Dimensions of Innovation and Creativity
in TESOL: Views in Eight Teachers
from Taiwanese Higher Education
Chin-chi Chao
National Chengchi University cchao@nccu.edu.tw
Abstract
This qualitative study explores dimensions of creative foreign language teaching through collaborative inquiry of a group of eight experienced EFL instructors from Taiwanese higher education system. Data collection methods included interviews, narratives, and group discussions. A symposium and group presentation at a creative education conference in October 2008 also constituted a part of the collaborative effort to clarify what the teachers thought about innovation and creativity in teaching as they reflected on what they did in the language classroom and why they did it. The results showed that the teachers’ innovations could be characterized by an attempt to break down the classroom walls in order to let in authenticity by applying both structural and role changes, by moving from teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness, and by encouraging learner autonomy. The challenges the teachers experienced included insufficient technological accessibility and support, concerns about language learning gains, and needing better ways to handle students’ resistance. Based on the eight teachers’ experiences, creative practices reflected the teachers’ identities and involved situated negotiations between the teachers, learners, and the social context. It also provided learning opportunities that could sustain both teachers’ and learners’ interest. Suggestions for future research and teacher professional development are provided.
Key Words: creativity and innovations in TESOL, sociocultural perspectives in CALL, university language teachers
INTRODUCTION
The need to innovate or be creative is not new to EFL teachers in Taiwan, if they are familiar with the language teaching literature, particularly the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach and its role as a long-term methodological trend of second or foreign language education worldwide since the 1970s. Some of the key concepts emphasized by CLT, such as meaningful construction of language, require creativity in language use by learners (Otto, 1998; Widdowson, 1978) and creativity in designing classroom activities by teachers (e.g., the TESOL New Ways series). Oftentimes technology or information technology is considered to play an important role (Meskill, 1996; Pennington, 2004). However, when CLT is coupled with the concept of innovation and teacher creativity, it often conjures up an image of cutting-edge technology, utilizing tools such as hand-held computers, cell phones, or the so-called Web 2.0 social network applications. This is the conception of innovation many language teachers and practitioners hold, and it often makes teachers who do not use technology feel they have no grounds to talk about innovation or creativity in language teaching, and those who do use technology may feel that their work is not fully understood or appreciated by their colleagues or school administrators.
Given the recent development in technology and creativity research and the widespread socially oriented paradigm shift in education in general and second language acquisition in particular (Block, 2003), there is a need to revisit the old concepts of teacher creativity and innovation and to understand how the two create
refreshing foreign language learning experiences that matter while making all the troubles and complexities a worthwhile experience for teachers. This study thus aimed to acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of creative language teaching through analyzing eight experienced EFL teachers’ collaborative reflections on some of the classroom innovations that they each engaged in and felt to be successful. The results may start to delineate a new conception of innovation and creativity in language teacher education.
BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW
Research on Innovation in Language EducationInnovation is indeed not a new concept in second or foreign language education. A review of the literature shows that Ferguson (1993) and Pennington (2004), among others, have followed the lead of Everett Rogers and his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations in theorizing the process of innovation in second language education. Ferguson (1993) specified that factors for implementation and management of innovation are in the area of properties of innovation, the transmission process, and the management of change. He also cited Doyle and Ponder (1997) in discussing practical factors that teachers want most from an innovation. These practical factors include the innovation having a direct, realistic classroom application and efficiency of the innovation showing up early in the implementation process. The credentials of the innovators are also important. Pennington, on the other hand, discussed a process of four phases of implementation of information technology (IT) in second language
education. Although she mentioned a few reasons, readers may still not understand why it is necessary to innovate other than that the technology is here, is good, and nobody wants to be left behind.
For delineating a definition and scope of innovation, Ferguson’s (1993) discussion is useful because it includes not just technology but also other areas of innovation in language education. According to Ferguson, innovation is “an idea, artifact, or practice which is new” (1993, p. 27). He specified areas of innovation in education, including the following levels of changes, and he also postulated that changes in beliefs, attitudes, and understanding are more fundamental and more difficult to achieve:
a. Structural change: e.g., changes in policy, in timetabling, in grouping of students, etc. These largely pertain to administrative arrangement for instruction.
b. Technological change: e.g., introduction of computers, videos, language laboratories, etc., into the instructional process.
c. Material change: e.g., new books, syllabuses or examinations.
d. Behavioral change: e.g., changes in what teachers do in the classroom, in their teaching style and behaviors.
e. Changes in beliefs, attitudes, and understanding: e.g., change in teacher’s beliefs about, and understanding of, teaching and learning (Ferguson, 1993, p. 28).
