國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
6
cognitive dimension of teaching and how this dimension of teaching is related to actual practice of teaching, which are viewed to be central to a deepened
understanding of a teacher and her teaching (Borg, 2006; Freeman, 2002). Chen (2009) only devoted to derive general patterns of teachers’ perceptions toward their
difficulties and remedial practices. Liu (2004) despite adopting classroom observation as one method of data collection, presented only teachers’ reported difficulties and practices in teaching English in multilevel classrooms. Chiang (2003), despite conducting a two-phase study to investigate the effective strategies that primary school English teachers employed in teaching multilevel classes, focused mainly on teachers’ shared practices with limited consideration of their personal cognitions.
Two more recent studies (Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009), with the recognition of the interactive relationship between teachers’ cognition and classroom practice,
investigated the beliefs and practices that teachers held in teaching large multilevel English classes. However, as Teng (2009) only examined the beliefs and practices of two experienced elementary school English teachers, she could hardly explain the correspondence between the two teachers’ beliefs and practices further other than the attribution to their rich teaching experiences. Lu (2011), though studying the issue more holistically by incorporating the development process of the teachers’ beliefs in large multilevel English classes, failed to produce a genuine picture and
understanding due to her somewhat inappropriate method design and data presentation.
1.2 Significance of the Study
In order to provide a more genuine, holistic and in-depth understanding of teaching English in multilevel classrooms, this study explored the learning to teach and teaching experiences of a junior high school English teacher in multilevel
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
7
classrooms and examined the cognitions and practices she developed in teaching and learning to teach such classes. The findings may inform teachers, researchers and other stakeholders of multilevel English classes about teaching and learning in multilevel English classes.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
8
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
9
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
The following literature review aims to provide an orientation for the present study and it covers five major sections. The first section begins with an introduction to existing research on language teacher cognition, which includes elaboration of the notion of language teacher cognition, a brief introduction of teacher cognition research where language teacher cognition research draws its conceptual basis, the numerous perspectives from which this field of research have been studied and the perspective from which the study was undertaken. Then, the second section elaborates Borg’s (2006) framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition, which was employed as the theoretical framework of this study, and the existing studies that have been conducted through the theoretical lens of Borg’s framework.
The third and fourth sections respectively examine the issue of teaching English in multilevel classes in general and a focused discussion of the issue in Taiwan. These four sections then lead to the final section, which illustrates the rationale and the research questions of the present study.
2.1 Research on Language Teacher Cognition
Over the years, as increasing recognition has been given to the characterization of teachers as active thinking agents and knowing professionals (Borg, 2003, 2006, 2009; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Woods, 1996), more and more researchers have engaged themselves in studying the psychological dimension of teaching and its impacts on teachers’ actual practice of teaching. Studying respectively from various perspectives and on different aspects of the issue, researchers have proposed a multitude of terms to describe, wholly or partially, the psychological context of teaching, which resulted in a “definitional confusion” (Eisenhart, Shrum, Harding &
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
10
Cuthbert, 1988). Given the complex, multidimensional and intertwined nature of the psychological dimension of teaching, Borg (2003, 2006, 2009), in studying this issue in the context of language education, proposed language teacher cognition as a collective term, to refer to the unobservable mental dimension of teaching, which includes “what language teachers think, know, and believe (Borg, 2006, p.1)”.
According to Borg (2003, 2006, 2009) and Freeman (2002), research on language teacher cognition emerged from general educational teacher cognition research and did not start to take hold until the mid 1990s. As the conceptual basis of language teacher cognition research, general education research on teacher cognition has a longer history, which traces its origin back to the 1970s. Before the 1970s, the field of educational research was fairly under the sway of a positivist epistemological perspective (Borg, 2006, 2009; Freeman, 2002; Johnson, 2009). Knowledge is
understood to be objective and generalizable from a positivist view. Consequently, the educational research at that time was dominated by a large amount of
“process-product” research, which sought to identify effective teaching behaviors that would lead to greater learning outcomes so that other teachers could follow the
behaviors normatively. However, such an epistemological perspective started to suffer growing criticism since the 1970s. In a critical response to the positivist paradigm, an interpretative epistemological perspective began to take hold in educational research.
