Though the study showed positive results in most aspects, there were three limitations of the present study. First, the results of the study might not possible to be generalized because of the small sample size. Despite of this drawback, the study still showed its value from students’ positive feedback mostly. However, for both
teacher-researcher and the students, the situational writing activities were still
time-consuming. Students had to spend more time completing the activities; while the teacher-researcher spent much time designing the activities. Last, as the
teacher-researcher, who has multiple roles in this study, spotted role conflict on herself. The details of the three limitations were explained in the following.
The Results of the Study might not be Generalized
This study was an action research in a class of 27 students only, so the results of the study might not be generalized. Though the results of the study might not be
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generalized, the concrete feedback and reflections from the students were still worth thinking. During the intervention, the teacher-researcher found that actually there were half of the participants living outside of the school community. However, the sample size was too small to be divided into two sub-groups. As a result, the data were discussed as a whole. Although the results of quantitative data could not be generalized, the qualitative evidence showed the value of the study. The students who didn’t live near the school indicated that the situational writing activities helped them develop interests in their own neighborhood community.
Additionally, the interesting findings of Interviewing among the five situational writing activities revealed important insight of the teacher-researcher. The special features of Interviewing were different from the other four activities. Interviewing was student-initiated and it had authentic audiences. The other four situational writing activities were in lack of local listeners while students had to go to the restaurants in person in order to conduct an interview. Students would be more engaged when they were interacting with real audiences. In addition, students were asked to generate the interview questions by themselves and make an appointment with the restaurant owners. The teacher-researcher just gave them guidelines while the students had to take over the following responsibility. Therefore, the students became active learners who initiated themselves to finish the tasks and overcome the difficulties. In the future, teachers could design course which involves authentic audiences to have more real interaction with people in person. When the course provided students with more authentic interactions, the students would become more learner-initiated.
The Time-consuming Issue for the Students and the Teacher-researcher
There would be several reasons why the students spent much time finishing these activities. One might be the unfamiliarity of assignment or electronic devices such as tablets. To them, some activities were new, such as interviewing others. So they
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needed some preparation time before conducting their own assignments. Another reason might be the little limitation of assignments. Once the guidance of the task types was taught, the teacher-researcher would allow students to finish the tasks with their imagination and creativity by themselves. Compared with traditional writing exercises on the textbooks, such as technical drills, these kinds of flexible tasks would take the students a lot of time to brainstorm and compose.
Time was a big issue for the teacher-researcher in two aspects. One aspect was the teacher-researcher spent more time designing the writing activities and the
teaching materials. In addition to the preparation of the original English textbook, the teacher-researcher spent time to develop ideas and compile information to make the situational writing activities suitable for the students. The other aspect was the conducting time. Although the situational writing activities were served as
supplemental material for the original textbook, the writing activities took extra class time. The students spent more time discussing on flexible assignments such as posters.
Within the lack of formal class time, the teacher-researcher spent time after class for the students to complete the writing activities. To cope with this difficulty in the future, teachers could cooperate with teachers from other subjects. To conduct this course during the additional time in summer vacation would be another solution.
The Teacher-researcher’s Difficulty in Staying Neutral
In this present action research, the teacher played different roles such as the researcher, the course designer, the writing rater, and most importantly, the homeroom teacher. The prior knowledge of students’ English proficiency level had an influence while the teacher-researcher was rating students’ writing works. It was difficult for the teacher-researcher to remain nonjudgmental and neutral. To cope with this problem, the teacher-researcher invited another rater who taught eighth grader students in the same school to keep the scores neutral. When there were big differences in the two
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rating scores, we spent time discussing and deciding the final scores together.
5.4 Teacher-researcher’s Role and Reflections
The teacher-researcher of the study became more sensitive of observing students’
performances and needs after conducting the study. During the process of designing the study, the teacher-researcher kept designing, observing, taking actions, and reflecting. This cycle of action research helped both the students and the
teacher-researcher became more engaged in the activities more. In addition, the teacher-researcher developed several principles for other teachers to design similar writing activities under the situation of each school. With the discussion of other colleagues during the process, many classes in the school implemented the situational writing activities designed by the teacher-researcher.
