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In the past decades, remedial education has increasingly been implemented into both secondary and higher education systems because of the uneven distribution of wealth that has indirectly influenced the unequal educational opportunities (Hsu, Yu,
& Chang, 2010). In addition, race issues have been paid much more attention than before for the disparate schooling and educational resources (Tsai, 2004). As a consequence, more and more people observed this problem and proposed remedial programs to make up the disparity, as well as to equip students with required and necessary skills and knowledge to meet the basic capabilities at schools (Rienties, Tempelaar, Dijkstra, Rehm, & Gijselaers, 2008). Also, Bettinger and Long (2005) claimed that a main purpose of remedial courses is to assist underachievers‟ and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and to help establish a smooth
transition to the following step of their schooling or career. While numerous remedial programs for underachievers have been employed (Adelman, 2004; Attewell, Lavin, Domina, & Levey, 2006; Bettinger, & Long, 2005; Chang, 2001; Rienties, Tempelaar, Dijkstra, Rehm, & Gijselaers, 2008; Tan & Wu, 2009), few have carried out for the disadvantaged students (e.g. aboriginal, disadvantaged background students) in educational settings.
Since the 1960s in the United States, remedial education is very common, especially at universities, and many undergraduates would choose those kinds of courses to help them accomplish their academic goals (Attewell, Lavin, Domina, &
Levey, 2006). The study conducted by Bettinger and Long (2005) examined approximately 8,000 freshman‟s learning outcomes after attending remediation courses at Ohio university from fall 1998 to spring 2003 or 2004, by controlling student background variables and using longitudinal data. The results showed that the graduation rate of those students participating in the remedial courses was similar to that of highly academically prepared students. Students could benefit a lot and had
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several positive effects from the remedial education (Bettinger & Long, 2005, Lavin et al., 2005). Nevertheless, other researchers claimed that not all students enrolling in the remedial program could have certain benifical consequences (Adelman, 2004).
Some may fail to complete remedial courses and some may drop out.
While many studies in relation to remedial programs were conducted in
universities in America and attention was paid to underachievers‟ learning outcomes, this phenomenon also has flourished in Taiwan from the year 2000. With the
implementation of the Nine-year Integrated Curriculum, all public schools need to offer English courses to students from grades three. Because of the earlier second language learning and uneven resources distribution, underachievers and
disadvantaged students fail to catch up in their language learning. Twin-peak
distribution of English learning has occurred (Chang, & Yu, 2004). The government has striven to carry out the remedial programs, such as Educational Priority Area (EPA), After School Alternative Program (ASAP), Education for Sustainable
Development (ESD), Hand-in-Hand After School Tutoring Program (HHASTP), and other plans in order to resolve this problem, to compensate the disadvantaged students for lower academic achievement, and to make up the learning gap at the starting point in elementary and high schools (MOE, 2004). Although Taiwan educators claimed that remedial education is designed for disadvantaged students and aims to help them achieve high academic performances, many remedial programs (e.g. ASAP, ESD, HHASTP) are applied to underachievers. Many studies were conducted related to various remedial programs and underachievers. In the current study, the researcher aims to focus on issues of remedial programs for disadvantaged students.
2.3.2 Remedial Education for Disadvantaged Students
In the field of remedial education for disadvantaged students, most studies focus
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on how to implement remedial programs efficiently. Chang (2001); for example, compared Taiwan remedial education with remedial education in Western countries and discussed how to design and improve the remedial programs to suit change to Taiwan. In Chang‟s (2001) research, he introduced different aspects of remedial courses and instructions such as the types of courses and the effective teaching strategies by collecting other‟s studies. The implication was that designing remedial instructions or handouts for individuals, choosing adaptive learning materials, training teachers‟ with professional knowledge for teaching remedial courses were all of importance when the educational authorities implemented the policy into schools.
Also, Tan and Wu (2009) examined difficulties the disadvantaged students faced in Taipei. Both studies urged that disadvantaged students mostly come from
low-socioeconomic backgrounds causing them to receive little educational resources which affected the students‟ academic performance.
Nevertheless, Chen (2008) provided a different perspective in her study which aimed to observe how the remedial programs ASAP, were conducted in Taiwan. She pointed out that remote areas obtained lots of ASAP resources. The major problems which caused students‟ lower achievement were that firstly, certified teachers lack professional trainings in the field of remedial education; secondly, parents do not take children‟s academic achievement seriously; thirdly, students themselves are lacking high learning motivations. Students are inclined to give up their study when meeting some familial difficulties including parents‟ divorce, child abuse, and an absence of parents with the role being filled by grand-parents family. According to Chen‟s research, the urgent issue for the implementation of remedial education is to develop teacher education, which scaffolds teachers to combine the theoretical and practical issues in their teaching practice so as to cope with the difficulties. Tsai and Hou (2009) echoed Chen‟s notion and proclaimed that teachers need not only be equipped with
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professional knowledge but also need to transform knowledge to assist disadvantaged students. Teachers indeed play a crucial role in remedial programs, so investigating how teachers think, act, and perform their instruction in remedial courses is important.
In conclusion, the previous research focuses mainly on remedial programs implementation and underachievers learning outcome; however, few of the studies portrait in detail how teacher‟s cognition interweaves with practice in the second language remedial programs for disadvantaged students. This study aimed to investigate teachers‟ cognition and teaching practices in the remedial program.
The literature review has shown how teacher cognition interweaves with classroom practice, which is vital to get further understanding of teacher cognitive development. It has also shown studies related to remedial programs and teachers and students‟ difficulties in remedial courses. Based on Borg‟s theoretical framework of teacher cognition, the research therefore conducted a study to investigate teachers‟
cognition and teaching practices in the remedial program. In the next chapter, methods used in the current study are described in detail.
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CHAPTER 3 METHOD
This chapter describes the setting, participants, data collections, and data analysis.