teyl seminar papers 2007 edited

1 This Material is Copyright © Dept. of Educational Studies 2010

Teaching English To Young Learners

Fourth International TEYL Research

Seminar 2007 Papers

Edited by Annie Hughes and Nicole Taylor


The Department of Educational Studies, University of York, is well known for its delivery of the award-winning MA in TEYL The MA in TEYL is a two-year part-time distance course, allowing students to study from anywhere in the world throughout their studies on the programme. The programme comprises 8 multimedia self-study modules, plus participation in an annual Preparatory Course with cohort colleagues. Students submit Assignments, after each module. Assessment is by submission of these eight module Assignments, some of which require the carrying out of small-scale classroom-based research projects. Students can choose to focus on a range of learner age groups for individual module assignments There are four programme start dates each year, as follows: - Online each October or February - Athens cohort with a one week face to face Preparatory Course each June. - Singapore cohort with a one week face to face Preparatory Course each

November. (new face to face cohorts are also being planned for Switzerland and Japan)

Emphasis in the MA in TEYL is on the linking of theory and practice, making extensive use of material from authentic classes.

For further information contact: MA Programme Administrator, Department of Educational Studies, University of

York, York YO10 5DD, UK E-mail: [email protected] / Telephone: ++44 (0)1904 433688 / Fax: ++44 (0)1904

433459

MA in Teaching English to Young Learners (by Distance)


Contents Annie Hughes Foreword

5

Shelagh Rixon EYL teachers’ background, beliefs and practices in the teaching of initial reading.

6

Wendy Arnold Use of project work to promote collaboration and research after the MA. A longitudinal study to evaluate the use of graded/leveled readers with YL 9-12 year old in Hong Kong.

15

Fatima Al-Aghbari What techniques could help to reduce disruptive behaviour in an EFL classroom of eight to nine year olds?

26

Valentina Bamber Focusing on form with Italian young learners: a case study.

34

Anika Browne-Jones Can the use of natural speech codes be increased in the short-story writing of grade 10 learners?

43

Chrysoula Christoforidou

How does the teacher’s location in the English language classroom affect the young learners’ accuracy and quantity in particular vocabulary of their spoken output in the target language, during oral pair-work activities?

51

Andréa Lopes

Can the use of puppets help six-year-old Brazilian children recall and reproduce refrains in fairy tales more easily?

57

Mike Glover An Investigation into the possible influences that persuade Young Learners to attempt, or not attempt, to participate in class discussions.

68

Katherine MacKay Can the use of Disney cartoon characters increase oral recall of vocabulary for 8-9 year olds studying English as a foreign language in Japan?

75

Kerry Powell Helping children to recognise words and decode texts.

85

Marilyn Roberts The effect of hand-raising on the amount of times English is used in the classroom.

99

Fiona Schmidt-Dowling

Can the use of television influence language motivation in an EFL classroom?

113

Kate Vivian

Cohesiveness in Mixed L1 and ESL Young Learner Group-work.

125


Foreword I am really thrilled to be able to write a foreword to this fascinating collection of papers following the 2007 International TEYL Research Seminar held at York. The papers from the International TEYL Research Seminar held at York in previous years have been really valuable for both MA in TEYL students and others of us involved in TEYL in many ways, according to feedback we have had from our readers. I am sure that this present set of papers will be just as valuable and important to us all, too. There are thirteen papers included in this collection. The topics within them range from teachers‟ practices and beliefs about initial reading to cohesiveness in mixed native speaker and ESL classrooms. There are stops along the way into a whole range of interesting and highly relevant areas of investigation, as can be seen from the list of contents above. Each of these papers deals with fascinating and exciting areas within TEYL, I am sure you will agree. It is easy to forget that all these papers, from well-established specialists and new specialists in the field of TEYL, alike, are often the result of months, and sometimes many years, of research. The papers don‟t always clarify how frustrating the bad times were or how exhilarating the good times of the research were for these individuals, but we know all the writers will have experienced both! We are so glad they did so as otherwise we would not have such a wealth of data to refer to or such interesting reflections and results to read about. Each of these papers will inform TEYL practice for all of us. Given this, I would like to thank all of the writers of the papers as I know their work will inform, illustrate and instruct those of us reading about their experiences. We are very grateful to read about and reflect on this research in order to inform our own TEYL practice. All of the papers in this publication are inspiring and thought-provoking and will make lots of us want to rush out and continue in these areas of research. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Nicole Taylor for all her work in the editing and preparation of these papers for publication. Annie Hughes Senior Teaching Fellow Department of Educational Studies Langwith College University of York York, YO10 5DD [email protected]

6 This Material is Copyright © Shelagh Rixon 2010

EYL teachers’ background, beliefs and practices in the teaching of initial reading.

Shelagh Rixon

Associate Professor Centre for English Language Teacher Education, The University of Warwick

This is a report of a study that I carried out over 2005 and 2006. Its purpose was to provide myself with a better grounded starting point for a series of larger and more comprehensive studies in the field of Young Learner studies on the theme of how initial reading is approached in different contexts. By „initial reading‟ I mean the first steps that children make in learning to recognise letters and words on the page and beginning to assign meaning to them. The method used for this preliminary study was a questionnaire. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION FOR THE STUDY The main reason why I felt the issue of the teaching of initial reading to YL to be worth addressing is my conviction that if YL can within a few years become confident and happy readers of real texts in English, the road to autonomy and enjoyment of the language is made that much clearer for them. The second reason is that this will not happen automatically; teachers need to know how to give YL a happy and well staged start on that road, beginning with the very first steps. Reading as a skill very often is not addressed in any depth, either in national syllabuses or in EYL teaching materials on which much of the onus of teacher support and development is placed in many parts of the world. The need to recruit or prepare new teachers of EYL often outstrips the capacity to give them a full orientation to the professional skills they will need (Rixon, 2000). The training that is given, quite reasonably, tends to prioritise the teachers‟ own oral language development and the development of a classroom methodology intended to suit both young children and the local teaching traditions (often a difficult circle to square). Issues such as the development of initial reading do not usually form part of this basic training. Another point to mention is that because the introduction of English to the primary schools in many countries is a recent occurrence, many EYL teachers did not themselves learn English at primary school age and so will have not have access to memories of how it feels to be a young child coping with English words on the page for the first time. This lack of attention to how reading skills might best be launched with YL contrasts greatly with the often furious debate about the most effective procedures for handling them with native speaking children. I am interested in investigating the possible reasons for this. It is true that many YL of English may not be novices to reading itself and that concepts of what it is to read and what readers do may have already been instilled in them through their L1 education. However, see Gregory (1996) on how concepts and practices of reading can vary from culture to culture. Any quest for a context-specific methodology also needs to be linked with a realistic analysis of the nature of the language challenges that are involved in the goals for teaching. Children coming from contexts in which their L1 uses a very different writing system, particularly a logographic system (such as Chinese) or a syllabic system (e.g. Sinhala) may need to make quite a conceptual leap when moving to an alphabetical system such as English. Children whose languages are written alphabetically like English but which do not use the Roman


alphabet (e.g. Greek, Russian, Arabic) will also have adjustments to make. Less obviously, children whose languages share an alphabet with English (e.g. Spanish, Italian, German) may find the different sound values given to seemingly familiar letters frustrating. Above all, the multitudinous relationships between symbols and sounds that English permits put it at the extreme end of the continuum representing Orthographic Depth, a term coined by Katz and Frost (1992) to signify the degree to which the writing system of a language transparently and reliably represents its sound system. Table 1 below uses information taken from the website associated with a project reported by the University of Dundee (2007). This clearly shows how English sits in a continuum involving alphabetically written European languages, with transparently written Finnish at the „shallow‟ end and English firmly at the „deep‟ end. Shallow ↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔ Deep Finnish Greek Spanish Portuguese French English Icelandic Norwegian Swedish Danish Table 1 Orthographic Depth of some European Languages Another measure of how difficult particular words may be to decode (and to spell) is the relationship between the number of letter-symbols contained in a word as written and the number of phonemes in the spoken word. See Spencer (1999) for how this affects native speaking children and also Rixon (2007) for an account of how the words on the Cambridge ESOL Young Learners Starters syllabus can be analysed according to this measure. As an example of this Grapheme/Phoneme relationship I gave the York seminar participants a puzzle based on the number words one to ten. See Table 2 below:

Orthographically transparent (one for one relationships between graphemes and phonemes)

Orthographically transparent but with fewer graphemes than phonemes (in „six‟ there are 3 letters representing 4 sounds because „x‟ represents /ks/)

Orthographically ‘working to rules’ but rules with which readers need to become familiar (e.g. „th‟ ,double „e‟ and „magic „e‟ at the end of a word like „five‟

Orthographically opaque (e.g. the /w/ phoneme in „one‟ has no visible representation; there are redundant „silent‟ letters in „eight‟)

seven ten six Three four five One two eight

Table 2 Complex grapheme and phoneme relationships within a set of very familiar words It is this mix of transparent versus variously tricky written forms in the English language that contributes to the debates amongst L1 reading experts concerning the effectiveness of phonics-based learning versus whole-word learning. In other words, English is a language in which it is not easy or straightforward to gain mastery in processing and understanding the written word, even for native speaker beginners. To this, we need to add the fundamental disadvantage at which Young Learners find themselves. Native speaker children have a large


orally-learned data bank of language upon which they can draw when trying to match not-very-transparent symbols with meaningful language, but Young Learners do not have this. Therefore a methodology that unquestioningly sees the written word as a facilitator of their early language learning, does at least need critical discussion. This brings into the discussion published course materials which in many cases rely on words on the page as a presentation or consolidation device for new language from the very first lessons. Publishers like words on pages, but does this tend to distort our classroom methods? Given all the points made above, it seemed worthwhile investigating teachers‟ own views and practices within an area that I was increasingly seeing as interestingly problematic. One issue is whether someone like me is an appropriate person to do this. The most useful studies of particular contexts may come from bilingual insiders e.g. Taiwanese teachers of English looking at Taiwanese YL reading, but perhaps there is also a place for the outsider in raising issues that may touch many different contexts. Many students come to Warwick, where I teach, expressing dissatisfaction with what they have been doing and with what they generally see done around them in terms of teaching reading. Putting myself into a position to help set them on their way to their own critical studies seemed a proper way of spending time. THE STUDY Between 2005 and 2006 I produced and distributed a series of questionnaires to ELT teachers, both Young Learners specialists and not. (I will explain the reasons for that later on). The sample was opportunistic, taken from two cohorts of MA students at Warwick University, from teachers attending short courses at Warwick and other institutions and from volunteers from the IATEFL Young Learners SIG newsgroup. Although teachers from a wide range of language and professional backgrounds are thus given a voice, I cannot claim that this study is reliably representative of all parts of the EYL universe, and have not indulged in elaborate statistical analyses for the quantitative responses. The main use of the questionnaire from my point of view was as a thinking tool and it is in that spirit that I offer it here. There was also a strong qualitative dimension given by the numerous open response items and I was fortunate that many of the participants were interested enough to answer them at some length and very informatively. The questionnaire is long and so has not been reproduced here in full. However any readers interested in receiving a complete latest version are welcome to contact me at the email address given at the end of this article. The usable questionnaire returns from teachers neatly, but fortuitously, arrived at a total of 100, divided between 39 ELT teachers, who had never had YL responsibilities, and 61 YL teachers. A very wide range of countries and language backgrounds was represented. The largest language groups were Chinese or Chinese +Taiwanese (25), Arabic (12), Spanish (12) and English (10). Other languages such as Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Greek, Thai, Turkish, Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia were represented by from one to three respondents each. The reason for including non YL teachers in the study was partly my interest in the extent to which „mainstream‟ ELT teachers had any background in techniques of teaching first steps in reading and partly my feeling that the remembered early reading experiences of everyone are worth hearing about and can be illuminating.


Apart from the demographic and professional background section, the questionnaire fell into 3 main sections on which I comment below. 1. Own memories of learning to read in L1 and in English I acknowledge that a source of unreliability in this study lies in the high degree of self-reporting involved and the fact that this often concerns distant memories which cannot be verified. However to this I would argue that people are influenced by the stories that they believe about themselves whether objectively true or not. That leaves out deliberate misrepresentation but I can see little motive for that in this study. Many participants. however, stated that they simply did not remember some aspects of their past. Some sample questions for this section and their results appear below:

• On a scale of 1- 6 ,what was the experience of first learning to read in English like for you? (Put a mark in the relevant box for each row)

Negative experiences → → →Positive Experiences

1 2 3 4 5 6 Stressful Relaxed Boring Interesting Difficult Easy Confusing Clear The spread of responses to all 4 scales above was very wide. Most responses were towards the positive end, but there were numerous negative reports which were accompanied by comments on how the respondents blamed later English reading problems on poor early experiences. Participants were given a descriptive list of activities that they might have experienced in their own English classes and were asked to say whether or not they recalled them. The list was repeated later in section 3 with regard to their own present practices. Questions about reading in English during participants‟ own educational career revealed that in many cases they had done little reading outside set texts or university handouts. 2. Own teaching practices and beliefs with regard to the teaching of early reading to Young Learners These questions were directed only to YL teachers. Care was taken in this section not to use any of the technical labels for teaching approaches which were later addressed in section 3, but activities closely linked with one or more approaches may be identified within this list, for example phonics and „Look and Say‟ respectively in the first two examples given below:

Children are systematically taught the letters and the sounds they represent

Children are taught to recognise words as a whole, by the shapes they make


The children are listened to reading aloud once a week or more often (just one child and the teacher together)

The children read aloud in chorus, under the teacher‟s direction The „yes‟ responses to the „Look and Say‟ oriented item outnumbered those to the Phonics oriented item, although in many cases both were marked as used. No responses from this sample indicated that children were heard reading aloud on a one to one basis. The list in the latest version of the questionnaire has reached 21 items. Here was a case in which my own presuppositions were usefully challenged at an early stage and the wisdom of always including an „other, please comment‟ category for any list-type question was confirmed. The last item above, about reading aloud in chorus, was not on my earliest questionnaire but numerous descriptions of this activity from respondents under the „other‟ heading soon made the omission obvious. The pair of questions below address aspects of broadly Phonics-based teaching that are well understood in the teaching of English L1 reading: the possibility of focusing on the syllable-initial consonant or consonant cluster (the onset, as described in the question numbered 34) or the rest of the syllable (the rime, as in question 35).

34. Are children in this context typically given material that gets them to pay attention to the initial letters and sounds of words (e.g. boy/book/boat/ball) when they start to learn to read?

NO

YES

Have you any comments on teaching approaches in your context with regard to this? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

35. Are children in this context typically given material that gets them to

pay attention to rhyming parts of words (e.g. cat/ bat/ rat/ hat) when they start to learn to read?

NO

YES

Have you any comments on teaching approaches in your context with regard to this? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Authorities on L1 reading development such as Goswami and her colleagues (Goswami and Bryant, 1990, Goswami and East, 2000) have argued persuasively that focus on rime is a powerful teaching strategy, particularly since it helps children to use analogy to work out new words by themselves. It is interesting to note that in my small sample of 61 EYL teachers the minority reported its use for reading development in the materials they used. This fits with my own analysis of YL materials world wide in which the predominating interest seems to be on the teaching of initial letters and sounds. (Given the widespread use of rhyming songs


and chants with YL for other reasons, it seems a pity not also to use them in connection with early reading). The set of questions below addresses the role of „words on the page‟ in YL methodology: 31. In your context, when Young Learners have contact with written words what function(s) do you think this contact has with regard to their overall language learning? (please choose all statements that you personally agree with. If you think that many colleagues in your context might have a different opinion from yours, please comment on this in section e.)

a) Seeing new words in the written form is a good way of helping children learn English vocabulary when they are beginning to learn English

b) Children should not be shown words in the written form unless they already know them aurally/orally

c) It is OK to let children see new words that they don‟t already know

aurally/orally, provided the teacher immediately pronounces them and makes the meaning clear

d) it is important for children to move as quickly as possible beyond the phase

in which they are decoding word by word and to learn how to read and understand whole texts in English

e) Your comments on any of the above answers:

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Items a) to c) are intimately connected, and it was my assumption that a „yes‟ to a) would be incompatible with a „yes‟ to b) and agreement with c) would override agreement with b). Respondents actually chose a number of combinations that I had not envisaged as possible. This was most likely my fault and the result of an over-complicated question which would need to be revised for future use. More than a third of respondents chose a). However, a number of the same people mitigated a) by also choosing b) or c). I think that the failure of this section to obtain any clearly interpretable results raises issues of the limitations of questionnaires when it comes to probing complex areas and reasoning, and that these limitations extend beyond the skill - or lack of it - with which the questions are framed. This is one of the reasons why I decided to give interviews a greater prominence in the next stage of the study. 3. Own knowledge of and confidence in discussing named ‘methods’ of tackling early reading derived from L1 practice Respondents were invited to write „yes‟ or „no‟ in response to each of 4 categories of acquaintance with 5 approaches to early reading. The categories were as follows:

• I have heard of it

• This approach was used on me when I was learning to read in English


• I use this approach with my Young Learners

• I could explain this approach confidently to another person The 5 approaches were as listed below:

• Whole word/‟Look and Say‟

• Whole Language/Real Books

• Phonics

• The Language Experience Approach

• Use of Environmental Print Both YL specialists and non-YL teachers were asked about these approaches. As expected, the YL group scored higher overall in terms of the confidence they expressed in recognising and defining the characteristics of the 5 approaches named. My main interest was in the response to Phonics, largely because activities labelled „Phonics‟ are to be found integrated in some YL materials ( for example in Taiwan) and because the term is quite frequently used in YL discussion. My interest for future studies is whether a „YL flavoured‟ version of Phonics is developing in some contexts, what it consists in and whether it has a rationale which seems to offer the promise of effectiveness with non-native learners. Again, although the questionnaire could not probe these issues, it did provide a platform for future thought and discussion. Nearly 33% of the non-YL teacher respondents said that they had never heard of Phonics. Half of the non-specialists said they had heard of Phonics with the rest „not sure‟. Nearly 90% of the valid responses for YL specialists were that they had heard of it. The proportions dropped dramatically for both groups when it came to being able to explain it confidently to another person. The final open response item of the questionnaire invited respondents to state their understanding of Phonics. Many chose not to. In the selection below an interesting mix is to be found of precise descriptions of particular traditions within L1 phonics, some acknowledged guessing and some interpretations which perhaps even a determinedly non-judging researcher might be permitted to describe as not fitting closely with most specialists‟ understanding of L1 based phonics.