An interpretative perspective considers knowledge to be socially constructed and hard to be abstracted from the social practices and contexts where it emerged. Adopting an interpretative perspective in conducting research on teaching thus means the need to go beyond the descriptions of teaching behaviors and to delve into what and how teachers know about their work and why they do what they do in their teaching
contexts. From this stance, it was revealed that how and why teachers do what they do were largely informed by their previous experiences and teaching contexts they are
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
11
situated, which characterizes a sociocultural perspective of teacher learning. And it is based on such a perspective about human learning, either partially or fully, that a substantial amount of research on teacher cognition evolves (Johnson, 2009).
As Borg (2006, 2009) noted, teacher cognition research was initiated at the year of 1975, when one group of experts in the field of education convened in a conference and argued that researchers needed to study the relationships between teachers’
classroom practices and the thoughts that underpinned their practices so to have a better understanding of teachers. From then on, there was a steady growth of studies examining the cognitions of teachers, which over the years have shifted their
predominant perspectives. In the early years of the inquiry into teacher cognition, studies mainly focused on teachers’ planning, judgment and decision-making, which however were later recognized to be not sufficiently holistic in studying teacher cognition. From the 1980s, works that adopted a more holistic perspective to view teacher cognition and practice began to emerge; these included studies of teachers’
knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 1987; Connelly, Clandinin & He, 1997; Elbaz, 1981; Shulman, 1986, 1987), learning to teach process (Calderhead, 1988; Carter, 1990), and beliefs (Pajares, 1992; Thompson, 1992).
It is based on the research of teacher cognition in the context of mainstream education that language teacher cognition research develops (Borg, 2003, 2006, 2009;
Freeman, 2002). Drawing on the various perspectives from which studies about teacher cognition in the general education context have studied, research on language teacher cognition has been conducted from a substantial number of views to study the mental lives of language teachers, including reasons for instructional decisions, rationale for improvisational teaching, beliefs, and practical knowledge, to name a few.
Informed by the general educational research on teachers’ decision-making, a
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
12
number of studies about language teacher cognition focused on the examination of factors accounting for the decisions language teachers made with regard to their instruction and improvisational teaching (Johnson, 1992; Osam & Balbay, 2004;
Richards, 1998; Smith, 1996; Ulichny, 1996; Yang, 2010). In the early stage of inquiry into the decisions teachers made prior to and during their teaching, the research focus was placed primarily on the identification of the immediate antecedents to the decisions (Johnson, 1992; Richards, 1998; Smith, 1996). For example, in examining the instructions and decisions of six pre-service ESL teachers, Johnson (1992) found that the instructional decisions of these teachers were largely influenced by “unexpected student behavior (p. 527)”, a finding that was also reported in Smith (1996). In her study of the pedagogical decisions of a group of experienced ESL teachers, Smith noted that “student affective states (p. 210)” were of major concern in the teachers’ interactive decisions. It did not seem to be later that the research on language teachers’ decision making started to examine the issue more holistically by relating the decisions that teachers made with the larger other than the immediate contexts where the teachers were situated (Osam & Balbay, 2004; Yang, 2010). In the studies of Osam and Balbay (2004) and Yang (2010), the researchers found that the institutional and ethic cultures that dominated the teaching contexts of the teachers could also have a major impact on their decision making.
In addition to the teachers’ decision making, a portion of research on language teacher cognition, drawing from mainstream educational research on teachers’
knowledge, examined language teacher cognition more holistically from this perspective (Ariogul, 2007; Chen, 2005; Chou, 2008; Golombek, 1998;
Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2011; Sun, 2012; Tsang, 2004; Woods, 1996). Employing the notion of personal practical knowledge proposed by Clandinin and Connelly (1987),
Golombek (1998) studied the personal practical knowledge (PPK) of two ESL
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
13
teachers and found their PPK, which was composed of knowledge of self, subject matter, instruction and context and was constructed from their previous learning and teaching experiences, informed their practice by serving as an interpretive framework and shaping their practice. Examining the PPK of an immigrant Chinese language teacher, Sun (2012) also confirmed the impact of previous personal experiences on a teacher’s PPK, but added “how profoundly an immigrant teacher’s identity and cultural heritage can shape personal practical knowledge and teaching practice (p.
766)”. Also focusing on the examination of the knowledge of language teachers, Woods (1996) however employed a different concept, that is, beliefs, assumptions and knowledge (BAK) in an attempt to recognize the interconnected nature within. Using this notion to examine the teachers’ prior experiences and interpretation of classroom events, Woods (1996) found a teacher’s BAK evolved through her learning and teaching experiences and played a role in both the “perceiving and thinking about (p.
