2. Literature Review…
2.5 Rationale and Research Questions of the Present Study
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beliefs and practices, incorporated the development process of the teachers’ beliefs to make her investigation more holistic. From her study, she found that the four teachers constructed their beliefs based on their prior learning and teaching experiences, and could not always implement practices congruent to their beliefs owing to some contextual factors. For example, one teacher reported that the pressure from the school and students’ parents was one force that kept her from carrying out practices that reflected her beliefs. But despite so, the teachers could still enumerate several teaching practices, such as employing effective classroom management strategies, having students participate in cooperative learning, providing various activities and peer tutoring, that they found to work effectively within their teaching contexts. In this way, by studying the teacher participants’ beliefs, practices and the factors that impacted the formation of beliefs and implementation of practices, Lu provided a more holistic picture of what teaching in large multilevel English classes was.
Nevertheless, her interview protocols which comprised several leading questions and failure to deconstruct teacher beliefs into specific beliefs and to distinguish these beliefs hampered the contribution of her study.
2.5 Rationale and Research Questions of the Present Study
As the previous review indicated, many studies on teaching English in multilevel classrooms only placed their research focus on the identification of
effective teaching practices in such contexts. However, according to existing language teacher cognition research, it is quite evident that if one attempts to acquire a more holistic and in-depth understanding of a language teacher’s teaching, one can not merely examine her actual practice of teaching in the classroom, but has to study the cognitive dimension of teaching that underpins her classroom practices as well. Hence, this study, in an attempt to gain a deepened understanding of teaching in large
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multilevel English classrooms, aimed to investigate the cognitions and practices that a junior high school English teacher held and employed in teaching large multilevel English classes. But unlike the previously reviewed studies on teaching English in large multilevel classrooms that were mostly conducted to identify effective classroom practices and the pedagogical beliefs and thoughts that supported these practices, this study hoped to delve into the issue in a way that was more open-ended and thorough by employing Borg’s (2006) framework of elements and processes in language teacher cognition to view the teacher’s teaching practices, the content and development process of cognitions that she held in large multilevel English
classrooms holistically.
Two research questions were used to guide the current study:
1. What cognitions did one Taiwanese junior high school teacher hold in teaching large multilevel English classes? How did she develop such cognitions?
2. How did the teacher’s cognitions interact with her actual classroom practices?
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CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY
This chapter illustrates the methodology whereby this study was conducted. It covers four major sections, and begins with the first section which elaborates the research design of the current study. The second section describes the background information of the participants of the study, including the teacher participant and the students in the three classes that she taught. The third and four sections respectively note down how the research data were collected and analyzed.
3.1 Research Design
This study aimed to explore the cognitions and practices of a junior high school English teacher by examining her teaching and learning-to-teach experiences in large multilevel classrooms. The complex and multifaceted nature and the research interests of this study (Hood, 2009; Merriam, 2009; van Lier, 2005) suggest that a qualitative case study serves as an appropriate research design. A case study is defined by Merriam (2009) as the study of a “bounded system (p.40)” and by Yin (2009) as “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth within its real-life context when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident” (p.18). In this study, the researcher hoped to study the “bounded system,” that is, how one junior high school English teacher, with her cognitions that were constructed and reconstructed from her previous learning and teaching
experiences, taught in large multilevel classrooms, with a case study design, as which affords knowledge that is concrete, contextual, and open for interpretation (Merriam, 2009) that is required to answer the research questions. Various sets of data were collected to derive in-depth and holistic understandings of teaching large multilevel English classes.
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3.2 Participants Teacher Participant
The teacher participant of the current study, Joy (pseudonym), was an expert teacher who had rich experiences in teaching and other education-related activities and work. She was invited to participate in the study for two main reasons. First, Joy was an experienced teacher who had extensive experiences in teaching large
multilevel English classes. Besides, she was an expert teacher who by the time the researcher commenced this study, had been appraised highly by many teachers, students and school administrators and won several awards for her expertise and commitment to teaching. In addition, she had been assisting organizations such as the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei, Taipei Teachers’
Association, National Teachers’ Association, and Ministry of Education in
undertaking education-related work. The work that she had been engaging in touched a variety of issues, one of which was teaching in large multilevel English classes.
Considering the vast experiences and understandings that Joy had accumulated about teaching in large multilevel English classes, the researcher earnestly invited her to be the teacher participant of the present study.
Joy was a 44-year-old female teacher who had accumulated 20 years of teaching experience by the time of the study. She grew up and received elementary and secondary school education in eastern Taiwan. Then, she continued her studies in a university of education situated in central Taiwan, where she majored in English.