1. I think phonics-based approach is to teach students the sound of vocabulary, that is to teach them how to read a word before to teach them the meaning and usage of a word. (YL teacher)

2. Learning explicit rules how certain letters (and combinations of letters) are pronounced. – Learning the phonetic symbols for every sound; - Learning to read using only phonetic symbols; Doing a lot of drilling exercises; - Learning short rhymes using particular sounds (YL teacher).

3. I am not familiar with the approach, but it seems to indicate an approach to reading based on sounds? Perhaps this is why I needed to constantly read aloud while learning to read and while practising as well? To this day, I admit I try to picture in my mind the sound of words I read, i.e. I read silently but my mind seems full of sound. (non YL teacher)


4. Phonics or „phone‟ methods should be something related to sounds in English. The approach might mean the method that uses sounds in English to help young learners to recognise and remember words. (YL teacher)

5. ……..I am not familiar with the term „phonics‟ in the language teaching terminology. I know it is a linguistic term from phonology courses. (YL teacher)

6. A combination of the phonics approach and the whole word approach was used on me when I was learning Greek. My knowledge of phonics is mainly regarding Greek. When using the phonics approach the teacher emphasizes on the sound of each letter. The sounds are then combined to make a word. (YL teacher)

CONCLUSION No firm conclusions can be drawn on the basis of this small sample but I hope that it may have raised interesting questions about how reading is tackled in different YL contexts. The report may also have been useful in underlining the sorts of issues that a questionnaire is not well equipped to investigate in depth. A central emerging issue seemed to me to be that of whether the written word was seen by teachers as a language mode to take seriously with YL or whether it was seen as a mere „prop‟ for presenting new language on the page. Ironically, this issue came from contradictory answers to a question (no 31 above) that I admit was not well framed. However, this has convinced me that I need to deepen this line of investigation but to do it through other means, principally through interviews. I hope to have an opportunity of reporting on the next stage of the research at a future York TEYL Research Seminar.

REFERENCES Goswami, U and Bryant, P E (1990) Phonological Skills and Learning to Read, East Sussex: Psychology Press Ltd. Goswami, U and East, M (2000) Rhyme and Analogy in Beginning Reading: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, Applied Psycholinguistics 21 (1), 63-93.

Gregory, E (1996) Making Sense of a New World: learning to read in a second language, London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd

Katz, L and Frost, R (1992) The reading process is different for different orthographies: the orthographic depth hypothesis, in Frost, R and Katz, L (Eds) Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, Amsterdam: Elsevier North Holland Press, 67-84.

Rixon,S (2000) Collecting Eagle‟s Eye Data on the Teaching of English to Young Learners: The British Council Overview, Pécs: University Press Pécs Rixon, S (2007) Cambridge ESOL YLE tests and children‟s first steps in reading and writing in English, Research Notes May 2007 www.cambridgeesol.org/rs_notes/ Spencer, K A (1999) Predicting word-spelling difficulty in 7- to 11-year olds, Journal of Research in Reading, 22 (3), 283-292.

http://www.cambridgeesol.org/rs_notes/


University of Dundee. Literacy acquisition in European orthographies http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/collesrc/ (last consulted 16/4/2007) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Email [email protected] Webpage http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/celte/staff/rixon_s/

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/collesrc/

mailto:[email protected]

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/celte/staff/rixon_s/

15 This Material is Copyright © Fatima Al-Aghbari 2010

Use of project work to promote collaboration and research after the MA …. A longitudinal study to evaluate the use of graded/leveled readers …YL 9-12 year old in Hong Kong

Wendy Arnold INTRODUCTION This paper briefly describes the writer‟s research project (Arnold: 2003) for the MA in TEYL and how this was developed into a longitudinal study. It will endeavour to illustrate the validity of continuing with a research project beyond the initial demands of a post-graduate course and how the results appear to lead the classroom researcher onto other related fields. It is no easy matter being both the teacher practitioner and classroom researcher. Lessons were learnt about setting up classroom research (CR) and some pragmatics will be identified. The first part of this paper will describe the initial classroom research project. It will identify the „burning question‟ that led to the study. The second part will briefly illustrate how the researcher developed the study into a longitudinal research project. The third part will outline how the original study led the researcher into another study and explore some of the initial findings from this longitudinal study. The fourth part will discuss the findings and identify areas or „gaps‟ which could be explored in the future. The writer firmly believes that sharing CR results may avoid other researcher teachers „reinventing the wheel‟, it is by learning from other classroom studies that the profession of English Language Teaching (ELT) can move forward in a meaningful way. Terms used are:

i) „collaborative learning‟ or „learning in a group‟ (Fisher 1995: 96-98) which is evaluated through the production of tasks, where a material outcome is produced;

ii) young learners (YL) will mean children aged 9-12 years old, unless otherwise specified;

iii) „a reading scheme‟ will mean a set of graded/levelled books which have a controlled vocabulary and grammar structure;

iv) primary schools are those with YL aged 6-12 years old and secondary school are those who educate YL from the age of 12-18 years old.

The developmental theories which underpin these studies are Vygotsky‟s (1978:90) „zone of proximal development‟ (ZPD) whereby a gap is present between what the learner has understood from their own experiences and what can be understood by a more knowledgeable „other‟. The role of the more knowledgeable other links into Bruner‟s (Maybin, Mercer & Stierer 1992:187) „scaffolding‟ metaphor, defining the role of the more knowledgeable adult/peer. Piaget‟s (Donaldson 1987:131-132) stages to intellectual development which include „ … combining, ordering, separation and recombining‟ … „assimilate, accommodate and find an equilibrium …‟ also influenced the researcher. The context where the study took place was in a state aided primary school in the New Territories in Hong Kong. Cantonese was the medium of instruction. There were ten lessons of 35 minutes each per week. The researcher took one of these ten lessons in the original study. The learning of English is valued as the


secondary schooling system is banded into three levels (Band 1 being the highest) and achievement in primary school leads to attendance at „better‟ bands of secondary school. Tertiary education is more likely achieved for those in Band 1, very unlikely in Band 3 (unless the parents can afford to send their children out of Hong Kong). RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY The original study was instigated as it was perceived that YL in the last year of primary school did not have skills in collaborative work needed for secondary school. Project learning was chosen because it appears to „encourage learner independence‟ by helping YL make choices and „take responsibility for their own work‟ (Phillips, Burwood & Dunford 1999:6-7). The study was influenced by Williams and Burden (1997:204-208) who outline factor which are believed to be „crucial‟ for language learning, which include:

- learners will learn what is „meaningful‟ to them and in ways that are „meaningful‟ to them

- learners will learn better if they feel in control of what they are learning and if learning takes place in a social context through interaction with other people.

Project work was used in order to create an environment where the YL „anxieties‟ were lowered (Krashen in Ellis 1985:263) promoting understanding and interaction. Pre-experiment background CYCLE 1 There was no observable evidence of group work being used in peer classes in any subject in the school and so between February to June 2000, the researcher introduced „controlled‟ project work to a year band of 10-11 year olds in order to evaluate if they could cope with the language and organization involved in producing a project in English. The term „controlled‟ means that the researcher chose the topic and gave very detailed instructions on how to sequence the project work. CYCLE 2 Surveys were designed and circulated to all the primary school teachers (in the researcher‟s school) and the feeder secondary schools in the area, to which the YL would attend. The objective was to evaluate if this type of learning was valued. The secondary school were banded or graded at three levels, Band 1 was for the most able YL and Band 3 for those who achieved the lowest grades in primary school. Pre-experiment research questions CYCLE 1 The researcher instigated the study with the following questions in mind 1) Can YL cope with the organization involved in producing a project using English? 2) How do the YL like learning? 3) Do YL like learning collaboratively?


CYCLE 2 1) Is group work used in primary schools? 2) How is it used? 3) Are the collaborative skills needed for group work necessary in secondary school? 4) In what contexts are these skills needed? Pre-experiment subjects The initial study used two parallel classes of 10-11 year olds (Primary 5) who were native speakers of Cantonese, mixed ability. In total there were 70 students and the study was completed in 35 minute lessons once a week where the researcher was also the English teacher. The students sat in grouping according to their regular classroom seating. Pre-experiment findings CYCLE 1 The YL liked learning English through games and reading. Class A was more positive about learning using project work than Class B. Class A was more positive about collaborative learning and group work than Class B. Both classes identified topics for future projects. All groups completed their projects. CYCLE 2 Primary teacher‟s indicated that 77% used group work for between 1-40% of their lessons. Secondary teacher‟s indicated that 89% used group work for between 1-40% of their lessons. The common use for group work by both was for discussion and project work. The response from the primary teacher‟s was not predicted but the researcher had no concrete evidence to disprove their replies. PILOT STUDY CYCLE 3 (September 2000) The focus of this cycle was to „evaluate whether the use of project work promotes collaborate learning‟. The research question was „Does giving YL the freedom to choose their project topic promote collaborative learning? Subjects The subjects for this part of the study were two parallel classes of 11-12 year olds (Primary 6). They were native speakers of Cantonese, of mixed ability and in total there were 70 students. These students had completed 5 years of English language learning (790 hours) in 35 minute lessons (one of these lessons was taken by the researcher) and the grouping was according to the class seating at the time. DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES AND METHODS USED The study used a case study approach. There were two groups (4-5 YL in each group) in parallel classes. Class A was given the „treatment‟, whereby they could choose a topic and Class B provided the „control‟, whereby they were given the topic „Hong Kong‟. The „treatment „ was the freedom to choose the topic.


The following data was collected: learner diaries; semi-structured interviews; self-assessment questionnaires; video recordings of on/off task analysis; lesson plans, field notes and researcher‟s diary; task completion and the completed project. PILOT FINDINGS Hypothesis The hypothesis was that the freedom of choice in selecting a topic could motive collaborative work more than would be the case if a topic theme was prescribed. Findings The pilot findings identified that there were issues with group dynamics, seen in analysis of on/off task activity and learner diaries. All groups completed satisfactory work but Class A (treatment) were more successful (75% achieved Grade A) or above compared to 38% in the control group. All the students were able to reflect on their project and were generally positive. All the tasks were completed reasonably well and one diary entry highlighted dilemmas with work allocation within the group i.e. peers not helping and problems sourcing resources. Learner diary analysis Some examples of entries „ … I was unhappy because (names of girls) and my by … I my did project very happy but I didn‟t like (name of girl) because she not like I feel … I hope the next project will not the girl doing project …‟ „ … my group hard but other group is naughty …‟ „ … we found a lot of information (name of student) and (name of student)) didn‟t work hard with us ….‟ INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS IN RELATION TO THE RESEARCH QUESTION It does appear that the freedom of choice motivates students to achieve a higher objective product but it does not appear that freedom of choice of topic has an impact on promoting collaboration. Additional research question The original study question was re-formatted during the analysis of data when it became clear that some students were not participating. The modified question was „Does this (collaboration) benefit all the students in the group? Variables identified The following were the variables identified which appeared to have an impact on the study. The gender balance in the groups; the position of the video camera; dislike of project work topic; dislike of group members and learning and behavioural differences. CYCLE 4 – 2001 project „Conservation” The research question in this cycle was „How does giving YL freedom to choose their group mates affect the groups‟ work? The subjects were four parallel classes of 11-12 year olds, in total there were 140 students in 35 minutes lesson, once a


week with researcher. The Students chose their group members. The data collected included self-assessment, reflective diary and criterion referenced project work. The findings in this cycle indicated that in total there were 31 groups of 15 all female and 15 all male groups with only one group choosing to be of mixed gender. Friendship groups seemed to work better and achieve better results in the all female groups in contrast to the all boys groups. It may be attributed to developmental stages and the females being more mature at this age. ADDITIONAL CYCLES, DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS Three more cycles were added which cannot be explained in detail due to space restrictions in this paper but some of the implications which arose will be identified. There seems to be a reasonable argument to ensure a gender mix for groups in order that boys are not disadvantaged. However, when the use of information technology (IT) was used in order to present the project, the disparity between the genders was not so apparent, this is possibly a variable that needs further investigation. The initial pre-experiment findings indicated that project work was viable in this context. The pilot study was part of the researchers MA and was necessarily detailed, it produced more questions than it answered but provided motivation to the researcher to continue to explore the variables. Teacher researchers would not be able to explore/collect data in the detail required for academic purposes in isolation. Further findings in longitudinal studies are useful for teachers but they are contextualized and it is difficult to make generalizations. Other teacher researchers need to follow the same research footprint and to share results before some „commonalities‟ can be identified. Project work is useful to learn collaboratively, but it does not suit all students, whose learning style does not easily accept working with others. A teacher researcher working on their own would have to focus clearly on one aspect at a time in order not to be over-burdened with data. At the end of this longitudinal study the researcher was pleased to find that the use of project work had started to be embedded in the school curriculum, albeit in Cantonese only. This was not really a concern as the learning strategies and skills needed to be effective collaborate learners are probably best learnt in the mother tongue. RESEARCH FROM 2003 TO 2007 The researcher‟s next longitudinal study was „Graded/levelled readers = effective scaffolding in EFL. Some concrete evidence!‟ which was presented at the yearly IATEFL conference in Aberdeen 2007. RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY „Reading is the only way … we become good readers, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammatical competence, and the only way we become good spellers …‟ (Krashen 2004:37) influenced the researcher.


The researcher wanted to know how a graded/levelled reading scheme could close the ZPD gap for YL learning English. They identified the positives as being that these types of reading schemes have a limited vocabulary, they recycle it in new contexts and they are high interest and low ability. However, they also identified that there was a danger that if a scheme was introduced too late that it became low interest and low ability and may fail to meet the needs of the YL. Pre-experiment background (1996-2003) A reading project was introduced into Hong Kong primary schools in 1996, called „English Extensive Reading Scheme‟. The pilot of this scheme started in 1993 (Yu 1993:258), the researchers school joined the EERS scheme in 1996 until 2003. The dilemmas for the researcher with this scheme were that the levels were too high or too low and there was a disparity between the levels as the texts were taken from many different reading schemes. The close placement test which was used to allocate a starting level for the YL did not assess ability to decode/encode text orally, as it was a gap fill. The researcher also found that there was no time for differentiated teaching or individual YL and teacher conferencing. In effect the teacher researcher was merely a „policeman‟ in the classroom to keep classroom management. Note It should be noted that whilst this has developed into a longitudinal study, the initial pilot scheme did not use a „control‟ or „treatment‟ as the researcher was more concerned in finding materials that assisted in learning. So for the „purists‟ in research, it should be noted that the only comparisons this researcher has are one year group a year older who did not have access to the PM reading scheme and only used EERS. Sometimes pragmatic ethics overcome research! PILOT STUDY 2003-4 As the EERS continued to be problematic the researcher made an active decision to identify other materials which could be used to met their YL needs more effectively. „Progress with meaning‟,(PM) scheme developed from the New Zealand Reading Recovery was found and the pilot scheme initiated. The PM scheme was designed for native-English YL and had 30 levels. There were corresponding worksheets which focused on the use of lower and higher order questions/activities. Levels 1-14 were targeted at reading ages of native-English students of 5 – 6..5 years old and levels 15-30 at 6.5 – 12 years old. Assessment for placement of levels was done with the use of a benchmark testing kit. Each benchmark test has a text, prepared reading running record and assessment pro-forma which uses lower/higher order thinking questions. The aim is on meaning of text. The benchmark assessments are carried out formatively and then continually at the end of each term (Term 1 ends January and Term 2 ends in July). A summative test is at the end of Primary 6 or when the YL leaves the school. Subjects


Four parallels classes of 9-10 years olds (140 in total) in 2 x 30 minute periods/week (double period) with 3 native-English teachers timetabled together. All the students were native-Cantonese speakers and each class was divided into 3 groups according to benchmark assessment. Each group had differentiated teaching. This group is identified as COHORT no.1 throughout. Procedure for using PM reading scheme Three native-English teachers were timetabled at the same time. Each class was split into three groups. Group 1 were YL with specific educational needs who had scored at the lower levels of the assessment and a visuo-thematic approach was used. This involved using a scrapbook with pictures that the YL chose themselves and sentences were constructed by the YL using vocabularly they „owned‟ Group 2 and 3 used individual and small group reading, as well as practice in answering high order thinking questions, both orally and in writing. Linking Piaget‟s theory of stages of intellectual development to practice There is differentiated teaching (3 groups) to cater for wide range of YL needs. And there are 30 levels of differentiated text to cater for wide range of abilities and interest. Linking Vygotsky‟s ZPD and Bruner‟s „scaffolding‟ theories to practice YL used the technique of „buddy reading‟, that is to say they read their story to a peer at a similar level. They Yl were encouraged to ask questions, vocalizing with their buddy and negotiating meaning (could be in mother tongue). Use of Bloom‟s taxonomy questioning was developed to challenge the range of intellectual thinking (use of task sheets). Differences between EERS and PM reading schemes

EERS PM

-6 levels -disparity of language within level -pencil/paper cloze placement test -1:35 teacher/YL ratio

-30 levels -carefully controlled language in each level -1:1 YL/teacher benchmark assessment 3-4:30-35 teacher/YL ratio

PILOT SCHEME FINDINGS All the classes had a wide range of abilities, from level 1 to level 23 at the formative assessment (level 1 being the lowest and level 30 the highest). Initially there were 29 students in levels 1-4, 58 students in levels 5-9 and 53 students in levels 10+. At the end of one year, the students had moved upwards, an average of +5 reading levels. In order to evaluate this pilot scheme, a comparison was made with a year group of 10-11 year olds (for want of a better word we will call them the BUFFALO group). This group has only had one year of EERS. They were benchmarked using the PM scheme assessment and the results were compared to cohort no. 1 (+1 year of the pilot study). It is acknowledge this is NOT a perfect comparison.