247)” the classroom events and the “structuring and organizing (p. 247)” of the instructional decisions.
Like Woods, Borg (2003, 2006) in reviewing the existing literature on teacher cognition in the contexts of mainstream education and language teaching, recognized the interwoven nature of the various constructs within the mental lives of teachers.
Hence, instead of compartmentalizing the sub-constructs for the sake of clarity, Borg (2003, 2006) proposed and used teacher cognition as an inclusive term to “embrace the complexity of teachers’ mental lives (Borg, 2003, p. 86)”. Based on the studies he reviewed, Borg (2006) also proposed a framework for the conceptualization and investigation of language teacher cognition to illustrate the interrelated and interactive relationships among teachers’ learning, cognition and classroom practice. As the present study aimed to explore a Taiwanese junior high school English teacher’s teaching in large multilevel English classes holistically, Borg’s (2006) framework of
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
14
elements and processes in language teacher cognition was thus employed as the theoretical framework of this study to assist the researcher in examining the teacher participant’s cognitions, practices and learning-to-teach process in large multilevel English classes from a sociocultural perspective in an in-depth and holistic manner. In the following section, the framework of Borg and the studies that have been
conducted based on the framework are elaborated.
2.2 Borg’s (2006) Framework of Elements and Processes in Language Teacher Cognition
Based on his review of existing studies on language teacher cognition, Borg (2006) proposed a framework to conceptualize the cognitions of language teachers, how they developed and related their cognitions to their classroom practices. The framework could be represented by the following figure.
Figure 1. Elements and processes in language teacher cognition (from Borg, 2006, p. 283)
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
15
According to Borg (2006), language teacher cognition played a critical role in teachers’ professional lives. Language teachers had cognitions about many aspects of their work, which ranged from personal understandings of self and colleagues, to those of subject matter, curricula, materials, activities, assessment and context and more generally to those of teaching, teachers, learning and learners. Language
teachers constructed and reconstructed these cognitions throughout their professional lives. During the schooling phase, language teachers might develop preconceptions about teaching from their interactions with significant others such as their parents and teachers. Then, they carried these preconceptions to teacher education programs, where their existing cognitions and their participation in the program exercised a mutual impact on each other. The mutually interactional relationship also existed between language teachers’ cognitions and classroom practices, which were mediated by the interaction between their cognitions and the contextual factors in their teaching contexts that were so critical and integral to the teachers’ classroom practices. In addition to the contextual factors, language teachers’ prior teaching experiences could also have an impact on their cognitions and practices in an unconscious manner or through conscious reflection.
With this framework, Borg provided an orientation for conceptualizing existing and conducting further research on language teacher cognition. A review of existing studies revealed that Borg’s (2006) framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition have been employed by a number of recent studies, with many of them being thesis and dissertation studies (Attia, 2011; Martinez, 2011; Mori, 2011;
Nishino, 2009, 2012; Sasajima, 2012; Shih, 2011). To investigate the cognition and use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) of three in-service teachers of teaching Arabic to speakers of other languages (TASOL) in Egypt, Attia (2011) utilized Borg’s (2006) framework as a conceptual springboard to explore her
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
16
research problems. Based on data collected from a variety of sources, she found that teachers’ cognitions about teaching, learning and themselves, which were developed and redeveloped from their prior experiences, mediated their practices of integrating ICT into instruction and determined how they perceived and responded to the
challenges within their teaching context. While affirming the role that the framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition played in guiding her exploration of the relationships between teacher cognitions and use of ICT, Attia (2011) still proposed four major modifications to the framework to make it more reflective of her study. First, she downgraded the elements that language teachers had cognitions about to the overarching concept of ICT. Second, she replaced the
schooling and professional coursework boxes with boxes of early experiences as learner and teacher education to make the framework more accurately descriptive of the elements within her study. Third, she connected the boxes of early experiences as learner and teacher education through the box of language teacher cognition in an attempt to highlight the relationships among the three. Lastly, she positioned contextual factors in teaching around both classroom practice and language teacher cognition to emphasize that language teacher cognition was studied within the context.