However, at that time, most of the courses there did not interest her. After graduating from the university, since she did not find much passion in teaching, she did not engage herself in the work of teaching, like many of her classmates did. It was not until one year after graduation that she started teaching at the repeated request of a
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school inspector living nearby. On the request of the school inspector, Joy started her teaching career by working as a substitute English teacher in La La junior high school, which was a fairly remote junior high school in eastern Taiwan with great difficulties in recruiting teachers. Despite being recruited as an English teacher, Joy had to teach other subjects such as history and geography as well. After finishing the one-year substitute teaching, she received the offer to teach in an elementary school. Having spent three years teaching in two elementary schools both situated in northern Taiwan, she found herself more fond of teaching in junior high schools and again started her job hunting for teaching positions in junior high schools. In the next year, she obtained the admission to teach in a junior high school in a remote area of central Taiwan, where she came to feel restraint in the exam-oriented school, which thus drove her to apply for a teaching position in the Fa Fa junior high school. Fa Fa junior high school was in an urban area of northern Taiwan; at the time of the study, Joy had been teaching there for 14 years.
In addition to the rich teaching experiences, Joy also had extensive
education-related work and learning experiences. In the year of 2001, Joy started her learning in an in-service teacher education MA program in northern Taiwan. In the same year, she also began working for Taipei Teachers’ Association and as a member of the English Advisory Committee for Junior High School in Taipei. In the following years, she successively worked for National Teachers’ Association and Ministry of Education. But at the same time, she still taught a particular number of classes in Fa Fa junior high school. In the years of 2008, 2009 and 2012, Joy also earned the opportunity to attend three overseas educational visits. Among the three overseas educational visits, she considered the one she had to Holland, Belgium, and France in the year of 2008 to be the overseas educational visit experience that had the greatest impact on her cognitions and practices of teaching large multilevel English classes.
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Below is a table that summarizes Joy’s teaching and other education-related experiences in a chronological order.
Teacher Participant
Teaching Experiences Other Education-Related Working Experiences
teacher in La La junior
high school situated in a
remote area in eastern
education MA program
2006: Summer Study in
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situated in a remote area
in central Taiwan
1998-the time of the
study: As an English
teacher in Fa Fa junior
high school situated in an
urban area in northern
Taiwan
2007-2008: As a central
curriculum and teaching advisory teacher in Ministry of Education
2008-the time of the study:
Textbook Auditing
Australia
Table 1: Teaching and other education-related experiences of the teacher participant
Student Participants
All of the three classes that Joy was responsible for teaching were large multilevel classes, that is, “classes that have been arranged by age-group with no thought to language ability (Hess, 2001, p.2)” and that often consist of more than 30 students and are considered by teachers to be large. To observe how Joy actually taught in large multilevel English classes, the students in the three classes that Joy was responsible for teaching were also invited to participate in the classroom observations of the current study. The reason to observe Joy’s teaching in the three classes rather than just one or two classes was because the intensity of multilevelness of students’ English abilities was perceived by Joy to be different in the three classes.
Out of a hope to study whether Joy taught differently in response to the varying
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degree of multilevelness of students’ English abilities, and if yes, how she taught differently in the three classes, the researcher hence decided to observe Joy’s teaching in the three classes.
All of the students were 9th-grade students in Fa Fa junior high school, situated in an urban area in northern Taiwan. According to Joy, the residents in the school district where Fa Fa junior high school was located were of highly varying
socio-economic statuses, which might be one of the reasons that resulted in the large multilevel English classes in Fa Fa junior high school.
At the initial stage of data collection, the participating students were not asked to share their experiences or express their opinions, and simply participated in the classroom observations of the study. But as the data collection proceeded gradually to the final stage, it was found to be of growing necessity that the voice of students of varying English abilities should be heard to shed additional light on the experiences and opinions of the teacher and ensure the trustworthiness of the data provided by the teacher. Ten students, three to four students from each of the three classes, were hence invited to participate in the informal student interviews.
Heterogeneous sampling method was employed in selecting student
interviewees “to search for common patterns across great variation (Glense, 2011, p.45)”. Based on their final grades of English in the last semester, the students were classified into three groups: students with beginning, intermediate and advanced levels of English proficiency. The researcher then asked the teacher participant to select one to two students from each group in each class who were willing and more capable of articulating their opinions to take the student interviews. Consequently, three students from Sun and Sky classes respectively, and four students from Sea class participated in the student interviews. In this way, the researcher had interviews with three students from each class, and each student interviewee represented one group of
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the students with varying English proficiency levels. Except for students in Sea class, four students participated in the student interviews, with two belonged to the group of advanced level students.
3.3 Data Collection and Procedures
To ensure “credibility (p.301)” and “confirmability (p. 318)” of the study (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), the researcher employed various data collection methods, including teacher narratives, teacher semi-structured interviews, informal student semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and copies of relevant course content materials to collect data and triangulate findings.
Teacher Narratives
Teachers construct their knowledge about teaching mainly from their
experiences (Johnson & Golombek, 2002). It is believed that the most appropriate and authentic way of exploring such experiences is through narrative as people think and make sense of their experiences via story telling (Bell, 2002; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006; Johnson & Golombek, 2002). When teachers narrate their experiences, they invest the experiences with their interpretations
(Golombek & Johnson, 2004), rendering narrative the most suitable tool to understand teacher learning and teaching from teachers’ points of view. Over the years, more and more researchers have been using teacher narratives to explore teachers’ knowledge and teaching practices within the sociocultural contexts where they teach and learn to teach and how they make sense of their development process (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Johnson & Golombek, 2002).