BUFFALOES group Formative ……………………………… average level 12.1 (end Primary 5) +1 year using PM summative ………. Average level 17.5 (+5.4 levels) (end Primary 6) COHORT no. 1 Formative ……………………………. Average level 8.5 (end Primary 3) + 1 year using PM continual ………. Average 13.5 (+5 levels) (end Primary 4) INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS OF PILOT STUDY It is acknowledged that this is NOT a perfect comparison but it is the only one available. Findings indicated that COHORT no. 1 had similar benchmark results after + 1 year to the BUFFALOES (formative) ie 12.1 and 13.5 average level. The average increases were similar ie +5 - +5.4 levels. But it should be noted that COHORT no. 1 were still one year younger (9-10 years old) than the BUFFALOES (10-11years old) and so a greater difference might have been expected. It is also acknowledged that YL on lower levels had language development differences (this was confirmed by cross checking with Chinese language teachers). A cursory analysis of common errors included: -miscuing (including changing verb endings, and adding final „s‟) -little use of self-correction -not attempting unknown words (little knowledge of phonemic awareness) The needs of the YL were therefore identified as needing explicit strategies for decoding and encoding text. The parents were also needed to be active participants and so needed training and inclusion in order to maximize learning and the „local‟ English teachers also needed training and inclusion. The pilot study concluded that the PM reading scheme was successful and all 9-12 year olds (Primary 4-6) were to be included from 2004-5. Modifications made post 2004-2007 Since the pilot scheme explicit teaching reading learning strategies have been introduced e.g. graphophonic (phonemic awareness), semantic (making meaning from text using textual and visual cues) and syntactic (grammar). There has also been explicit exposure to a wide range of text types and explanations of their protocols. Parent training and inclusion in YL reading at home, as well as teacher training and inclusion by the „local‟ English teachers being timetabled alongside the native-English teachers. LONGITUDINAL STUDY At the time of writing 5 cohorts have taken part in this study. Two cohorts have completed three years. Due to restrictions in space in this paper a comparison will be shown of the BUFFALOES (+1 year using PM scheme) and COHORT NO. 1 (+3 years using PM scheme).


Year 2003-4 2004-5 (BUFFALOES + 1 year PM reading)

2005-6 COHORT NO. 1 (+3 years PM reading)

Group 1 (levels 1-4)

Not done 1 (1%) 0

Group 2 (levels 5-9)

Not done 7 (6%) 3 (2%)

Group 3 (levels 10+)

Not done 120 (93%) 131 (96%)

Total YL Ave level Ave increase

Not done 128 17.5 +5.4 levels p.a

134 23.7 +5.5 levels p.a

UNEXPECTED FINDINGS The current COHORTS 4A and 4B have increased by +4.7 and +4.1 levels in one term compared to the average of previous cohorts of +5.1-5.8 levels in one year. Hypothesis COHORT no. 1 formative average = 8.5 level Summative average = 23.7 level Average increase = +5.1 levels/year COHORT no. 2 formative average = 7.2 level Continual average@ 5 terms = 21 level Average increase = +5.6 levels/year Predicted summative = 23.9 level COHORT no. 3 formative average = 11.6 level Continual average@3 terms = 20.3 Average increase = +5.9 levels/year Predicted summative = 29.3 level And if this is the case both COHORTS 4A and 4B might be over level 30 at the end of 3 years. It should be noted that COHORT 4B started this PM scheme at the beginning of Primary 3 (8-9 years old), in contrast to COHORT 1,2,3 and 4A who started it at the beginning of Primary 4 (9-10 years old). DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS The procedure is a crucial part of the success of the PM reading ie the explicit exposure to reading learning strategies and the grouping. A wide range of text levels ensures „low level‟ and „high interest‟ which is crucial for the wide range of abilities in each class. The teacher ratio is important and assumptions should not be made that YL are literate. Revision of phonemic awareness and text types is essential. There are lessons to be learnt from the procedures used for mother tongue teaching of literacy skills as it might differ fundamentally from how English learnt e.g. Chinese reading is learnt by rote memorization of multiple writing of text).


The PM reading scheme is not perfect but it is on the right track for ELT. The Lower levels need updating as they do not reflect the needs of 21st Century YL and there is a need for wider contextual lifestyles in order for it to be accepted by a wider multicultural audience. There appears to be a good argument for cascading the scheme down to Primary 2 (7-8 years old) as current formative and continual benchmark test result show a pleasing progression. The „younger the better‟ to start this type of reading scheme appears to be prudent. And having bilingual teacher is advisable, especially for the lower levels. Possible future studies Studies which might extend this research could be to observe the cohorts which stand out as different from others e.g. COHORT no. 3 and both COHORTS no. 4A and 4B. What has changed to make such a difference in the results? And why have some individual YL made significant progress ie +10 levels between benchmark tests? CONCLUSION This paper has attempted to give a potted version of the researchers‟ experiences with studies in their classroom. The initial study was started as part of the writers post-graduate degree and was detailed. A lot of experience was gained from the wide range of data collected but it was not realistic to collect so much. The latter research focused on quantative data collected from the benchmark assessment and qualitative data collected from both YL and peer colleagues on the scheme. Triangulation does not need to be a burden! REFERENCES Arnold, W. H. (2003) University of York 2

nd International TEYL Research Seminar – „Action

research :Using projectwork to promote collaborative learning‟ Donaldson, M (1978) Children‟s Minds. London:Fontana Ellis, R (1985) Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford:Oxford University Press Fisher, R (1995) Teaching Children to Learn. Cheltenham:Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd Krashen, S (2004) The Power of Reading. USA:Heinemann Maybin, J, Mercer N & Stierer, B (1992) “Scaffolding” Learning in the Classroom‟. In K. Norman (ed) Thinking voices. The Work of the National Oracy Project. London: Hodder & Stoughton Phillips, D, Burwood, S & Dunford, H (1999) Projects with Young Learners. Oxford:Oxford University Press Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Great Britain:Harvard University Press Williams, M & Burden, R.L. (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press


Yu, V et al (1994) English Extensive Reading in the Primary Curriculum:Current Practice and new initiatives. In „Language and learning‟ by N.Bird (ed). Hong Kong:Hong Kong Institute of Language in Education


What techniques could help to reduce disruptive behaviour in an EFL classroom of eight to nine year olds?

Fatima Al-Aghbari

INTRODUCTION This report will be about an action research (AR) project, which was conducted to find out what kind of behaviour was disruptive in the eight to nine year-olds classroom and possible ways of reducing it. The first step was to find out about those disruptive behaviours. The next step was to find out what techniques could help to reduce disruptive behaviour in the classroom of eight to nine year-olds such as, reducing the amount of inappropriate shouting of “me teacher”, answering without permission, talking with each other about things not related to the lesson, and moving or standing without permission. In this paper, the term “young learners” (YLs) refers to children from 8-9 years old. The term “foreign language learning” refers to “the learning of a second language where the target language is not widely used in the community” (Lightbown and Spada 1999:175). The two adjectives “inappropriate and disruptive” would, interchangeably, describe a behaviour which tends to be unacceptable in a language learning classroom. THE AIMS OF THE ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT 1. To establish what disruptive behaviour is occurring in the classroom. 2. To explore techniques that might reduce the amount of inappropriate

shouting “me teacher” of the YLs in the classroom. 3. To explore techniques that might reduce the amount of answering without

permission in the classroom. 4. To explore techniques that might reduce the amount of talking about things

not related to the lesson in the classroom. 5. To explore techniques that might reduce the amount of inappropriate

movement of the YLs in the classroom. 6. To compare the effectiveness of the techniques in reducing the above

misbehaviour. THE TEACHING CONTEXT This project was conducted in a state primary school in Muscat, Oman, in a class of 26 male and female YLs, who were about 8-9 years old. The number of boys was 17 and the number of girls was 9. English in this country is taught as a foreign language. The number of English lessons is usually five lessons a week, but during this project there were only four lessons a week. This was due to a national festival training for the YLs. Both the teacher and the YLs share the same native or first language, which is Arabic. The YLs in this AR project were divided into 6 groups in their classroom. This class seemed to be a difficult class to manage.


RATIONALE I found that it was very difficult to cope with teaching YLs in a classroom, with some disruptive behaviour like shouting “me teacher”, answering without a permission, talking to each other about things not related to the lesson, and inappropriate moving or standing in the classroom. According to Brewster, Ellis and Girard (1991:220) “a classroom with little discipline may descend into chaos where nothing is learned.” So, I decided to investigate these misbehaviours to find out some techniques that could reduce them in order to make the classroom a suitable place for learning. THEORETICAL ISSUES UNDERLYING THE AR PROJECT Classroom discipline seems to be important for learning to take place. Ur (1996:260) states that “little or no learning will take place in a thoroughly undisciplined atmosphere.” Thus, it could be argued that classroom discipline is helpful in achieving the aims of a lesson which tend to be the main concern of most teachers. Cowley (2001) provides teachers with some techniques for classroom management. Some of these techniques are; give them structure (Cowley 2001:10-11), wait for silence (Cowley 2001:28-29), and set the boundaries (Cowley 2001:41). The author, also, has some “thoughts on rewards and why do students misbehave?” (Cowley 2001:72-73). Dixie (2003:16), also, stresses the importance of setting rules and routines for the YLs. The author believes that rules may help in providing a secure learning environment for the YLs and in reducing bad behaviour in the classroom. Dixie (2003:20), also, stresses the importance of writing or drawing the rules and displaying them in the classroom. Using praise with YLs seems to be stressed by Dixie (2003:81). The author presents his point as follows:

“Be very aware that you can often win over potential troublemakers by giving them the esteem they have failed to gain in other areas of their lives. Effective praise, however, must be genuine, descriptive and specific. It is important not to praise pupils unless you really mean it!”

So, this quotation shows the importance of using praise with difficult YLs in the classroom, and the importance of using specific and descriptive praise which a child might deserve to gain. Specific information about “shouting, moving, talking, and answering without permission” was not found in the literature of classroom management, because there appears to be little literature written on these specific areas. DATA COLLECTION METHODS Data was collected using an initial questionnaire to teachers, observation through video-recording, and the teacher-researcher‟s journal. The purpose of the questionnaire to teachers was to see the teachers‟ opinions regarding what techniques could help in reducing the misbehaviours in question. Most of the


questions in the questionnaire were used to collect objective and quantitative data. The questionnaire contained of sixteen statements, which were required to be scaled from one to five. Below is an example of these statements:

Discuss the importance of behaving well in the classroom and negotiate the rules and routines in the classroom with the children.

1 2 3 4 5

Display some pictures which illustrate the rules in the classroom, e.g. a picture which shows that eating is banned in the classroom.

1 2 3 4 5

Reward the well-behaved group. 1 2 3 4 5

Reward the well-behaved child. 1 2 3 4 5

The statements were describing some techniques for controlling misbehaviour in a classroom. So, the questionnaire contained sixteen statements which were easy to answer and they seem to have the same feature as closed questions in that they can be answered quickly and easily. I also designed the questionnaire in a simple and straightforward manner. This could be noticed from the layout of the questionnaire, which seemed to help the respondents to find their way through it easily. I also took into consideration the importance of relevance of the questionnaire to the main subject of the AR project. So, there were no questions about the gender of the respondent or their ages. User friendliness was considered, too. I introduced the questionnaire by providing a friendly letter in which a thanking for cooperation was given. STAGES IN THE PROJECT There were a baseline data collection phase and four cycles in this project. Video-recordings were made to see the frequency of the misbehaviours in question in each cycle including the baseline data collection. The objective in video-taping was to look at the different misbehaviours in the class as a whole rather than individual learner‟s behaviour. The video-recording was only done once at the end of each cycle. The length of the video-recorded lessons was about 35 minutes. However, cycle two lesson was only 27 minutes. This was due to the schedule in Ramadan in which the time of the lessons was reduced. This might raise a question of reliability, because this might have an effect on the number of the disruptive behaviours which occurred in this lesson. Since the video-taping provided a large quantity of data, I decided to use quantitative, objective and empirical data (Wallace 1998:38). This data was collected by counting the number of instances of misbehaviour in each cycle by using checklists. My journals were used to reflect on the progress and effectiveness of the researched techniques, to record the dates of video-taping the lessons for the different cycles and to describe these lessons, to reflect on the problem in question, to raise questions and hypothesis, and finally to record decisions made about the AR projects.


AN OVERVIEW OF THE AR PROJECT The research took place over a total of eighteen weeks from 24th August, 2005 till 21st of December, 2005. Baseline data collection: The baseline data collection lasted from 24th August till 12th September, 2005. In the first three weeks, I distributed a questionnaire among forty teachers in two schools. This was done on 24th August, 2005. Twenty eight answers were returned to the teacher-researcher. My journals on 28th August, 2005 states that “Twenty eight out of forty answered questionnaires were returned back to me.” Then the questionnaire was analysed. After analysing the results of the questionnaire, I decided to implement the techniques which had a total of 100% of strongly agree and agree. Table 1: The analysis table of the questionnaire:

Number Strongly

Agree Agree Total

T-1 82.1 17.9 100.0

T-2 71.4 28.6 100.0

T-3 89.3 10.7 100.0

T-4 85.7 10.7 96.4

T-5 17.9 50.0 67.9

T-6 17.9 46.4 64.3

T-7 57.1 32.1 89.3

T-8 14.3 32.1 46.4

T-9 50.0 39.3 89.3

T-10 57.1 35.7 92.9

T-11 21.4 53.6 75.0

T-12 25.0 28.6 53.6

T-13 57.1 42.9 100.0

T-14 39.3 42.9 82.1

T-15 7.1 14.3 21.4

T-16 42.9 32.1 75.0

The bar chart showing the responses of the teachers:

Technique Selection

0.0 20.0 40.0 60.0 80.0 100.0 120.0

T-1

T-3

T-5

T-7

T-9

T-11

T-13

T-15

Total

Agree

Strongly Agree


Figure 1: The responses of the teachers for strongly agree and agree statements The techniques which had a total of 100% are as follows: “. Discuss the importance of behaving well in the classroom and negotiate the rules and routines in the classroom with the children. . Display some pictures which illustrate the rules in the classroom, e.g. a picture which shows that eating is banned in the classroom. . Reward the well-behaved group. . Praise any good actions from the badly-behaved child.” I avoided using the techniques which had a total of less than 100%, although some of them seemed to be appealing to me in order to address ethical issues. Examples of such techniques are as follows: “. Reward the well-behaved child. . Talk quietly and privately to the badly-behaved children and tell them to stop the misbehaviour.” At the end of the questionnaire, there was an open question, which asked for “other comments”. This question was used to collect qualitative data and to find out about unexpected data (Wallace: 1998:135). Only four teachers out of twenty-eight answered this question. The four answers were as follows: “ Engaging the badly-behaved child by giving him/her some responsibilities to do in order to reduce his/her energy, avoiding embarrassing him/her in front of the classmates. Using moral support and encouragement.”, “Using a bell or switching off the lights to indicate silent”, “reducing the number of children in the classroom from 30-20” and “the teacher needs to try again and again to discover the best technique for the different individuals.” I did not go for any of those techniques, because they were only four responses and each response was different from the others. The last step which was done for baseline data collection was video-taping a normal lesson to see the frequency and type of disruptive behaviour in question. Table 2: Analysis of baseline data collection lesson

The misbehaviour Its frequency

Shouting “me teacher”