The Teacher-researcher’s Role
As the teacher-researcher and the participant-observer in this study, the reflections and the record of the study would be important and valuable. To the teacher-researcher, action research was not just a study to be done; it was a way to examine teaching ideas and to record the teaching process. The most important for the teacher-researcher was that after observation, students’ learning difficulties were spotted. She could find ways to solve the problems and try to avoid the problems next time. Now, being more experienced after conducting this study, the teacher-researcher could examine her teaching in more systematic way and be more sensitive to students’
needs when teaching or designing course.
The Cycle of Action Research
An action research contains a cycle of four steps which are Designing, Observing, Action Taking, and Reflecting. The process and thoughts are recoded as follows:
The motivation of designing this course was to meet the needs of 12-year
curriculum guidelines. Also, course design has always been an interesting thing to the
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teacher-researcher. As a teacher, seeing students’ smile and engagement in class brings her sense of achievement. As the students’ homeroom teacher, it has always been a pleasure to design something intriguing for the students and to create wonderful memories with the students together.
Before designing the course, the teacher-researcher spent lots of time observing the students. These students have always been open-minded and challenge-accepting.
They also have positive attitudes toward learning new things and joining in new activities. They are also willing to help each other on many things. Therefore, because of the positive and cooperative learning environment, the teacher-researcher has been inspired by the students to make efforts to create a variety of different activities for students.
When the researcher designed the course, she considered students’ multi-level abilities and divided them into groups to work with each other. Due to the limitation of class time, these activities should be embedded in the original textbook. To make up with the drilling exercises on the book, the teacher-researcher thought of this series of meaningful and interesting writing activities for students to have fun as well as practice English writing.
During the process of conducting the course, the researcher kept observing
students’ performances, collecting visual and verbal feedback in order to find students’
inner thoughts about the situational writing activities. She found that though students enjoyed the course, some activities still needed more time and needed to be conducted outside of the school. If there is a chance next time, this kind of time-consuming activities should be arranged in summer vacation as the summative assessment for the whole semester. Students could have more time and could finish these tasks with more joy and less pressure.
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Useful Principles in Designing Courses
The situational writing activities in this study were designed by the teacher-researcher. The writing activities followed the guidelines of designing situational writing courses mentioned in Herrington’s study (2008). After the intervention, data collection, and data analysis of the study, the teacher-researcher spotted the practicality of Herrington’s principles as well as other valuable principles for teachers to design courses in the future. The teacher-researcher hoped that these principles of designing courses could help all the teachers.
The 7 designing principles mentioned by Herrington (2008) were applied in designing the situational writing activities in the present study. The teacher-researcher spotted two more practical principles as follows: (1) Engage students in real-life scenarios. Aside from Herrington’s principle of providing authentic materials, teachers could provide students with chances to stimulate. In the theory of Cone of Learning stated by Edger Dale (1969), when students are stimulating, they will remember 90%
of things. Instead, learning with only reading, students tend to remember only 10% of the information two weeks after. Therefore, when designing courses, teachers can provide students with activities that can engage them in. There are two easy ways to conduct the principle. One is to connect the course to their life experience and background knowledge. The other is to design authentic assessments which require students to stimulate. (2) Usefulness. Some teachers might be hesitant to apply Herrington’s (2008) designing principles, they might consider the principles might interest students but without learning. As a result, remember to make the course useful.
The most important thing is to apply what students have learned in class to real life.
The courses could be designed to make students realize that all the things students learned could be used in their real life instead of words on the textbooks.
Other two valuable principles noticed by the teacher-researcher are introduced
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below: (1) Less limitation, more flexibility on learning activities. Students would have more room to use their imagination and creativity. They could also practice thinking critically in order to prepare themselves for senior high school or even future life. (2) Find the strengths of every student. Every student has his or her own strengths on something, so teachers could design course with multi-tasks. In this way, when students are put in groups, they could contribute their groups with strengths and gain sense of achievement in the process. Even some of them might not get much
improvement in English; they would never hate English or be scared of learning English.
Ripple Effect
Another interesting thing was that when the teacher-researcher was conducting the activities, other two English teachers in the same office heard of the course and decided to join. Therefore, actually there were ten classes out of twenty-one classes at the school conducting these writing activities. Through the sharing of this course, the teacher-researcher and the other two teachers became partners who worked together in English teaching. Teacher collaboration became another important finding and growth of the teacher-researcher.
