According to Geoffrey E. Mills (2007), there are four elements of the action research process: identifying an area of focus, collecting data, analyzing and interpreting data, and developing an action plan. The research procedures are as described in the following sections.
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Identifying an area of focus. From the beginning of this semester, I planned the lessons
in an integrative way, students are told to finish a project called “A day trip in Kaohsiung.” In this project, students are going to design a schedule as a trip adviser, including the places (Unit 3) they are going to visit, the transportation they are going to take, the food (Unit 4) they are going to enjoy, and the activities they are going to prepare for Unit 5) at various destinations. The reason for doing this type of project is to help students to actually use the language in a real-life scenario. However, I noticed that the time spent on Chinese discussion was far too much, I wanted to encourage students to speak English throughout the activities. I also asked students to rewrite the dialogue and to do a role-play activity while talking about directions in Unit Three “Is there a bus stop nearby?” I discovered that students were not confident enough to talk in front of the class in English, and usually when I speak Chinese, the students followed the Chinese instructions and discussed them in Chinese most of the time. The use of English is then limited. so I continued to seriously reflect on myinstructional methods/procedures, and I started to use more English instruction in class, I found that only a few students replied in English and reacted correspondently. In unit four
“What would you like to eat?”, I planned an activity for the students to calculate the total cost the customer had ordered. I felt disheartened that the dialogue was usually not completed and the calculation took a long time, even though the students showed an interest in this activity. I decided to plan the lesson in a way that most of the activities have to be accomplished in
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English, and I will therefore encourage the students to speak more in English. There are numerous models for the action research process. I followed the Hendricks’ model and started to develop my own action plan as shown in Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1 Modified Hendrick’s Model (2006) of Action Research Process
Collecting data. During the time I discovered the problem that neither the high nor low
proficiency students wanted to speak English in class. I remembered the time I was at cram school and thought of how I taught my class in English, I did some research on the Internet and read an article entitled “Make it Possible: The SOP of English Only in TeachingElementary School Students” by Chi (2018). In her action research, she had approved that by applying English only, the results are beneficial. First, students’ listening ability is better as
My students do not follow the English instructions and they always speak in Chinese except the time when the teacher ask them to answer in English. The students in remedial English test
scores low in classroom daily English, how can I help them to
overcome this obstacle? I coincidently read a journal article about English-only instruction, the author strongly recommend that English teachers
use EMI in class in public elementary school. She claimed it worked well in the
English class. At the same time, I’ve received an official document that encourage teachers to use 75% English in
class, for doing so, they will award teachers by two commendations.
I will observe and interview students, keep a reflective journal, analyze samples of students’ works, and ask more than two colleagues to observe my
teaching and my students. On the other hand, I will keep tract on students’
performance on listening and speaking as well as how their attitudes change
over time.
At this point, I evaluate the effectiveness of the
task-based English leaning and continue
the cycle.
I will model more strategies, such as simplified English or TPR and I will provide more task-based speaking practice e.g.
information-gap activities, reasoning-information-gap activities, and opinion-gap activities
during classes to strengthen their speaking ability.
All data sources indicate that students’ performance on listening and attitudes toward English learning have improved,
however, students are still struggling about speaking English in front of the class.
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compared to the class taught in both Chinese and English. Second, she claimed that the class taught in English only had more interest in learning English. Third, the degree of anxiety has no differences between the two classes. The research further gives suggestions to the teachers such as, keep the language short and simple, use more body language, pictures, and realia to support the lessons and let the students practice using the language. On the other hand, I did a survey among my colleagues and English teachers at other schools. Most of them still
question the method, as to whether English as a medium of instruction, and will work or not.
I started to review the related literature to further understand both the task-based approach and the EMI teaching.
Pilot study. I decided to adopt a pilot study on another class of students. The lesson plan
is in Appendix A. I conducted a Task-Based Approach to design the class curriculum on Lesson Five of Hess Give Me Five Book 7. The topic is “What will you do tomorrow?”There are three stages in each class: pre-task, main-task, and the post-task period. I added a warm-up activity in each class to keep it short and interesting to attract the students’ attention, then I began the three stages in the Task-Based procedures. In the first lesson, I asked
students to describe things they saw in the pictures downloaded from the Internet, as all of them are about outdoor activities with “real people,” which was considered as “new” to the students. The background of the pictures was in a real-life scenario in Western countries, the people in the pictures were mostly foreigners, which seemed very interesting to the students.
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They were allowed to use any form to present the answers, the classroom was full of chattering, and then they just quietly wrote the things they saw in the pictures. In the next stage, the main-task, I prepared a worksheet for each student to fill out their weekly plan and then talk to a friend, trying to figure out what was their plan in the near future. Lastly, the post-task stage, I pointed out what were the grammatical mistakes I heard and applauded the students who contributed to the activities. The full lesson plans on lesson five is in Appendix A. Since the first semester would end soon, the lesson plan was focused on the main
dialogue, but not the phonics.
Analyzing and interpreting data. The data will be collected throughout the 12 weeks
from March to May 2019. I will keep all the records such as the teaching journal, students’worksheets after each lesson, 24 class video recordings, students’ interview voice recordings, and the research peers’ interview recordings, as well as the feedback forms after the class observations, the results of their pretests and posttests on both the English performance test on listening, and the questionnaires of speaking and learning attitudes toward learning English. The qualitative data will be evaluated, triangulated, and the quantitative data analyzed by the SPSS and the descriptive statistics to see if there is any change in the students’ performance and learning attitudes.
Developing an action plan. At this stage, I will analyze the collected data and present
my conclusions in the thesis. Since the process of the action plan is a continuous cycle89
(Mertler and Charles, 2011), the findings can be used in the next stage of planning a new action. The action plan of the current research was developed according to the timeline shown in Figure 3.2. The timeline is needed in order to better understand who will be doing what and when (Mills, 2007). The development of the action plan followed Mertler’s nine steps of action research (Mertler, 2012), and I have disclosed the actions into the four stages that Mertler (2012) has proposed.