The First Three Months of the Instruction (from April 22 to July 22)

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on his English learning attitude.

4.1 The First Three months of the Instruction (from April 22 to July 22) Behavioral aspect of English learning attitude

For the first three months of the instruction, Patrick’s behavioral learning attitude remained similar. On one hand, conforming to what his school teacher described, most of the time he consistently acted as a cooperative learner who followed the researcher’s orders and participated in class activities. Although occasionally he still got distracted by making comments not relevant to the class or squabbling with Patricia, he did not misbehave in any way so serious that would disturb the class.

On the other hand, concerning the after-class behavior attitude, although it was observed that when intrigued by certain lessons he enjoyed in the class, Patrick reacted with more enthusiasm and made additional effort extending his learning after class, he did not show consistent and significant attitudinal change. For example, in lesson three “Animal Sounds and Languages,” the researcher used the viral song

“What Does the Fox Say” to teach them the animal sounds. Since the song was quite long and contained some difficult words and sentences, only the first paragraph of the lyrics was taught and used as the learning material. To the researcher’s surprise, after the first part of the lyrics was taught, Patrick, who claimed in the pre-interview that he did not like singing English songs, memorized the whole lyrics by himself. When asked to sing alone in the class, he sang with confidence and sang particularly loud in the chorus part. Jennifer later told the researcher that after the song was introduced in the class, Patrick asked her to let him watch more similar music videos online, and he ended up having fun enjoying those videos one after another. However, his positive and active reactions toward this lesson did not therefore have much influence on his

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overall behavioral learning attitude at the stage. His after-class behavior was similar to that in the previous stage in which he usually would just finish the assigned

homework and showed no tendency to engage in extra English learning activities.

Besides, Jennifer also reported that she did not find Patrick had any obvious behavioral change after the class.

Affective aspect of English learning attitude

Regarding the affective aspect of learning attitude at this stage, Patrick’s

attitude remained the same regarding his reaction to the types of the learning activities he favored and disfavored. However, what showed sign of change was his growing positive feedback to learning English in class.

Conforming to what Patrick reported previously, Patrick did show more positive response to those comparatively light-hearted activities, such as watching the video, drawing, and playing games but reacted negatively toward other types of activities requiring more effort. For example, the researcher observed that when playing the videos, Patrick always paid attention to the contents and sometimes made comments or even took notes on what he watched on the video. As observed in lesson five “Ride a bike,” when the researcher played a story video and asked the kids to pay attention to what the characters can and cannot do, Patrick’s reaction surprised the researcher.

She later recorded on her journal that:

Once he heard what I said, he took out a piece of paper and wanted to take notes.

Actually I didn’t intend to ask them to jot down the notes, but he just took the notes by himself. When he was watching the story video, he was very

concentrated and kept jotting down the notes and asked me how to spell some

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words. After the video, he was also eager to raise his hands to answer my questions related to the video. (Journal entry 13, June 17, 2014)

Additionally, he reacted more excitedly whenever there were activities that required him to compare and guess various cultural features. For example, in some lessons “Guess cultural facts” was used as the warm-up activity to activate the kids’

background knowledge of the target culture. Different questions related to the culture would be presented in the slides, and the kids would need to guess and choose the right description about the culture. For instance, when introducing Brazil in lesson eight “Fun Games around the world,” the researcher showed the pupils the pictures of a soccer ball and a baseball and asked the pupils to guess which sport is the most popular in Brazil. When doing this type of activity, Patrick was very engaged: he said out the answer and showed great content and felt proud of himself whenever he guessed the right answers. His interest in this type of game was also reflected in the feedback sheet in which he started to rank “Guess cultural facts” as his favorite activity.