This expanded framework of innovation is important since it indirectly supports the position that IT is not the only innovation possible and that IT does not provide the only innovative answer to problems in language education.
Research on Creativity in Second Language Education
Creativity in second language education is another concept this study was interested in exploring. At first it seemed difficult to distinguish between innovation and creativity; both seemed to be about new experiences, and the two terms are often used interchangeably, for example, when referring to creative or innovative classroom activities. If innovation denotes novelty and change, including both product (ideas, artifacts, or technology) and process, do these features not exist when creative language teaching and learning is of concern? And, does creativity need to be nurtured in second language education? Again, the researcher turned to the literature for some initial answers.
Studies that investigate the role of creativity in the language learning process are found dating back to the 1970s, indicating that this is an issue that has historically generated much research interest in the field of TESOL. For example, Otto (1998) attempted to understand the relationship between individual differences in creativity and language learning success. Through quantitative methods and statistical procedures, the study found that secondary school students’ total scores on creativity tests were highly correlated with their English grades, suggesting that students with a higher level of creativity have more opportunity to be successful language learners. More recently, Tarone (2002), in her study on variations in interlanguage provided the following explanation of how creativity in second language happens and why it is important:
The learner’s creativity [became] revealed when learners' noticing leads them to view utterances not just as potential objects of analysis but as potential objects of language play. Noticing results
in the selective internalization of language input in interactions with various L2 speakers, and creativity occurs in the learner’s consequent production of any of a range of different voices thus internalized for the purposes of expressing social identity and of language play. (p. 287)
The idea of language play is associated with language learner creativity. Other relevant studies are by Carter and his colleagues (Adolphs & Carter, 2003; Carter, 1999a, 1999b, 2002, 2004; Carter & McCarthy, 2004), who are interested in the creativity in naturally occurring everyday spoken language, such as in advertisements, which again is about language play. Carter’s studies also echo the recent interest among researchers in bilingual individuals’ creativity in language use or pragmatics (Baker, 2001; Baker & Eggington, 1999; Nelson, 1988; Tawake, 2003; Zhang, 2002). Furthermore, Meskill (1996) studied learner creativity elicited by computerized language learning activities which allowed students to play with the target language (words) by creating associative poems and prose. She then asked the learners and language teachers to reflect on the creative processes and their learning of English. The tool was found to stimulate, guide, and support the invention process which, as the researcher remarked, “in turn prompt(s) internalization of the sense and nuance in a second language” and brings confidence (Meskill, 1996, p. 6). If innovation is a process and product that brings changes, perhaps creativity, particularly in terms of language play, would be one of the features language education innovations need to enable.
In terms of research on language teacher creativity, while there are many publications providing language teachers with suggestions, advice, and practical examples of innovative teaching strategies (for
example, the TESOL New Way series, Simplicio, 2000), there have not been many studies investigating language teachers’ creativity based on data elicited from teachers on what they think creative language teaching entails and what it means to teach language creatively. One study that attempted to collect such data to understand factors that make highly motivated and creative teachers creative is Horng, Hong, ChanLin, Chang, and Chu (2005). Through observation, interview, and other qualitative data collected from four award-winning teachers, Horng et al. found that personality traits, family background, education, beliefs in teaching, hard work, and administrative support were important. They also found that creative teachers tended to consider some common teaching strategies as useful or effective: student-centered activities, a connection between teaching contents and real life, management of skills in class, open-ended questions, an encouragement of creative thinking, and use of technology and multimedia. The researcher was interested to know if classroom practices which university language teachers believed to be innovative had these enabling features and what other features language educators also valued and believed to bring positive changes to language education.
With teacher-initiated classroom innovations and creativity as the focus of the current focus, the innovation and creativity literature initiated in the 1960s does not seem very helpful, particularly because it seems to underestimate a teacher’s role in her own classroom. Diffusion or management of innovation in an organization as in Rogers’ original concern is very different from that of a language teacher. In the language education environment, a teacher usually decides whether she wants to implement an innovation or not, and in
which way she will implement it. As Ferguson (1993) also noted, usually a language teacher’s scale of innovation is much smaller, concerning only what she does in her classroom. The existing innovation literature following Rogers’ organizational changes thus does not give satisfactory answers as to why language teachers innovate in their classrooms. Not only so, because innovation is usually concerned with implementation in large organizations, classroom teachers are usually excluded from the decision-making process. They are often treated simply as one of many factors that need to be taken into consideration when implementing an innovation. The creativity literature, on the other hand, seemed to focus too much on the past of the teacher’s experience, seeking to understand how a teacher became creative, rather than what she does now in her classroom. If one truly wants to understand why, what, and how innovations and creative teaching happen and benefit language learning, sufficient focus on teachers and teacher autonomy is crucial.
