The school, target teacher, and classes in the senior high school are discussed in the following section, providing a thorough description of the research site.

CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY

This present research is a case study of a senior high school English teacher’s instructional beliefs and curriculum practices in both the English gifted and the regular classes. In this chapter, three qualitative research methods (i.e., classroom observations, interviews, and questionnaire) are delineated. The participants, data collection and analysis of the study are described in sequence.

Participants

The school, target teacher, and classes in the senior high school are discussed in the following section, providing a thorough description of the research site.

The School

For the sake of accessibility, the researcher decided to investigate the English

gifted program in Taipei City. Among several senior high schools where English

gifted programs were offered, the chosen school was deemed by the researcher as the

most appropriate one for this research. This municipal senior high school, located in

the eastern part of Taipei City, was a complete school containing both junior and

senior sections. For senior high section, it approximately consisted of 31 classes,

including 27 regular classes and 4 self-contained gifted classes for English and

physical education talented students. The English gifted program in this school was

relatively new with only a three-year history; that is, there was an English gifted class

in each grade. Teachers in this English gifted program were enthusiastic and earnest

about teaching, even though few of them had sufficient background or qualifications

of gifted education.

The Teacher

This research was a case study intending to investigate a teacher teaching both the English gifted and the regular classes. Thus, after some possible teachers were sifted out, the researcher immediately contacted them through telephone. After suffering from telephone refusals, one of the possible teachers lightened the researcher’s road by granting the help without hesitation. This target teacher, Stephanie

, had been teaching English in this senior high school for 3 years, among which 2 years were in the English gifted program. After graduating from Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University, she started her teaching career in a private girls’ high school in Taipei. In order to enrich herself, Stephanie attended an MA summer TESOL program in the Graduate Institute of English, National Taiwan Normal University. At present, Stephanie has finished all the graduate courses, but the thesis. In total, Stephanie had been teaching English in senior high schools for 8 years.

Concerning specialized teaching areas, Stephanie was interested in and took delight in reading, writing, and speaking instruction. As mentioned earlier, teachers in this English gifted program did not have ample qualifications for educating gifted learners, Stephanie was no exception. However, in the attempt to enrich herself and advance her teaching, Stephanie had participated in some in-service training workshops pertaining to English gifted education several times.

In terms of the target teacher’s perspectives on the English gifted class, she took a positive attitude toward the self-contained mode. As Stephanie noted:

(In a self-contained class), students are at the same level. It is easy for me to design activities in class. And more capable or high-ability learners will provide stimuli for peer learning. But in this kind of class for three years, (students) will become numb, feeling paralyzed gradually to the stimuli.

1

For ethical consideration and protection of the teacher, a pseudonym is used.

(PREOIBG: 12/5/2006)

As for diplomaism’s impact on English gifted program, Stephanie mentioned that

“diplomaism acutely influences every senior high school student, so let alone English talented learners; they need to choose the road that leads to further studies in colleges”

(PREOIBG: 12/5/2006).

The Classes

In this study, two second-year classes taught by Stephanie were selected as the target classes for observation. The first class, in which Stephanie was the homeroom teacher, was the second-year English gifted class in this senior high school. This self-contained gifted class consisted of 16 male and 14 female students. Among these 30 students, 14 of them were enrolled through the joint entrance screening examination for scholastically gifted students hosted by the city government, whereas 16 were sifted out from within-school identification process. Stephanie had been teaching their “General English” in the previous and present academic years in this English gifted class. In the second observed semester, besides General English, Stephanie also taught “Introduction to British and American Literature,” one of the enrichment courses in this class. In both semesters, in addition to the accelerated

“General English,” the English gifted class had other enrichment courses that were null in the regular class, including “Independent Study,” “Introduction to British and American Literature,” “Speech and Debate,” and “Internet English.” Students in this gifted class were not all interested in social studies; rather, 9 of them belonged to science studies group. What turned out to be was that those belonged to science

2

The data sources are abbreviated as follows: PREOIBG stands for pre-observation interview (background information); PREOIBL is indicative of pre-observation interview (teachers’ beliefs);

POSTOI indicates post-observation interview; POSTOQI stands for post-observation questionnaire

interview; and COEG denotes classroom observation in the English gifted class whereas COR in the

regular class.

studies group would attend physics and chemistry in other classes while the English gifted class was having history and geography classes. It is interesting to note that, according to Stephanie, only a few of the students in this English gifted class studied hard and showed strong intrinsic motivation for learning English. Yet, in Stephanie’s eyes, they were “simpleminded and kindhearted and naïve” (PREOIBG: 12/5/2006).

