Teachers’ and students’ perceptions of CLT

Week 2NJ Kang

CA ?

• Richard & Rodgers (1985) stated that CLT should be considered as an approach rather than a method, according their view in this approach there is a neat distinction between the theory of language and what is going on in the implementation process, in which im-plementation process directly relates to teachers and students’ perception of this approach and variations in applying this ap-proach in different classes according to their specialized context.

1) Research questions2) Research methods 3) Participants4) Findings• Read one chapter about CLT and summa-

rize meanings of CLT, theory of language and learning.

Try to understand roles of comprehension and production in language learning.

Student’s Understandings and Practices Regarding Communica-tive Language Teaching (CLT) in Malaysian Secondary Schools

• Reza Raissi Faizah Mohamad Nor Marzilah A Aziz Zaidah Zainal Za-nariah Md Saleh

Structure of the article

• Title• Abstract: Miniature of an article• Introduction : Background of an article• Literature Review : Direct relevant• Method • Result• Conclusion• References

RQ from Abstract• In this study researchers attempted to investigate how CLT

understood and implemented in Malaysian secondary schools from the students’ point of view. In order to get a clear picture of students’ understanding, perceptions and the way that they incorporate CLT in the secondary schools a semi-structured in-terview was conducted among 30 ESL Malaysian students in Malaysian secondary schools. Results of the study showed dif-ferent contextual and cultural problems regarding implemen-tation of CLT from the students’ viewpoint. There were some mismatches between what is going on in Malaysian secondary schools English classes and what has been assigned to do by the curriculum of the ministry of education of this country. At the end of the study some pedagogical implications have been proposed by the researchers which can help decision makers in the language teaching and learning of this country.

RQ

• In this study researchers attempted to investigate how CLT understood and implemented in Malaysian secondary schools from the stu-dents’ point of view.

Literature Review

• Pitfalls of GTM (Dam, 2001)• Its focus on written language• CLT focus on learners’ communicative competence• Richard & Rodgers (1985) stated that CLT should be

considered as an approach rather than a method, according their view in this approach there is a neat distinction between the theory of language and what is going on in the implementation process, in which implementation process directly relates to teachers and students’ perception of this approach and variations in applying this approach in different classes according to their specialized context.

Method Qualitative method of data collection A three phase semi-structured interview Participants:• 30 secondary students in Pasirgudang district, Johor, Malaysia. • They have studied in form one to form four levels, • Their age range was between 13 to 16 years old. • Stratified purposeful sampling technique was used in order to select

their participants to this aim they had different criteria in their mind to choose their required sample,

• The first and most important factor related to the school types, researchers chose governmental schools which follow the assigned curriculum by the min-istry of education of Malaysia.

• Second criterion related to the level of the schools in which researchers chose just secondary schools that students are more proficient to implement CLT in classes in comparison to primary schools.

• Third criterion related to the setting of the schools which should be located in Johor Bahru that researchers could do their data collection there and generalize the findings to the whole schools of Malaysia.

Method• Three phase semi-structured interview• In the first phase of the interviews researchers asked students’ ideas and per-

ceptions about the implementation of CLT in Malaysian secondary schools whether they have favorable or unfavorable attitude regarding CLT and their tentative chal-lenges (if any) regarding CLT use in classes. Also researchers asked participants ideas about the negotiations of teacher and learners in the class to see whether these kinds of negotiations can help them to improve their communicative compe-tence or not.

• In the second phase of the interviews researchers asked students about the quality of the textbooks and other supplementary materials (if any) their teachers use in the classes, and their overall opinion about the English curriculum in Malaysia. In order to complete the second phase questions researchers asked stu-dents’ about the amount of real-life situation and authentic tasks in the classes and whether they found it useful for their pedagogical purposes or not.

• In the third part of the interviews researchers asked students about the process of learning different skills in the Malaysian secondary schools. Researchers asked students’ feeling about their improvement in different skills (reading, writ-ing, speaking &listening) through CLT, and their ideas about the error correction in CLT method; how they want teachers to feedback on their errors (implicitly or ex-plicitly) when their teachers want to teach them different skills.

Results & discussion

• Results of the first phase of the study

• In the first phase of the current study firstly researchers asked students’ fa-vorable or unfavorable attitudes regard-ing the nature of CLT in Malaysian sec-ondary schools, in the following table you can see frequency and percentage of students’ opinions regarding the na-ture of CLT.

Results & discussion

2. Results of the second part of in-terview

In this section researchers asked stu-dents’ ideas about the English text-books, assigned curriculum by the ministry of education, and amount of using authentic tasks & facilities in the Malaysian secondary schools results of the study follows in this section.