Research Questions
The main intent of this collaborative study was to start a reflective conversation among university instructors who were interested and involved in creativity and innovation in EFL instruction. The researcher and the participating teachers drew on the philosophical underpinning that is consistent with the widespread social turn observed in recent TESOL research (Block, 2003). This means we believed there were reciprocal relationships among the teacher, the learner, and other contextual factors which led to creative classroom practice in situ. An emic point of view through narrative inquiry (Johnson & Golombek, 2002) was the research tradition that
this study followed, and this method was believed to allow the participating teachers to reveal important thought processes behind their innovations and provide insights to critical challenges which perhaps other language educators may also face. Thus, the research questions in this study were stated as:
1. From eight teachers’ narrative accounts on creative practice in EFL instruction, what defining features of creativity and innovation in EFL instruction can be derived? What do the teachers emphasize with their practices?
2. What conflicts and concerns about creative language teaching are revealed based on the challenges that the teachers encountered in implementing their activities?
METHOD
ParticipantsThe participants involved in this study and the researcher herself are members of the Research Center for Innovations in Foreign Language Education of National Chengchi University, established in June 2007 and originally based on the members’ interest in using technology in foreign language education. We learned from our research and teaching practice that any use of technology or new teaching tools must take sociocultural contexts into consideration. Our focus thus expanded to include language learning and teaching in conventional language classrooms and self-access learning contexts. Some critical questions we asked ourselves were why we innovated, how to innovate, and what could
be the purpose for doing so. In the process, we reflected on how we had attempted innovations in our language classrooms, what issues we believed to be critical, and what implications we could derive for future practice.
The main participants of this study were eight EFL instructors, including two English native speakers and six Mandarin speakers, representing four national (government-sponsored) university contexts and four private universities of science and technology in Taiwan. All were highly experienced EFL university instructors, with teaching experience ranging from five to more than fifteen years. As instructors or professors in higher education, all of the participants had extensive experience teaching EFL and often engaged in creative and innovative classroom activities. The participants knew the activities were new and innovative; however, the rationales of their classroom activity design were seldom articulated. This study was an opportunity to clarify what they thought about innovation and creativity in language education as they reflected on what they did and why they did it.
The author’s role in this project was to serve as the initiator of the project and a facilitator during the discussions. With the help of research assistants, she was also responsible for collecting the teachers’ narrative data through interviews, providing initial results from analysis for further discussions, and writing up this paper.
Data Collection
The study was conceived as a collaborative reflection and discussion among the eight teachers, and the data were collected from
individual interviews, group discussions, and a joint conference presentation. To help the participants think about the topic, a set of eight questions was sketched out and then revised based on a discussion with the participants. The resulting questions were:
1. Describe a classroom practice which you would use as an example for innovative language teaching.
2. Why do you think this is innovative? What elements make it so? 3. Where did you get this innovative idea?
4. If you have done this (activity or others) with your students, what changes did you observe in your students which tell you that it worked? As a teacher, what do you think you can achieve with this?
5. What is your role as a teacher in the activity?
6. How important is creativity or innovation as a criterion for language teaching practice? As a teacher, what other features do you include in your teaching?
7. What definition or emphasis for innovation in language learning and teaching can you conclude from your answers above? 8. What challenges did you have in implementing the project?
Originally the participants were to write in response to the questions; however, they felt that writing would take up a lot of time and that they would lose the social nature of storytelling prized in this project. It was then decided that the author and her research assistants conducted interviews with each participant. A training session and an interview protocol were provided to graduate student assistants so as to ensure proper interview procedures. During the interview, care was also taken to keep the topic of discussion flexible so that other interesting or
emerging themes and comments could be included. The interviews were conducted either in English or Mandarin Chinese, depending on the native language of the interviewee and typically lasted for 45 to 60 minutes, depending on the available time each interviewee had. All the interview data were audio recorded on site and later transcribed for analysis. This was the first stage of data collection.
The second stage of data collection involved dialogues among the participants. After all the interviews had been analyzed, the author brought the preliminary results to a meeting and asked for participant responses. The participants then discussed the meaning of creativity and innovation based on the preliminary findings. Dialogues and discussions allowed all participants a chance to clarify, specify, explicate and eventually converge toward a set of common concepts associated with creativity and innovation and which will be discussed later in the finding section. This discussion was conducted in English, since all the participants were educators and academics in TESOL but not everybody felt comfortable engaging in an academic discussion in Chinese. The discussion continued to the point when all the participants presented at a symposium of a creativity education conference in October 2008, in which the participants used pictures, photos, and video clips to describe and discuss their practice once again in front of audiences. This symposium provided yet another opportunity for the researcher and all the other participants to understand their practices in concrete terms. Thus, data from the interviews, discussions, and the symposium presentation complimented each other and allowed proper triangulation during the final analysis.