About 30

Answering without a permission

About 12

Talking to each other

About 12

Standing or moving without a

permission

About 22


It could be noticed from this table that the disruptive behaviours which were found in this lesson were; “shouting „me teacher‟, answering without permission, talking about things not related to the lesson, and standing or moving without permission”. A permission letter for the video-taping was obtained from the school principal. I also kept writing in my journals during this phase. Cycle one: Cycle one started on 13th September and ended on 3rd October, 2005. After analysing the questionnaire in baseline data collection phase I decided to implement the techniques which had the highest score of “strongly agree” and “agree” for the techniques presented in the questionnaire. So, I chose to implement the technique of discussing some classroom rules and displaying some illustrations to show those rules to make the YLs aware of them. Some of the rules that were discussed were; “Don‟t shout me teacher, don‟t answer without permission, don‟t talk about things not related to the lesson, and don‟t move or stand without permission.”. Reminding the children with the rules was done daily for twelve lessons. A lesson was video-taped at the end I also kept writing in my journals during this phase. The duration of this cycle was about three weeks. Cycle two, three and four were repeated in exactly the same way as cycle one with changing the classroom management technique for each cycle. In cycle two the used technique was “rewarding the well-behaved group”. In cycle three it was “moving some naughty YLs from their places”. Although this technique was not mentioned in the questionnaire, but I felt the need to do it in order not to let friends talk to each other or encourage each other to misbehave. In cycle four the used technique was “praising any good action from the badly-behaved child”. ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF THE DATA Figure two shows the four misbehaviours which were researched and identified in the baseline data collection lesson, and which were video-taped in the five different lessons; baseline lesson, cycle one lesson, cycle two lesson, cycle three lesson, and cycle four lesson.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Base lin

e less

on

Cycle

one

Cycle

two

Cycle

thre

e

Cycle

four

Shouting "me teacher"

Answering without a

permission

Talking

inappropriate moving or

standing

Fighting

Figure 2: the frequency of misbehaviour in the five lessons


If one starts looking at the misbehaviour of shouting “me teacher”, it can be seen that it decreased gradually from baseline lesson to cycle one lesson. Then it fell dramatically in cycles two and three. In cycle four there was a sudden increase in shouting “me teacher”. In baseline lesson, the number of shouting was 30. In cycle one lesson, it was 28. In cycle two it was 9. In cycle three, it was only 8, but in cycle four, it was 20. The misbehaviour of “answering without permission” first decreased slightly from 12 times to 11 times in baseline lesson and cycle one lesson, respectively. Then it went down dramatically. In cycle three this misbehaviour increased suddenly, but it fell down from eight times to two times only in the last cycle which appeared to be a great progress in the classroom discipline. Talking about things outside the lesson was gradually increased in cycle one, but it decreased dramatically in cycle two, and then there was a slight decrease of this misbehaviour in cycle three and four. The fourth misbehaviour, which was about “inappropriate moving or standing”, showed a sudden increase in cycles one and two. It increased from 22 times to 28 times in cycle one to 26 times in cycle two. However, there was a noticed decrease, in this misbehaviour, in cycles three and four lessons. The misbehaviour of “fighting” was not intended to be investigated in the action research project plan, but it appeared suddenly in cycle one lesson. There were six instances of fighting in this lesson. In cycles two and three lessons there was no fighting, but it appeared again in cycle four‟s lesson. The existence of such misbehaviour might be due to the presence of the camera, because there was no such misbehaviour had been noticed during the action research project except in these two lessons. This data shows a decrease in the amount of the disruptive behaviour in question. This might be due to the cumulative effect of the used techniques. Thus, the decreasing of the disruptive behaviour in the final cycle could be the result of the five used techniques and not only the effect of using “praising” in this cycle. However, it could be noticed from this data that the disruptive behaviour has decreased dramatically in cycle two, three and four if they were to be compared with those in the baseline lesson and cycle one lesson. So, it could be said that using the techniques of “rewarding the well-behaved group, changing the place of the badly-behaved children, and praising any good actions from the badly-behaved children” was more effective than using the techniques of “discussing the rules with the children and displaying illustrations for those rules in the classroom”. It also seems that the technique of “praising any good actions from the badly-behaved children” was more effective than the techniques of “rewarding the well-behaved group and changing the place of the badly-behaved children” in reducing the amount of answering without permission, inappropriate standing or moving, and talking about things not related to the lesson. However, this technique was less effective in reducing the amount of shouting “me teacher”. So far it seems that the project met its objectives in finding out which techniques were effective in reducing the amount of the disruptive behaviour of “answering without permission, talking about things not related to the lesson, and inappropriate moving or standing”, but it does not seem that it fully met its objective in finding out which techniques were effective in reducing the amount of shouting “me teacher”. Being consistent in rewarding the quiet groups, might have helped in reducing this disruptive behaviour.


These conclusions from the data analysis shows the effectiveness of using rewards with the YLs and of using praise with them, which were discussed earlier under the theoretical issues underlying the AR project, in reducing the disruptive behaviour in question. However, the data does not show the effectiveness of discussing rules with the YLs and of displaying illustrations showing those rules. CONCLUSION This paper has outlined an AR focussing on exploring some techniques to reduce some misbehaviour in a classroom of 8-9 year olds. After analysing and interpreting the data of the AR project, there seems to be a need for further research on the area of reducing the amount of shouting “me teacher” in the classroom of 8-9 year olds. There, also, appears to be a need for researching the effectiveness of discussing rules and of displaying illustrations showing those rules in the classroom of 8-9 year olds. REFERENCES Brewster, J. Ellis, G. and Girard, D. (1991) The Primary English Teachers‟ Guide. London: Penguin. Cowley, S. (2001) Getting the Buggers to Behave 2. London: Continuum. Dixie, G. (2003) Managing your Classroom. London: Continuum. Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. (1999) How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ur, P.(1996) A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, M.J. (1998) Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Focusing on form with Italian young learners: a case study

Valentina Bamber

INTRODUCTION The “action research”, or AR (Wallace 1998) project here reported derives broadly from the teacher/researcher‟s (henceforth researcher) aim to foster young learners‟ long-term language development and their ability to express themselves freely and creatively, since linguistic “ability ... will influence happiness and success throughout a child‟s life” (Fisher 1990: 15). It was further informed by Doughty and Williams‟ proposals (1998: 197-261) as regards approaches towards the implementation of “focus on form” – or “FonF” instruction”, (Doughty and Williams 1998: 3-4), “which draws attention to the forms and structures of the language within the context of communicative interaction” (Doughty and Williams 1998: 199). The general area was chosen because integrating such instruction in primarily meaning-based language learning programmes may make them “more effective” and prevent persistent lack of accuracy in spoken production (Cameron 2001: 107-108), provided that specific learner factors including age are considered (Lightbown and Spada 2006: 177-179). RATIONALE

In order to refine the research focus, further inspiration was drawn from a study (Harley 1998: 156-174) which looked at how 7-8 year-old Canadian children benefited from FonF instruction targeting low “salience” language features, or those which learners may overlook or not ”notice”, since “forms will not be acquired unless they are noticed” (Schmidt in Harley 1998: 157). The aim for the AR project here reported was to investigate the feasibility of delivering such FonF instruction through activities/materials which may firstly foster young learners‟ love of learning, or “intrinsic motivation” (Pinter 2006: 37), and secondly call for the use of the target forms in spoken output (Harley 1998: 158). Target forms English subject pronouns were hypothesized as lacking salience for low-level Italian young learners, the intended subjects for the study. Italian subject pronouns can be omitted, as Italian verbal forms are inflected (Willis 2003: 30); moreover, because of their brevity, phonology and spelling, English subject pronouns might be seen as “cross-linguistically different and low-profile features of grammar”, and “need FonF instruction” (Cameron 2001: 104). FonF techniques It was hypothesized that with 9-10 year-old young learners, appropriate FonF techniques may be those which might least distract from an engagement on meaning, or less “obtrusive” ones (Doughty and Williams 1998: 258). The researcher therefore decided to adopt the approach outlined below.

35 This Material is Copyright © Valentina Bamber 2010

As regards teacher talk/materials, FonF techniques to be used would entail: 1. providing many instances of the target form in the language the children

heard/read, or “input flood”; 2. highlighting target forms, or “input enhancement”, both visual and

“intonational” (as well as through gesture); 3. providing learners with correct versions of their incorrect language, or

“recast”.

As regards learner talk/activities, FonF techniques would include: activities/tasks which may call – as much as possible - for the spoken production of the target form, or “task-essential” language” . Such techniques were however often used together, “in a pedagogically motivated combination”, as suggested by Doughty and Williams (1998: 258; 233). Proactive versus reactive approaches to form selection Pre-determining the language structure to be focused on entailed taking a “proactive” stance to FonF instruction, versus a “reactive” stance in which teachers/research give FonF instruction as and when they feel it is needed (Doughty and Williams 1998: 205-212). It was also planned to restrict FonF instruction to the target forms. Learning activities The FonF activities in the study were meant to cater for the “physical, cognitive and affective aspects of the learner” (Stevick in Arnold 1999: 173), thus choices included young learner-appropriate activities such as stories, songs/singing games, drama, picture descriptions, visualizations, drawing/painting, categorizing, language games (Brewster, Ellis and Girard 2002: 162-202; Williams and Burden 1997: 26-27; 32). The speaking activities for data collecting were self-description tasks (productive), interviews, improvisations and language games (interactive). RESEARCH METHODS AND TECHNIQUES The research methods employed were: video-recordings of most of the form-focused activities/tasks implemented, including all data collecting activities; transcriptions of all video-recordings (which noted intonational enhancement such as emphasis and loudness); action research journal reflections and field notes. Reliability and validity Although using a variety of data-collecting methods may increase reliability, in the present study, carried out by one teacher/researcher, “internal reliability” may be weak; however, the extensive use of video-recordings and transcriptions may counteract that danger (Nunan 1992: 60). As regards validity, the „single researcher‟ factor may threaten validity (Doughty and Varela 1998: 142) as any outcomes may be due to personal teacher factors. Moreover, it seemed impossible to control all potential variables. Video-recording and transcriptions were used extensively during the study, so as to protect validity, especially category validity, through “saturation” - Hopkins 2002: 135). Categories for data analysis Six categories were hypothesized to analyse the young learners‟ spoken production of English subject pronouns: firstly, a „missing‟ category (verb not preceded by pronoun); secondly, “chunks” (Richards and Schmidt 2002: 71), or


„strings‟ of linked language items learnt as wholes; thirdly and fourthly, incorrect and correct instances produced in isolation; in the fifth and sixth place, incorrect and correct instances „embedded‟ in complete/incomplete sentences (following Johnson 2003: 42-44); correctness is here taken to refer only to the form-in-focus – subject pronouns.

Category Examples of pronoun production from transcript (underlined)

Missing _ is a quee::n! (line 147)

Chunks I don‟t know (line 1680)

Isolated use, incorrect o::::h, they- wh- .., cos‟era? ., ((tr: what was it?)) it? (line 1525)

Isolated use, correct you = (line 1209)

Embedded use, incorrect ((whispering)) is she really? (line 1526)

Embedded use, correct she is in the …, mm .., sitting room? (line 1802

[..., .., …, indicated pauses (three periods approximate one second.); e:r, the:::, :: one or more colons indicate lengthening of the preceding sound; emphasis : italic type indicates marked prominence through pitch or amplitude; ((2‟‟)) : (*) pauses longer than 1” (one second) are indicated in double brackets] (Transcript code is adapted from van Lier‟s 1988: 243-4). RESEARCH QUESTIONS The research questions were planned as: 1. Can FonF instruction be delivered in the present AR project in ways which are young learner-appropriate? 2. Do English personal pronouns lack salience for 9-10 year old native Italian young learners? 3. Can (seemingly) young learner-appropriate FonF instruction targeted at English subject pronouns during a short residential EFL course affect the spoken output of 9-10 year old Italian young learners? IMPLEMENTATION OF THE AR PROJECT

Change of context

The research focus was intended for two primary school classes of Italian children aged 7-8; the project would have been implemented over a period of three months, with experimental and control groups. However, this was impossible due to a lack of permission to video-record lessons. In alternative, the study was carried out at the researcher‟s residential EFL school, which runs short summer courses for young learners, aiming to offer opportunities for both formal and informal language development (through lessons as well as artistic, drama and sport activities). In the changed context, the project was undertaken as a “case study” with the aim of “applying theories to practice” (Wallace 1998. 161-169).


Subjects Two Italian young learners took part in the study. They are referred to in the present paper using the pseudonyms Betty (aged nine) and Fiona (aged ten). Both had had two hours‟ English tuition per week since starting primary school in Italy, Fiona from age six, and Betty from age seven. Ethical issues

The parents of the two subjects gave their written permission for their children to be video-recorded during lessons; the learners were also asked. The study focus was not revealed, as this might detract from the spontaneity of learners‟ contributions (Edwards 2005: 266). Timing of AR project

The study took place between July 21th and August 6th 2006, with a break (school excursion) from July 25th-27th. Baseline data was collected within the first three days of the study, other data on July 28th and August 4th, and final data on August 6th. FonF activities took place during daily lessons (three hours in the morning) for 40-90 minutes. DATA PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Research question 1.

Can FonF instruction be delivered in the present action research project in ways which are young learner-appropriate? Young learners‟ views To throw light on the above question, on July 31st, Fiona, Betty and the researcher had an informal conversation in Italian (recorded, transcribed and translated) whilst preparing drawings for a later activity. The purpose was to get feedback about the learners‟ satisfaction with, and understanding of, the FonF learning activities. As they drew and coloured, the learners talked about learning English at their primary schools, and contrasted this with their lessons in the context of the study:

Transcript line 1086

Betty si impara giocando, ..., ((tr: one learns by playing))

1087 Researcher

e questo secondo te era un gioco, quello che abbiamo fatto prima? ..., quello di fare- = ((tr: and in your opinion what we did before was a game?))

1088 Betty = bè, era divertente! ((tr: well, it was fun)) 1089 Research

er ah! ((unint)) =

1090 Betty = ((unint)) non era molto lavorativo, però era divertente. ..., abbiamo imparato, ., ((tr: it was not very work-like, but it was fun, we learnt))

Betty repeated her view about learning through playing. A few turns later, Fiona surprised the researcher by commenting: Transcript line 1108

Fiona = ma comunque:: ., è un gioco, solo che nascosto c‟è un esercizio! = ((tr: but anyway it‟s a game, only that there‟s an exercise hidden in it))


There would seem to be some evidence of a relaxed atmosphere and enjoyment (laughter). Betty (line 1090) uses the seemingly unusual (in that context, and for a child) adjective lavorativo (see line 1090 above), which could be argued to indicate autonomous thinking on her part, as indeed may be the case with Fiona‟s perceptive contribution (line 1108).


Do English personal pronouns lack salience for 2 native Italian young learners, 9 and 10 year-old respectively? A rare instance (in the present study) of a missing pronoun comes from a semi-planned improvisation:

1174 Fiona ye::s, is in my rucksack. ((takes juice from rucksack on her back))

The category of „missing‟ pronouns (verbs not preceded by a subject) was developed as it may indicate a lack of salience for the form. There are (as per recordings and transcript) no occurrences of missing pronouns in the self-description tasks, and only two examples from Fiona and one from Betty in the language game (see Tables 1 and 2 below). Throughout other data collected (there are in all 2237 conversational turns in the transcript) there are only two other instances of missing pronouns.


Can (seemingly) young learner-appropriate FonF instruction targeted at English subject pronouns during a short residential EFL course affect the spoken output of two Italian young learners aged nine and ten respectively? To answer the question, the number of conversational turns per young learner in each data collection activity were counted in the transcript (including unintelligible ones/laughter). Instances of pronoun use (categorized as above) per young learner were counted, and then percentages per number of turns were calculated. A degree of subjectivity may perhaps have been unavoidable when categorizing subject pronoun production. The same tasks were used for both baseline and final data collection, with the further aim to satisfy young learners‟ need for familiar “formats” (Cameron 2001: 8-11). The data shown in the tables below, by necessity only a limited part of the data arising from the study, are taken from self-description tasks and a language game. Self-description tasks Table 1 (below) sets out each young learner‟s production of the target form during self-description tasks as recorded during the study. The tasks‟ aim was to get the young learners to speak about their everyday lives and family circumstances, and to draw on their previous English knowledge. Table 1. Baseline, mid-cycle and final data: Self-descriptions tasks.


Subject pronouns spoken

production categories

Baseline data

21st July 2006 Fiona

Mid-cycle data

28th July 2006 Fiona

Final data 6th

August 2006

Fiona

Baseline data

21st July 2006 Betty

Mid-cycle data

28th July 2006 Betty

Final data 6th August

2006

Betty

Turns: 5 Turns: 19 Turns: 21 Turns: 6 Turns: 11 Turns: 44

Missing

Chunks

Isolated use, incorrect

Isolated use, correct

3 (14%) 1 (2%)

Embedded use, incorrect

Embedded use, correct

3 (60%) 4 (21%) 9 (43%) 1 (17%) 2 (18%) 9 (21%)

It may be seen that both learners show increased use of subject pronouns (final data); Pronouns used in the tasks are preponderantly „I‟; in such cases it seems difficult to decide whether utterances can be classified, in alternative, as chunks. Language game After enjoying a visit to a local castle, the young learners and researcher together created a FonF language game, Castle Game (see Table 2 below), with pictures of rooms in the castle as well as pictures of people supposedly living there (a lady; a gentleman; a dog; a ghost). The idea for this came from a desire to provide further opportunity for free interaction as well as to give freedom of choice to learners. Table 2 Further versus final data: Castle Game.

