5. Discussion
5.1 The Impact of Experience on the Teacher’s Cognition and Practice
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CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION
The previous chapter presents four major cognitions that Joy held in teaching large multilevel English classes, how she developed such cognitions, and how she externalized and negotiated these cognitions in the observed teaching context. Since the present study aims to present an in-depth and holistic picture and understanding of teaching in large multilevel English classes, this chapter discusses four themes that have emerged from the findings presented in the earlier chapter, which include the impact of experience on the teacher’s cognition and practice, reflection, the teacher’s cognition about students, and the impact of context on the teacher’s cognition and practice.
5.1 The Impact of Experience on the Teacher’s Cognition and Practice
In discussing teaching in multilevel classrooms, teachers and researchers have tended to focus on the difficulties encountered and the practices found to be effective in addressing the problems in teaching such classes (Chen, 2009; Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Maddalena, 2002; Xanthou & Pavlou, 2008). Few of them have probed further to understand the mental dimension of teaching that accounts for how and why certain practices are adopted in particular periods of class time and specific teaching contexts (Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009), hence rendering their discussions rather superficial touching only the surface of teaching. The present study, however, drawing on a teacher narrative, interviews, observations and document analyses, presents a more in-depth picture of how the teacher participant, Joy, taught large multilevel English classes, what cognitions she held in teaching such classes and how she developed such cognitions.
With the findings, the researcher found that what and how Joy taught in large
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multilevel English classes were closely related to the cognitions she held in teaching such classes, which were shown to be largely informed by the various experiences that she had accumulated. In fact, the impact of experience on language teacher cognition has already been made quite evident in the existing literature, which does not only recognize the effects that teachers’ experience have on their cognitions but also contends that the experience of teachers are one of the significant contributors to the formation and development of their cognitions (Bailey et al., 1996; Borg, 1999, 2003, 2006; Ellis, 2004; Freeman, 1993; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Woods, 1996).
Accompanied with such recognition of the importance of teacher experiences was the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the knowledge that teachers produce out of their professional experience. Scholars such as Schön (1983) and Wallace (1991) both proposed terms “knowing-in-action” and “experiential knowledge” that gave due recognition and fair value to the knowledge that teachers derived from their
experience. Borg (1999) in studying the theories underlying the grammar teaching of five teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), argued that the exploration into the theories that teachers held were unlikely to be made without an examination of the crucial experiences of the teachers and the significance they attached to the
experiences. A few years later, Borg (2006), based on the language teacher cognition research, further proposed a schematic framework to conceptualize language teacher cognition where the impacts of the vast experiences that language teachers acquired through schooling, professional coursework, and previous classroom practices on their cognitions were clearly noted.
In line with Borg’s (2006) framework, the present study showed that the varied experiences that Joy had acquired during different phases of her previous professional life had impacts on a variety of her cognitions and classroom practices in large
multilevel English classes. Moreover, a closer look at Joy’s stories revealed that these
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experiences were capitalized on in different ways by her for her professional growth.
The manners that Joy capitalized on her professional experiences could be classified into three ways, including feeling, thinking and developing skills and ideas out of the experiences. Building on these critical experiences (Webster & Mertova, 2007), Joy then constructed and re-constructed her cognitions and classroom practices in teaching large multilevel English classes. For example, in recounting her senior high school learning experience of English, she explained how this horrible experience on the one hand, became food for her to feel and empathize with the pain that lower achieving students went through, and on the other, worked as food for her to think about the need to accumulate holistic knowledge about students. According to Joy, this traumatic experience provided her access to experiencing the painful feelings that lower achieving students underwent, which she believed some teachers could hardly understand due to their smooth and outstanding learning experiences. Consequently, Joy felt she was, compared with some of the other teachers, more able to empathize with students and accumulate holistic knowledge about them. The impact of the language learning experiences, whether good or bad, of teachers on their cognitions and classroom practices were also noted in several studies (Ellis, 2004; Golombek, 1998; Johnson, 1994; Lu, 2011; Numrich, 1996; Woods, 1996). In exploring whether the variety of a group of monolingual and multilingual teachers’ language learning experiences were reflected in their professional knowledge, Ellis (2004) described how two monolingual teachers in her study reported to have developed empathy for their students out of their previous frustrating learning experiences of foreign languages, and concluded that the unsuccessful language learning experiences of these monolingual teachers had gone through seemed to result in their belief that language learning was difficult and led them “to over-emphasize the difficulties and underplay the prospect of success (p.104)”, which she suspected could have a
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negative impact on the learning of their students. While Ellis was concerned that the limited and traumatic foreign language learning experiences of the monolingual teachers in her study might not be sufficient for them to present a balanced picture of language learning for their students, the same negative language learning experience that Joy had gone through in senior high school however was perceived by her as a valuable resource as which laid the affective basis for her to know and empathize with her students, particularly the lower achievers, in large multilevel English classes.