In terms of their English ability, these English talented learners were slightly better than their regular counterparts because most of them had started learning English at an early age.

The second class, the regular class, was comprised of 34 and 37 students in the first and second observed semester respectively. Stephanie had also been their

“General English” teacher for almost two years. In this regular class, “General English” received more instruction time per week than that in the English gifted class.

Generally, students in this regular class all belonged to social studies group.

These two classes shared some commonalities. First of all, as mentioned, Stephanie had been teaching these two classes from the previous academic year on.

Second, both classes subscribed the same textbooks for their “General English”

course, except for that the English gifted class had one more reading book. More than these, students in both classes had a good relationship with Stephanie. Table 3-1 briefly illustrates the background information of both classes mentioned above.

Data Collection

There are two sections in the discussion of data collection of the current study.

The first part precisely reports the instruments and methods adopted for collecting

data, including classroom observations, interviews with the target teacher, and

questionnaire survey. The second section presents the data collection procedures of

this research.

Table 3-1 Background information of both the English gifted and the regular classes Numbers of

Students

Subjects Taught by Stephanie

Enrichment Courses

Subscribed Textbooks English

Gifted Class

1

semester Male: 16 Female: 14 Total: 30

2

semester Male: 16 Female: 14 Total: 30

1

semester General English (4)

2

semester General English (5)

Introduction to British and American Literature (2)

1

semester

Independent Study (2)

Introduction to British and American Literature

(2)

Speech and Debate (2)

2

semester Independent Study (2)

Introduction to British and American Literature

(2)

Internet English (2)

1

semester English III

(New Fareast version) Listening Magazine Vocabulary Book Reading Book

2

semester English IV

(New Fareast version) Listening Magazine Vocabulary Book Pattern Book Reading Book

Regular Class

1

semester Male: 11 Female: 23 Total: 34

2

semester Male: 14 Female: 23 Total: 37

1

semester General English (6)

2

semester General English (7)

NA 1

semester

English III

(New Fareast version) Listening Magazine Vocabulary Book

2

semester English IV

(New Fareast version)

Listening Magazine

Vocabulary Book

Pattern Book

Note: Numbers in the parentheses stand for the instruction hours per week.

The Instruments

In spite of the defect that qualitative approaches “are sometimes thought to be weaker on falsifiability and generalizability” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p.

69), this study was fundamentally a case study incorporating essentially qualitative research methods to elicit data, including classroom observations, interviews, and questionnaire. With the adoption of these methods, frequently employed in a single case study, an in-depth research of the target teacher’s curriculum implementation, teacher’s beliefs, and decision-making process was therefore rationalized with validity.

Classroom Observations

The primary instrument in this current study was classroom observation.

Viewing from an etic, outsider’s perspective (Murphy, 2001), the researcher functioned as a passive nonparticipant observer or privileged observer, “watching and listening attentively” in the back of the classroom (Charles & Mertler, 2002, p. 240).

As opposed to naturalistic and descriptive observation, systematic observation with a coding scheme in hand was used in this research (McDonough & McDonough, 1997).

This intentional observation scheme or “systematic observational schedules”

(McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p. 105) (see Appendix A), with reference to

Avery, VanTassel-Baska, and O’Neill’s (1997) and Kulieke’s (1986) classroom

observation forms and Ullman and Geva’s (1981) TALOS (Target Language

Observation Scheme) observation scheme, contained three major “preplanned

observational categories” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p. 105): content

materials, instructional strategies, and assessment. The first category incorporated

such dimensions related to content materials as content adaptation, focus, topic,

cognitive level, instructional function, delivery, and variety; the second category

included dimensions pertaining to instructional strategies, such as higher-level thinking, type of activity, teacher’s question, teacher talk, classroom language use, learning context, and technique; the third part dealt with how the observed teacher implemented assessment, including mode and nature of assessment. Beside the categories or items was the tally column where frequency of occurrence or items being observed was documented.

Despite that systematic observation is convenient, observation scheme can “blind us to aspects of interaction and discourse which are not captured by the scheme, and which may be important to our understanding of the classroom or classrooms we are investigating” (Nunan, 1992, p. 98); also, “interesting events in that data that are not included on the checklist will not be noted” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p.