Subject pronouns spoken production

categories

Language game

4th August 2006 Fiona

Language game

6th August 2006 Fiona

Language game 4th August 2006

Betty

Language game 6th August 2006

Betty

Turns: 81 Turns: 23 Turns: 67 Turns: 33

Missing 2 (9%) 1 (3%)

Chunks 6 (7%) 6 (9%)

Isolated use, incorrect

Isolated use, correct 3 (4%) 4 (6%) 1 (3%)

Embedded use, incorrect

2 (3%) 2 (6%)

Embedded use, correct

15 (18%) 6 (26%) 10 (14.5%) 7 (21%)

When the game was played for the second time on August 6th, due to learner tiredness the number of turns for both learners was far lower (see Table 2), so that


a seeming increase in the production of subject pronouns, particularly correct ones found within sentences, may be difficult to interpret. Cutting short the activity for the sake of not demotivating the learners may be seen as an example of conflict between teacher/researcher roles. Chunks Instances of “chunks” in the Castle Game seem to be confined to “I don‟t know” (seemingly a chunk – Moon 2000: 6), produced by both learners. INTERPRETATION OF THE DATA IN RELATION TO THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS In the light of the data outlined above, the following tentative and provisional

answers are given:

1. Can FonF instruction be delivered in the present action research project in ways which are young learner-appropriate? Relevant data, such as from the interviews with the young learners, should be interpreted with caution, as children may want to “please the adult” (Pinter 2006: 146). The young learners repeatedly state their enjoyment of the lessons, and it could be argued that they appear to be expressing their own thoughts and feelings. The FonF activities chosen seem to derive from principles of child learning and development, although further analysis would be needed to demonstrate that they were in fact delivered and “mediated” (Williams and Burden 1997: 186-187) in child-appropriate ways. With insufficient data it would seem impossible to answer the question either positively or negatively. 2. Do English personal pronouns lack salience for two native Italian young learners, 9 and 10 year-old respectively? If instances of missing pronouns are taken to be indicators of their lack of salience for specific learners, then the extreme rarity of such instances appears to indicate that this is not so for the two young learners in the present study. However, many other factors may be involved in such a question. 3. Can (seemingly) young learner-appropriate FonF instruction targeted at English subject pronouns during a short residential EFL course affect the spoken output of two Italian young learners aged nine and ten respectively? The number of variables potentially affecting outcomes in the study, the low number of participants, and lack of control groups make it impossible to answer the question. Moreover, the difference in the number of turns in various tasks, caused by pedagogically-motivated researcher decisions, appears to make the changes even more difficult to interpret. It should be also emphasized that as the tasks employed for baseline/further/final data collecting are indentical, for the sake of using “routine” tasks that the learners may find reassuring (Cameron 2001: 8-11), any resulting data should be interpreted with caution, since “task repetition” may be a factor in any improvements shown (Pinter 2005: 116-120). Therefore, although some increases in the use of the target form were noticed, it seems impossible to determine whether they were caused by the FonF instruction implemented as part of study. It would not seem possible to prove the efficacy of any particular instructional treatment because of the small-scale nature of the study and the many uncontrollable variables which may make problematic “the internal validity of the research”, and “thus render the results uninterpretable” (Nunan 1992: 92).


REFLECTION AND EVALUATION OF THE PROJECT

The AR project took place during, and indeed coincided with, a brief residential English course. Throughout the course, the many other duties of the researcher may have meant having little time to reflect and make adjustments, leaving the researcher feeling, in van Lier‟s apt words, “that my project was a mess”, and later realizing that “the steps and cycles … are simultaneous strands that are braided together as one goes along”; in fact, “most of the reflecting was done after the project was over” (1996: 34). One result of such reflection was that although it had been decided to limit FonF instruction to the target form, the researcher realized that in fact she had unwittingly used intonational/gestural input enhancement „reactively‟ – that is, in response to the young learners not understanding - during lessons not part of the study, for example in storytelling, or when talking (in English) to the young learners; in retrospect, she reflected that not to do so would have had felt „wrong‟.

In spite of its shortcomings, the study may satisfy Allwright‟s “criteria for exploratory practice” (Edwards 2005: 268): as regards “relevance, reflection, continuity”, the project seems relevant to learning/teaching, to have fostered on-going reflection, and to have resulted in the researcher experiencing an “integrated research and pedagogy”. As regards “collegiality, learner development, teacher development”, collegiality seems realized through this paper; there was an attempt to include the learners‟ views in the research as well as to teach as ethically as possible; professional development may result from the study. Allwright‟s aim of “theory building” would not seem to have been furthered by the small-scale effort; however, in reflecting on practice and resulting data through the lens of theory/research, the researcher hopefully noticed deeper layers of knowledge and their interrelationships, as well as implications for future inquiry in curriculum and teacher development, and classroom practice. CONCLUSION

The study here reported did not set out to show any „cause-effect‟ relationship between any treatment administered and any findings, as in a classroom environment “it is fruitless to search for simple causal relations” (van Lier 1996: 38); it was rather a personal exploration which might illuminate teaching/learning and further professional development, since carrying out enquiry-driven projects may help to “understand better classroom lives” (Allwright and Bailey 1991: 196). Such better understanding may hopefully contribute towards each child‟s future potential as “a member of the culture-creating community” (Bruner 1986: 132).


REFERENCES Books: Allwright, D. and Bailey, K. M. (1991) Focus on the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, J. (ed.) (1999) Affect in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Begley, J. and Hughes, A. (eds.) (2003) Teaching English to Young Learners: Second International TEYL Research Seminar 2003. York: EFL Unit, University of York. Brewster, J., Ellis, G. and Girard, D. (2002) The Primary English Teachers‟ Guide (New Edition). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Cameron, L. (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty, C. and Williams, J. (eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, C. and Willis, J. (eds) (2005) Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, D. (2002) A Teacher‟s Guide to Classroom Research. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lightbown, P. M. and Spada, N. (2006) How Languages are Learned. (Third edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moon, J. (2000) Children Learning English. Oxford: Macmillan. Nunan, D. (1992) Research Methods in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinter, A. (2006) Teaching Young Language Learners. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, J. C. and Schmitd, R. (2002) Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Third Edition). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. van Lier, L. (1988) The Classroom and the Language Learner. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited. van Lier, L. (1996) Interaction in the Language Curriculum. Harlow: Longman. Wallace, M. J. (1998) Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, M. and Burden, B. (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willis, D. (2003) Rules, Patterns and Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapters, Articles and Extracts: Doughty, C. and Varela, E. (1998) Communicative focus on form. In C. Doughty and J. Williams (eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition (pp. 114 – 138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty, C. and Williams, J. (1998) Pedagogical choices in focus on form. In C. Doughty and J. Williams (eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition (pp. 197 – 261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, C. (2005) Teachers Exploring Research. In C. Edwards and J. Willis (eds) Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, R. (1990) Teaching Children to Think (Chapter 1). Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes. Harley, B. (1998) The role of focus-on-form tasks in promoting child L2 acquisition. In C. Doughty and J.Williams (eds.) Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition (pp. 156-174). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, L. (2003) An investigation into increasing spontaneous language production. In J. Begley and A. Hughes (eds.) Teaching English to Young Learners: Second International TEYL Research Seminar 2003 (pp. 40-45). York: EFL Unit, University of York. Pinter, A. (2005) Task Repetition with 10-year-old Children. In C. Edwards and J. Willis. (eds) Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

43 This Material is Copyright © Anika Browne-Jones 2010

Can the use of natural speech codes be increased in the short-story writing of grade 10 learners?

Anika Browne-Jones

INTRODUCTION

This Action Research (AR) project was designed to see what happens when ways are found to introduce natural speech codes in the short-story writing of twelve 14-15 year old learners in a tenth grade English class in Antigua & Barbuda, West Indies. It was hoped that a long-term by-product of the project would probably be an increase in the learners‟ use of natural speech codes in their short-story dialogues.

As an English language teacher in the Anglophone Caribbean I was generally teaching Standard English as a second dialect (a variety of English distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from regional varieties of English used in the Caribbean). In this context the English used daily in most quarters of society tended to be forbidden in the classroom. Yet, in many instances it became inappropriate to suggest to learners that a one size fit all standard variety of English (Burton & Simmons: 1965) was their only means of effective communication. This became particularly clear when preparing learners to write short-stories for an external examination which allowed them to use non-standard varieties of English in their dialogues. The fact that Caribbean English (CE) could be used in short-story dialogues meant that it was necessary for learners to produces written versions of CE. The question therefore arose; will these learners actually increase their use of CE in their short-story dialogues when this variety of English is commonly viewed as bad or broken English (a degradation of the standard)?

METHODOLOGY

Timing

The project was conducted over a four month period.

Cycles

This project unfolded in the stages outlined in the following AR Overview Chart.


AR Overview Chart

MONTHS CYCLES DATA COLLECTED TOOLS USED

April Formulating Research Question

Problem identification, research question formulated and its focus understood beginning to mentally formulate AR timing and stages (Wallace 1998:29)

Literature Review

May-June Baseline

Reading Response Prompt Sheets

Reading Response Forms

Class Discussion Transcription

Samples of student writing

Observation & Journaling

Audio-recording

Checklists

June-July

Planned Action

Samples of student writing

Checklists

Comparisons

July

Reflection (on) all Collected Data Journaling

Baseline data was collected and analyzed as a means of establishing the learners‟ views about CE. These views were later evaluated against journal recordings of learner reactions during class. Planned action included lessons on generating ideas for dialogue driven short-stories and creating and using realistic CE dialogues in short-stories. Learners then wrote short-stories with CE dialogue. Their efforts were collected as data and compared with writing they did prior to the AR. This was done to measure changes in the amount of CE dialogue learners used. These stages were followed by reflection to determine the need for further planned action.

DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUES

The data collection techniques used included observation, journaling, audio-taping, reading response prompts/forms and samples of student writing. It was felt that the use of observation and journaling would allow for the documentation of even the slightest change in the learners‟ reactions to the idea of using CE in their writing. With journaling it was also felt that the progress of the AR could have been easily monitored to determine whether the project was unfolding as planned.


Audio-taping was used to record class discussions. This technique was selected because it would be important to use data from class discussions to identify and define problems that learners might be having with using CE in their short-story dialogues. Such data would have a direct impact on adjustments and would be needed in planning any further action. In addition, student writing or work samples would provide evidence of whether the actions already taken (such as lessons on generating ideas for dialogue driven short-stories, creating and using realistic CE dialogues in short-stories and writing exercises that would have helped learners to put what they were taught into practice) were having an effect on the amount of CE learners were using in their short-story dialogues.

In general these data collection techniques seemed appropriate for the AR. However, in the baseline the use of questionnaires might have been a good means of gathering information about learner attitudes, opinions and preferences with regards to CE. Also, one of the noticeable drawbacks of using journaling was that it proved to be a time consuming technique and entries were not made as systematically as was hoped. This could have had a negative impact on the research findings since these findings were likely to be affected by any haphazard collection of data. It was also probable that observations were being made and recorded selectively and this would have meant that the data collected did not always give a complete picture of learner reactions.

PRESENTATION OF DATA Data collected during the baseline suggested that learners seemed to know what CE was. They listened to a short-story interspersed with CE dialogue and were given a check list to check off how often slang was used in the short-story as opposed to CE. As presented in the bar-graph, after listening to the short-story, most of the learners recognized that it was CE being use and that slang was infrequently used in the short-story. This was an important distinction for them to make in order for it to be decided whether they knew CE when they heard it.

FIGURE 1 - Graph showing the frequency of the use of slang in a short-story.

1

2

10

11

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Responses

Very Frequently Frequently Infrequently Not at all


Baseline data also suggested that learners generally understood CE when it was used in writing. Analysis of Reading Response Forms indicated that CE in short-stories did not seem to limit most of the learners understanding of the stories they read. Only 11.5 % of the responses were incomplete and in more than half of the responses learners were able to follow the stories well enough to have favorite parts and characters they liked. This demonstrated that more than 50 % of the learners most probably understood what they read in CE.

Incomplete Responses

FIGURE 2- Pie-chart showing the Percentage of Incomplete Reading Responses

The analysis of baseline data also revealed that the learners appeared more comfortable with speaking CE than using it in writing. They generally expressed uncertainty about the capacity of written CE to express as much as they felt could be expressed in SE. This trend persisted even after intervention with planned action at which stage when learners were asked whether they thought they could write realistic CE dialogues most of them felt that they probably could, but no learner was absolutely certain. This implied that even after instruction and awareness raising some learners were still hesitant about using CE in their short story dialogues.

11.5%


FIGURE 3- Responses to the question: Do you think you can write CE dialogues in your short-stories?

Data collected in the planned action also tended to suggest that the learners appeared inclined to think that there may well be a place for CE in written short-stories to establish setting, create character and to make a cultural distinction. The learners generally felt that it was likely that CE could be used effectively in creating realistic dialogue that aided story telling. However, the learners continued to question their own correctness in using CE in their writing. When compared with writing done before the AR, the writing samples collected during the planned action of the AR showed that learners had moved from using little or no dialogue in their short–stories to creating dialogues with more CE. Therefore, even though they expressed concerns about whether they should use CE in their writing, the learners were able to increase their use of natural speech-codes in their short-story dialogues.

DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

Throughout the AR, the learners remained generally uncertain about the correctness of using CE dialogue even though they might have understood the possible function of this dialogue in their short-stories. This trend seems to point to the pervasive influence of a colonial history in which the natural speech code of the majority of the members of society was marginalized. Yet, class discussion data seemed to indicate that even though it is marginalized; learners would probably use CE if more attention is placed on teaching it by looking at its grammatical patterns, vocabulary and other recognizable linguistic components. For example, findings suggest that learners would have probably been more comfortable if they could have found standardized spellings for CE lexicon that

0

11

6

8

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Responses

Most Certainly Probably Probably not Absolutely Not


they intend to use in their dialogues. Therefore, this AR project seems to indicate that when ways are found to teach CE as a variety of English with a recognizable structure, natural speech codes can be increased in the short-story writing of grade 10 learners. This is apparent since almost every learner increased the amount of CE used in his/her short-story dialogue after receiving lessons on how to manipulate CE to create this dialogue. Therefore, should teachers be committed to instructing learners in the use of CE, it is likely that they will use it effectively in their short-stories.

PROJECT EVALUATION

Grappling with validity, reliability and triangulation was often a challenge during this AR project. For example generating data that would reflect only what needed to be known (valid data), while being consistent enough to be able to produce similar results in the future (reliable data), proved difficult at times. There was also the issue of what appeared to be the limited generalizablity of the study since the group that the AR was conducted with might not have been representative of a typical Anglo-Caribbean bi-dialectical English language class. Therefore, a lingering concern throughout the research was the likelihood that findings will change dramatically with a different group of learners. Notwithstanding this however, it is possible that these AR findings can probably be used in future research in the process of replicating knowledge by testing old results with new participants or on new research sites (Creswell: 2002).

In addition, the literary review revealed very little information about the bi-dialectical English language classroom. As such, analyzing research findings against established theory was often impossible and even locating and retrieving alternative sources of unpublished information was quite difficult. Therefore, this project can probably be a small signal that more voices need to be added to the discussion of and research in this area of English language teaching and learning. Perhaps more teachers in Antigua and Barbuda and across the Caribbean can be encouraged to conduct similar research and to share their views so that a deeper understanding of how to go about teaching English to bi-dialectical learners might be obtained.

From this perspective, and based on the fact that the learners did increase their use of CE in their short story dialogues, the project was worthwhile to conduct. It does seem to leave the impression that there is a need for further research, perhaps beginning with collaborative AR amongst English Language teachers. This type of research may well emerge from practical concerns such as finding ways to increase CE in the short story-writing of grade 10 learners.

CONCLUSION

It is probably true to say that as long as the use of natural speech codes in writing is guided by a teacher, learners are likely to use it. AR data findings seem to back-up this conclusion because with instruction the learners in this study increased their use of CE in their short story dialogues. As such, it might be worth-while for more thought to be given to creating an English language curriculum that keenly supports bi-dialectical English Language teaching and learning in the context of the Anglophone-Caribbean.


This recommendation seems to be supported by the work of linguist Robert Le Page (1968). After visiting Jamaica in the 1950‟s, he noticed the appalling failures in the teaching of English in the public schools and he proposed that the first year or two of school be taught in CE before SE is introduced. This proposal was based on his observation that there was a problem with the teaching of SE because CE was not being recognized by the teachers and the educational system.

Over two decades have passed and the argument seems similar, given the complexity of dealing with bi-dialectic learners in a region where history has attached a stigma to one dialect rendering it inferior to the standard form, it becomes difficult to sustain the confidence of learners who try to make creative use of English in classrooms where part of the language is silenced.

REFERENCES

Blaxter, L. Hughes, C. & Tight, M. (Eds.). (2001). How to research (2nd

ed.). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press

British Educational Research Association (BERA) (1992) “Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research” Available at: www.bera.ac.uk/guidelines.html Accessed on (November 3, 2005)

Burton, D. L. & Simmons J.S. (1965) Teaching English in Today's High Schools, N.Y. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Creswell, J. (2002). Research Design, Trenton, N.J., Sage

Elliott, J. (1991). Action Research for Educational Change. Buckingham: Open University.