Data Analysis
The first stage of data analysis was conducted before the conference symposium by identifying themes that were related to the following questions: What dimensions of values are embedded in the teachers’ creative practice? What do the teachers mean by innovation and creativity in language teaching? The analysis involved, first of all, reading the transcription several times to identify major themes. The data were then organized in a matrix which helped to make emerging themes become more salient and facilitated comparing and contrasting the eight teachers’ statements. A summary table of the eight teachers’ responses was then created and presented at the discussion of this paper, which helped the researcher and the participants confirm and identify salient issues related to the research questions. As the participants gathered to discuss the preliminary findings, the information in the table was reviewed and revised, which served as a member-checking procedure. Through recursive procedures, themes related to the research questions emerged and will be discussed in the following sections.
HIGHLIGHTS
OF
THE
EIGHT
TEACHERS’
BACKGROUNDS AND CREATIVE ACTIVITIES
Before the results are presented, a brief summary of the teachers’ backgrounds and their activities is necessary. For the sake of easy understanding, the activities discussed below are grouped in three categories of language learning foci: content-based, writing, and oral communication.
Content-Based Language Learning Activities
Paul: Using YouTube extensively to understand social contexts of rock ‘n’ roll. As a native-English-speaker senior lecturer affiliated with a national university foreign language center, Paul’s creative idea is having students work on projects which require searching for videos on YouTube in support of their understanding of the history and other contextual factors resulted in the worldwide rock ‘n’ roll culture and phenomena. As a rock ‘n’ roll fan himself, Paul considers this a content-based language course for advanced-level EFL learners.
JS: Students work on self-selected WebQuest projects in collaborative groups. JS is an assistant professor affiliated with the applied foreign language department of a private college. Her creative idea is to have students in a reading class work as groups to develop projects following existing WebQuests designed by teachers all over the world and available at the WebQuest Central website. Students pick a quest that interests them, which can be as diverse as, for example, planning a trip to a remote country or solving a major energy problem. After consulting with and gaining approval from JS to make sure that the projects are appropriate for them, the students research, read, analyze, and write or create projects in response to their chosen quest.
PH: Students research a company of their choice in a business English class. PH is an assistant professor in the applied foreign language department of a private university. Her students are required to present the success story of a business that is interesting to them in the English business course. The students have to decide which
company to focus on and how to present the story using information found on the Internet. They usually become engaged and attentive during all of the activities, even when other teams are presenting.
Writing Activities
Ruth: Wikispaces story writing with new vocabulary words. Ruth is a native-speaker senior lecturer affiliated with the English department of a national university. In her class, she usually uploads vocabulary words to a Wikispace right as the words are generated from the discussion of weekly student readings. Then she creates tasks to support her emphasis that students need to review and use new vocabulary words promptly after class. Her tasks include group-created stories in Wikispaces that must include the new words discussed in class.
CF: Scaffolding EFL writing with discussions of controversial issues. CF is an assistant professor at a national university. In her writing course, CF has students brainstorm opinions or debate controversial issues first in class and later in an asynchronous online forum before the students start writing essays. These pre-writing discussions help students think, develop their own viewpoints, and make the writing task meaningful.
YC: Incorporating service learning into College English writing. YC is also an assistant professor of a different national university. In YC’s writing class, students are required to take volunteer jobs at non-profit organizations and bring these real world experiences to their writings. This activity intends to prompt students writing exigencies, sharpen their critical thinking skills, and enrich their sub-cultural understanding.
Oral Communication Activities
LD: Scaffolding low-level learners’ communication skills with film dubbing activities. LD is an assistant professor at a private college. She has deep concerns for lower-level English learners. In order to help them develop proper communication skills and engage them in meaningful and contextualized speaking tasks, she has students work as groups in a multimedia language lab to dub sections of a movie that has both the right difficulty levels of language structures and interesting storylines.
SJ: Students creating video information for prospective international students. SJ is also an assistant professor affiliated with a foreign language center of a national university. SJ’s students develop video presentations on various campus topics for prospective international students in order to help these in-coming students understand Taiwanese campus life. This idea came from SJ’s feelings that information provided by the school administration was often dry and not very informative. She feels that her students can be the best spokespersons for campus life topics and that this project will create authentic English communication opportunities.
This is just a snapshot of what each of the teachers does in his or her classroom which they believe to be innovative. The results of analysis and discussions are presented below to address the research questions.
RESULTS
creative practice in EFL instruction, what defining features of creativity and innovation in EFL instruction can be derived? What do the teachers emphasize with their creative practices?