In addition to her senior high school learning experience, Joy also reported that her early teaching experience in La La junior high school, a remote resource-deficient school where most of the students there were lower achieving students, offered her access to the frustrating feelings that lower achievers experienced and hence
reinforced her cognition of knowing and empathizing with her students. Moreover, the awareness of the difficulties that her culturally-disadvantaged students experienced in learning English also led her to think and question the validity of setting the same learning criteria for all students and to recognize that certain things were beyond her control. In fact, when recounting her prior teaching experiences, Joy stressed
repetitively how critical the experience of her first full year teaching in La La junior high school was to her. Several studies have discussed the impact of language
teachers’ prior teaching experiences on their development of cognitions and classroom practices (Crookes & Arakaki, 1999; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Lu, 2011; Mok, 1994; Woods, 1996), with a not small proportion of which focusing particularly on the influence that the first year of teaching of novice language teachers has on their cognitions and classroom practices. In exploring the teaching experiences of language teachers in their first year, researchers (Farrell, 2003, 2006; Werbinska, 2011)
affirmed the significant impact that this period of teaching experience could have on the future careers of the teachers, as it exposed the teachers, probably for the first time,
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to the realistic picture of classroom life and the complexities within, which often posed challenges of different sorts to them. To assist these beginning teachers in the transition, Farrell (2006) suggested that language teacher education programs should
“promote development of skills in anticipatory reflection (p.218)”. In the present study, Joy mentioned many problems caused by the students and the difficult
socio-educational context in her first year of teaching in La La junior high school and even reported to have experienced a strong sense of powerlessness while teaching there. However, despite so, Joy was able to draw upon her reflective abilities and skills to reflect on her classroom experiences, extend and derive new understandings about the problems that she encountered, hence making the hard year a fruitful experience that contributed to three of the four major cognitions she held in teaching large multilevel English classes.
Having taught for about ten years, Joy attended an in-service teacher education MA program, where she accumulated a large amount of theoretical knowledge and further added theoretical vigor to her experiential cognition of knowing students. A review of existing research showed that a large number of studies have been conducted to examine the impact of pre-service teacher education programs on the cognitions of prospective teachers, but much less research was carried out to study the impact that in-service teacher education degree programs on the cognitions of
practicing teachers. Of the studies about the impact of teacher education programs on the cognitions of teachers in the in-service contexts, most were conducted during the teacher’s participation in the programs and examined the cognitive and/or behavioral changes of the teachers that resulted from their experiences in the programs (Borg, 2011; Freeman, 1993; Lamie, 2004). These studies reported impacts of different kinds, such as changes in beliefs (Borg, 2011), increasing ability to use professional
language and awareness of their conceptions of practice (Freeman, 1993). The
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impacts resulted from the participation of in-service teacher education program were also perceived and mentioned by Joy, who in telling her stories, referred to the
experience of participating in the program far more than once and emphasized how it, particularly the experience of conducting her thesis study, had “changed” her
significantly in terms of her ability to “bridge the gap between theory and practice”.
Such bridging of theory and practice was represented by her connection of her finding from her student participants that different learning styles might result in various learning needs to her reading of relevant theoretical studies. This experience, Joy concluded, added some theoretical vigor to her cognition of accumulating holistic knowledge about students that she had formed and developed from personal experiences in the classroom.
As discussed so far, this study supports the framework proposed by Borg (2006).
But more than being in line with Borg’s framework, this study intends to extend the framework and argue that language teachers structured and re-structured their cognitions and practices not just out of their experiences of schooling, professional coursework and prior classroom practices. The data presented in this study revealed that Joy, unlike the teachers delineated in Borg’s framework, also developed her cognitions and practices about teaching in large multilevel English classes from her additional educational experiences of working as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei, as an advisory teacher at the Ministry of Education and attending an overseas educational visit. Besides working as a school teacher, Joy was also invited to work as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei, where she was required to do demonstration
teaching, attend lectures and workshops and observe classes conducted by other teachers, hence enhancing her skills in observing students and ideas for varying her teaching. Such additional experience distinguished Joy from the teachers reported in
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the study of Crookes and Arakaki (1999). In studying where teachers of English as a second language (ESL) obtained their ideas for teaching, Crookes and Arakaki found that their teacher participants, mostly working only as teachers in an English program, could only draw their ideas from themselves, colleagues, workshops and some
pedagogical resources. Among the few sources they reported to derive their ideas from, their personal teaching experiences were the most often cited source of their teaching ideas, which was utilized so often to the extent that they tended to adopt a skeptic attitude when asked to employ sources and ideas outside the self-contained knowledge and ideas accumulated from their prior teaching experiences. While the teachers in Crookes and Arakaki’s study drew on very restricted sources for teaching ideas, Joy was fairly open-minded about the knowledge, be it theoretical or
experiential, that she received from her additional working experience such as that of working as an advisory teacher at the Ministry of Education, and was able to relate it to her already-held cognition of recognizing certain things were beyond her control in teaching large multilevel English classes. Moreover, the sources for Joy to draw ideas for teaching in large multilevel classrooms were not confined to domestic educational experiences but also overseas ones. In an overseas educational visit to Holland, Belgium and France, Joy was introduced to the various types of secondary education offered there, which further strengthened her cognitions of building variety into teaching practices and adding differentiation into learning criteria in large multilevel English classes.
As the above discussion indicates, the vast and varied experiences that Joy had accumulated, whether good or bad, had significant impacts on her cognitions and practices that she held in teaching large multilevel English classes. Her experiences as a language learner and teacher prior to her participation in the in-service teacher education MA program contributed to the experiential dimension of such cognitions,
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with the experience of attending the teacher education program and those experiences taking place after her participation in the program adding some of theoretical vigor, other than experiential reinforcement, to the cognitions. However, what also merits our attention is that, such formation and development of cognitions out of the experiences that teachers accumulate can hardly be made without one very essential activity undertaken by teachers themselves, that is, reflection, which is elaborated in the following section.