On the other hand, as for the types of activities that required more effort to prepare and to labor, such as reading, writing, and preparing for the tests, Patrick’s reaction still remained negative. For instance, he sometimes reported that he did not like to read some stories because he said, “There are too many words.” Also, he continued to react negatively to the spelling tests. For example, the researcher gave the kids a spelling quiz that usually required them to spell less than five words each time in the beginning of the class. The quiz was mainly used to help them review what they learned in the previous class, so they could know what words to prepare, and it was thus not very difficult. Yet, unlike Patricia who could always spell all the

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words correctly, Patrick usually just got two words out of five correct; this showed that he did not really spend time preparing for the quizzes at home. Moreover, on another test used to assess their learning progress approximately after the first month of the instruction (May, 21, 2014), Patrick also showed unsatisfactory performance on the spelling part. The test was categorized into three main sections: speaking,

vocabulary, and cultural facts. The speaking and cultural facts sections required the children to answer questions orally, and the vocabulary section required them to read aloud the Chinese words in English. Spelling the vocabulary was optional but would be awarded extra points as an incentive. The test result indicated that Patrick did well on the oral sections, but for the spelling one, he only spelled eighteen words correctly out of forty-five words, whereas his younger sister almost correctly spelled all of them.

The result once again showed that Patrick did not put much effort memorizing the spelling of the words. His dislike for the spelling was also reflected on the feedback sheet in which he once responded that he did not like the spelling test because he thought it was too stressful.

However, though at this stage there was no obvious sign on attitudinal change regarding Patrick’s preferences to the learning activities, what changed was his

consistent and growing positive feedback to learning English in class. During the very first three months of the instruction, Patrick consistently reported to have good mood by circling smiley faces on the feedback sheet. Sometimes he wrote, “because I didn’t feel unhappy [about myself],” as the reason to explain why he felt good about the lesson. What is more, later at the stage, Patrick also exhibited more perceptible emotional change by leaving positive comments to the IECT instruction. At the first few weeks of the instruction, Patrick did not really leave any comments to the question, “How do you feel about the class?”, on the feedback sheet except circling

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the smiley faces. However, approximately two months after the instruction, he started to comment differently and gave more positive feedback to the instruction.

For instance, he wrote, “[I] can do different activities,” “The activities are fun,” “I like to listen to the story,” and “I like the English class” as the reasons why he felt the class was interesting.

Cognitive aspect of English learning attitude

Similar to the previous stage, Patrick claimed he did not consider English complicated and difficult to learn: he always wrote, “No!” in response to the

question, “Do you encounter any difficulty in the class?” on the feedback sheet. Yet in terms of the perceived usefulness of the English learned in class, Patrick exhibited a positive change of attitude on this stage.

As mentioned previously, Patrick did not think what he learned in the English classes was very useful because the contents were either boring or easy for him.

During the first few weeks of the instruction, Patrick did not respond much to the question that was meant to delve into his opinions about the differences between the IECT instruction and other English classes. He either left the question unanswered or simply commented that he felt the English classes were all the same. Around the seventh week of the instruction, however, Patrick started to make comparisons and made different comments. For example, he began to respond that he thought the IECT was more useful because he could learn more new words and could also learn how to spell them. Besides, another difference he made was that he felt the IECT was more difficult compared to other English classes. That being said, a higher level of difficulty did not create a negative learning attitude; instead, the material that contains more challenge actually made him feel more useful. It was however worth

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mentioning that his concept of “being useful” was still confined exclusively in learning new words instead of learning other information or knowledge.

4.1.1 Summary of Stage One –The First Three Months

All in all, up to this stage, some aspects of Patrick’s learning attitude remained similar but others showed signs of positive change. Behaviorally, though he showed willingness and interest in doing related English learning activities after class, he did not show consistently active and positive after-class behavior. Affectively, what remained similar at the stage was Patrick’s preference toward the activities; he still favored those light-hearted actives and did not show any more positive reaction to other types of activities. Yet, one different change was that he already developed more positive attitude to English learning by giving good comments to the IECT class. At last, cognitively, he began to feel what he learned in IECT was more useful than his other learning experiences, for he could learn new words.

4.2 The Last Month of the Instruction (from July 25 to August 15)