The proportion of grammar instruction

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

59

the value of using these materials was to offer students more real exposure, telling them that “See, there’s a sentence pattern here, no big deal. It’s pretty easy, right?” She was convinced that students’ psychological barrier about grammar can be reduced by so doing. As she kept saying in the interview, “I hope they don’t hate English at least.”

However, this significant belief that she stated did not take too much time and frequency during observation. Among the three kinds of teaching resources she mentioned, only one was witnessed (interesting online articles). As for the time devoted, Jane only implemented these resources in one out of six observed periods, with a total of seven minutes. This is contrary to what she described during the interview, saying that “I’ll show them the interesting stuffs whenever there is one or two minutes left.”

This tension unraveled Jane’s inner struggle about implementing extracurricular resources and finishing textbook content, namely, the struggle between interest developing and time pressure.

4.3.2 The proportion of grammar instruction

This section highlights the tension regarding the amount of grammar instruction.

In the interview, Jane expressed her own interpretation about the role of grammar in junior high school setting by saying that grammar was “essential for beginners” but

“shouldn’t be over emphasized.” Her attitude for grammar was quite neutral during the interviews. As she put it,

Of course the ideal case for them is to understand as many grammar points as possible. If they really can’t achieve it, however, I’ll ask them to at least memorize more words. Having a basic vocabulary bank is already enough for moderate students [to utilize in daily life]. What’s more important is the

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

60

courage to speak out. (J-10-374-376)

Even so, actual classroom demonstrations revealed some contrast to the neutral position that she expressed earlier. Besides the period in which new sentence pattern was taught, considerable grammar was incorporated in almost every section of the textbook. For example, in the dialogue and reading section where Jane claimed to put meaning comprehension prior to grammar, sentence analysis still took the major part. Meaning comprehension was conducted through direct Chinese translation by the teacher. As for the vocabulary section which usually took her two periods to finish, the majority of the time was dedicated to word usages, parts of speech and the synthesis of related grammar, as shown earlier in this chapter.

Basically, a great proportion of Jane’s lectures followed this pattern: (1) The teacher read out a word or a sentence in the textbook. (2) The teacher picked certain grammar points that were related to the word or sentence and asked students some relevant questions. (3) The teacher reorganized the questions and answers, rephrasing them into clear statements about grammar usages for a quick review.

4.3.3 The use of grammatical terminology

Another tension occurred in Jane’s use of grammatical terminology. There was a gap between how she claimed these terms should be used in English class and how she actually employed them. In the interview, she described herself as someone who does not “put too much emphasis on grammatical terminology” because “knowing how to use the language is far more important [than knowing the terminology].”

Besides, “they may not be able to remember if you tell them too much” according to her own understanding to the students here.

In the classroom observation, although her frequency of grammatical terms

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

61

varied from sections to sections, generally speaking, high frequency of grammatical terms was witnessed. The amount of terminology was particularly obvious in sentence pattern, reading and dialogue sections. In one episode, for instance, five terms were mentioned within three minutes of lecture on dialogue section:

T: The sentence “Neither did I.” is an inversion sentence. How do you change it back? How do you say it if you move the subject to sentence initial position?

S: I couldn’t, either.

T: Remember to use “either” in a negative sentence. In inversion sentence, you have to put “neither” at the beginning. Also, “neither” is already a negative word, so just say “Neither could I” is enough. In the next sentence, you can see the phrase “be good at.” Who can tell me why “at” is followed by a V-ing here?

S: Because of the preposition.

T: Right. Prepositions should be succeed by nouns. By adding “ing” to verbs, you get nouns. Continue. “I can’t even fry an egg myself”, how do you call

“myself” in grammatical terms?

S:…(Silent) T: No ideas?

S: Reflexive pronouns.

T: Then who can tell me the situations in which reflexive pronouns should be used?

Episodes like this occurred commonly in Jane’s teaching. In another excerpt, Jane spent ten minutes refreshing students’ memory about gerunds and present participle. She illustrated the difference of the two terms not only by explaining the

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

62

meanings but also by offering several example sentences. It was found that students might need to have some mastery about terminology to keep pace with Jane’s explanation. Mere understanding about parts of speech, as Jane expressed in the interviews, was sometimes not enough.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

63

CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION

The previous chapter revealed the answers to the three research questions of the present study. This chapter provides a general picture of the findings as well as possible reasons behind them. Four sections were included in this chapter. The first two sections focus on the core beliefs and peripheral beliefs of the participant. The teacher’s actual practices will be described in section three. Section four presents the interaction between core and peripheral beliefs, and how tensions emerged from this interaction.