106). Owing to these limitations, in every single class period, descriptive and evaluative/interpretive field notes (Lynch, 1996) were taken in the narrative report part of the observation form to compare and contrast the target teacher’s behaviors and practices in both classes. Descriptive notes recorded events that actually happened in real time, such as the questions asked, activities practiced, or points written on the blackboard, and so on. On the other hand, classroom atmosphere, students’ interest level, or other subjective judgments were recorded as the evaluative notes.

Due to the one-month winter vacation, this two-month classroom observation was from December to March in the next year and had documented 4 lessons of Stephanie’s “General English” course in both the English gifted and the regular classes. Three lessons were observed in the end of the first semester, while one was observed at the start of the second semester after the winter vacation. By means of a nonstop observation over a longer period, the researcher could obtain the

“insider-knowledge” more easily (McDonough & McDonough, 1997). Table 3-2 has

outlined the observation schedule in detail.

Table 3-2 The classroom observation schedule

English Gifted Class Regular Class General English General English Length of Observation Dec. 21, 2006 ~ Mar. 13, 2007 Dec. 19, 2006 ~ Mar. 13, 2007 Total Amount of

Periods Observed 26 periods 37 periods

Total Amount of

Lessons Observed 4 lessons 4 lessons

Interviews with the Teacher

Apart from classroom observations, interviews with the target teacher were also conducted since interview enables participants to “use their own words to communicate their attitudes, opinions, and beliefs” (Nielsen & Buchanan, 1991, p.

279).

Pre-observation interview. Prior to the observation, a pre-observation interview

with the teacher was carried out in the attempt to inquire the participants’ background

information and elicit Stephanie’s teachers’ beliefs. The semi-structured interview

designed to investigate teachers’ beliefs was composed of three sections (see

Appendix B). The first section asked beliefs about English learning, such as the

purpose, strategies, and the most important aspect in learning English; the second part

of the interview probed into Stephanie’s experience of and beliefs about English

teaching, such as her perspectives on effective teaching and CLT, and her ways of

enhancing students’ motivation for learning English; the third section was mainly the

inquiry and investigation of her beliefs about the English gifted program, including

her perceived differences between and expectation for the English talented and the

regular learners, and her differentiation practices with regard to materials, strategies,

and assessment for the English talented learners.

Post-observation interview. Once an intact lesson was observed, a semi- structured interview combined with a method similar to stimulated recall (McDonough & McDonough, 1997; Nunan, 1992) with the target teacher was conducted to probe into the teacher’s belief, practice, and behavior in terms of the selection of content materials, teaching strategies, and assessment in the particular lesson. This kind of self-reporting technique is “a technique that holds promise for studying inaccessible behaviors” (Swassing & Amidon, 1991, p. 151). The interview questions included three parts: content materials, instructional strategies, and assessment (see Appendix C). In each part, the observed teacher’s actual differentiated practices and the underlying forces that drove decision making in both the English gifted and the regular classes were inquired. This post-observation interview after each lesson added up to 4 episodes eventually. When the entire observation was completed, a wrap-up post-observation interview was conducted to better understand the teacher’s knowledge about differentiation. In this interview, both the constraints on the target teacher’s practice of differentiation and her hypothetical ways of differentiation in the English gifted class were investigated.

Informal conversational interview. Intending to gain a more comprehensive

understanding of the target teacher’s underlying beliefs which dominated her in-class

decision-making, the researcher actively sought opportunities to have informal

conversational interviews after class with Stephanie. In the after-class informal

conversation, Stephanie’s interesting decision-makings in the previous class that

aroused the researcher’s curiosity were chatted about. In this way, those essential data

not emergent in the formal interviews because of time and memory could be revealed

in the small talks.

Post-Observation Questionnaire

To achieve triangulation of data and to acquire a more holistic, thorough and comprehensive understanding of the target teacher’s curriculum implementation in both classes, a questionnaire surveying the teacher’s selection of content materials, teaching techniques, and assessment implementation was used after the completion of observations (see Appendix D). This questionnaire, or “opinionaire,” was basically designed with the four-point Likert scale (Charles & Mertler, 2002; McDonough &

McDonough, 1997).