In another dissertation study (Martinez, 2011), Borg’s (2006) framework was also employed to be one of the theoretical lenses to view the research puzzles. In her study, Martinez (2011) used the conceptual frameworks of social constructivism and
language teacher cognition to examine the cognitions of five first-year teacher assistants (TAs) and how they developed and redeveloped their cognitions and practices during their learning-to-teach process in a university in the U.S.. In the research process, Martinez (2011) recognized the value of the language teacher cognition framework in guiding her to conceptualize the mental processes through which teachers made sense of their prior experiences and classroom practices. But she
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
17
also found Borg’s (2006) model to be rather limited as it did not account for the learning and teaching experiences that language teachers developed outside of the classroom, which she believed could also be critical forces that shaped the cognitions of language teachers.
In addition to the aforementioned two studies, another four studies conducted in the context of Eastern countries such as Japan and Taiwan also adopted Borg’s (2006) model of elements and processes in language teacher cognition as their conceptual framework or a basis to formulate their own frameworks. In employing a mixed method research design to investigate the beliefs and practices with regard to communicative language teaching (CLT) of Japanese high school teachers, Nishino (2009, 2012) drew on Borg’s (2003) framework to develop a hypothesized path model of her own. Based on Borg’s (2003) framework, which was grounded in his review of mainstream educational teacher cognition research and was the basis of his later framework proposed in the year of 2006, Nishino formulated a path model of teacher beliefs and practices to expound the relationships among teachers’ beliefs, practices, prior learning and teacher training experiences, perceived teaching efficacy and contextual factors. With her research results, Nishino found her results were more in line with the framework of Borg (2006) than that of Borg (2003), and emphasized the closely interconnected relationship between teachers’ classroom practices and their teaching contexts. Recognizing from her study that teachers’ classroom practices were highly contextualized, Nishino also suggested that the framework of Borg (2006) might be more suitable to be used as a conceptual framework of qualitative studies.
Also studied from a teacher cognition perspective, Mori (2011) adopted the
framework of Borg (2006) as the theoretical lens to view how the cognitions of two post-secondary English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in Japan shaped their corrective feedback practices. Noticing that the inquiry into teachers’ corrective
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
18
feedback practices from such perspective was still rather limited, Mori, with her study, stressed how study teachers’ cognitions that underpinned their corrective feedback practices could produce a more nuanced understanding of the practices and the wider contexts where these practices were adopted. While Nishino (2009, 2012) and Mori (2011) affirmed the value of Borg’s (2006) framework in guiding them to examine teachers’ cognitions within their contexts, Sasajima (2012) in utilizing the language teacher cognition framework to investigate the cognitions of Japanese secondary school English teachers, however, found it hard to reflect the situated, social and local nature of the cognitions of his participants, and thus proposed a modified framework which was developed based on that of Borg (2006). Another study that was also conducted in the context of secondary schools employed Borg’s framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition to examine the cognitions and practices of two Taiwanese English teachers with varying amount of teaching
experiences in teaching aboriginal junior high school students in a remedial program (Shih, 2011). With the research findings, Shih confirmed Borg’s (2006) framework concerning the impacts of the teachers’ prior learning and teaching experiences and teaching contexts on their cognitions. However, she found the framework of Borg (2006) to be not sufficiently detailed in terms of its explication of contextual factors.
While Borg used contextual factors to refer to “the social, psychological and environmental realities of the school and classroom (Borg, 2003, p. 94)” generally, Shih noted that the roles that teachers played in their teaching contexts could also had an impact on the power they enjoyed and in turn the classroom practices they
employed in the contexts. In her study, Shih thus suggested that a more elaborate definition of contextual factors should be included in the framework.
The review of studies that have been conducted through the theoretical lens of Borg’s (2006) framework showed that Borg (2006)’s framework of elements and
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
19
processes in language teacher cognition could be of considerable value in guiding researchers in conceptualizing language teachers’ cognitions, how they developed and related their cognitions to their classroom practices. As the current study aimed to develop a holistic and in-depth understanding of a Taiwanese junior high school English teacher’s psychological and actual practice of teaching in large multilevel English classes, Borg’s (2006) framework was taken as the conceptual framework that guided the researcher throughout the research process. In the following section, a
processes in language teacher cognition could be of considerable value in guiding researchers in conceptualizing language teachers’ cognitions, how they developed and related their cognitions to their classroom practices. As the current study aimed to develop a holistic and in-depth understanding of a Taiwanese junior high school English teacher’s psychological and actual practice of teaching in large multilevel English classes, Borg’s (2006) framework was taken as the conceptual framework that guided the researcher throughout the research process. In the following section, a