3. Methodology
3.4 Data Analysis
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
41
materials, such as lesson plans, supplementary teaching and learning materials, assignment sheets, and test and exam papers, were also collected to triangulate and elaborate the findings.
With the permission from the participants, the data collected through narratives, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations, were audio and/or
video-taped and transcribed for further analysis (Carspecken, 1996; Nunan, 1992).
The researcher’s memos and research journals, where she recorded her own attitudes, assumptions, and any changes that occur were also put to analyze to maintain a critical perspective on the data (Hood, 2009).
3.4 Data Analysis
To analyze the data, all of the collected raw data were transcribed verbatim, except for the videotaped classroom observation data, which added up to videotapes of 51 class periods. Each class lasted 45 minutes. Since it would take much more time and effort than what the researcher could manage within a limited length of time and budget to transcribe the videotapes of all 51 classes, hence only relevant segments of the videotapes were transcribed.
All of the analyses began with the researcher listening to the audiotapes and watching the videotapes recursively for several times and then transcribing the data.
With respect to the classroom observation data, after watching the videotapes of each class for several times, the researcher, building on the classroom observation records she made during the observations, strived to make the descriptions as thick as possible concerning the three aspects, that is, the procedures, content and manners of the teacher’s teaching, the responses of the students to their teacher’s teaching, and the interaction between the teacher and her students. And when any segments showed themselves to be relevant to the two research questions of the study, the researcher
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
42
transcribed the segments word by word.
Afterwards, the data were initially analyzed based on Charmaz’s (2006) grounded theory and Webster and Mertova’s critical events approach (Webster &
Mertova, 2007) to investigate what and how the teacher constructed and modified the cognitions she held concerning teaching in multilevel English classrooms and how the cognitions interacted with her classroom practices. According to Charmaz (2006), data analysis in grounded theory began with coding, which was composed of three phases of analyses, namely, initial coding, focused coding and axial coding. When engaging in initial coding, one studied small segments of data, which could be words, lines and incidents to examine their meanings analytically and generated codes that closely reflected the insider’s view. Among these initial codes, one then selected codes that were of the greatest significance and/or the highest frequency and used them to study larger segments of data. Focused codes were generally “more directed, selective and conceptual (p. 57)” than initial codes. Then, one continued to the next phase, axial coding, which was to identify the relationships between categories and subcategories and specify such relationships. Throughout the coding process, one had to employ “constant comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967)”, that is, to constantly compare data with other data, and codes with other codes so to make sure that codes were produced out of the data rather than one’s prior perspectives.
Besides, a critical events approach (Webster & Mertova, 2007) was also adopted in analyzing and coding the narrative and interview data. Such an approach for data analysis assisted the researcher in identifying the events that were
“instrumental in changing or influencing understanding (p. 71)” and subsequent behaviors of the storytellers and thus were of significant support to the researcher in recognizing the transitions of the development process of the teachers’ cognitions. In analyzing the narrative and interview data, the researcher assigned the events
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
43
recounted by Joy into “critical events (p.73),” “like events (p. 78)” or “other events (p.
78).” According to Webster and Mertova (2007), a critical event was an event that had an impact and caused a change of understanding and possibly also behaviors of the storyteller. The identification of such critical events can be verified by the recognition of like events and other events. The former refers to events that “occur at the same level as critical events (p. 78)” but happen with different people, whereas the later refers to events that “reveal the same issues and inform the critical and like events (p.
78).” The recognition of like and other events could be used to confirm and/or elaborate issues emerge from the critical events.
With the attention to the critical, like and other events, the researcher kept scrutinizing the data, generating codes and categories out of the data and specifying the relationships within them, from which salient themes emerged and were identified and extracted to make comparisons with Borg’s (2006) framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition.
The methods of data analysis are as outlined above. To increase the trustworthiness of the analysis, peer debriefing and member checking were
undertaken (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Throughout the process of data collection and analysis, any questions concerning the interpretations of reported data were constantly discussed with, clarified and corroborated by the teacher and student participants through member check. A graduate student in the same TESOL MA program that the researcher participated in was also invited to engage in peer debriefing to enhance the trustworthiness of the present study.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
44
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
45
CHAPTER FOUR FINDINGS
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the present study employed a variety of data collection methods, including teacher narrative, teacher semi-structured
interviews, informal student semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and copies of relevant course content materials to study the cognitions and practices that Joy, the teacher participant of the present study held in teaching large multilevel English classes. The obtained data were analyzed in relation to the two research questions proposed in the study: (1) what cognitions did one Taiwanese junior high school teacher hold in teaching large multilevel English classes? How did she develop such cognitions? And (2) how did the teacher’s cognitions interact with her actual classroom practices?
