Analysis of the classroom video data and student interview data has identified evidence illustrating (A) factors affecting student participation in the classroom, (B) classroom instances of non-optimal use of NETs, and (Q the unique impact of the NETs.
(A) Factors affecting classroom learning atmosphere and student participation level (i) Teacher factors
Classroom atmosphere and students1 participation level seem to be affected by.
• the personality and style of the NET,
• her/his ability to build rapport with students and,
• the interest level of activities and tasks.
Young, dynamic, humorous NETs (as opposed to NETs who are more formal and serious;
NETs who scold students for speaking in LI) seem better able to get even low-ability students to participate in class activities and interactions (PA). Moiu-c^e study data, we sw that young, dynamic, humorous NETs also tend to use a greater variety of interesting activities and tasks while the more formal, serious and somewhat distant NETs (e.g. SC and SF) tend to cling to textbook worksheets and tasks. The latter also tend to have a poorer relationship with students because they conduct the lessons vary much in the same way as many local teachers while
lacking the affective resources (e.g. sharing the same LI) to establish solidarity with the students,
(ii) Student factors
There is a clear distinction in responses to NET teaching between high English proficiency classes and low English proficiency classes.
High L2 proficiency classes in non-public exam classes across all sampled schools in general have positive attitudes towards NET teaching. They hold the NETfs English speech models and expertise in high regard and feel that they can learn better and acquire more standard English from the NET. Their positive self-image (though few would explicitly claim to have higji proficiency in English), positive attitudes towards NET teaching, plus their own adequate L2 linguistic ability to interact with the NET (e.g. Students demonstrated and reported few communication problems in the NETs classes) all seem to serve as a good foundation to enable them to participate in NET classes and benefit from NET teaching. In one student interview, a student with a higher L2 proficiency from SC was advising the others with lower L2 proficiency to be daring enough to speak up and ask questions because the NET was very willing to answer questions on a one-to-one basis when she walked near to the students.
In not-very-high L2 proficiency classes, preferred learning style and culture seem to be important factors affecting student participation and interest in NET lessons. Those students who are outspoken, outgoing, risk-taking, not afraid of making mistakes or being laugfaed-at eager to make guesses and attempts to solve communication problems and tolerant of uncertainty, are found to be participating the most in interactions with the NET and in class activities. They also seem to enjoy NET lessons more. In contrast, those students who seem to be less adventurous, less outspoken and less tolerant of uncertainty, are found to be quiet or not engaged in lessons taught by the NET. Their facial expressions show that they seem to be at a loss (e.g., not knowing what's happening, or what to do, or what the NET is talking about).
The student interview data confirms these observations. Some students say they prefer to be taught by a local teacher than a NET because "a local teacher can explain in Cantonese11 and
"they can ask questions in Cantonese*1 and understand better what is happening in the lesson. A local teacher will usually know what their problems are and can help them better. Some students (SC) even expiess highly negative feelings towards their NET, e«g.f complaining that the NET doesn't understand them, does not attempt to figure out what they want to say, and is not patient with them. Complete communication breakdown and total lack of rapport are found in the worst case; e.g., where the NET is reserved and serious (SF, SC), scolding students for
^peaking in LI (SQ, and where students' L2 proficiency and motivation to learn English are low.
(B) Classroom instances of non-optimal use of NETs.
In this section, we shall describe how and why some NETs have not been able to play an optimal role. Two major types of sitaatkm in which the NET is not found to have a unique, optimal role to play are:
* with a local teacher doing conseoitive translation for the NET in a low proficiency class;
• withtheNETdri^
no
(i) The local teacher does consecutive translation for the NET in a low proficiency class
Appendix V-a contains a transcript of part of a lesson conducted in a very low L2 proficiency Form 1 class, where theNET (R)ishelpedby a local teacher (P), who does consecutive translation for him.
In this lesson excerpt, the students need to pay attention only to the local teacher's translations when listening to the instructions on how to play the game. The role of the NET seems to be limited to^that of providing target pronunciation models for the words listed on the blackboard.
The NET's role can be easily replaced by a local teacher with target-like word pronunciations or an audio/videotape demonstrating the pronunciation for the students. The NET does not have a chance to directly interact with the students in L2, or to establish any real personal relationship with the students. The NET cannot understand the impish jokes of the students (e.g.
a boy remarking that he needs to wear a suit to serve in the restaurant) and respond to them (the local teacher does that in LI for the NET), Nor are the students motivated to speak directly to the NET in L2. In this kind of classroom scenario, the role of the NET is confined to that of a
"human tape-recorder*'.
In another lesson recorded with the same class in which the local teacher is teaching, it is evident that the local teacher plays the additional roles of counsellor, advisor, motivator.
appealing to LI cultural norms to urge the students to pay attention and do the work in class.
The local teacher also plays the role of linguistic and cultural **broker", acting as a middleman facilitating the communication between the NET and the students, presenting L2 material and explaining them in LI for these limited-English speakers. Since the students in this school (a practical school) have serious motivation and learning attitude problems and their L2 proficiency is very low, the NET alone in the classroom cannot play the many non-pedagogical roles (e.g., counsellor, advisor) that local teachers can play. However, using a local teacher to do consecutive translations for the NET is clearly not an optimal use of resources.
One might be led to the conclusion that very low proficiency secondary school students might not be able to benefit from NET teaching in a regular classroom setting. However, low proficiency secondary students may be able to benefit from extra-cumcular activities (e.g.«
drama, acting, role playing, poem speaking^ led bv a NET with the help of a local teacher. The NET can serve as a good model of L2 and as an actor in such activities engaging Ss in role-playing or acting out the social identities of 12 cultural members (see discussion in 73.2.5 below).