The defining features can be described using Ferguson’s (1993) definition of creativity, which, as discussed earlier, was useful for this study because of its unique focus on innovation in language education. The researcher divided Ferguson’s list into two levels: (1) what can be observed from the surface, including structural, technological, material, and behavioral changes; and (2) what cannot be observed, i.e., changes that happens at a deeper conceptual level, such as those in beliefs, attitudes, and understanding. Table 1 summarizes the defining features that emerged from the eight teachers’ narratives, and the sections below discuss what each of these defining features entails.
Table 1
Two Levels of Creative Teaching Practice
Innovation in Education (Ferguson, 1993, p. 27)
Defining Features of the Activities Discussed Here
Surface Level, or What May be Observed Structural, technological, material, behavioral changes
Changing Techniques: with new people, context, tool, and technology
New, refreshing experience because of
1. Breaking down classroom walls to let in authenticity 2. Implementing structural and
role changes Conceptual Level, or What May not be Observed
Changes in beliefs, attitudes, and understanding Changing Philosophy/ Belief:
using people, context, tool/technology with new focus, purpose, and relation in mind
Concepts behind the creative practices
1. Aiming for learner autonomy 2. Gradually moving from
teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness
Breaking down classroom walls to let in authenticity. In the eight teachers’ narratives, breaking down the classroom walls was found to be the most salient innovative feature. The teachers attempted to link learning to the real world and bring the authentic world and people to the classroom by using real-world tools (e.g., YouTube, movies, videos, Wikispaces), engaging students in the discussion of real-world issues (e.g., Paul’s rock ‘n’ roll, CF’s debatable issues, YL’s experience from service, PH’s researching businesses), assigning authentic tasks (e.g., YL’s service), allowing learners to work on projects so that they can show their personal preference and creativity (e.g., PH and JS), or carrying projects that are developed by real teachers world-wide (e.g., JS’s WebQuest), and those that provide an image of a possible target audience (e.g., SJ). When the students were of higher language proficiency levels, the technology was used to enable authentic tasks which allowed teachers and learners to focus on the audience’s needs and the quality of created information. For the other teachers who put more emphasis on developing concrete language skills, the technology was used to provide refreshing and varied contexts and to make skill learning more meaningful and enjoyable through such activities as reviewing and using new vocabulary words in group-created stories (Ruth’s use of Wikispaces) and developing speaking skills in movie-dubbing activities (e.g., LD’s movie dubbing). Authenticity in learning context, tasks, audience, and goals, albeit of varied degrees of application, obviously existed in all of the activities discussed here, and technology often played an important role in bringing authenticity to these teachers’ classrooms.
The emphasis on authenticity is understandable, given that the context in which all these teachers work is a limited English environment. Taiwan as an EFL environment does not afford much natural context for learners to use the English language outside of the classroom. Many of the students take required English courses for unspecified goals and an unforeseeable future. It can be difficult for them to feel motivated about learning English. Projects or activities that entail some elements of authenticity were thus regarded by the teachers as having the potential to make English learning more meaningful. As LD said, “The ‘newness’ in my activity is because students never had such an opportunity to observe how the language is actually used [in context]…and then imitate it” (Interview, November 31, 2007).
Upon careful consideration, one can also see that the eight teachers’ authenticity focus was in many ways similar to the language play emphasis discussed earlier in the literature review. Both involve actual action or manipulation by the learner, although the teachers here wanted more: Besides having students manipulate or play in order to learn bits and pieces of the language, the teachers were more concerned about bringing in real-world contexts so that the learner, under the teacher’s help, could learn and use the language for real, with interest, and in meaningful ways.
Although none of the teachers mentioned John Dewey, their narratives are in many ways resonate with Dewey’s (1938) conception of experiential education; that is, teachers and learners engaging in purposive and direct experiences with the learning environment and content (See Itin, 1999 for more discussion). As Paul said, “I’m giving students hopefully more of an opportunity to do it [the task]
themselves, and if you do it yourself, you will learn, or remember, better. I usually find they appear to understand it better” (Interview, April, 21, 2008).
In some way, this reflects many of the teachers’ experience abroad, as YC revealed in her interview, “[Service learning] is a common practice in the United States. Um, some of the schools…they put service learning as mandatory and required before [students] graduate from school or university” (Interview, June 19, 2008). The teachers’ adoption of experimental activities also points to the fact that the higher education context does provide the nourishment needed for creative practice, not just in terms of faculty backgrounds but also the flexible curriculum requirements, as LD also said,
In the college of science and technology where I am teaching, we teachers are not confined by a curriculum guideline or a required textbook. There is a bit more freedom to what I want to do in my classroom. So, I do have the tendency to take teaching as a kind of learning [for myself]… (LD Interview, November 31, 2007)
Implementing structural and role changes. The second common feature among all the activities discussed here has to do with observable structural and role changes: That is, all of the activities involve some kind of group discussion or group work.
