investigate the language they have acquired, to correct the grammatical mistakes, and to give
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feedback. I found the following difficulties or factors affecting student performance as well as the teacher’s instruction at this stage, such as the time constraint, students’ language usage, the affective reasons of how students present the language they have learned through writing and performing the task, and their learning attitudes. First of all, time constraint was found as a major problem. I spent plenty of time explaining the tasks in the pre-task and task cycle stage, as my research peer Christina wrote “Even though the teacher repeated the instructions for three times, the students did not understand the rules until the teacher demonstrated in each group” (RP20190326). From my own teaching journals, I found myself spending more time clarifying meanings; therefore, I seldom had time to write down what the students had said. I wrote in my teaching journal “Not enough time to finish the language focus stage,” as listed below:
I did not have enough time to finish this part of the worksheet and discuss the language format (TJ20190220).
There was a lack of time to do the activity called “Reporter,” as only two students had an opportunity to perform (TJ20190222).
I spent time reading through all the sentences, but we ran out of time for the song and the language focus (TJ20190308).
We ran out of time for the language focus, and the role play presentation took a great deal of time (TJ20190312).
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Not enough time for the language focus. (TJ20190402).
I had to extend this final stage to the following lesson and the wholeness of the lesson was separated into two parts. February 22nd and 23rd were the same lesson extended to the next lesson, and March 20th and 22nd were based on the same lesson because of the lack of time.
The language focus was neglected and the TBLT procedure was not complete. Instead of discussing the grammatical errors at the end of the lesson, the teacher corrected their mistakes by saying the correct sentence again within the groups. The reason was because I had to check each team to make sure they knew the procedure of the tasks, and therefore. it was not the same situation that the students worked on the task and the teacher observed as Willis mentioned.
Another time consuming task was the worksheet. I had actually modified my curriculum design on written tasks after seven lessons on March 12th, because I found students had a heavy workload when they needed to fill in the worksheets and finish the tasks. Furthermore, I had modified the instruction of the worksheet because the students were facing the problem of understanding the instruction as it sometimes distracted their attention, and they could be frustrated by reading so many words without pictures. I found my worksheet design to be not appropriate for elementary school students. I wrote “I would like to redesign the worksheet to include pictures and make it easier to understand” (TJ20190220). The time to use the
worksheet should be based on the curriculum and not routinely for every lesson. As I wrote
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“Students used to copy the answer from their partners’ worksheet. They did not practice orally, and therefore, when the teacher checked their speaking, they were still out of practice”
(TJ20190222).
Second, students’ language usage was mainly Chinese and therefore I only focused on the correctness of the target sentences but not the other grammatical errors, I would say the correct sentence again immediately after hearing their errors. I did clarification during the presentation on April 23rd, when I asked the question “What does he do?”, S8 answered
“Japan” which was not correct. I clarified the sentence and said “Yes, he is from Japan, what does he do to earn money?” (VR20190423). From my class observation and the research peers’ observation, students talked in Chinese for the discussion (RPC20190423). When I checked the task progress, I would correct them immediately and did not wait until the final stage. My purpose of EMI was to encourage English speaking, and therefore, I was not very strict on the grammar errors (VR20190424). I would let them say the target sentence
correctly and I would allow them to make mistakes. Repeating their sentences with emphasis should be able to help them learn, and I thought the grammar was fine at this stage. I
encouraged them to speak more English and when I was demonstrating in the group, students would ask questions in Chinese and I replied in English. Surprisingly, after the mid-term test, S17 and S18 had reported to me the unfairness of the board game called “Ugly dolls.” They claimed that there was a grammatical mistake in the boy’s answer, the boy said “I want to be
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fire fighter.” The girls said “I want to be a fire fighter.” The girls wanted me to judge who would receive the card, so I approved their observation of this grammatical rule and I said the girls should win this round (TJ20190501). It was amazing that they started to use English to correct the mistake during the game. On May 3rd, it was impressive that the mid-proficiency students participated in the job riddle game where S6, S8, S12, and S14, all tried to use English to say a variety of the sentences with the same meaning. They started to create sentences during the presentation. In my journal I wrote:
At the language focus stage, I did not correct students’ grammatical errors directly. I repeated their sentences instead of pointing out their mistakes. Students automatically changed their answer to another sentence like “Am I a fire fighter?” which I think is appropriate because they chose to use a more reasonable question rather than the sentence
“Do I want to be a/an…?” which is not as common in a real life scenario. (TJ20190503) Third, the affective reasons to keep the low proficiency students from exposing their mistakes to the whole class, or even within their group, as they felt stressful when doing the role-play, or when they had to speak. S10, S11, S15, S22, and S23, claimed that the most difficult activity was to perform or to speak in class because they could say little or no English and they usually made mistakes. Activities like role-play, and answering questions, are the most difficult activities for the low proficiency students. In contrast, the high and mid proficiency students did not usually experience this problem.