Epstein, R.I. & Xu, L.X.J (2003) Roots and Wings: Teaching English as a Second Dialect to Aboriginal Students available at http://www.extension.usask.ca/ExtensionDivision/about/Staff/eh/RootsWings_LitRev.pdf. Accessed on (August, 2005)

Ferrance, E. (2000). Themes in Education: Action Research. Providence, RI: LAB at Brown University. Henry, J. Cosby Backs School‟s Ban on Street Slang, The Sunday Telegraph July 4, 2004 Hopkins, D. (2002). A Teachers Guide to Classroom Research. Buckingham: Open University Press. Jacob, E. (1990). “Alternative Approaches for Studying Naturally Occurring Human Behaviour and Thought in Special Education.” The Journal of Special Education, 24(2) 195-211.

Le Page, R. (1981) Caribbean Connections in the Classroom. London: Mary Glasgow Language Trust.

Le Page, R. (1968) “Problems to be faced in the use of English as the medium of instruction in four West Indian territories.” In Language Problems of Developing Nations, edited by J. Fishman, C. Ferguson and J. Das Gupta, 431-41. New York: Wiley.

Maxwell, J. (1996). Using Qualitative Research to Develop Causal Explanations. Harvard University: Harvard Project on Schooling and Children. Nunan, D. (1992). Research Methods in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Neill, J. (2003). Qualitative versus Quantitative Research: Key Points in a Classic Debate. Available at: www.wilderdom.com/research/QualitativeVersusQuantitativeResearch.html Accessed on: (November 3, 2005) O‟Brien, R. (2001). “An Overview of the methodological Approach of Action Research” in Richardson (Ed.), Theory and Practice of Action Research. Available at: http://www.web.ca Accessed on (October 15, 2005 ) O‟Malley, J. M. & Valdez Pierce, L. (1996). Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners: A Practical Approach for Teachers. Reading, MA: Wesley Publishing Company. Padak, N & G (2003) “Research to Practice: Guidelines for Planning Action research Projects” Ohio Literacy Center. Available at: Accessed on: Riding, Phil, Sue & Levy (1995) “An Action Research Approach to Curriculum Development.” Information Research, 1(1) Available at: http://InformationR.net/ir/1-1/paper2.html Accessed on (October 15, 2005 ) Verster, C. “Action Research.” Teaching English Available at: http://britishcouncil.com Accessed on (October 10, 2005)) Wallace, M. J. (1998). Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, J. (1995). Ethical Issues for Teacher Researchers. The Scottish Council for Research in Education: SCRE Spotlights. Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative Assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Base Winter, R. (1987). Action Research and the Nature of Social Inquiry; Professional Innovation and Educational Work. Aldershot, England: Grower Publishing Company. Zeni, J. (1998). A Guide to Ethical Issues and Action Research. Educational Action Research, Vol. 6 No. University of Missouri-St. Louis: Gateway Writing Project

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How does the teacher’s location in the English language classroom affect the young learners’ accuracy and quantity in particular vocabulary of their spoken output in the target language, during oral pair-work activities?

Chrysoula Christoforidou

INTRODUCTION This Action Research project focused on the teacher‟s location in the classroom and how this may affect the accuracy and quantity in particular vocabulary of the English spoken output of the learners. This was based on the fact that the researcher‟s experience as a teacher showed that learners may respond in different ways in the classroom when the teacher is located in a different position in the class. The project therefore, was carried out in order to understand in a better way how the location of the teacher may be a factor that could enable the learners to use the target language more in the classroom. As far as the context of the project was concerned, the research took place in two classes of eight year old students. There were nine students in each class and they had their lessons in a private language school in Greece where English is taught as a foreign language. It was their first year of learning English. They had lessons three times a week, each lesson lasting one hour. RESEARCH METHODS AND TECHNIQUES The results of the action research project were based on the journal kept by the teacher throughout the year on each cycle. The journal was kept after the end of the two lessons that formed one cycle so that a clearer view of the situation might be recorded as close to each lesson as possible. Both the lessons of each cycle took place on the same day and this helped the teacher record her notes on both of them after they were both finished. The teacher recorded her mood, feelings and the overall atmosphere in each lesson as well as what they thought the results of each cycle meant. The results were also based on simple questionnaires given to the learners in their mother tongue since it would be difficult for them to understand a questionnaire in English at this level. The questionnaires were given after the completion of each cycle and involved various questions concerning the learners‟ preferences of the teacher‟s location in the classroom. The questionnaires were given to all the learners so that the ones observed would not feel that something out of the ordinary was taking place and it involved only them. They were given to the learners observed for ten minutes in the end of the activity and the students were asked to complete them alone and quietly without asking each other anything. The others were given the questionnaires when the rest of the class finished this activity. They were not given to be completed at home so that any parental intervention to their answers could be avoided and also because they would feel closer to the activity taking place so that they would remember easier how they felt during this activity. The questionnaires also may have involved questions that were not directly related to the project itself but were used just to attempt to make the learners feel more comfortable towards what they were doing at the time.

52 This Material is Copyright © Andréa Lopes 2010

Furthermore, the results were based on video transcriptions of each lesson so that the amount of learners‟ output would be measured more accurately, since only by keeping a journal some findings may have been forgotten. The analysis of the data took place after each cycle so as to be more objective. Ethical Issues One of the ethical issues involved was the permission given by the manager of the school to the researcher to conduct the action research project. The researcher was aware of the situation from the beginning and managed to convince the manager that the data collected would be used only for the action research project. The parents of the learners were another problem since it took time for them to be convinced to allow for a form of an experiment to be conducted in their children‟s classroom. Their belief was that the lesson would be disrupted by a camera taping their children during the lesson, since the learners would focus on this and not on what the teacher has to teach them. In the end, written permissions were given to the researcher. Moreover, there was a problem in the amount of bibliography found concerning the topic of the assignment. There was little available concerning the theoretical background of the assignment apart from some internet sources. Procedure and Timing of Research

Four sets of observations took place during the school year by the researcher who was also the teacher of the class. This was thought to cover a wider perspective of the situation. Each class had a lesson three times a week and two of these lessons each week were observed, one for each class. All in all, eight lessons were observed throughout the school year. One specific pair of learners was chosen for the project in each class. However, the activity took place among other pairs of students in each lesson, too, so that it would not be considered as something peculiar by the learners. The teacher experimented on different locations. During the first cycle of observations, she was sitting at her desk in the classroom and during the second cycle she was standing right next to the pair of learners that she experimented on. During the third cycle of observations, she was moving around the desks and during the last, she was standing in front of all the learners‟ desks, which were in orderly rows. The amount of learners‟ output was measured in terms of how much English they produced during oral pair-work activities. The activity involved was a specific one and was repeated for each lesson. The pair of learners involved in the project had a set of six flashcards with coloured drawings, the items on which they had been taught in the previous lesson. The cards were chosen, so that they would apply to what the learners might find interesting and might find enjoyable to name. As Cameron (2001: 58) suggests, in order for children to talk in classes „they must have something they want to say‟. Student A showed Student B the cards one by one and student B said loudly the name of the animal or item they showed. When student A finished showing the cards then student B would start showing the same set of cards to student A and the same procedure would take place. The number of the words they remembered and uttered was counted by the researcher. The activity was repeated for every cycle but different cards were used in each cycle to ensure that the learners would


respond in the similar way each time but not just because they would have the same items that they might remember having been shown to them beforehand. DISCUSSION, ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF THE DATA

Specific Results and their meaning Truell (2006) states that „the teacher should be difficult to locate as the teacher is working with students at various locations throughout the classroom. This approach allows the teacher to work with and to encourage students individually.‟ However, the findings showed that the learners responded by naming more items and therefore producing a larger and more accurate amount of the spoken target language when the teacher either stands in front of the whole classroom or stands next to them. The video recordings and the teacher‟s journal showed that the rest of the learners in the classroom were quiet when the activity took place in the cases of the teacher standing next to the two students involved and standing in front of the whole classroom. Therefore, it could be argued that the others let the pair of students involved in the experiment pay more attention on the cards and concentrate more on the task they had to do. The journal showed that the feeling the teacher had after each cycle coincided with the results of the video recordings. The teacher showed much interest for classroom management and discipline in the journal when talking about the first cycle. Her confidence was supposed to be shaken when her position was at her desk and the same happened during the third cycle according to the writer of the journal since the lack of discipline of the learners and her lack of control of the classroom proved to be more evident at the time than in cycle two or four. The learners‟ answers to the questionnaires showed that they preferred the teacher to be standing near them than far away in the classroom or sitting at her desk. The questionnaires showed that the learners during the first cycle found the cards either of medium or of great difficulty to name. This also happened in the third cycle. However, they thought that they found the cards of medium difficulty or of no difficulty during the second and the fourth cycle. Moreover, they said they liked naming cards instead of showing the cards to their classmates most of the times during the second and fourth cycle, which might prove that they were more encouraged to speak during these cycles. Donaldson (1978: 112) suggests that „education (…) should aim to discourage defense and withdrawal‟. In addition, they claimed to be more certain that they were going to name all the cards they were shown during the second and the fourth cycle. Finally, they thought that the location of the teacher in the classroom when the activity took place maybe was of more of assistance to them during the second and fourth cycle. Therefore, the students involved in the project may also feel the teacher‟s presence more intensely when the teacher stands in front of the class and therefore, themselves, or next to them. This may enhance their concentration on the task and give them the motive to speak more, considering the fact that the teacher is not moving but standing close to them and listening intensely. The learners being of a young age, it may be considered to be encouraging for them to have the teacher near them since learners of that age may need the teacher‟s support and reward for whatever they do correctly in the classroom and the teacher‟s location may be a way of promoting this support. After all, as Brewster, Ellis and Girard (2002: 13) suggest „there is no such thing as a pedagogy of


language which is not also a pedagogy of encouragement and a pedagogy of discovery‟. Other variables affecting the results However, it could be argued that the teacher‟s position in class may not have been the only aspect of the lesson to have influenced the results of the project as other variables could have been taken into consideration. One of these variables may have been the fact that during the first cycle the learners were still not familiar with the concept of the activity having not engaged in something like that before, which may have lead them to feel that it was something complex. Therefore, the stress of doing something for the first time may have been a factor affecting their performance. To this, one could add the fact that it had been the learner‟s first month of learning English and their first year, too. Their first contact with the new language may have been another aspect causing them stress and not letting them perform as well as they did during other cycles. During the second, third and fourth cycle, the learners had already been familiar with the process of the activity and probably felt more relaxed than the first cycle. The complexity of the activity that they may have felt during the first cycle could have decreased by now letting them perform better. However, the third cycle showed that they did not perform as well as the second and fourth cycle. This may have not been attributed only to the teacher‟s position in class but also to the fact that the interest value of the items on the cards may not have been the same as previously. The learners having dealt with such an activity a lot in the past, during the two previous cycles, may have felt uninterested now and may not have paid so much attention to the activity. Moreover, the last cycle showed that the learners performed better. Apart from the teacher‟s position in the classroom another variable that might have influenced the learners‟ performance may have been the fact that it was almost the end of the school year, since the school year ends in May. The learners may have been familiar enough with the activity‟s process by now. The activity being a way of relaxing from the normal routine of the lesson and also being a form of a game, may have let them feel comfortable and stress-free, as well as entertained now that the school year was almost over and they would not have to worry so much about their grades or their performance. It might also be possible to assume that since one student of each pair of learners had the advantage of starting to show the flashcards to the other, he/she might listen to their names by the other, so when his/her turn comes to name the cards he/she would have them fresh in their memory having just heard them, making it therefore, another variable affecting the learners‟ results. In addition to these variables, there may be also the one of the personality of each learner at the time. This may mean that each learner may have responded the way they did not just because the teacher‟s positions were the ones mentioned but also because their own personality was influenced by aspects not concerning the classroom environment. Their thoughts for example may not have been on the particular activity at the time, but on matters concerning their school or their family life outside of the classroom making it more difficult to concentrate during the first or the third cycle. It could be of importance to mention that the learners of the particular classroom all attended the same class in the same primary school, possibly making it easier to assume that if there was a problem at school, that


made them focus on this and not on the language school lesson, then more than one learner would be affected by this. Maybe this was why both the learners‟ performances showed similar results and at the same time. All these possibilities do not imply that the teacher‟s position in class did not affect their performance in each cycle but they could be factors whose influence added to the particular performance of the learners having the results mentioned beforehand. Problems encountered During the project, apart from the ethical issues mentioned that engaged the researcher, the problem of keeping the class quiet for the activity to take place was encountered. Being of a very young age and being for the first year in a new classroom and language environment may have been factors that affected them and making them feel uneasy in the presence of a camera. However, they tended to be quieter when the teacher‟s location in the classroom changed during the second and fourth cycle, making it easier for the activity involved in the process to take place. Moreover, the fact that the activities involved in each cycle and the questionnaires that had to be completed meant that the teacher and the learners would devote time out of the lesson for them, the time management was an issue to be taken into consideration as well as the fact that the class syllabus could not be overlooked. However, every possible effort was made not to deviate from the syllabus and the time allocated for the other activities to take place. CONCLUSION In the case of organising a future action research project, the researcher might consider requesting the assistance of other teachers as well, and of their learners by observing their lessons, as well as requiring the teachers to write their beliefs in journals and asking their learners to complete questionnaires as well. The researcher could also use more cards in the cycles so that the second learner would not have heard the words once by the first learner when showing them their flashcards, possibly therefore, making the results of the project more objective. One other possible path would be to engage more pairs of learners in the project as well as more cycles in the project so that a clearer view of the situation might be formed. The mere increase in the quantity of the participants in the project or of the cycles involved may not be a decisive factor which may decrease the influence of other variables on the results of the project but it may enhance the project‟s validity. Brown (2000: xi) suggests for the researchers that „we can rejoice in our defeats because we know that it is the very elusiveness of this phenomenon of second language acquisition that makes the quest for answers so exciting. Second language acquisition is no simple, unidimensional reality. It is “slippery” in every way‟. Therefore, it could be a beginning for more teachers to conduct their lesson taking into consideration the findings of the project and for others to expand their research on this. As Campbell, McNamara and Gilroy (2004: 198) suggest „it is important that even research which is highly specific to a particular situation should still at least be shared within the wider context that provides a setting for that situation.‟


REFERENCES

Brewster, J., Ellis, G. and Girard, D. (2002) The Primary English Teacher‟s Guide (New Edition). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Brown, H. D. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. USA: Addison Wesley. Longman. Cameron, L. (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Campbell, A., McNamara, O. and Gilroy, P. (2004) Practitioner Research and Professional Development in Education. PCP

Donaldson, M. (1978) Children‟s Minds. London: Fontana/ Croom Helm Elliott, J. (1992) Action Research for Educational Change. Buckingham: Open University Press

Gray, E. and Evans, V. (2001) Set Sail! 1: Picture Flashcards. Berkshire: Express Publishing Ligtbown, P. and Spada, N. (1999) How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revised Edition Truell, D. Allen (2006) Classroom Management: Strategies and implementation www.bcte.ecu.edu/ACBMITEC/p1998/Truell1.htm Accessed on 13/03/2006

Wallace, M. (1998) Action Research for Language teachers. Cambridge Teacher Training and Development

http://www.bcte.ecu.edu/ACBMITEC/p1998/Truell1.htm


Can the use of puppets help six-year-old Brazilian children recall and reproduce refrains in fairy tales more easily?