Group work as an unorthodox classroom structure makes the learning experience immediately feel different. A more conventional teaching model in the university context here would have the teacher serve as the expert or the giver of knowledge, while students are passive receivers of knowledge. However, five out of the eight teachers in this study described their own role as a facilitator or
cheerleader; others said they provided scaffolding or they found ways to help students learn whenever possible. Being a facilitator instead of a key player in the classroom would have made these teachers, for example, leave the podium often, stand among the learners, listen to, converse with, and actually work and solve problems with the learners. All of these could contribute to a different feel of the classroom experience. Role difference also entails that the usual give and take relationships in the classroom are changing. While the teacher is usually the one who works harder to give information, knowledge, methods, orders, and points of view and the learner is at the receiving end, the innovative classroom experiences described here often required the learners to do more with the language they were learning. As YC said, “…it’s very challenging as well. A lot of my students…they complain a lot, because they over-worked for [this course that counts] only two credit hours, you know, to fulfill my requirements.”(YC Interview, November 31, 2007)
The structural changes not only allow students to interact with many of their peers or other individuals but also have the effect of leading the learners away from a view of English learning to which they have become conditional, if not callused, over the years. As CF said,
I am hoping that they will develop a different view toward writing—one that you write not simply because of writing [i.e., writing itself as the goal]. Since this is task-based…and asynchronous discussions are involved, they can continue their discussion in the classroom to writing in the online forum. Writing is [or should be considered] an extension of classroom discussion. (CF Interview, June 12, 2008)
Aiming for learner autonomy. In terms of conceptual differences revealed by the eight teachers, it was found that all of the teaching practices they discussed have a strong emphasis on learner-centeredness and learner autonomy. When asked about the ultimate goal for their activities, the teachers responded that they wanted to develop autonomous learners who could engage in meaningful language learning. Most of the activities required learners to create a product or make a choice, through which the learners would have the opportunity to express their views and preferences and engage in autonomous learning activities. For example, Paul’s goal was “…[learners will be able to] use English to talk about the different forms of music, and the cultural events that are happening” (Email response to a follow-up question, Oct 2008), and PH said, “When students are allowed to do things that they enjoy doing, they tend to be more confident—not so intimidated anymore.”
Gradually moving from teacher-centeredness to learner- centeredness. The intention to encourage learner autonomy was as frequently mentioned by the eight teachers as when they said they regarded themselves as facilitators in the activity, suggesting that both were favorable goals: The teachers expected learners to have the capability and willingness to control their own learning. When the learners assumed control, the teachers would opt to move to the background. Thus, the teachers also emphasized an evolving learner-centered instruction, which means the teacher took the leading role only at the beginning stages of instruction, providing step-by-step scaffolds if necessary and gradually allowing the learners to do the work on their own. Many of the teachers did not seem comfortable
letting learners take full control of their learning activities right from the beginning.
Indeed, not all the students feel comfortable without the teachers’ authoritative lead. Research has shown that learners from Confucian-influenced Asian cultures do expect teachers to lead and to teach (e.g., Wang, 2006). CF mentioned that one of her students was very unhappy with her discussion-focused teaching method. “He made his displeasure very obvious to me in class,” she said. Given that learners from our culture typically expect teachers to take more responsibility for managing learning and are quite used to subsuming their will to the teacher’s authority, a suggested future study would be to investigate how professors and teachers in Taiwanese higher education actually negotiate their roles so that the learner autonomy goal may be achieved.
In sum, the teachers in this study did not engage in creative classroom practice simply because of the technology or for the sake of newness or changes. Instead, they implemented innovations for important goals they set for their teaching. These goals can be characterized as bringing in authentic, contextualized, meaningful, engaging learning experiences to achieve the ultimate goal of learner autonomy. Oftentimes, it involved moving from teacher-centered practice to more autonomous projects and taking learners away from the attitudes conditioned by previous conventional classroom routines through introducing obvious structural or task changes and careful scaffolding.
Research Question 2: What conflicts and concerns about creative language teaching are revealed based on the challenges that the
teachers encountered in implementing their creative activities?
The data indicates three types of conflicts and challenges faced by the teacher: (1) insufficient technological accessibility and support, (2) students’ resistance, and (3) the teacher’s own hesitation and reflective thoughts. Together these forces shaped the innovations and achieved a negotiated manifestation of the creative practice.
