4. Findings
4.4 Admitting that Things Can be Beyond Her Control
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After expressing these words with an indifferent tone, Denny concluded saying how critical differentiated criteria were to the learning of students like him and students like Tom, his higher achieving classmate.
4.4 Admitting that Things Can be Beyond Her Control
Despite trying her best to build variety and differentiation into large multilevel English classes on the basis of her knowledge about students to take care of each student, Joy still felt that it was impossible for her to enhance the English abilities of every student as certain things were clearly beyond her control. She explained that she first had such feeling when she had her first full year teaching in La La junior high school, a very remote junior high school in Hualien, where over 99% of the students were indigenous. While recounting her previous teaching experiences, Joy stressed repetitively how critical this period of teaching experience was to her, as it not only informed her belief about the need to accumulate knowledge about students in and add differentiation into large multilevel English classes, but also made her realize that there were certain things beyond a teacher’s control. She said:
La La junior high school was a place that made you feel that there were certain things beyond your control….because the students were indigenous, more than 99 percent of them were indigenous, so English was the third language for them.
For us, English is the second language. But their mother tongue was indigenous language, and Chinese was their second language, which they didn’t start learning until they entered elementary school….Besides, many of them were raised by their grandparents who could barely speak Chinese, so they already had a hard time learning Chinese….And when they entered junior high school and started learning English, it became even worse. We needed to use Chinese to explain, and if we used English directly in teaching, that’s much worse,
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because they wouldn’t have the slightest idea about what you’re talking about, because English was something they had very little exposure to in their daily lives. They’re unlike students living in Taipei City; students in Taipei City have the opportunity to be exposed to English. But students there could barely find such opportunities, so they just couldn’t help but think ‘Why do I have to learn English?’….So you can know how difficult it is to teach English there. You couldn’t teach them grammar, even if you explained the grammatical points to them, they could barely understand. Even if you asked them to do some very simple oral practices, they just practiced for a very short time in class and never practiced again when they got home. So teaching in such a context would make you feel really really powerless. The contextual factors would make you feel extremely powerless. (POI6, p.3-4)
During the year of teaching in La La junior high school, Joy was made to think how to enhance the students’ English abilities and whether it was possible to do so in such a difficult teaching setting where the socio-cultural factors had a serious impact on the students’ learning and her teaching of English. While she was so frustrated at not being able to enhance the students’ English abilities, what her brother told her a few years earlier occurred to her:
When I just started teaching, I tried very hard to enhance the English abilities of every child, but I just couldn’t make it. And then my brother told me, he started teaching a year earlier than I did, he told me something very cruel. He said ‘Sis, you’ve got to learn to give up.’ How horrible it is to tell a person full of passion and enthusiasm to give up! He then continued saying ‘I told you to give up, to give up on enhancing their English abilities. But I didn’t tell you to give up these kids.’ (POI3, p.33)
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With her brother’s words, Joy gradually leant to accept that not every student could learn English well and that sometimes she as a teacher just needed to respect the various learning process that students undergo and decisions students make with regard to their English learning. This realization was later reinforced when she met her student Emma in her third year of teaching in Fa Fa junior high school, where she was still teaching at the time of this study:
I have a student who gave up on English but learnt Japanese very well within just three months and won the National Nail Art Contest. She told me ‘Thank you, Ms. Lee, thank you for being supportive when I said I want to give up on English.’ It was three months before The Basic Competence Test for Junior High School Students, and she told me ‘Ms. Lee, I want to give up.’ I said
‘Okay, then tell me, what are you planning to do?’….She said she found nail art to be interesting. And we girls know that France and Japan are the two countries that have the best nail art. She found it difficult to understand French, so she tried to read some Japanese magazines but couldn’t’ understand either, so she went to learn Japanese….And just before the test, she could already speak some easy Japanese. I was so surprised! She was a student who could barely
recognize the 26 letters but she could speak Japanese with only three months of learning. And then she came visiting me on Teacher’s Day, and did my nails.
She did it so fast and pretty. And she said ‘Ms. Lee, I came back this time because I want to give you Teacher’s Day presents, not just the nail art I did for you’ and at this time she took out a medal from her bag saying ‘I won the National Nail Art Contest!’ Oh it always makes me cry when talking about this.
(S1, p.22)
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Joy said Emma’s story was a case that strongly strengthened her thought that she had to recognize that not every student could master English even if she tried very hard and that sometimes she just needed to respect the decisions students make, including the choice of giving up on learning English.
A few years later, when Joy worked as an advisory teacher at the Ministry of Education, she learnt about a longitudinal comparative study conducted and presented by a professor teaching at a university of education on the English learning of
lower-achieving and typically-achieving students:
The professor conducted a two-year longitudinal study on these children. The children were taking remedial classes….And she found that these
lower-achieving students could hardly reach the same levels as the typical students did….But these lower-achieving students could still improve, though in a rather slow pace, when there’s someone there supervising their learning.