Andréa Lopes

INTRODUCTION The following is a detailed account of a small-scale research project undertaken at a private language school in Rio de Janeiro between September 2005 and May 2006. The project was carried out with a group of young learners aged six at the beginning of the research. The investigation was carried out collaboratively with the children‟s class teacher. Ten children were initially involved and two newcomers joined the project later. THE CONTEXT The children involved in the project had covered only about 50 hours of English when the research started. They come to a private language school for a 60-minute lesson twice a week and both the group and the class teacher share the same mother tongue (Portuguese). The school adopts a topic-based approach for 6-year-olds, linking foreign language learning with the conceptual development of the children. The main aim is to involve the learners actively, through problem solving tasks, songs, games and stories. Speaking and listening are the only skills developed as the children have just recently become literate in their mother tongue. The issue the research is to address The provision of an effective EFL programme is a central issue within the school. The school policies claim that lessons should be conducted in the foreign language as a way of maximising the children‟s exposure to the language and thus their learning opportunities. Although Brazilian children are likely to encounter English words in their everyday lives such as „milkshake‟, English is not often heard or used outside the classroom. For the great majority of Brazilian families learning a foreign language means, primarily, learning English. This interest, indeed passion, shown by parents for English undoubtedly helps create a favourable climate for learning. However, they also tend to have very high expectations when sending their children to a language school and reiterate a strong desire to see them using L2 from the very first lesson. Bearing this in mind, the researcher set out to investigate the use of storytelling as a way of increasing the amount of L2 spoken in class. Narrowing down the argument for experimental purposes, it was hypothesised that the use of puppets can help the recall and reproduction of refrains in the stories which are often told to this young audience and which they can use to relate to their own everyday


experiences, e.g. it was too hot / big / small (a chunk from „Goldilocks and The Three Bears‟). Choice of the experimental stories Fairy tales have often been considered inappropriate for foreign language teaching as they are fairly long and do not always have the repetitive language which seems almost essential for teaching English to young learners. In order to cope with this possible problem, the researcher has used simplified versions of three stories – Pinocchio, The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood – which contain a series of repeated patterns of language (See example in Appendix 1). There has been, however, an attempt to keep some natural features of the language such as the use of alliteration (e.g. Big Bad Wolf) and onomatopoeia (e.g. and he huffed and he puffed) and the simple past. This strategy could be supported by Krashen‟s comprehensible input theory, which states that acquisition takes place as a result of the learner having understood input that is a little beyond the current level of his competence (Ellis 1985). Telling and retelling the stories The three stories were told purely orally by the class teacher three times each, in three consecutive classes. Big books were used so that pictures as well as the teacher‟s gestures, mime and adapted voice to the different characters could help convey meaning and keep the children‟s attention. No effort was made to pre-teach the meaning of any unfamiliar lexis before the narration of the stories. For the last two stories – The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood – the puppets were introduced on the second day and although they were not used for the storytelling, the children were allowed to manipulate them. Since the very first time they were told each story, they were encouraged to engage in the natural built-in repetition of words and phrases. The learners were asked to retell a scene from the story (the one which contains most of the refrain) after listening to it for the third time. STAGE ONE: THE BASELINE „Pinocchio‟ was the story chosen to collect baseline data. As mentioned earlier, three subsequent sessions of the story were followed by the children retelling the first scene, which contained most of the refrains – „He‟s just like a boy!‟, „I/He can(‟t) walk / talk / sing‟ and „I wish Pinocchio could walk / talk / sing.‟ No puppets were used at this stage, just the Big book. DATA ANALYSIS An interesting point which appears to be confirmed by the transcript of the children‟s retelling of the story is that as they were genuinely involved in the story, they were actually reproducing large chunks (other than the ones which are part of the refrains) despite some grammatical and lexical inaccuracies. The teacher decided to „stretch‟ them a bit and encouraged them to summarise the story as a whole. A lot of prompting was given, which seems to confirm Cameron‟s (2001) belief that “routines and scaffolding are two types of language-using strategies that seem to be especially helpful in making space for children‟s growth”:


There also seems to be a balance among the children as far as their participation is concerned. No child remained silent or avoided speaking. There were very few instances of the children‟s resorting to L1 at the beginning of the story, which seems to suggest that they were a bit insecure. As the story progressed, however, both the teacher‟s (and peers‟ support ) appear to have built up their confidence and allowed them to take risks, as the child who responded „nhac‟ (using an onomatopoeia in her mother tongue) in an attempt to avoid resorting to L1 to explain that „the whale caught Pinocchio‟. Even when the story became more complex and more prompting was needed, the children made their contributions, giving basically one-word answers resorting to previously known language. Motivation, however, dropped a bit as the language demand increased considerably. REFLECTION ON STAGE ONE The story itself and the retelling seem to have motivated the children to participate and speak English all the time, despite the fact that „Pinocchio‟ proved to be a quite long narrative and did not offer a lot of repetition towards the end. Thus the researcher went on to investigate a puzzle which was part of her journal reflection – would stories containing repetitive language in a dialogue aid retention of chunks and facilitate reproduction as the children acted it out? STAGE TWO: CYCLE ONE „The Three Little Pigs‟ was told during three consecutive classes under the same conditions of „Pinocchio‟. The twelve children were split into two groups. Group A was encouraged to act out the dialogue between the Big Bad Wolf and each of the pigs with puppets, whereas group B was asked to reproduce the dialogue by using flashcards depicting the most important elements of the story – the characters, the three houses and the chimney (see examples of transcripts in appendix 2) As soon as possible after the retelling, each child met the researcher individually and was asked: „What did the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf say in the story?‟ No prompting was given. Group A children were also asked: „Did the puppets help you remember the story?‟ The interview was carried out in L1 to ensure the children‟s understanding of the questions. DATA ANALYSIS FOR CYCLE ONE It has been observed that when using the puppets the children made a great effort to use only L2. It appears that young learners not only feel more confident when using puppets in front of a group but also recognise that they have their own identity. The class teacher wrote down several instances during the retelling session in which the children were engaged in short dialogues using the puppets and language which is already part of their linguistic repertoire. Although they are not part of this investigation, these dialogues tend to show that the children recognise that the puppets are „native speakers‟ and therefore communication will take place only if the target language is used. While there is a clear effort to use only English when retelling the story with the puppets, the children using the flashcards, in contrast, did not seem to worry about switching into Portuguese to ask for clarification or sustain the task when they did not recall the chunks .


Trying to subject the results to statistical analysis, it has been observed that the children using puppets could recall and reproduce all the utterances in the refrain more easily than the ones using flashcards. The non-use of puppets involved more prompting: 2/3 of the expected chunks (Open the door, Little Pig/ No, no, no way. Please go away/ I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down) were spontaneously recalled and reproduced and 1/3 required prompting:

Spontaneous recalling/ ease of retelling

Prompting required

Puppets 9 0

Non-puppets 6 3

. The puppets also seem to make the event more memorable for young learners and facilitate retention and reproduction of larger chunks. Responses given by children in the individual interviews have been reported verbatim, in full and serve to support this hypothesis: What did The Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf say in the story?

Group A (with puppets)

Subject number Response

1 Open the door, Little Pig. No! Go away! I‟ll puff, puff ...your house.

2 Little Pig, little Pig, open the door! No way! Please go away! I‟ll huff and puff.

3 Open the door, Little Pig. No way! Go away! I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and your house down.

4 Open the door. No! Wolf huff and puff and blow your house down.

5 Open the door, Little Pig. No, go away! I‟ll huff and puff and huff and puff, huff and puff.

6 Open the door, Little Pig. No!

Group B (with flashcards)


7 Open the door or .... huff, huff, puff, puff.

8 Não sei (I don‟t know).

9 Open the door! Open the door! No! Go! Puff ...

10 Knock. Knock. Little Pig, open the door. No, no, no! ..... esqueci (I forgot it).

11 Open the door, Little Pig. I‟ll huff ... I‟ll puff .... your house.

12 Open the door, Little Pig. No! Please go away! Vou soprar sua casa (I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down).

Although the recall was not always a perfect phonological or grammatical reproduction of the refrain, the children who had used puppets demonstrated wider recall when compared to the children who had manipulated flashcards. During the interview they all said that the puppets had helped them. Once more, some children from group B resorted to L1 during the interview to explain they had forgotten the refrain or as a strategy to compensate for the chunk they could not recall – „I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down‟ was definitely a difficult one for all of them.


REFLECTION ON CYCLE ONE „The Three Little Pigs‟ proved to be a more adequate fairy tale for the experiment as it is shorter and the rhythmic refrain is repeated from the beginning to the end, allowing children to do a lot of repetition as it was told. Also, the occurrence of the refrain in a short dialogue seems to help retention and recall, especially when puppets were used, as the learners took turns to say their lines. In order to provide group B with a similar experience with puppets, a story which has the same characteristics was chosen for the next cycle – Little Red Riding Hood. STAGE THREE: CYCLE TWO The researcher repeated the same process as before, but group A and group B reversed roles for this cycle: while group A was asked to retell the dialogue between Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf with flashcards), group B learners were provided with puppets for the task. All children remained in the same original groups and both events were videoed and later transcribed. Once again, each child met the researcher individually for a short structured interview. Group B learners were asked in L1: „What did the Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood say in the story? and „Did the puppets help you remember the story?‟ Group A children had to answer only the first question. No prompting was given at this stage and the responses were recorded and written down. DATA ANALYSIS FOR CYCLE TWO It has been observed that the children using puppets seemed less-conscious and more empowered to use L2 through the multiple voices of the characters. At no time did they resort to L1 to accomplish the task. Despite some lexical and grammatical inaccuracies, the dialogue appears to have taken place smoothly, with the children taking turns to say their lines very naturally. The class teacher pointed out that this refrain was considered more difficult by the whole group as the story was told in the three consecutive classes, but even so the children performed quite well . It has also been observed that the learners particularly enjoyed hearing this story over and over again as their confidence grew when they realised they could remember more and more the dialogue between the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood. This challenge became a kind of game activity. Group A children clearly required more prompting to recall and reproduce the repetitive chunks from the story: only half of the chunks were spontaneously recalled and reproduced. L1 was used by this group to ask for help as they failed to remember the refrain or to give an explanation about the story). As they had used puppets before, the researcher suspects they might have been a bit frustrated this time. Group B children, on the other hand, required prompting only once to correct one of the chunks, recalling and reproducing the refrain more easily: Grandma, what big eyes you have!/ All the better to see you with/ Grandma, what big ears you have!/ All the better to hear you with/ Grandma, what a big nose you have!/ All the better to smell you with/ Grandma, what big teeth you have!/ All the better to eat you with!


Spontaneous recalling/ ease of retelling

Prompting required

Puppets 7 1

Non-puppets 4 4

Motivation was slightly affected when the flashcards were used. However, it can be noticed that group A children were making a clear effort to reproduce the dialogue. No signs of boredom or indications that they would quit were observed. In contrast, group B learners showed greater liveliness in their retelling when the recordings were compared. The results of the interview were rather clear cut. In response to the researcher‟s first question group B children confirmed the hypothesis that puppets can aid retention and reproduction of chunks. Their responses in verbatim are longer and more complete than group A students‟, despite all inaccuracies. 100% of the children agreed that the puppets were really helpful. Group A learners‟ responses were not only shorter, but two children were also unable to recall the refrain – one clearly stated he did not know the answer and the other one was actually recalling the refrain from the previous story: What did The Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood say in the story? Group B (with puppets)


7 What big eyes, grandma! All the better to see you with. What a big nose, grandma. All the better to hear you with.

8 What a big eyes, grandma! All the better to see you. What a big .... ear? All the better to hear you. What a big teeth! To eat you!

9 What a big eye you have! All ... good, very good. What a big teeth! Ah .... Yes! What big hear! No! Ears! What big teeth you have! Hum .... all the better to eat you!

10 What a big eye! All the better to see you with. What a big nose! All the better to smell you with. What a big ears! All the better to hear you with. What a big teeth! All the better to eat you with.

11 What a big wolf ... ears! And teeth .... and nose ... and eyes!

12 What big eyes, grandma. All the bad to see you. What big ears. All the bad to hear you. What big nose. All the bad to smell.


Group A (with flashcards)


1 Knock, knock. Open the door , grandma.

2 You have big eyes, grandma. All better to see you with. You have a big nose, grandma. All better to smell you with. You have a big teeth, grandma. All better to eat you with.

3 Grandma, what big eyes ... ears ... nose ... head and teeth!

4 What big ears! To hear. Big eyes. To see. A big nose. To smell. Big teeth. To eat you!

5 Grandma, big eyes! Big teeth! Big foot! Big ears!

6 Grandma, what big eyes you have! And big teeth! And big ears! And better to eat you! Yummy! Yummy!

DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS Limitations of the experiment and recommendations for future research The number of subjects in this experiment was small and the experiment took place in a particular context, so it seems important to interpret these findings with caution. Three fairy tales which are popular among Brazilian learners were used, so it may be difficult to say whether different stories would evoke the same response. The experimental stories were adapted to be very much within a typical genre of repetitive stories which are often used by EFL teachers teaching young learners. The scope of the study was limited, for practical reasons, to investigation of recall and reproduction of newly presented refrains, with both puppets and flashcards, after they had been heard and drilled in the storytelling sessions. Although the results were extremely promising in this area as the use of puppets appears to lead to a greater long-term uptake of whole chunks of language by many children, this study in itself can make no such claim. Replications of this investigation with different stories – perhaps some popular ones in TEYL such as „The Turnip‟ or „Chicken Little‟– in different young learners‟ situations could provide some solid data to support or disconfirm the researcher‟s hypothesis. REFERENCES Cameron, L. (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, R. (1985) Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Appendix 1

An example of a simplified version of the fairy tales used in the experiment

The Three Little Pigs There were once three little pigs. Little Pig number 1 was lazy. He built a house out of straw. But one day along came a Big Bad Wolf. “Open the door, Little Pig”, roared the Big Bad Wolf. “No, no, no way. Please go away”, said the Little Pig. “I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down”. And that‟s what he did. Little Pig number 2 wasn‟t quite so lazy. He built a house out of wood. But one day along came a Big Bad Wolf. “Open the door, Little Pig”, roared the Big Bad Wolf. “No, no, no way. Please go away”, said the Little Pig. “I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down”. And that‟s what he did. Little Pig number 3 was clever. He built a house out of bricks. But one day along came a Big Bad Wolf. “Open the door, Little Pig”, roared the Big Bad Wolf. “No, no, no way. Please go away”, said the Little Pig. “I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff and blow your house down”. And that‟s what he did. And he huffed and he puffed .... and he huffed and he puffed but he couldn‟t blow the house down. The Big Bad Wolf was very angry. He wanted to eat the Little Pig. The Wolf jumped onto the roof and climbed down the chimney. But the clever Little Pig put a big pot under the chimney. Splash! That was the end of the Big Bad Wolf.


Appendix 2

An example of a transcription of the retelling sessions

T: Teacher

Ss: Students

Sn: (n= 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) One of the students in the group

[P]: Pause

[ ]: Gestures, actions or procedures explained

( ): Translations when necessary (because a student has used L1)

Italics: L1 being used

The Three Little Pigs (with puppets)

1. S4: Little Pig number 1 was very very lazy.

2. T: He built a house [P] out of ...

3. S2: straw.

4. S3/S5: Knock, knock. Open the house, Little Pig.

5. S1: No way! No way! Go away!

6. S3/S5: I‟ll huff ... I‟ll puff and blow your house down!

7. S1: Sniff! Sniff! [S pretends to be crying].

8. T: And ...

9. S2: That‟s he did.

10. T: That‟s what he did [T prompts S2 to repeat this sentence].

11. S2: That‟s what he did.

12. S4: Little Pig number 2 built a house .... open the door....

13. T: [T interrupts S4] He built a house out of ...

14. S4: hum.......

15. S3: wood.

16. S4: wood!

17. S3/ S5: Knock, knock. Open the door, Little Pig.

18. S1: No, no! No away! Please go away!


19. S3/S5: I‟ll huff ... I‟ll puff and blow your house down!

20. S4: And that‟s [P] what he did.

21. S2: Little Pig number three is clever.... [P] built the house and ...

22. T: He built a house out of brick [T encourages choral repetition].

23. Ss: He built a house out of brick.

24. S4: Open the door, Little Pig.

25. S2: No way! Please go away!

26. S4: I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff your house down!

27. S1: Built the house is strong.

28. S4: And the hot pot .... Ouch!!!! [S runs away].

29. S3: Bye bye, Big Bad Wolf!

The Three Little Pigs (with flashcards)

30. S7: Little Pig number 1 was very lazy.

31. T: He built ...

32. S10: a house

33. T: out of ...

34. S8: Como é palha? (How do you say „palha‟ in English?)

35. S9: Straw

36. T: The Big Bad Wolf said ...

37. S11/ S12: Open the door, Little Pig!

38. S9: No way! No way! Go away!

39. S7: I‟ll huff ... puff ... esqueci .... (I forgot ...)

40. T: [T encourages choral repetition] I‟ll huff, I‟ll puff and blow your house

41. down!