During the implementing month, before and after each entry of the situational writing activities, the teachers held a short meeting to discuss the difficulties during conducting. We also became each other’s observer of the class in order to give suggestions to the teacher’s teaching procedure or students’ learning process. At the end of the series of situational writing activities, we decided to collect our discussion process and students’ learning outcomes systematically. We would send the portfolio of the course design to join the Competition of Lesson Plan for Effective Teaching in Taipei City in the near future. We would name the series of situational writing
activities “You are the Experts of the Community”. The preparation gave us more
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chances to interact with each other. It also encouraged us to continue collaborate with one another in developing courses for students.
In conclusion, Dewey said, “Learning by doing”, which is the most important ability that required by the 12-year curriculum guidelines. In the present study, not only did the students learn a lot during the process, but the teacher-researcher herself also became more experienced in designing courses. In the future, it is hoped that the teacher-researcher could keep on designing proper and interesting courses to involve all of the students as well as motivate more teachers to provide students with more positive and meaningful learning environment.
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Tomei, L. (2008). Online and distance learning, concepts, methodologies tools and applications.
Herrington, J., & Oliver, R. (2000). An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments. Educational technology research and development, 48(3), 23-48.
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Hwang, W. Y., Chen, H. S., Shadiev, R., Huang, R. Y. M., & Chen, C. Y. (2014).
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Obst, P., Smith, S. G., & Zinkiewicz, L. (2002). An exploration of sense of community, Part 3: Dimensions and predictors of psychological sense of community in geographical communities. Journal of community psychology, 30(1), 119-133.
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APPENDICES
Appendix A
Pre-questionnaire—Sense of community
1 = strongly disagree 非常不同意 2 = disagree 不同意
3 = agree 同意
4 = strongly agree 非常同意
1 2 3 4
社 區 參 與
1. 我會積極參與社區內所舉辦的各項活 動。I will participate in any kinds of activities held by my neighborhood.
2. 我願意參與社區中自願性的服務工作。
I will be willing to participate in voluntary service activities in the neighborhood.
3. 我會主動和鄰居討論社區內發生的大小 事。I will discuss on all the things with my neighbors actively.
4. 我會主動拜訪社區中其他鄰居。I will visit other neighbors in my neighborhood actively.
5. 我認為社區的事就是我的事。I consider the things in our neighborhood as my own business.
6. 我會主動關心社區發生的事情。I will care about the things happening in the
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neighborhood actively.
7. 我會主動向別人介紹我的社區。I will introduce my neighborhood to other people actively.
8. 我會關心社區內發生的任何變化。I will pay attention to any changes happening in the neighborhood.
9. 我經常主動和社區內其他居民打招呼。
I usually greet other neighbors actively.
10. 我很喜歡我居住的社區。I like my neighborhood very much.
11. 我會捨不得搬離我居住的社區。I am not willing to move out from my
neighborhood.
I consider my neighborhood as a good one.
13. 我覺得我是屬於我居住的社區。I think I belong to my neighborhood.
14. 我覺得社區鄰居之間非常友善。I think my neighbors are friendly.
15. 我可以輕易說出我社區的優缺點。I can tell the advantages and disadvantages of my neighborhood easily.
社 區
16. 我對社區的事務並不那麼關心。I feel indifferent to the affairs of my
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疏 遠
neighborhood.
17. 我覺得社區居民很少有互動往來。I think my neighbors don’t have much interaction.
18. 我對現在居住的社區感覺很陌生。I feel unfamiliar with my neighborhood.
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Appendix B
Post-questionnaire—Sense of community and open-ended questions
Part 1.
1 = strongly disagree 非常不同意 2 = disagree 不同意
3 = agree 同意
4 = strongly agree 非常同意
1 2 3 4
社 區 參 與
1. 我會積極參與社區內所舉辦的各項活 動。I will participate in any kinds of activities held by my neighborhood.
2. 我願意參與社區中自願性的服務工作。
I will be willing to participate in voluntary service activities in the neighborhood.
3. 我會主動和鄰居討論社區內發生的大小
3. 我會主動和鄰居討論社區內發生的大小