be explained. Finally, each segment was combined to form a complete sentence pattern. By doing so, Shelly believed it was easier for students to follow her
instruction.
In sum, Shelly did spend a great amount of time preparing writing materials, including the content in the textbook and English articles in the past. However, the time for class preparation has decreased as she becomes more and more experienced.
Writing Instruction in Class
When interviewed, Shelly said that she had a fixed writing instruction procedure for every lesson. First, she explained the sentence patterns and then asked students to finish the drills on the textbook. Next, the articles Shelly gave students in the previous class would be discussed and key points were pinpointed. For the teacher, the article reading was thought to be helpful in learning writing, which will be elaborated in the next section. After class, an assignment was assigned to each student to make three sentences based on what they have learned today. However, she also acknowledged that there was an inconsistency between her beliefs and practices on writing instruction.
Ideally, Shelly thought that certain activities should have been included, such as brainstorming, group discussions and revising. The activities could make students
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realize that language could be served as a tool to communicate with others (e.g. writing a letter), rather than merely a subject learned in class. However, she had difficulty carrying out her ideal teaching methods because of students’ inappropriate behavior and time limitation. The goals of her instruction, according to Shelly, were to enable students to understand the connection between the language they learned and their surroundings. For her, writing instruction included extensive reading, sentence-pattern teaching and practices.
Beliefs and Practices on Writing Instruction
Data collected from Shelly’s statements could be categorized as the following teaching beliefs and practices on writing instruction: (a) Learning L2 is like learning L1, (b) sentence patterns should be taught by using bottom-up strategies, (c) practice is essential when teaching sentence patterns, and (d) instruction should be adjusted according to different students.
Learning L2 is like leaning L1: Reading comes before writing. Shelly believed learning English is like learning Chines, which meant reading came before writing.
Therefore, she thought the key to successful writing instruction was extensive reading across various topics, which was correspondent to Borg’s model (2003) that teachers’
beliefs could influence their instruction. During the interview, she told the researcher that the process of learning a second language should be similar to that of learning our mother tongue; that is, we learned how to listen before we knew how to speak. Further, through learning letters, words, and sentence patterns, we could read. After
accumulating enough input, we could write. Likewise, for Shelly, the situation remained the same when we learned English in Taiwan: reading should be learned before writing. Therefore, according to Shelly, “lots of reading materials should be
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provided before asking students to write an article.” In the following paragraph, how Shelly realized the importance of extensive reading will be discussed.
Shelly realized the importance of extensive reading when she was in college.
There were lots of reading assignments each class. Most of the students did not finish them. But Shelly did the assignments every time, for she loved reading English, which also indirectly improved her writing skills. She stated the special experience to the researcher.
When I was a freshman, I spent a lot of time reading the textbook. Therefore, professors often reminded me of practicing writing on my own for the
purpose of taking the mid-term exam, which was full of open-ended questions. But I didn’t. Possibly because I had no interest in writing. When the mid-term came, I thought I was unable to answer the questions. To my surprise, I smoothly finished the test without difficulties. The score of the test was also pretty high. I guessed it was a large amount of reading that made me write smoothly even I did not practice beforehand. (Interview 052211)
According to Shelly’s statements, we found Shelly believed the extensive reading could improve writing skills, so she could write smoothly during the exam even though not practicing writing in advance. But Shelly also acknowledged that her personal experience may not be generalizable to others, especially her students. As a teacher, she thought successful writing instruction should include both extensive reading and practice, which will be further discussed in later paragraphs. She did not need to practice, according to Shelly, might be because of her solid foundation of English proficiency in high school as well as her large amount of reading input in
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college, which made her a unique case. In other words, her personal experience triggered the thoughts that extensive reading could improve writing, but not everyone could write smoothly without practice as she did.
After becoming a teacher, Shelly did some research and found out how to improve students’ writing skills by extensive reading. According to her viewpoint, extensive reading could increase not only students’ linguistic knowledge, such as sentence patterns, but also their background knowledge of writing. “If they (students) do not read a lot, they have no idea what to write when randomly given a topic during the exam,” Shelly explained. Accordingly, Shelly gave each student an article to read every day, and then she would lead students to review the key points in next class. The following excerpt shows how she utilized extensive reading in class to improve
students’ writing abilities. (See Appendix C for transcription conventions)
S: Have you read the article I gave you yesterday?
