Teaching English in Large Multilevel Classrooms in Taiwan

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English to a group of students with diverse proficiency levels in Japan, found that it was hard to take care of the various needs of students with different proficiency levels.

To solve the problems encountered, Maddalena conducted action research to study how the students and the teacher, that is, himself, perceived the use of advanced learners as teaching assistants With data obtained through a questionnaire and classroom discussions, he reported that most students, regardless of their proficiency levels, were in favor of and benefited from this device. Maddalena hence suggested that advanced learners could serve as teaching assistants offering aid to their

lower-level peers in the multilevel class.

Despite of their provision of some understandings of teaching English in multilevel classrooms, the two studies of Xanthou and Pavlou (2008) and Maddalena (2002) offered only a general or incomplete picture of the issues being studied. By employing questionnaire as their main data collection method, Xanthou and Pavlou (2008) provided a general account of the experiences and views of the 114 EFL teachers in Cyprus on how to deal with multilevel English classes. However, they could hardly offer further information about how and why each of those teachers utilized such practices, that is, the cognitive dimension of teaching that underpinned their actual teaching of practice. Similarly, Maddalena (2002), by affording findings mostly from students’ perspectives, also provided few specific details about his cognitions and practices of using advanced learners as teaching assistants in teaching the multilevel class.

With a hope to achieve a more holistic and in-depth understanding of teaching English in multilevel classrooms, in the following section, the researcher elaborates the issues further with relevant studies conducted in Taiwan.

2.4 Teaching English in Large Multilevel Classrooms in Taiwan

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According to the Compulsory Education Law promulgated in 2004, students in all elementary and junior high schools in Taiwan should be randomly grouped based on normal class grouping so to promote students’ adaptive learning. Along the

implementation of the policy was the inevitable accompaniment of multilevel English classes (Chang, 2009). According to some domestic researchers (Chang et al., 2003;

Tsai, 2008), in addition to the policy, a variety of other factors resulted in varying English abilities among students, including the development gaps between urban and rural areas, the socioeconomic gaps among families, the instruction of teachers, and the learning of students both in and outside of the classroom. Multilevel English abilities among students were hence no new phenomenon. However, in recent years, such multilevelness of students’ English abilities has been further intensified with the fact that more and more students started learning English in private English institutes before receiving formal English education at school (Chen, 2009; Chiang, 2003; Liu, 2004; Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009; Tsai, 2008).

Besides, most of the English classes in elementary and secondary schools in Taiwan are not only multilevel, but also large (Hess, 2001; LoCastro, 2001; Ur, 1991), which poses even more challenges to teachers’ instruction. Although there is no consensus as to what a large class is, it is agreed by many that what class size is large or too large depends mainly on teachers’ perceptions (LoCastro, 2001). Many of the English classes in elementary and secondary schools in Taiwan are comprised of more than 30 students, and in some cases, even more than 40 students, which is considered by many teachers to be large classes (Liu, 2004; Lu, 2011; Teng, 2009). In teaching such large multilevel classes, teachers reported many teaching difficulties, which included not only the difficulties encountered in multilevel classes, but also some other pedagogical, management-related, and affective problems (LoCastro, 2001).