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Fourth, students’ learning attitude will affect their performance at this stage. From my observation and the survey results, high proficiency students with a positive learning attitude were willing to try the activities like the “news reporter” because it was more challenging. S5 and S9 reported the script fluently in the activity (TJ20190222). Both of their scores on learning attitudes of all four aspects topped 27%. Students with high proficiency but negative learning attitude towards curriculum design would not actively perform in the class as they claimed that the activities were boring. S24 seldom participated in the activities the teacher provided as she was not interested. I found two students reading books during the English class. S19 had expressed herself in the survey and the interview that she wanted to read books because all of the materials were taught in the cram school. Another high proficiency student S7 was reading a book on May 3rd when I was giving instructions and noted that S7 is a high proficiency student with a nonchalant manner. When I discussed the problem with the homeroom teacher, and from his observation, students had English lessons after school, and therefore he believed that they could have a negative attitude toward the amount of English learning hours (IH20190523).
The general findings of the performance on EMI. There were 25 of the 27 students
who believed that EMI did help their English learning. Among the them, 12 thought EMI was most helpful for listening, nine thought EMI was most helpful for speaking, two thought EMI was most helpful for writing, one thought EMI was most helpful for reading, and one thought120
EMI was helpful for all four skills. There were 14 of the 27 students who thought EMI promoted their learning in English, and there were 13 of the 27 students who thought that EMI did not motivate them to learn more English or change their thoughts about English itself. Only two thought that English should only be taught in class, whilst others thought that Chinese was needed for the difficult vocabulary, sentences, and instructions.
Students had more or less extended their listening and speaking skills. Due to a variety of learning and teaching variables, I found that some of the low proficiency students turned more passive in this EMI action research and some did not. In general, the low proficiency students were more active at the beginning of the semester, unfortunately, when the program continued, they could not stay focused and were easily distracted. Students S2, S15, and S23, gave up on understanding the whole lesson, as they acted as they didn’t want to be seen or noticed. They usually had their face down or facing their friends instead of looking at me when I tried to explain the meanings or ask questions in English. They were interested in the videos, pictures, and drawings, but they claimed translation was needed. They became more passive than the homeroom teacher and I had observed. One of the team leaders told me that she had to teach S15 and S23 many times to have them say the correct vocabulary. The group leader also claimed that they usually chatted instead of practicing in the group. When I asked the reason for this in the interview, S15 said it was stressful to ask about everything in the team because he was afraid that it might take the team too much time teaching him, and that
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he was too shy to ask. But if there were tasks or discussions needed to be finished, he would be brave to ask many questions as the team had to cooperate to finish the assigned tasks, he would not have hesitated in doing so (IS1520190510). In an opposite trend, S10 and S11 became much more focused in class as the homeroom teacher and I had observed, they participated more in answering questions. They showed their enthusiasm at the end of the course, as they both did well on April 24th when we made the video recording. Our observation, however, was contradictory to the survey questionnaires and the interview results. S10 did not think he could learn through EMI, as he said translation was needed, and S11 thought EMI helped him for the speaking part, but he still believed the teacher should use Chinese when the students did not understand (ISS1020190508, ISS1120190511).
Despite the proficiency levels, various factors like the seat arrangements, the time of day, and various other reasons could also affect the students’ performance. I have discussed these factors as follows:
1. Seats were arranged by the homeroom teacher and modified by me because of the multiple levels of students. I found that group members do matter, especially the
characteristics of the leader. If the leader is more active and attentive, the group members may experience success. S11, a low proficiency student, had memorized five sentences in the memory game on March 15th, the group leader encouraged and trained him to
successfully say the sentence himself. When S24 was the leader, the group seldom
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participated in the activity and therefore the group was not competitive.
2. Time factors can also influence the learning effort, therefore, to establish a lesson plan within the time limit or consider the time of day is very important. From my observation, no matter what the proficiency level, when it was time for a break or when they had some arguments during the break, students would not concentrate, and usually the classroom management problems happened. Moreover, there were two lessons each week, with one lesson in the morning on Wednesday, and the other during the last period on Friday. The lessons on Fridays were usually distracted by the students’ chatting and other factors.
There was evidence of the classroom management problems which I have listed below:
This is the last period of the day and I found it hard to manage the class at this time (TJ20190222).
I noticed there was more chatting today (TJ20190223).
I noticed students were not listening and did not complete the task, and the classroom was full of chatting in Chinese (TJ20190312).
Students were conversing a lot in Chinese today, they usually avoided eye contact and continued talking during this last period of Friday (TJ20190322).
Students couldn’t focus when they heard the bell ring for a break (TJ20190402).
Today, during the last period, students were having a hard time concentrating. S5, S9, and S21, were talking, S14 had scissors and a tape. and S7 was reading a book
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(TJ20190503).
3. Whether the students could acquire the language successfully through games depended on the effort they put into them. To encourage or remind them to use the target language during the game was therefore important since most of them were game lovers, and at the same time, their native language was not prohibited. There were 12 students who claimed that they liked games during the English class in the pretest questionnaire, and 26 replied they liked games and competitions during the class in the interview. However, the
performance of the students was not as impressive. On April 16th, I had prepared a game for them to walk around the classroom and share their diary with different people, they did not practice, and the game ended with them chatting to friends or staying with the same partner. The whole classroom was full of noise and the game was not effective. I lost control of the game’s language usage. In my teaching journal I wrote “games are relaxing, however, they can be ineffective” (TJ20190416).
Student’s performance varied due to various factors such as the course content they thought was not interesting, the activities were too difficult, the social factors, and other affective reasons.