Ss: Yes…
S: It is about Japanese Girl’s Day. Take a look at the first paragraph. Here are some words you should notice: the word “observed” in line two, “in celebration of” in the next line, and “do so” in the last line. Let’s take a look at the first paragraph, the word observe meant celebrate rather than check. The next one is in celebration of, the usage of which is similar to to celebrate plus verb. Next time, you could try to use that instead of to celebrate plus verb in your articles. The final one is do so. It replaced study hard in the sentence to avoid repetition. Of course, it is correct to write study hard, but it sounds a bit redundant. Ok, let’s look at the next paragraph…
In the above excerpt, the process of instruction was clearly displayed. Before class, Shelly gave each student an article to read. But because of time limitation, she
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could not lead students to read the whole article. Instead, Shelly expected her students to read articles on their own. In class, she told them certain crucial word usage they should notice. In the above example, she pointed out another meaning of “observe,”
another expression of “to celebrate,” and the usage of “do so” to represent the mentioned verb phrase. In conclusion, Shelly carried out her beliefs by making students read articles and pinpointed the key points for students to notice.
When it comes to choosing the articles, there were two requirements for them to meet. The first one was that those articles should meet students’ English proficiency.
They were selected from English magazines sold in book stores. The other one was that the topics of articles were related to current events. Shelly explained, “Since the content on textbooks was out of date, students had problems understanding the practicality of language learning.” Therefore, the topics included festivals, sports events, adventure stories, and some movies currently released in theater. “I think it is a good way to let students understand what they have learned in class could be
connected with their daily lives.” Shelly’s students also have the same viewpoints.
Edward, one of students in class C, said to the researcher, “I enjoyed reading those articles, for them broaden my horizons, making me realize what had happened in the world.” Another student, Iris, also expressed her thoughts: “I am a moviegoer, and I enjoy reading the movie introductions in the article. At the same time, I could improve my reading ability.” From students’ points of view, it is clear that interesting topics are served as incentives for students to study English.
Sentence patterns should be taught by using bottom-up strategies. Shelly suggested that sentence patterns should be taught piece by piece and then combined those pieces to form a complete pattern. During the interview, Shelly said that sentence patterns played an essential role for constructing an article, for an article consisted of several
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paragraphs, and a paragraph was composed of several sentences. Therefore, being familiar with sentence patterns was indispensable when writing an article. That is, Shelly expected students to be familiar with the patterns taught in class and be able to use them in their writings. When teaching sentence patterns, Shelly broke the whole sentence pattern into several parts, explaining each of them. Finally, she combined each part to form a whole sentence pattern. For example, in Lesson Seven, Shelly set up her goal for writing instruction as making students be familiar with the sentence pattern “what + (S) + V,” which meant a noun clause led by what. In order to help students easily understand the pattern, Shelly first analyzed the pattern and then elaborated on the noun clause. Next, she described the function of the composite relative pronoun “what.” Finally, she combined “what” and “noun clause” as a complete sentence pattern. Shelly explained why she spent extra time analyzing the sentence patterns as follows:
A sentence is combined with several words or small patterns. Like the above example, noun clause is involved in a noun clause led by “what.” If students don’t understand the noun clause, they definitely have difficulties picking up the whole patterns. (Interview 070211)
In the above statement, Shelly indicated the importance of teaching sentence patterns piece by piece, for students had to initially understand the individual words and then the whole patterns. However, she claimed that there were two main reasons that many teachers did not disassemble the sentence patterns as she did. The first one lied in that teachers thought it a waste of time. Due to the limited time distributed in English classes, teachers had to figure out how to cram their instruction in the intensive schedule. Therefore, they would teach sentence patterns directly by explaining the
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target structures. The other reason was that teachers might think students have already learned and realized fundamental sentence patterns embodied in the complex ones.
They worried that disassembling the sentences would raise students’ impatience and cause an unpleasant learning climate in class. However, according to Shelly’s teaching experiences, over half of students in her class did not thoroughly realize the usage of the basic sentence patterns. Take the above excerpt as an example. When teaching the sentence pattern “what + (S) + V,” Shelly wanted to confirm if students realized what the noun clause was. To her surprise, lots of students showed confusing expressions by shaking their heads or frowning at her, which reinforced her belief that teaching sentence patterns should start from the basic elements.