(S1, p.21)
Having learnt about this study, Joy became even more certain about her thought that there did not exist a proportional relationship between the effort that a teacher put into teaching and the learning achievements that a student can make and consequently that sometimes a teacher needed to recognize that certain things were simply beyond her control.
Informed by these teaching experiences and her belief that English should not be viewed as the most crucial linguistic resources but only one of the many linguistic resources, Joy in the interviews repetitively stated the need for her to accept that not every student could and need to learn English well and to respect the decisions students made with regard to their English learning. She explained there were a multitude of factors at play that kept certain students, especially lower achieving
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students, from learning English effectively. The restrictive factors she perceived included contextual factors such as linguistically, socio-culturally, and school-level contextual factors, familial background, and student factors. In the interviews, Joy more than once mentioned the impact that linguistically and socio-culturally contextual factors could have on students’ English learning:
Well our context is not an ESL learning context, but an EFL one, which makes it even harder for students to learn English well, yeah, because they don’t need to use English once they step out of the classrooms. However we always have this prevailing social atmosphere that considers English learning to be very crucial. Especially for us residents in Taipei City, the ability to speak English is even more essential….But for kids living in Lishan, they might not have the chance to see a foreigner throughout their whole lives. You can see foreigners everywhere here in Taipei City. And for the families that are better-off, they can take their kids abroad. But kids living in Lishan can barely find such
opportunities and the ability to speak English is less crucial for them. (POI3, p.4)
In the above excerpt, Joy indicated how the linguistic and socio-cultural contexts where students were situated could have significant impacts on their exposure to English and motivation for learning English, and thus could be constraining factors in the English learning of some students.
In addition to the larger contextual factors, Joy also mentioned school-level factors as another kind of restrictive factors that prevented her from effectively enhancing the English abilities of some students. One of such factors she said was the large class size in her present teaching context, which was a rather popular and successful junior high school and therefore was very often forced to accept more
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students than it was supposed to. This however caused serious problems as Joy felt that high enrollment made it harder for her to pay sufficient individual attention to students, which she believed was particularly essential for lower achieving students.
What’s perceived as restrictive factors by Joy included not just the
disadvantageous external contextual factors, but also detrimental internal factors such as familial background and student factors. When describing how she taught lower achievers in her classes, Joy mentioned the disadvantaged family background of one lower achieving student, John:
Well these kids [the lower achieving students] can barely learn any more English, but you can still try to broaden their horizons by giving them some information about the world. Well the families of these kids, especially John’s, his is the worst, the poorest. He has a culturally disadvantaged family. His father has drinking problems. Once he came to school to teach him [John] a lesson….but you could tell that he doesn’t have the ability to give his child a lesson. He’s very drunk and was just there scolding John. So I have strong sympathy toward him. (POI7, p. 1)
Joy said that, in such a family, John could hardly receive any cultural and financial support for his English learning. Such a disadvantaged family background, coupled with John’s own scant interest in and motivation for learning English hence made it very difficult for her to help him develop English abilities.
Faced with these students whose interest and motivation for learning English could scarcely be enhanced with her use of various teaching practices, Joy said she would respect their current choice of giving up on learning:
I think it doesn’t matter when he starts learning. What really matters is whether he has the impetus and will to learn. Some students might not start learning
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English until they enter into senior high school or university, when they find it necessary. Now they don’t want to learn because they don’t see the urgency of doing so. But maybe in the future when he develops an interest in, say,
mechanics, he might find it necessary to learn some English in that specific field. (POI4, p.11)
Holding the belief about respecting learner choices, Joy was seldom found to force or push students having little interest in English to learn hard. Once during lunch break, Joy was noted to have a short talk with Lucy, a lower achieving student who was often late for class and slept in class. Instead of scolding Lucy relentlessly for not paying attention or being late, Joy told her short stories to illustrate that even though she had found herself not interested in English and more interested in
beautification, learning some English could still do her good in her future career. She said in the post-observation interview:
I told Lucy the other day that I had expectations of her. I want her to learn some English because I hope with English she can enhance her expertise, because if she knows one more language, she’ll look more professional. Yeah, so I was telling her this stuff. She could understand. But she has very little interest in English, and has a very hard time learning it. I knew that. Yeah. But I don’t force her to learn, I don’t force her to learn. Because there will be one day that she will find learning English to be necessary, and she’ll go for it. (POI2, p.73)
From the above excerpt, one could see that although Joy wanted her students to learn English, she did not send this message to her students in a forcible way, but in an encouraging manner, which was formed on the recognition that learners were agents whose decisions could be informed but definitely not controlled by their
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teachers.