This questionnaire, primarily with reference to Kulieke’s (1986) observation form for teachers of the gifted and VanTassel-Baska’s (1996b) lists of criteria for evaluating language arts units and curricular features for highly able verbal learners, was composed of three parts, 46 questions. The first part (Qs 1-17), the content materials, addressed teacher’s selection of materials on the basis of learners’ qualities (Qs 1-6 & Q 13), the content complexity, variety, degrees of challenge, enrichment and acceleration (Qs 7-12 & Q 15). The target teacher’s instructional practices, addressed in the second part (Qs 18-38), included thinking training (Qs 18-26), inter- and intra-disciplinary teaching (Qs 27-28), various use of techniques, strategies, and resources (Qs 32-35), TL use and grammar focus (Qs 37-38). The third part (Qs 39-46), inquiring teacher’s assessment, was inclusive of mode and nature of assessment (Qs 39-43 & Q 45), student involvement (Q 44), and standard for assessing student production (Q 46).

For the purpose of enhancing validity, this questionnaire had been scrutinized

and slightly revised by one of the professors specialized in TESOL at the English

Department, National Taiwan Normal University before it was distributed to the target

teacher. The questionnaire survey was conducted in an interview manner in which the researcher repeated the statements and the teacher expressed her opinions orally. In each question, the reason of the target teacher’s choice was asked, too.

The Procedures

As soon as Stephanie agreed to participate in this case study, the researcher took initiative to arrange the meeting time with the target teacher. The first meeting time occurred at the beginning of December. The consent form (see Appendix E) was signed, background information of her and her both classes was asked, and teachers’

beliefs were surveyed at that time. After a short period of time, the classroom observation began. In the process of observation, the researcher took field notes, filled in the observation forms, and videotaped the whole class time although the camera might “invite strange behavior” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p. 110). For safety and reliability, the researcher rewatched the recordings after class, double- checking the preciseness of the tallied data. Only interesting and research-worthy parts of the observation were transcribed for analysis. The 4 posterior lesson interviews with the teacher, conducted after each lesson ended in both classes, were audiotaped and transcribed; the researcher also took notes during the interviews in case of unexpected follow-up technical problems. After all the classroom observations and interviews were completed, the questionnaire survey was implemented in a manner the same as what had been done in the semi-structured interviews. With all the data collected, the analysis was conducted.

Data Analysis

Data analysis in this study encompassed three phases. The first phase, using

quantitative approach, coped with the numerical data elicited from the tally-oriented

observation forms. Descriptive statistics (Olszewski-Kubilius & Kulieke, 1991) were used to calculate the frequency and ratio to arrive at reliable interpretations.

In the second stage of analysis, the interpretive approach to analyzing the ethnographic and naturalistic data derived from classroom observations, interviews and questionnaire was adopted (McDonough & McDonough, 1997). Based on the naturally occurring data in the classroom and the researcher’s field notes, frequency and patterns (McDonough & McDonough, 1997) of teacher behaviors and practices were inductively analyzed to see what featured the teacher’s choice of content materials, use of instructional strategies, and implementation of assessment in both classes. This same technique was applied to analyzing interview and questionnaire data as well. Themes, patterns, and categories were searched, and frequency tabulation was conducted via logico-inductive content analysis to make interpretations and explanations (Charles & Mertler, 2002; McDonough & McDonough, 1997).

Data analysis in the third phase dealt with the sources altogether to cross-analyze the relationship between data sets. Since the three research domains in this study were all explored in each research method, it seemed plausible to examine the correlation between each data analysis. Regarding the differentiated instructional materials, strategies, and assessment, what had been observed from the observations and field notes was compared with what had been espoused by the target teacher in the pre- and post-observation interviews and questionnaire to examine the consistency degree between teachers’ beliefs and practices. Moreover, the factors influencing teaching practice and decision-making were analyzed with relation to Stephanie’s stated beliefs.

With these three approaches being used, triangulation of data, which enhanced validity and reliability to a great extent, might be achieved (McDonough &

McDonough, 1997; Moon, 1991). By cross-validating the data elicited from multi-

methods, lessening “the bias inherent in any one source or method” seemed to be

possible (Lynch, 1996, p. 60).

Data analysis process in this present research, as rooted from typical case study research, was an on-going act both during and after data collection (Lundsteen, 1991).

Rather than the terminal data analysis after the completion of data collection,

recursive data collection and analysis (Moon, 1991) was salient in this case study. On

the basis of the analysis of previous episodes of observation, the focus of following

observations was sometimes slightly altered. With repeated measures design or

repeated administration of measurements (i.e., interview on a regular basis after one

lesson finished) (O’Tuel, 1991), patterns of practices and beliefs were formulated

effectively.