(1) Insufficient technological accessibility and support. Technological accessibility and supportive personnel were on top of the teachers’ wish list. For example, LD was troubled by not having many appropriate films to choose from for her movie dubbing activity. In addition, the recording functions in the lab often failed to record learners’ work. The computer in the lab she used did not enable learners to play DVDs, making it difficult for learners to work at their own pace. JS also complained about technological accessibility in implementing her WebQuest projects, but her issue was that students were asked to pay extra fees to use the lab for such a credit course. All of these challenges suggest that accessibility and support are still a problem for teachers who engage in creative practice in higher education here, even though technological development and network infrastructure are often a source of pride for the Taiwanese society.
Research has shown that creative ideas are shaped by the context and environment in which one is situated (Amabile, 1996). Without a supportive environment, teachers would have a heavy workload and pressure, as was the case with SJ. As a new faculty member at a university which is well-known for its research in technological innovations, SJ was surprised by the limited resources available to her and her students. Just five weeks into the semester,
the electronic quota available to her online class forum had already reached its limit. When she asked for a greater quota, the staff in the computer center warned her that her request would not be granted anymore. This kind of warning certainly does not encourage any teacher to engage in a creative teaching practice. Our wish is that the school administration would understand the absurdity of such a warning and be able to always strive for accommodating teaching and learning needs. We see no reason for conflicts between administrators and teachers on the issue of computer resources. After all, teacher creativity is for the benefit of student learning, and it is now relatively inexpensive to acquire more computer resources.
(2) Students’ resistance. In the discussion, the teachers talked about their intention to gradually move from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centeredness through their creative projects. As discussed earlier, the traditional patterns of interaction between teachers and students were thus disrupted. Learner-centeredness naturally entails that students need to actively participate in the activity. The teacher is not the only giver anymore, and the students cannot expect to get everything they need to know from the teacher. Although the teachers were interested in encouraging authenticity and learner autonomy, some of the classroom innovations might make the students feel that they were doing more work than they should, and some students were not pleased with the learner-centeredness emphasis.
In one of the meetings, YC revealed that her students had complained about the required social service at non-profit organizations. Thus, she was interested in finding out how she could give more academic credit to the students than the credits they
normally could get from a writing course. It was clear that not every student could appreciate the teacher’s innovative practice and his or her intention to make language learning tasks authentic. They did not necessarily feel that they own the task, borrowing SJ’s words from the interview. Other teachers also commented that their challenges included coping with the diverse levels of motivation for the required task. As Paul said, “I still have a way to go to achieve the level of student independence I'd like to see.”
This is probably a challenge that teachers who engage in creative practice must face, and there are actually two sides to the problem: From the teacher’s point of view, the learner is less motivated than we want them to be, but from the learner’s point of view, they may not feel that they are given sufficient opportunity for autonomy.
Many teachers either try very hard to persuade the students or take the students by the hand in small steps, as LD did, until they could fully appreciate the fun of the activity. The difficulty is that not every creative activity aims for being fun or has engaging elements from the student’s point of view. For example, the teachers noticed that it could be difficult to get some of our students to talk about serious but important topics in the language classroom, particularly topics that were widely discussed in our country and in the news, such as elections or other political topics. Part of the reason was that the political talk shows prevalent in our TV broadcasting system often lead to strong emotional reactions, turmoil, and conflicts among adults. Although these are authentic topics useful for language classrooms, in the eyes of many of our youngsters, the repeated
reports and overly emotional discussions by different parties are simply too overwhelming and make them feel powerless. Students usually want to have nothing to do with such discussions in the classroom. Thus, although the teachers agree that learner autonomy is an important goal for engaging the students in authentic and creative activities, our learners may not think of themselves as being autonomous in the activity we design for them or in the topics we wish they would express their views. Some of them may even see themselves more in terms of being forced to work on a task assignment than being given an opportunity to show us who they are and what they think. This suggests that, as teachers, we may need to examine our activities more often from the learner’s point of view.
Insights about this issue can also be derived from Amabile (1996) in terms of the effects of rewards and task constraints on creative performance. In her study, although the learners gained similar scores in a post-test, those who worked in a situation where there were external rewards tended to choose easier tasks to work on, compared with those who did not have external rewards. The researcher therefore concluded that external rewards may decrease motivation to be creative, instead of encouraging it. We can also take this to imply that as long as there are requirements prescribed by a teacher, it will be difficult to expect all of the students to act like genuine autonomous learners.