As teacher cognitions and practices are personal mental and actual dimensions that teachers possess with regard to their work of teaching, teacher narrative, teacher semi-structured interviews and classroom observations were utilized as the main data, with the other data serving as supplementary data to answer the two research
questions. From the data emerged four themes that were extracted and analyzed to answer the two research questions. These themes are four major cognitions and practices that Joy held in teaching large multilevel English classes, including (1) knowing and empathizing with her students; (2) building variety into teaching practices to accommodate the diversity of students; (3) adding differentiation into criteria to attend to the diversity of students and (4) admitting that things can be beyond her control.
During the data collection and analysis, it was found that Joy’s view on diverse English abilities among students seemed to be central to the four themes. In one of the interviews, Joy expressed her view on diverse English abilities among students, which
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
46
was often referred to as the phenomenon of bimodal distribution by her:
I think there’s not going to be any solution to the phenomenon of bimodal distribution, definitely not. Because you have to admit that people are born to be different. (S1, p.40)
Rather than seeing the phenomenon of bimodal distribution as a problem that needed to be tackled, Joy viewed it as a very common phenomenon as people were born with different abilities and their abilities varied across different dimensions.
Neither did she think she needed or could find “any solution to the phenomenon of bimodal distribution (E-mail, March, 14th, 2013)” or “reshape the distribution (E-mail, March, 14th, 2013)”. Instead, she believed what she should do was to appreciate “the diversity among students” and conduct teaching in a way that served the diversity in the students.
As Joy recounted how she taught large multilevel English classes, her perception of diverse English abilities among students was found to permeate and influence in some way her cognitions about teaching in such classes. Below, the four major cognitions and practices that Joy held in teaching large multilevel English classes were presented and elaborated together with how she developed such cognitions.
4.1 Knowing and Empathizing with Her Students
In discussing how she taught in large multilevel English classes, Joy expressed a deep and genuine concern about students, which could be learnt from her narration of teaching experiences. Whenever she mentioned a student in sharing her
experiential stories, she paused for a while to give the researcher some background information about that particular student, which often included more than the English
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
47
achievement of that student but also his personality, familial background and learning history. When asked about why she had such rich knowledge about students, she explained: “[I] have to know [my students]”, and then related to her somehow painful senior high school English learning experience. According to Joy, she encountered serious frustration in learning English in senior high because:
She [her English teacher, Ms. Chiang (pseudonym)] didn’t know that the children from the city, probably because they had learnt in cram schools or private institutes before, they had access to much more English resources than we [children from the countryside] did. They were really used to the reading load that she gave, but we simply could not digest all the materials…. So I was really frustrated then. (N1, p.15)
Thinking back, Joy said the experience as a lower achiever in senior high had an impact on her in two major ways. One was the realization of the need for a teacher to dig and accumulate rich knowledge about students, one category of which was the learning histories of students; the other was the ability to empathize with lower achievers. As she said with a bitter smile on her face,
[In senior high school,] I felt that it’s really painful not being able to
learn….Even till now, sometimes I still woke up from terrible nightmares about not being able to memorize two hundred vocabulary words, yeah, even till now.
So I can deeply feel the pain that these kids go through of not being able to learn. Yeah, so I never punish a student just because of his poor performance on a test. (POI6, p.18)
Such realization of the need to accumulate knowledge about students and empathize with students was later reinforced in Joy’s early teaching experiences in
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
48
two junior high schools both situated in remote rural areas of Taiwan. When talking about her first-year teaching experience in a small school in Hualian, where the majority of the students were indigenous, Joy mentioned how the students there gave her a knock on her head:
[I was in] La La junior high school, and one day the students told me ‘Ms. Lee you teach us English, and we teach you our language’….Yeah they told me that and it was like a knock on my head….[I then started thinking] if today the official language were one of the indigenous languages, then it would be us who are the lower achievers that need to take remedial classes. (I1, p.31)
While Joy had previously viewed lower achievers from a rather unitary and simplistic point of view, what the students told Joy acted like a catalyst that prodded her to reflect on and question her previous view about lower achievers and then further expand her knowledge about students to include the socio-cultural and socio-educational factors that had an impact on the students’ English learning.
Moreover, the voice that the students made also drove her to have deeper empathy for the students and feel the pain they had when encountering difficulties in learning English: “What the students told me gave me a big shock. Yeah, so we can’t think that hey why you’re so stupid, why you can’t learn, just because we’re good at English, just because it’s our thing, no, we can’t do that. (I1, p.32)”
Another reinforcing experience that strengthened Joy’s cognition about the need to know her students occurred during her M.A. thesis writing. When she was
collecting data for her thesis study, she found that her student participants
demonstrated different learning styles that seemed to have an impact on the diverse needs they presented. Such finding about her student participants drove her to read relevant literature on learning styles and needs, where she further strengthened her
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
49
cognition about the necessity to broaden and deepen knowledge about students with theoretical support.