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CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION
The previous chapter presents four major cognitions that Joy held in teaching large multilevel English classes, how she developed such cognitions, and how she externalized and negotiated these cognitions in the observed teaching context. Since the present study aims to present an in-depth and holistic picture and understanding of teaching in large multilevel English classes, this chapter discusses four themes that have emerged from the findings presented in the earlier chapter, which include the impact of experience on the teacher’s cognition and practice, reflection, the teacher’s cognition about students, and the impact of context on the teacher’s cognition and practice.
5.1 The Impact of Experience on the Teacher’s Cognition and Practice
In discussing teaching in multilevel classrooms, teachers and researchers have tended to focus on the difficulties encountered and the practices found to be effective in addressing the problems in teaching such classes (Chen, 2009; Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Maddalena, 2002; Xanthou & Pavlou, 2008). Few of them have probed further to understand the mental dimension of teaching that accounts for how and why certain practices are adopted in particular periods of class time and specific teaching contexts (Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009), hence rendering their discussions rather superficial touching only the surface of teaching. The present study, however, drawing on a teacher narrative, interviews, observations and document analyses, presents a more in-depth picture of how the teacher participant, Joy, taught large multilevel English classes, what cognitions she held in teaching such classes and how she developed such cognitions.
With the findings, the researcher found that what and how Joy taught in large
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multilevel English classes were closely related to the cognitions she held in teaching such classes, which were shown to be largely informed by the various experiences that she had accumulated. In fact, the impact of experience on language teacher cognition has already been made quite evident in the existing literature, which does not only recognize the effects that teachers’ experience have on their cognitions but also contends that the experience of teachers are one of the significant contributors to the formation and development of their cognitions (Bailey et al., 1996; Borg, 1999, 2003, 2006; Ellis, 2004; Freeman, 1993; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Woods, 1996).
Accompanied with such recognition of the importance of teacher experiences was the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the knowledge that teachers produce out of their professional experience. Scholars such as Schön (1983) and Wallace (1991) both proposed terms “knowing-in-action” and “experiential knowledge” that gave due recognition and fair value to the knowledge that teachers derived from their
experience. Borg (1999) in studying the theories underlying the grammar teaching of five teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), argued that the exploration into the theories that teachers held were unlikely to be made without an examination of the crucial experiences of the teachers and the significance they attached to the
experiences. A few years later, Borg (2006), based on the language teacher cognition research, further proposed a schematic framework to conceptualize language teacher cognition where the impacts of the vast experiences that language teachers acquired through schooling, professional coursework, and previous classroom practices on their cognitions were clearly noted.
In line with Borg’s (2006) framework, the present study showed that the varied experiences that Joy had acquired during different phases of her previous professional life had impacts on a variety of her cognitions and classroom practices in large
multilevel English classes. Moreover, a closer look at Joy’s stories revealed that these
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experiences were capitalized on in different ways by her for her professional growth.
The manners that Joy capitalized on her professional experiences could be classified into three ways, including feeling, thinking and developing skills and ideas out of the experiences. Building on these critical experiences (Webster & Mertova, 2007), Joy then constructed and re-constructed her cognitions and classroom practices in teaching large multilevel English classes. For example, in recounting her senior high school learning experience of English, she explained how this horrible experience on the one hand, became food for her to feel and empathize with the pain that lower achieving students went through, and on the other, worked as food for her to think about the need to accumulate holistic knowledge about students. According to Joy, this traumatic experience provided her access to experiencing the painful feelings that lower achieving students underwent, which she believed some teachers could hardly understand due to their smooth and outstanding learning experiences. Consequently, Joy felt she was, compared with some of the other teachers, more able to empathize with students and accumulate holistic knowledge about them. The impact of the language learning experiences, whether good or bad, of teachers on their cognitions and classroom practices were also noted in several studies (Ellis, 2004; Golombek, 1998; Johnson, 1994; Lu, 2011; Numrich, 1996; Woods, 1996). In exploring whether the variety of a group of monolingual and multilingual teachers’ language learning experiences were reflected in their professional knowledge, Ellis (2004) described how two monolingual teachers in her study reported to have developed empathy for their students out of their previous frustrating learning experiences of foreign languages, and concluded that the unsuccessful language learning experiences of these monolingual teachers had gone through seemed to result in their belief that language learning was difficult and led them “to over-emphasize the difficulties and underplay the prospect of success (p.104)”, which she suspected could have a
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negative impact on the learning of their students. While Ellis was concerned that the limited and traumatic foreign language learning experiences of the monolingual teachers in her study might not be sufficient for them to present a balanced picture of
negative impact on the learning of their students. While Ellis was concerned that the limited and traumatic foreign language learning experiences of the monolingual teachers in her study might not be sufficient for them to present a balanced picture of