Shelly also responded to the doubts raised by those who did not disassemble the sentence patterns because of time pressure and students’ impatience. Disassembling the sentence patterns and explaining them was not a waste of time, for it could eliminate students’ confusion at the beginning of learning and would not make teachers teach the whole sentence pattern again. As for students’ impatience, Shelly also presented her thoughts. Many teachers had a myth that students should understand and memorize all of the content taught in the past. As she expressed, “I don’t think that’s possible, students need to be taught over and over again.” Since there were so many subjects for students to learn, Shelly would seize the moment to help students review what they have learned.
This kind of instruction was also embraced by most students. For instance, Katrina, one of the students in class D, admitted that the instruction was helpful.
Katrina’s English proficiency was pretty low since she did not have a solid foundation of English in her junior high. If Shelly did not disassemble the sentence patterns and directly taught them, she would have easily lost her attention for not being able to follow her instruction. Although most students appreciated Shelly’s ways of instruction,
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some students, especially those with higher English proficiency, had opposite opinions.
For example, Jane, also from class D, with higher level of English proficiency, complained, “I do not think it is necessary to disassemble the sentence patterns and then explained each of them, for those we have learned several times.” Responding to Jane’s complaints during the interview, Shelly replied, “Jane said so because she has higher English proficiency. But I have to take care of the majority of students in class.
So I cannot change my instruction.”
Practice is essential when teaching sentence patterns. According to Shelly’s statement, giving students chances to practice is indispensable in writing instruction. From her point of view, extensive reading and practices are inseparable when delivering writing instruction. As Shelly expressed, “some teachers taught writing simply by asking students to memorize sentence patterns or synonym, which could indeed improve students’ reading skills, but only a bit on writing.” Shelly elaborated on the difference between learning reading and learning writing in the following excerpt:
From my point of view, writing an article is no different from driving a car or swimming. You can not learn those skills simply by reading books or
memorizing the techniques. Of course, you have to gain the relative knowledge at first. After that, what you have to do is constant practice to improve your skills. (Interview 052211)
As the above statement indicated, for Shelly, writing was a skill that should be learned through constant practice, while reading ability could be developed through the memorization of vocabulary words and sentence patterns, that is, reading is absorbing knowledge, while writing is practicing skills.
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In order to carry out her teaching beliefs, Shelly would give students
assignments. In her first year of teaching, she assigned students to utilize the sentence patterns they had learned in class to write a composition. In the first couple of weeks, the condition went well. However, as the first monthly exam was coming, fewer and fewer students finished the assignments because it was time-consuming. After the monthly exam, few students did the assignments. To solve this problem, Shelly
modified the assignment by asking students to use each sentence pattern taught in class to make three sentences. Shelly would comment on and correct them. She said this adjustment could make students focus on the sentence pattern usage without spending too much time organizing the whole paragraph. From students’ viewpoint, they thought this compromise between teachers and students made their assignments much easier.
Edward, one of students in class C, told the researcher his opinion toward this change.
In the past, he had to spend a lot of time looking up new words in the dictionary so as to finish the parts that had nothing to do with the sentence pattern practice. After the adjustment, he thought this assignment could make him practice sentence patterns more efficiently. Another student from class C, Katrina, with lower English proficiency, said that this modification could motivate her to finish the assignment, for writing the whole article seemed much more difficult for her. It is obvious that the Shelly’s
adjustment could carry out her pedagogical beliefs and meet students’ demands as well.
In conclusion, Shelly believed that providing chances for students to practice was crucial in writing instruction. When facing students’ noncooperation, she would ponder the reasons behind it and adjusted her assignment to meet students’ needs. It is clear that the modified instruction was still consistent with Shelly’s pedagogical beliefs.
Instruction should be adjusted according to different students . From Shelly’s point of
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view, every individual should be given appropriate instruction. This belief could be traced back to her college life, when she took tutoring as a part-time job. Shelly
narrated the difference between being a tutor and a teacher. “Tutors need to adjust their instruction according to different individuals, while teachers could only adjust their instruction according to different class.” The above statement clearly indicated the different ways of teaching between teachers and tutors. When Shelly was a tutor, she would let her student take a test designed by herself in the first class in order to understand student’s current English proficiency. Next class, she would give the student suitable materials. For example, Shelly recalled when she was a sophomore,
narrated the difference between being a tutor and a teacher. “Tutors need to adjust their instruction according to different individuals, while teachers could only adjust their instruction according to different class.” The above statement clearly indicated the different ways of teaching between teachers and tutors. When Shelly was a tutor, she would let her student take a test designed by herself in the first class in order to understand student’s current English proficiency. Next class, she would give the student suitable materials. For example, Shelly recalled when she was a sophomore,