• 3 Results of the third part of the study

• In the third phase of the study researchers asked students about the process of learning different skills and sub-skills in the Malaysian secondary schools in order to see whether CLT method was effective for them and their pedagogical purposes or not. On the other hand researchers attempted to investigate about participants ideas regarding error correction & grammar teaching to see whether they prefer that their errors to be corrected explicitly or implicitly, or grammar principles to be taught implicitly or explic-itly

Two dimensions of teacher knowledge: the case of communicative language teaching

1) Research questionsTeachers’ knowledge and beliefs of commu-

nicativeness in language teachingMulti dimensional and dynamicPersonal /impersonal dimensionTheoretical/ practical dimension2) Research methods : examines the interac-

tion between these two dimensions3) Participants: 6 Turkish teachers4) Findings

Structure of the article• Title• Abstract• Introduction• Literature review as document analysis• 2. The concept of teacher knowledge• 2.1. Knowledge and beliefs • 2.2. Knowledge versus ability • Methodology• 3. The concept of communicativeness in language teaching• 3.1. The study • 3.2. Results • 4. Conclusion •

Research questions

Critical examination of two “ concepts”= conceptual ar-eas

1) Teacher knowledge, Teacher cognition, Teacher beliefs: what a teacher thinks, knows and believes

Examines the various facets of what can be referred to by the term teacher knowledge

Document analysis2. Concept of teacher

knowledge2.1 knowledge and be-liefs2.2 knowledge versus

ability3. Concept of communicative-

ness in language teaching

2) Teacher knowledge about communicativeness in language teaching

• Critical examination of two “ concepts”= conceptual areas

1)Teacher knowledge, Teacher cognition, Teacher beliefs: • what a teacher thinks, knows and believes

2) Teacher knowledge about communicativeness in language teaching

The participants in the study

• had graduated from the same B.A program in English Language Education offered by a prominent university in Turkey in Spring, 2008, after having undergone more than 10 years of previous language learning experi-ence in an educational system where grammar-based teaching was the norm. They all had participated in at least one-term teacher training which included observ-ing EFL classes, and a year-long practicum where they taught EFL classes. Three of them are currently teach-ing at schools in Turkey while two are pursuing their M.A degrees in the U.S., and four of them had at least one-term studying/teaching experience abroad where English is spoken as a first language.

Methodology

• Two Phase Data Collection• Phase 1: Survey• Phase 2: Video taped class observa-

tion Interview

1st Phase• The first phase examined teachers’ background knowledge of

communicative language teaching as a more abstract entity re-flecting what they were taught in the teacher education program.

• Survey to teachers about what they were taught in the teacher education program.

• A statement: An examination of the culminating philosophy statement produced at the end of their teacher education pro-gram,

• A sentence-completion task: ten sets of words/phrases related to the common principles or themes taken from the descriptions and definitions in literature on communicative language teaching, and required the teachers to put them into sentences which artic-ulated their own views

• A follow-up interview related to their understandings of “com-municative language teaching”: It allowed the participants to clar-ify and elaborate on their responses.

The second phase• Video taped classroom observation: Elicited their perceptions

in a more situated manner by having them reflect on specific class-room processes that they observed in videotaped clips of class-room teaching. It required the participants to view a videotape of three authentic lessons from an English for Academic Purposes program in a Canadian university, in which a Canadian ESL instruc-tor carried out instruction using a variety of different types of activ-ities, tasks, and strategies.

• A questionnaire drew their attention to six main activities and elicited their views about the communicativeness of each.

• A follow-up interview explored their responses in more depth, starting in an open-ended manner where they could respond more freely and spontaneously, followed by a more structured process in which they were posed specific questions (e.g. What was it about this activity that you found (un)communicative? Why did you (dis)like it? etc.) that arose out of their previous discussion.

The analysis• For each participant, recurrent terms and themes were identified

and the emergent patterns provided the blueprint for further analy-sis, as they signaled issues of particular significance for the partici-pants.

• In the survey, the questionnaires, teaching philosophies and initial inter view, the responses were categorized based on whether the participants were referring to their personal experiences of learning and teaching or to the information they had learned in their courses and readings, and sorted according to the factors that were de-scribed as relevant in leading the teacher to a certain belief stated in the initial interview. The analysis in the initial phase produced questions for them to elaborate on during the follow-up observa-tional interview, and a further cycle of analysis was done, examin-ing the results of all participants in light of both (i)a synthesis of the principles of communicative language teaching described in the lit-erature, and (ii) the evaluation of the activities by the instructor who carried out the teaching in the recorded classes.

Conclusion

• This study allows us to posit relationships in these two dimensions of teacher knowledge (as in Fig.3), reflecting the finding that, rather than there being a di-rect connection between impersonal theoretical knowledge and practice, im-personal knowledge must be personal-ized through a process of interpretation stemming from a teacher’s own experi-ence.

Homework

• Read two articles, summarize each article following the structure below

1) Research questions2) Research methods 3) Participants4) FindingsCompare the two articles in terms of structure

and type of research they used.Bring your own opinion of findings of these

two researches.