Are we being too idealistic in our efforts to encourage autonomous learning in this cultural context? Although the literature on language learner autonomy has suggested that autonomy as a western concept tends not to be accepted well by students from Asian cultures (see Littlewood, 1999 for a review), we feel uncomfortable in
accepting such a notion. After all, we have all met some very autonomous Taiwanese learners, particularly when they are striving for some specific goal of their own, such as trying to pass a high-stakes examination in which the learner clearly sees life-or-death consequences. Perhaps some of the learners in our classrooms simply do not see how our tasks complement their personal goals. Obviously, we have some adjustments to make in our activity design and more negotiation to do with our learners.
(3) Teacher’s hesitation and reflective thoughts. In addition to student complaints, the following comments taken from the data also caught our attention. CF responded that, “The activity increased student writing opportunities, but not necessarily increased their writing capability” (Interview, June 12, 2008). YC reported that, “[I am] not able to provide quantifiable language learning evidence” (Interview, June 19, 2008). And PH observed that, “Students have fun, but do not necessarily learn in the traditional sense of language learning gains” (Interview, March 27, 2008). These comments indicate that the teachers might also be concerned about the results of their innovative activities. The teachers might feel more or less pressured to comply with the orthodox view of what a language teacher should do and what kind of result should be expected from a language course. As CF concluded after describing the student who was displeased with her writing instruction, “I ended up spending a large portion of my class time on more conventional writing exercises.” Thus, the learner’s reaction to the innovative practice and the teacher’s reflective thought actually negotiated with each other to achieve a level of innovation acceptable to each other as well as to the
general TESOL professional community (Cropley, 2006). Such consciousness generated collaboratively by the learner and the teacher is a mechanism that moderates and regulates the creative teaching practice so that, although the practice is new and refreshing, it will not be regarded as exceeding an acceptable level. This suggests that challenges can be considered as a positive force to help the teacher develop a more workable practice that meets the local learner’s needs.
CONCLUSION
This study explored dimensions of innovation and creative language teaching based on reflective collaborative inquiry of a group of eight language teachers in the Taiwanese higher education system. Using Ferguson’s (1993) definition of creativity as a framework, the study points out that the eight teachers’ creative language teaching entailed breaking down the classroom walls to let in authenticity, adopting structural and role changes in the classroom, gradually moving from teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness, and aiming for learner autonomy. The challenges experienced by the teachers centered on insufficient technological accessibility and support, insecure feelings from not being sure about meeting the achievement expectation for language teaching, and the need for better ways to handle student resistance.
Our findings are resonant with Horng et al.’s (2005) discussion of creative instructional strategies identified in their study of four award-winning creative teachers. However, we do not think the eight teachers’ emphases here are simply at the instructional strategy level,
which seems insufficient to describe the teachers’ professionalism. It is clear that the eight teachers here teach in ways that are most consistent with their beliefs as to what language teaching is all about and in what ways their students can best engage in learning. In addition, the activities the teachers described as creative are closely related to their identities, including their individual interests (e.g., Paul’s interest in rock ‘n’ roll music), teaching philosophy and deep reflections about their experiences, originating either from their own learning experiences or from working with other learners. What truly matters, as many of the eight teachers suggested, is that creative language teaching brings fulfilling learning experiences to themselves and their students. These teachers are willing to deal with all the complexities and challenges brought about by creative teaching because there are opportunities for them to do their job well as teachers and to learn and sustain their own interest and enthusiasm for being a teacher. Thus, creative teaching involves much more than using a particular type of instructional strategy or technology. Based on these teachers’ experiences, future research focusing on the connections among language teacher learning, the formation of teachers’ identity, and their creative use of technology in teaching may lead to fruitful results.
Besides offering a better understanding of dimensions of classroom innovation and creative language teaching, this project also provided implications for community building for the purpose of teacher professional development. Through a series of joint academic activities—a conference presentation and then a paper—this project has been a rare opportunity for the teachers to listen to colleagues and
to understand what others think about their teaching. We found that having concrete goals to which everybody can contribute helps form a learning community. Our experience can perhaps serve as a model for language teachers at all educational levels to support each other in the process of adopting creative teaching practices.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan (Project numbers: 96-2411-H-004-045 and 97-2410-H-004- 126-MY2). Special thanks also go to the eight participating teachers, Paul Cameron, Ching-fen Chang, Jin-shan Chen, Shu-Chen Huang, Christine Lu-de Lee, Yichun Liu, Ruth Martin, and Pi-hua Tsa, and the following doctoral students of the English Department of NCCU: Susan Liao, Cher Chen, Daniel Chiang, Joe Chang, Ken Pan, Michael Cheng, and Sharon Chen, for their assistance.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chao, Chin-chi, Ph.D. in Language Education, is an Associate Professor of the Department of English, National Chengchi University. Her research draws upon Vygotskian sociocultural theory to investigate issues related to foreign language learning of the net generation and language teacher professional development in learning communities and Internet-supported environment.