While these sets of learning and teaching experiences worked as food for thoughts that provided experiential and theoretical support for Joy’s cognition of knowing her students in large multilevel English classes, her experience as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei offered skill support. In narrating her experience of working as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei, she attributed the enhancement of her skills in observing and knowing students to this experience:
I was required to do demonstration teaching and give talks when working as a member of the English Advisory Committee…. Doing demonstration teaching trained me to observe student responses very closely and thoroughly [because I had to derive as much info about the students as possible within limited time so that my teaching would more likely be successful]. Maybe it’s because of this experience that I can know my students well within a very short time when I go back to my own classes. Yeah I was trained to do so. It was very tough training.
(POI5, p. 14)
With these experiences, Joy in the interviews, made repetitive references to the necessity, rationale, ways and benefits of knowing and empathizing with students in large multilevel English classes. For Joy, it was of vital importance to acquire knowledge of each student, or in her words, to know “the story behind each case” in such classes otherwise students could easily hide or be overlooked in these large heterogeneous classes. Moreover, as she saw students as multi-dimensional
individuals who reached varying levels of achievement in different dimensions, she felt that it was significant to develop knowledge about students that is as holistic as
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
50
possible in such classes. As she put it, “If you can’t see and know every dimension [of a student], you’re doing harm to the student…. Because when you don’t know some other dimensions of the student, you’re misunderstanding him. (POI1, p. 32)” As a result, she stated repetitively the necessity to develop holistic knowledge about students which included understandings of cognitive development, learning styles, attention span, physical and mental states and the various dimensions of students and the factors that contributed to students’ current English proficiency levels such as their learning backgrounds and habits. Such knowledge about students, according to Joy, was essential for her to empathize with them and to conduct teaching that was tailored to them, including setting learner-tailored criteria, assigning learner-tailored learning tasks, and devising tasks and materials that were more likely to draw students’ interest and meet their proficiency levels.
When talking about the rationale and benefits of acquiring understandings about students, Joy also elaborated on how she developed such sophisticated knowledge about students, which could be classified into two major approaches: one was drawing inferences through observation of relevant educational contexts and documents and conversations with other teachers of the students; the other was direct observation of student behaviors and performances. Unlike some teachers who knew their students mostly by observing how students acted in the classroom only, Joy acquired student knowledge from a wider range of resources, including observation of the school-level and classroom-level educational contexts where students were situated and reading the demographic information forms that contained students’ family backgrounds.
Acknowledging that subject teachers could only access partial domain of information about students, Joy said she also developed her understandings from conversing with students’ homeroom teachers. Despite providing valuable information about students, these resources however could not offer first-hand information that was only available
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
51
in direct observation of student behaviors and performances. Therefore, Joy, though making good use of and benefiting from the first approach to knowing students,
valued and relied more on the second approach to obtaining knowledge about students, that is, observing, which was sometimes achieved by walking around the classroom, how students performed and responded to particular learning and assessment
materials, activities and practices.
As a matter of fact, from the interview data emerged a mutually informing relationship between what and how Joy taught and assessed students and what she knew about students: Joy designed and enacted her teaching and assessment materials, activities and practices based on her knowledge about students, and at the same time observed how the students responded to the materials and activities while teaching and assessing so to feed the newly acquired knowledge about students to subsequent design. On more than one occasion in the interviews, she said: “Faced with [such diverse] students, I used various assessment methods, and various learning [materials and activities] to discover and know the different children. (POI3, P.30)” Such knowledge were then fed back to her subsequent teaching, as she said in a later interview explaining why she taught much faster in the 9th grade: “I have taught this class for three years, well two, this is the third year. When I knew so much about the class, I am clear about what they want and how far they can go [and therefore I can teach more quickly and effectively.] (POI4, p.10)”
A review of the data from classroom observations revealed that knowing and empathizing with students were more than reported cognitions and practices, but actual practices. In the three 9th grade classrooms that Joy taught, Joy was noted to spend the majority of class time conducting teaching in a form of whole-class lecture that was based on her knowledge about students, that is, lecture that is addressed to the whole class and is from time to time modified in response to student
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
52
comprehension and performance in class. Such knowledge about students could be classified into long-acquired and newly obtained real-time student knowledge. The former refers to knowledge about students that Joy had already acquired prior to a particular class while the latter is knowledge about students that she obtained or inferred from students and their documents such as worksheets, workbooks and test papers in that class. During classroom observations, Joy was often observed to either carefully notice student responses and behaviors on the platform or walk around the classroom to know whether students were ready for an upcoming activity or on-task, how they comprehended her lecture and did on particular assignments and tests. As a classroom observation record noted:
It was the 3rd class period of today. Upon hearing the bell rang, the student assistant Lisa (pseudonym) in Sun Class [, of which Joy was an English subject teacher] distributed the test papers on unit 1 to the other students. Most students were quietly writing the test papers, with a few still lying on their desks asleep.
It was the 3rd class period of today. Upon hearing the bell rang, the student assistant Lisa (pseudonym) in Sun Class [, of which Joy was an English subject teacher] distributed the test papers on unit 1 to the other students. Most students were quietly writing the test papers, with a few still lying on their desks asleep.