Faced with such large multilevel English classes, several researchers in Taiwan

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have thus commenced studies on teachers’ teaching in these contexts hoping to gain a better understanding of what specific difficulties they encountered and how they addressed those problems. Of these studies, Chen (2009) examined the perceptions of 204 elementary school English teachers in southern Taiwan toward large multilevel classes and their reported remedial practices. By asking his teacher participants to complete a questionnaire, Chen found that teachers of different age groups and levels of education and teaching in different contexts had dissimilar perceptions toward difficulties encountered in teaching large multilevel classes. Despite so, most of the teachers reported that they addressed the difficulties with similar practices. During in-class teaching, most of the teachers said they would ask higher achieving students to provide tutoring to their less competent peers, employ multiple assessments and textbooks of appropriate challenge levels to take care of the needs of students with varying English proficiency levels. Many teachers also reported that they adopted additional practices to facilitate the learning of higher and lower achievers. With the former group of students, the teachers provided them with supplementary learning materials of more challenging levels, whereas with the latter group, they offered more guidance, opportunities for practice, multimedia and remedial instruction to assist them in learning English. In another study, Chiang (2003) also explored what difficulties elementary school English teachers encountered in teaching large multilevel classes and how they dealt with those problems. But unlike Chen (2009), Chiang (2003), based on an unarticulated assumption that proper use of classroom management strategies could effectively address the problems, focused mainly on what classroom management strategies that the teacher participants employed to cope with the difficulties they faced in teaching large multilevel English classes. With a two-phase study design, she examined how 14 EFL elementary school teachers with varying amount of teaching experience employed such strategies in their classrooms.

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In the first phase of her study, Chiang had telephone interviews with six first-year novice elementary school English teachers to understand what classroom management strategies were adopted in their classes. In the second phase, she conducted interviews and classroom observations of six more experienced teachers in two elementary schools in Northern Taiwan to examine the classroom management strategies they reported to use and they actually used to solve the difficulties they faced in large multilevel classes. From her study, she came to conclusions that both novice and experienced teachers had difficulties in teaching large multilevel classrooms and addressed the issue with various classroom management strategies. In view of the large multilevel classes accompanied by the normal class grouping policy, Liu (2004) also conducted a study to investigate what specific difficulties and practices that eight expert teachers of four different subjects encountered and adopted in large multilevel classes in the context of junior high schools. With qualitative data elicited from teacher interviews and classroom observation, she found that the two expert English teachers encountered similar difficulties and held the same beliefs in encouraging students and innovating teaching but resorted to different instructional practices. Liu concluded her study by arguing that teachers should engage themselves in teacher development activities such as workshops, seminars and communication with expert teachers to develop and enhance their professionalism.

Drawing from teachers’ perspectives, the studies of Chen (2009), Chiang (2003) and Liu (2004) together informed our understanding of teaching large multilevel English classes in Taiwan; however, none of these studies accounted much for the cognitive dimension of teaching, which according to Freeman (2002) are fundamental to a holistic and in-depth understanding of a teacher and her teaching as they form the

“hidden side of teaching (p.1)”. By utilizing quantitative questionnaire data as the main research data of his study, Chen (2009) could only derive general patterns of

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teachers’ perceptions toward their difficulties and remedial practices and could hardly provided us with further understandings of how the teachers’ perceptions impacted the instructional practices they adopted. Chiang (2003), despite employing a two-phase qualitative case study design to compare novice and experienced teachers’ reported and actual teaching, seemed to focus largely on identifying the shared classroom management strategies that the teachers employed and did not delve much into the cognitive basis that underpinned each teacher’s instructional strategies. Similarly, Liu (2004) though adopting classroom observation as one source of data collection, did not present the similarities and differences between teachers’ reported and actual classroom practices in teaching large multilevel classes, nor did she examine them with much reference to the teachers’ cognitions.

Also aiming at exploring teacher’s teaching in large multilevel English classes, two more recent studies, Teng (2009) and Lu (2011), studied the issue more

holistically by investigating not only teachers’ practices, but also the cognitions they held in teaching large multilevel classes. To study teachers’ beliefs and practices in teaching large multilevel English classes, Teng (2009) collected data from

questionnaire, interviews and classroom observations of two experienced elementary school English teachers. From the data, she found that the two veteran teachers, like many other teachers, encountered difficulties in teaching large multilevel English classes, but they were capable of implementing effective practices, such as providing guided practice, employing flexible grouping methods and assigning multilevel assignments, that reflected their beliefs. In discussing the two teachers’ beliefs and practices, Teng (2009) attributed the congruence between the teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices to their rich teaching experiences but did not further investigate these experiences from which the two teachers developed and redeveloped their beliefs. Lu (2011) in studying four experienced junior high school English teachers’

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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.