(ii) The NET does textbook-based language pattern drills
The unique qualities which distinguish NETs from local teachers are not employed to the full when the NET engages in teaching activities which a local teacher could do equally well.
Examples of such activities include, for example, drilling students with textbook exercises and checking answers to tasks with the whole class.
Examples from the case study data taken from a secondary classroom (R2, mid-ability level) illustrate NET engaging in classroom practices in which there is little evidence of the kind of authentic, spontaneous interaction between NET and students which would appear to represent a more effective use of resources.
The second classroom excerpt (Excerpt 2), which can be found in Appendix V-b, helps to illustrate the point
In this F.2 lesson, almost half of the lesson time was spent on checking answers on some sentence transformation exercises with the students. The answer-checking activity is highly mechanical and non-communicative (as the whole class was looking at the same picture). The utterances coming from the students have no personal relevance to them. There is no doubt that the students were churning out the expressions listlessly (evident from the lengthened syllables of all words giving the impression of a lack of interest).
Excerpt 2 (Appendix V-b) can be compared with another lesson excerpt (Excerpt 3 in Appendix V-c) which shows a lesson taught by a local teacher. Here we can see that the local teacher can motivate students to use the target language meaningfully through an effective use of teaching methodology.
In this Excerpt, the group of El students from the same school as those in Excerpt 2 were asked to use different adverbs of frequency to make personal sentences describing their everyday habits. It should be noted that both the classes in Excerpt 2 and 3 are the best in their respective year group in terms of overall academic performance.
Compared with the sentence pattern drills used by the NET in Excerpt 2, the task implemented by the local teacher in Excerpt 3 is more able to elicit meaningful and personal responses from the students. We can see that most students reported their sentences naturally. The teacher attempted to respond to the meaning* in addition to the form of the student's utterance (see the example highlighted (marked with an arrow> in the excerptX Of course, the local.teacher in Excerpt 3 could have done more in this respect by attempting to extend the interaction sequences with each student
(C) Classroom instances showing the unique impact of the NET
In the Hong Kong secondary school context, one aspect of the uniqueness of NETs is the fact that they are generally non-Cantonese speaking and never use Chinese in their teaching of English. Thus, any successful communication between the NETs and the students should in normal situations take place in English. Except in high proficiency schools or in classes where the local teachers arevery strict about using only English in the English classroom, most students in our samples used Cantonese to ask and answer questions in classes taught by local teachers. The situations illustrated in Excerpts 4 and 5 below would seldom appear in a local teacher's classroom.
Hie lesson recorded in Excerpt 4 (Appendix V-d) took place in the same class as that in Excerpt 3. Near the aid of an answer-checking lesson, the NET talked about the holiday assignment One student (Bl) initiates a question in broken and quite unintelligible English about the project requirement Assignments and assessments are always the major concerns of most Hong Kong students. If the teacher had been a local one, the student definitely would ask in Cantonese, and in most cases, for clarity purpose, the local teacher would answer in Cantonese too. Hie presence of the NET has forced the students to use English in some instances like this one. Interestingly, in this case where the discourse topic relates to an "administrative" matter, Le. required length of the homework assignment, flic communication is far from smooth and it is not at all clear that students would have understood what they were expected to do. On the other hand, they would not have had the oivironment to speak naturally in English if it had been a local teacher,
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In Excerpt 5 (Appendix V-e), a girl initiates a question about a grammar exercise in English.
Interactions like this are difficult to capture as the classes are large and the students and teachers usually talk softly. Nevertheless, fix>m our observations, instances such asthatin Excerpt 5 emerge quite frequently across cases during individual work time when the NET will walk around the class and monitor students* work. It is safe to assume that such interactions in a NET class would always take place in EngEsk (This is of course, due not only to the general lack of Cantonese skills among the NETs, but reflects a teaching philosophy). On the other hand, similar interactions in a local teacher's lessons would usually take place in Cantonese, or in mixed code with the teacher using English and the students Cantonese.
However, student initiation in English remains infrequent in Hong Kong classrooms. Usually, the teacher (both the NET and the local) will do most of the talking whereas the students will only nod their heads or repeat one or two words. In our data, there are many occasions in which the students use more Cantonese than English even in NET classes. The Cantonese was mainly used by students in talking among themselves, or in helping themselves make sense of what the teachers had said.
The NET also seems to have a unique role to play in apprenticing pupils into the culture of L2 speaking and "acting1" bv modelling naturally how target L2 speakers speak and.act, with appropriate paralinguistic features - the verbal and non-verbal expressions that go with the speaking.
An example can be found in Lesson Excerpt 6 (Appendix V-f)- The lesson excerpt is taken from a lesson in which a NET is engaging a primary 3 class in a dramatic act to get them to both verbally express and act out a particular identity for other students to guess (e.g., an old person who is sadV The extract shows a pair of pupils acting out a dialogue with appropriate facial, body and verbal expressions to project a certain identity for their classmates to guess* The NET's own dramatic facial and body expressions, coupled wifh the use of appropriate voice and stress patterns, serve as a good model for the pupils' acting and speakingin L2.The activity is greatly enjoyed by the pupils, with the pupil actors attracting hilarious laughter from the class.
While a local teacher well-versed in communicative L2 development strategies can also possibly c reate a s imilar L2 speaking environment, it will p erhaps t ake someone who has interacted in an L2 culture for some time to be able to naturally model both L2 social ways of speaking and the corresponding social ways of acting.
In our data, evidence of the unique impact of the NETs in terms of interaction with students is not substantial. Very often, students kept silent in the NET classes, or only responded with 'yes' or *no*. In some local teachers' lessons in our samples, the interactions between the teachers and the students were more lively and the language use more creative. The major reason for this can be traced to the use of some Cantonese in explaining vocabulary, joking and socialising with the students.