The “legitimate knowledge” (Johnson & Golombek, 2002, p.4) that teachers produce out of their narratives of lived learning and teaching experiences (Golombek
& Johnson, 2004; Johnson & Golombek, 2002) is the research interests in the present
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study. Thus, in this study, the teacher participant, Joy, was asked to recount her prior English learning, teacher training and teaching experiences. From the personal and contextualized narratives, the researcher hoped to learn, from Joy’s perspectives, about her progressive internal development process through which she continually constructed and modified her cognitions and practices concerning teaching large multilevel classes within the sociocultural contexts where she taught and learnt to teach. In other words, the researcher hoped to understand Joy’s internal cognitive development process of what and how she came to know about teaching in multilevel classes. The interview protocol for teacher narrative is included in Appendix A; it is designed based on Borg’s (2006) framework of language teacher cognition and Webster and Mertova’s (2007) and Carspecken’s (1996) guidelines.
Semi-structured Interviews
The researcher also conducted semi-structured interviews with Joy and ten of her students. Two types of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Joy: one was to confirm, clarity and broaden the issues emerged from the teacher narrative; the other was to further investigate what had been noted through classroom observations.
As noted earlier, at the later stage of data collection, it was recognized that there was a need to hear voice from the students so to add additional perspectives on and ensure the trustworthiness of the data provided by Joy. Informal interviews were hence conducted with ten of Joy’s students that were with varying English proficiency levels.
One semi-structured teacher interview lasting about three hours was conducted to further probe into the significant events recounted in the teacher narrative and more contextual information about the teachers’ current teaching context. With the data elicited, the researcher developed a clearer understanding of Joy’s cognitive
development in teaching large multilevel English classes. The exact questions in the
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semi-structured interview were subject to the narrative data.
In addition, since how a teacher utilizes her cognitions in classrooms is largely interpretive (Johnson & Golombek, 2002), to further investigate how Joy externalized her internal cognitions concerning teaching multilevel classes into actual classroom practices and to examine how the formation of material practices were facilitated and/or inhibited within the teaching context, the researcher undertook a
post-observation semi-structured interview every three or four days, depending on the teacher’s availability. In total, four post-observation semi-structured interviews were undertaken, each lasting one and a half to two and a half hours. The interview protocol for post-observation semi-structured teacher interviews is included in Appendix B; it is also constructed based on Carspecken’s (1996) guidelines.
At the later stage of data collection, it was found that data from the students should also be collected to shed additional light on the data provided by Joy. Informal individual interviews were hence undertaken with ten of Joy’s students. Each
interview took about ten to fifteen minutes to probe into how students of varying English abilities perceived their own English abilities, Joy’s teaching in large multilevel English classes and Joy’s interactions with students of diverse English abilities.
Near the end of data collection for the study, two follow-up interviews were conducted with Joy to clarify some issues that had not been answered quite clearly in the previous interviews.
Classroom Observations
As evident in the literature, teachers use their cognitions in teaching in a way that is constantly negotiated within the sociocultural contexts where they teach (Borg, 2003, 2006; Johnson & Golombek, 2002). Therefore, to investigate the interactive relationship between teacher cognitions and classroom practices within the teaching
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context, the researcher conducted classroom observations of Joy’s teaching and interactions with the students. To avoid interruption (Carspecken, 1996), the researcher carried out classroom observations passively sitting in the back of the classroom. To guard against unnoticed biases towards the observation, the researcher followed Carspecken’s (1996) suggestions of “the use of a flexible observation schedule (p.48).” Despite so, three focuses could be identified: the procedures, content and manners of the teacher’s teaching, the responses of the students to their teacher’s teaching, and the interaction between the teacher and her students. The priorities of observation were the teacher, the students that interact with her, and the rest students. To ensure that the field notes produced are trustworthy in a certain degree, the researcher adopted Carspecken’s (1996) advice in constructing thick description. Besides, to assist the researcher in constructing field notes, the researcher also video-taped the observations of Joy’s teaching and interactions with her students after gaining her admission.
The researcher conducted two phases of classroom observation. The first phase of classroom observation was conducted before the first mid-term and covered the nine to ten periods that the teacher spent to finish teaching Lesson 2. In teaching Sun Class and Sky Class, it took ten class periods for Joy to finish teaching Lesson 2, but only nine for Sea Class. The second phase of class observation was conducted before the second mid-term and covered the seven to eight class periods that Joy used to finish teaching Lesson 5. She spent eight class periods to finish teaching Lesson 5 to Sky Class, while used seven class periods to finish teaching the same lesson to the other two classes. After the observation of several class periods, the researcher would conduct a post-observation interview with the teacher to delve into the questions emerged from the classroom observations.
Besides the data collection methods mentioned above, relevant course content
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materials, such as lesson plans, supplementary teaching and learning materials, assignment sheets, and test and exam papers, were also collected to triangulate and
materials, such as lesson plans, supplementary teaching and learning materials, assignment sheets, and test and exam papers, were also collected to triangulate and