5. Discussion
5.3 The Teacher’s Cognition about Students
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delineated by Farrell (2007b) so to make good use of and benefit from their personally unique experiences. This study also advances that while undertaking reflection,
teachers can appeal to theoretical knowledge to use it as a reference for conducting reflection and developing reflective skills. During the formation and development of reflective skills, some teachers may need less guidance and scaffolds, like the teacher participant, Joy, in the present study, but some do require assistance of different kinds, such as the teaching about reflection (Gunn, 2010; Liou, 2001), the provision of a supportive environment for reflection (Farrell, 1999; Liou, 2001; Orland-Barak &
Yinon, 2007; Wyatt, 2010) and the offering of an expert other (Farrell, 1999, 2007a;
Golombek and Johnson, 2004), from their colleagues and teacher educators. Lastly, as indicated in the present study, a teacher’s reflective practice may lead to improved teacher performance, but what exactly these improvements are about and how they are related to the teacher’s reflective practice needs to be further explored. More research is needed in investigating the relationship between teachers’ reflective
practice and their and their students’ performance in large multilevel English classes.
5.3 The Teacher’s Cognition about Students
A comparison between the present study and the existing studies on teaching English in multilevel classes reveals that Joy perceived students and student learning differently from the participants in most of those studies and such distinctions seemed to play a core role in their cognitions and/or practices of teaching English to
multilevel classes. In most of the studies that the researcher reviewed with respect to teaching English to multilevel classes, the teacher participants tended to view diverse English abilities among students as a problem or some sort of threat to their teaching effectiveness (Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Maddalena, 2002; Teng, 2009; Xanthou &
Pavlou, 2008). However, the teacher participant in this study, Joy, perceived diverse
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English abilities among students in a different way. Instead of conceiving different English abilities among students as a problem, Joy viewed it as a very normal phenomenon. Such conception of diverse English abilities among students was also found to be related somehow to her cognition about students, cognitions and practices of teaching English to students with different English proficiency levels.
In addition, while most of the teacher participants in the studies on teaching English to multilevel classes seemed to conceive students as unitary receptive English language learners, Joy, nonetheless, understood them as multidimensional agents, who by nature possessed different abilities and whose abilities varied across different dimensions. The conception of her students as multidimensional active learning agents allowed Joy to acknowledge and respect the agency, “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001, p. 112)”, that her students exercised in directing their learning pathways. Such difference in their cognitions about students seemed to result in dissimilar focuses in their cognitions and practices of teaching in large multilevel English classes. While elaborating on how they taught large
multilevel English classes, the teacher participants in the previous studies were found to focus on and emphasize strongly what they did to engage students with different English proficiency levels (Liu, 2004; Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009); Joy, however, described her teaching to such classes with more consideration of her students and the tacit but rather clear recognition of the need to value learner agency. Such recognition can be learnt from the practices that Joy conducted to enhance learners’ desire to learn English and the practices that she carried out to construct room for students’ decision making on their own English learning.
In teaching English to large multilevel classes, Joy tried to enhance students’
desire to learn English by building variety into her teaching practices on the basis of her knowledge about students. However, she did so with the recognition that she
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could only “stimulate” her students and the final control of whether to increase their desire to learn or not was in the hands of each of her students. Such recognition of the control that learners possess in enhancing their desire to learn and attention to the dynamic and often individualistic and complex nature of learners’ desire to learn draw Joy’s conception of students’ orientation toward learning, or in her words, “students’
motivation”, more in line with the notion of “investment” proposed by Norton (1995), a term that Norton proposed to replace the dominant concept of motivation. With the notion of investment, Norton intended to capture the complex relationship between language learners and the commitment they made to the target languages. Such an understanding represents a more authentic and sophisticated frame of students’ desire to learn than the old conception of motivation, and places increased recognition to the agency that learners exercise in their learning. While Joy conceived students’
orientation toward English learning in this way, the teacher participants in most of the studies on teaching English in multilevel classrooms tended to conceive students’
motivation as a more simplified stimulus-responsive characteristic intrinsic to students without much consideration of the impact of learners’ other individual characteristics and the socio-cultural contexts where they were situated on their motivation. For example, in the studies that explored what effective strategies and practices that teachers employed in teaching multilevel English classes (Chen, 2009;
Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009; Xanthou & Pavlou, 2008), the teacher participants enumerated the practices that they found to be effective in motivating their students without much reference to their students’ control of engaging in those practices and what other factors, except for their students’
respective English abilities, might have an impact on their students’ different levels of motivation in particular occasions, which seemed to imply their view of students as passive stimulus-responsive processors. However, the reference to learners’ control
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was repetitively mentioned by Joy, who tried to engage students by investing in them, that is, by accumulating holistic and in-depth knowledge about each of her students and devising various practices based on such knowledge. Even though she tried to make students feel they were invested, Joy did not think particular practices could definitely result in more investments made by the students as they also exercised certain control while learning. As Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) noted, “It is agency that links motivation, more recently conceptualized as investment by Norton Peirce (1995) to action and defines a myriad of paths taken by learners (p. 146)”. In such a way, Joy, in teaching large multilevel classes, recognized and respected the agency that her students exercised in directing their own learning.
Besides recognizing and respecting learner agency, Joy also allowed and encouraged her students to exercise learner agency by providing room in her teaching practices for students to make decisions for their learning. While talking about her teaching in large multilevel English classes, Joy mentioned the dilemma she faced when setting her students with different English proficiency levels the same learning criteria. This difficulty was also articulated by the teacher participants in other studies (Chen, 2009; Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009). The teachers in the studies of Chen (2009) and Chiang (2003) said to present students of different English proficiency levels reasonable challenges in the classroom, they would ask students different levels of questions and give them different levels of learning materials that met their abilities. To sustain students’ learning when they stepped outside the classroom, teachers in the studies of Chiang (2003), Liu, (2004), Lu (2011) and Teng (2009) also expressed that they would design multilevel assignments for their students.
These teaching practices did reflect the teachers’ concern for students with different English abilities and efforts to take good care of them, but such teacher-imposed differentiated practices could result in a decline in slower-learners’ self-perceptions
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(Rubie-Davies, 2006). Joy, on the contrary, despite also trying to take care of students with different English abilities with differentiated learning criteria, on most occasions, left her students the control of deciding the mastery level they want to achieve, as in the examples of designing 5-level oral exams, worksheets with multilevel sections, and various supplementary materials. By doing so, Joy on the one hand offered choice for her students, which was noted as one determinant of agency (van Lier, 2008); on the other, avoided the possible impacts of her differentiated expectations on students’
learning. As a matter of fact, Joy did not only adopt an attitude of valuing learner agency in her teaching practices, but also took the same attitude when faced with the various decisions that students made with regard to their English learning.
Recognizing that multiple factors could be at play in each student’s investment in his/her English learning, Joy said she could only try as hard as possible in teaching multilevel English classes, and respect the decisions students made with regard to their English learning.
The results of the present study and related studies on teaching English to multilevel English classes shows that teachers’ cognitions about teaching English in multilevel classrooms could be largely informed by their cognitions about students.
Joy’s conception of students as multidimensional agents led her to conceptualize a balanced picture of teaching and learning in large multilevel English classes, which might also suggest the need for future research to further investigate the relationship between teachers’ cognitions, practices and students’ learning (which does not receive much attention in the present study) in large multilevel English classes if we seek to have a more balanced, holistic and in-depth understanding of teaching and learning in such classes.