42. Ss: I‟ll huff, I‟ll puff and blow your house down!

43. T: Again! What did the Big Bad Wolf say?

44. Ss: I‟ll huff, I‟ll puff and blow your house down!


45. T: And that‟s ...

46. S8: what he did!

47. S7: Little Pig number 2 built a house [P] wood.

48. T: The Big ...

49. S10: Bad Wolf said: Open the house....no! Open the door, Little Pig!

50. S9: No way! No way! Vou soprar .... (I‟ll huff and puff ...) [The S makes the

51. corresponding gesture]

52. S11: I‟ll huff and I‟ll puff

53. T: and blow ...

54. S11: your house!

55. T: And that‟s ...

56. S6: what he did!

57. S12: Little Pig number 3 was clever .... built a house ... brick.

58. T: The Big ...

59. S10: Bad Wolf .... Open the door!

60. S7: No way!

61. Ss: Go away!

62. T: So the Big Bad Wolf said ...

63. S7: I‟ll huff puff

64. S9: Blow your house down!

65. T: But the house.... [As the T gets no answer, she goes on prompting the

66. Ss] the house was ...

67. S12: Muito forte! (Very strong!)

68. T: Strong..... The house was strong. So, the Big Bad Wolf ....

69. S7: jump chimney.

70. T: And ... that was the end ...

71. S9: Big Bad Wolf!

68 This Material is Copyright © Mike Glover 2010

An Investigation into the possible influences that persuade Young Learners to attempt, or not attempt, to participate in class discussions

Mike Glover

INTRODUCTION This paper will investigate the amount of Attempted Vocal Participation (AVP) of girls and boys in a class of 8 and 9 year olds (British National Curriculum Year 4) in Saudi Arabia. The children are all second language English learners from Egypt, the Philippines or Pakistan. It will begin by discussing the rationale for the investigation and then go on present and evaluate the results. This will be followed by a discussion of the different factors that may have influenced the results of the investigation. The investigation was conducted during the academic year of September 2005 to March 2006. RATIONALE FOR THE AR The rationale for the investigation came from the academic journal of the teacher investigator and the comments of other teaching colleagues. It had been noticed that some pupils, primarily girls, were not attempting to participate vocally, as much as it was felt that they could do during the lessons. „Sometimes I notice that someone hasn‟t answered a question for a while….usually it‟s a girl‟ (teacher journal 11th March 2005) „Unless I ask her directly by name she just sits there and looks as though she isn‟t paying attention.‟ (teacher journal 24th April 2005) This did not seem to be due to any lack of understanding or failure of the girls to grasp the linguistic concepts covered in the lessons. Monitoring of pupils‟ work during the lessons confirmed that the girls had an equal grasp (to the boys) of the concepts covered, so it was the whole class discussions at the beginning of the lessons that were the concern of the investigation. The investigation was not aimed at comparing the effect that the amount of a pupil‟s AVP has on language acquisition, or on the actual amount of vocal participation of pupils during the lesson, but on the amount of a pupil‟s AVP. It was decided that studying actual vocal participation of the Young Learners would not give an accurate impression of participation, as only one pupil could answer at a time, and it was the attempted participation, or being prepared to give an answer, that was of more interest. The pupil answers to a questionnaire about their thoughts on being taught in single or co-educational classes tended to indicate that (to the girls especially) „typical‟ gender conflicts were distinct from cultural gender differences. Whilst the boys‟ answers (and some girls‟ answers) tended to concentrate on gender differences that may be found worldwide - “when there are girls[in the class] they are too slow [at answering].‟ (9 year old male pupil) „We have to behave more when there are girls [in the class] (9 year old male pupil) „You can have more fun if there are just boys in the class.‟ (9 year old male pupil)


„I have time to think and it is peaceful [when there are only girls in the class].‟ (9 year old female pupil) answers by some girls (though none of the boys‟ answers) seemed to imply an influence of cultural rules and expectations of behaviour - „I am allowed to talk when the boys aren‟t there.” (9 year old female pupil) „I know what to write but I can‟t say it with the boys there‟ (9 year old female pupil) The introductory section of the lesson, in which the whole class contributed to learning and discussion of the topic, was chosen as the focus as it was felt that the later stages of the lesson, in which the pupils worked in pairs or groups, would yield different results, as the pairs or groups would be chosen by the pupils and therefore their attitudes to participating in discussions, when working within their „comfort zone‟, was likely to be more positive and voluntary: „Groups is better because then I don‟t need to say it with the boys there.‟ (9 year old female pupil) PRESENTATION OF DATA

% of AVP in each Lesson by each gender

Lesson 1 (mixed sex class)


Lesson 3 (Single sex class)


Girls 57% 67% 72% 70%

Boys 75% 80% 89% 87%

A.V.P. is defined by the pupil raising a hand or showing a willingness to answer a question or verbally participate in a discussion, whether or not the pupil actually gets the chance to answer or verbally participate. The A.V.P. percentage of lesson 3, the single sex classes, is not 100% as sometimes questions had to be re-phrased or repeated and such questions were counted as separate questions. Also, some questions elicited no A.V.Ps. Lesson 3 was conducted first with the boys and then, two days later, with the girls.


ANALYSIS OF DATA

This graph shows the percentage values of A.V.P for boys and girls in each of the four lessons of the research. The results showed that the A.V.P of the boys in each lesson was consistently higher for all of the lessons. However, it can be seen that the difference between the A.V.P. of the boys and the A.V.P. of the girls narrowed as the academic year progressed. The amount of A.V.P. by the girls during the lessons also increased at a faster rate than the amount of A.V.P. by the boys. The fact that the boy‟s A.V.P. was higher than the girls‟ throughout the year could be seen as unsurprising in a culture that gives boys more confidence to speak and gives them less inhibitions about engaging in speaking. Interestingly, the A.V.P of the girls in the girls‟ only lesson was less than the boys‟ A.V.P in the boys only lesson, which could be due to teacher gender or the (perceived?) teacher relationship (see below for further comments). That the amount of A.V.P. by the girls increased over the academic year may show that they felt more confident at participating actively as the academic year progressed and realized that the cultural expectations of „school‟ and „in the classroom‟ (Brown 2000:189) were not the same as the cultural expectations of the general society. By lesson four the percentage of A.V.P. of the girls had increased to the level of the boys‟ A.V.P.at the beginning of the academic year. The fact that the girls‟ A.V.P. increased at a faster rate than the boys could show two things: Firstly, that the girls gained in confidence at a faster rate than the boys, and, secondly, maybe, that the boys began the academic year with a more confident attitude and so had less scope to increase their participation than the girls. INTERPRETATION OF THE DATA: FACTORS AFFECTING FINDINGS How might the question types and styles asked by the teacher affect A.V.P?


Halligan (1988:85) says that „the most familiar form of classroom questioning is „guess what‟s in my mind‟, in which the teacher is expecting a „precise response from pupils‟ and calls it a request for information rather than a question. Richards and Lockhart (1996:186) say that these types of questions asked by the teacher are more requests for demonstrations of form and are not actually questions (because the answer is already known) but, they say, they give Young Learners an opportunity to use the language structure of the lesson. Such questioning techniques are also recognized as such by the Young Learners and so they may adapt their A.V.P to what they perceive as the required response. McIlvain (1992:52) seems to conclude that this perception by the Young Learners may affect their A.V.P. as they may not be prepared to answer questions, or participate in discussions which are perceived as being too teacher focused and of no relevance or interest to the learners. Thompson (1997:100) counters this by arguing that simplified questions and question forms may sometimes encourage A.V.P when „[teachers] direct [simplified] questions at the weaker learners [which] encourages learners to accept a part in the interaction even if they are shy or hesitant.‟ Nolasco and Arthur (1986:101) also say that simple questions may be used by the teacher as a device to encourage a reluctant speaker to participate in a lesson. They refer to this as „Lock-step‟ interaction, which seems to consist of a teacher-led direct „closed‟ question (one requiring a simple „yes/no‟ answer), a pupil response and a teacher request for elaboration. How Might the Observation Process Affect A.V.P? Although it was stressed to the pupils that this observation was not a form of assessment, Harris and McCann (1994:10) say that pupils might try harder or try to participate more than they would normally in a lesson, if they know, or perceive, that they are being assessed on their participation level. This seems to suggest that the converse may also be the case and that some pupils may become so nervous of making a mistake that they choose not to participate orally in the lesson at all or „may perform worse in the knowledge that the teacher is actively monitoring them.‟ How Might Pupils‟ Learning Styles Affect A.V.P? Williams and Burden (1997:91) suggest that pupils‟ individual learning styles means that language learning may take place in many different ways and that lack of vocal participation, or attempted vocal participation, may not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding. Nunan (1998:170) notes that only some pupils can be categorized as „communicative learners‟ who learn best by participating and practicing their language skills by speaking out loud. Cameron (2001:52) also seems to allude to levels of pupils‟ verbal interactions being affected by the pupils‟ preferred learning styles. She also seems to infer (2001:53) that a lack of verbal participation does not necessarily mean that learning is not taking place or that the pupil has not understood the preceding utterance. It may simply be that the pupil prefers to listen to the language as used by the teacher and others, and analyse it in his/her mind.


How Might the Amount of Wait Time Allowed by the Teacher Affect A.V.P? „Wait time‟, or „thinking time‟ is defined by Fisher (1995:21) as the time a teacher waits for a verbal response, from the class in general or a specific pupil, Fisher seems to suggest that if pupils do not have sufficient time to think about the question and compose an answer in their minds, then they may be reluctant to continue participating, or attempting to participate, verbally in the lesson. Fisher notes that some teachers average a response time of one second before either answering the question themselves or asking another pupil for the answer because „[they] want to keep the conversational ball rolling‟. He suggests (1995:21) that longer wait time may result in more pupils attempting to verbally participate in class discussions as they are able to consolidate their answers in their minds before speaking, which gives them more confidence and willingness to attempt to verbally participate. How Might Teacher Gender and Teacher Relationship with the Class Affect A.V.P? Wells (1986:144) notes that teachers might try to encourage pupils to express their views more spontaneously and at length in order to promote conversational discourse and fluency, but, in doing so, can inadvertently interact in such a way that the child „is caused to appear linguistically deficient or disadvantaged‟. This may be seen as, unintentionally, discouraging a pupil to attempt to vocally participate in a lesson. He also notes (1986:113) that using names of children can show that teachers care about the pupils as individuals and, thus, possibly encourage pupils to attempt to vocally participate in a lesson. Lepper and Hoddell (1989 in Williams and Burden 1997:136) found that teacher phrases, such as „well done‟, were more likely to make learners feel good „momentarily‟, but that such phrases were viewed by the pupils as virtually meaningless in terms of educational worth as they did not give indications of how their performances may be improved. This seems to indicate that encouragement may not be as influential on A.V.P levels as Wells (1986:144) seems to suggest. Caffyn (in Williams and Burden 1997:135) noted that pupils valued praise more highly if it was given in private and not necessarily in front of the class, which seems to imply that a teacher‟s relationship with a class, or with an individual, might not be as influential on a pupil‟s A.V.P level as might be assumed. Wells also says (1986:143) „It is highly probable that teacher expectations have some influence on children‟s performance‟, which seems to imply that a teacher may vary the type of question asked to a pupil, the length of wait time allowed to a pupil and the quality of answer/reply expected from a pupil. If a pupil realizes that more is expected of them in a reply then they may not choose to voluntarily orally participate for fear of failing to meet teacher expectations. The answers to the questionnaire dealing with the pupil‟s perceptions of having a male teacher suggest that their attitudes – and expectations – of a male, as well as a male teacher, also influenced their participation in a lesson. „Mr. Glover is too tall to hear my answer‟ (female pupil) seems to suggest that the pupil just doesn‟t think it is worthwhile attempting to answer, whilst „Mr. Glover is like my dad and is cross when I talk to him‟ (female pupil)


seems to indicate that familial perceptions have coloured expectations and perceptions that girls should be seen and not heard. How Might Peer Relationships Affect A.V.P? The class in which the A.R. was conducted has intense parental pressure for their children to exceed the achievements of their peers. This pressure is felt intensely by their peers and appears in the classroom as verbal put downs. There is also racial pressure between communities, as well as pressure for the boys to be seen to do better than the girls. Any perceived deviations from the expectations of behavior or achievement, especially amongst the boys, is honed in on, in the classroom by their peers and the perpetrator is ridiculed and subject to verbal put-downs. „I don‟t want to speak if it isn‟t right because then the others will laugh.‟ (male pupil) „I can‟t say it wrong or they [others in the class] will think I‟m silly.‟ (female pupil) seem to suggest that this fear is quite common amongst both girls and boys. How Might Cultural Values Affect A.V.P? Ellis (1985:165) seems to suggest that second language learning may be easier if the second language has social, as opposed to structural, similarities to the first language, which he calls „strategy types‟. Such strategy types may include similarities in turn taking and other gender related speech patterns. Brown (2000:29) mentions that the language systems that children learn may depend on adult teachers, who may encourage the children to comply with the behavioural expectations of the culture that the language is being taught in. Williams and Burden (1997:67) referring to the works of Feuerstein et al (1980) seem to suggest that children may meet a culture of „oh, you don‟t need to know that at your age/because of your gender‟ when parents, and „later, teachers select and organize stimuli that they consider most appropriate for the child‟. In a mixed class Sunderland (1992:81) says that it is usual that in any demonstration dialogue and in pairwork practice that male pupils speak first, giving a model of male „firstness‟ (Sunderland 1992:86). This may also allow the boys to seize and dominate any class discussion, which may further demotivate the girls into not attempting to vocally participate. Sunderland (1992:88) says that lesson transcripts have shown that teachers tend to pay more attention to male students in mixed classes – even when the teachers think that they are treating both sexes equally or even try to consciously give time to the girls. Thus, males might get more feedback on their utterances (Sunderland 1992:88) and feel more encouraged to participate verbally, whereas girls may come to the view that there is not much point attempting to verbally participate.Sunderland (1992:89) also raises the issue that A.V.P may reflect gender roles in pupils‟ background cultures. She suggests that there may also be a difference in how genders learn – girls may be much more passive and „we cannot assume that oral production is the most effective path to proficiency‟.


CONCLUSION This paper investigated the amount of Attempted Vocal Participation (AVP) of girls and boys in a class of 8 and 9 year olds in Saudi Arabia. It began by discussing the rationale for the investigation and then went on to present and evaluate the results. This was followed by a discussion of the different factors that may have influenced the results of the investigation. Van Lier (1988:93) states that „participation need not necessarily be overt at all times [and] may consist in “eavesdropping”, thinking about what is going on, internal repetition, etc‟. Attempted vocal participation may not seem to always be an accurate indicator of linguistic competence, or linguistic confidence, but, more possibly (and probably?) it may be an indicator of personal confidence: „I want to be sure before I speak.‟ (9 year old female pupil) „I don‟t want to speak if it isn‟t right because then the others will laugh.‟ (male pupil) „I can‟t say it wrong or they [others in the class] will think I‟m silly.‟ (female pupil) Such comments as these seem to show that personal confidence influences pupils‟ AVP levels. However, the results of this study indicate that some female pupils appear to be held back from attempting to vocally participate not only by inter-gender conflicts and perceptions of self but cultural gender expectations too. REFERENCES Books Brown, H. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (4

th Edition): New York:

Addison Wesley Longman. Cameron, L (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen. L, Manion. L, and Morrison. K (2000) Research Methods in Education (5

th Edition)

Oxon: RoutledgeFalmer Ellis, R. (1985) Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisher, R. (1995) Teaching Children to Learn. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes. Harris, M. and McCann, P (1994) Assessment. Oxford: Heinemann Hopkins,D. (2002:52) A Teacher‟s Guide to Classroom Research. Berkshire: Open University Press Nunan, D. (1998) Language Teaching Methodology. Harlow: Longman Richards, J.C and Lockhart,C. (1996) Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Williams, M. and Burden, R.L. (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Van Lier, L. (1988) The Classroom and the Language Learner. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Wallace, M.J. (1998) Action Research for Language Teachers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Wells, G. (1986) The Meaning Makers. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Articles Halligan, D. (1988) Is There a Task in the Class? In Maclure, M. Phillips, T. and Wilkinson, A. (eds) Oracy Matters (82-92). Milton Keynes: The Open University. McIlvain (1992) Boys Will Be Boys Nolasco and Arthur (1986) You Try Doing It With A Class of Forty! ELT Journal, 40 (2), 100-106. Sunderland (1992) Gender in the EFL Classroom, ELT Journal 46 (1), 81-91. Thompson (1997) Training Teachers to Ask Questions, ELT Journal 51 (2), 99-105.

75 This Material is Copyright © Katherine MacKay 2010

Can the use of Disney cartoon characters increase oral recall of vocabulary for 8-9 year olds studying English as a foreign language in Japan?

Katherine MacKay

INTRODUCTION The goal of this Action Research was to research the impact of using children‟s favourite Disney cartoon characters as a tool for vocabulary recall in foreign language development with 8-9 year olds in Japan. The assignment firstly defines vocabulary recall in the context of the AR. It then provides a rationale for the AR focus, specifically related to the context and considers the pedagogy behind vocabulary learning and recall strategies. Next, research methods and techniques of „experiment‟ and „control‟ groups, video observation and questionnaires are described and rationalized, before turning to the ethical issues and specific problems encountered during the AR. Quantitative test results are presented, followed by a triangulated and in depth analysis, which includes both quantitative and qualitative data. Finally, the reliability and validity in research methods used are considered and the AR focus evaluated. The Action Research focuses on vocabulary recall. Vocabulary refers to „content‟ words. Cameron suggests that for young learners this type of word can be taught „more directly‟ as it carries „a lexical meaning‟ and „can be linked as sets of related ideas in various ways‟ for example through topics, creating „mentally linked schemas or networks of meaning.‟(Cameron, 2001:82-3) Recall can be identified „in certain memory task, (when) subjects are asked to recall (remember) items that were previously presented.‟ It can also be subdivided as „free‟ recall where no hints are given and „cued‟ recall when some hints are given. (Richards & Schmidt, 2002:446) In this AR, recall is defined to mean whenever the young learner produces the vocabulary independently, that is without having heard it from either the teacher or a peer. Recall can be prompted by aid of a card, action or sound. Vocabulary is measured as a single word or a two-word collocation of the target vocabulary. FOCUS AND RATIONALE The AR focus was identified, explored and narrowed over a year long process from July 2005 to July 2006. Two 3-week cycles with „control‟ and „experiment‟ groups ran in place of the student‟s regular lessons, during the summer months of May, June and July in 2006. Two small groups of a similar age were chosen in an attempt to control, to some degree, research conditions. Both groups had the English classes after school, and at the beginning of the week. The „control‟ group consisted of 2 boys and 2 girls, the „experiment‟ group consisted of 3 girls. The control group had been learning English for 40 minutes every fortnight for 18 months, whilst the experiment group had been attending weekly 60-minute lessons for 9 months. The control group were learning in an


„informal‟ home environment, where as the experiment group students were enrolled in lessons at a „formal‟ privately owned local language school. In both cases, the teachers were native speakers of English with over 10 years of teaching English as a foreign language to Japanese students, in Japan. The control group teacher currently studies a PhD in linguistics studies with an interest in ethnography. The experiment group teacher holds a CELTA [Certificate of English Language Teaching for Adults] and runs a local grass-roots teachers group. The differences in characteristics of each group; the length of language learning, the gender ratio, the learning environment and teacher profile, it may be suggested, presented „uncontrollable‟ variables to the AR.

The AR aim was to adapt materials from „English Land‟ a coursebook series for elementary students in Asia featuring children‟s popular Disney characters and scenes. The role of popular cartoons for child development within Japanese culture appear to be encouraged for providing an important shared social knowledge and experience, „… if I prevent my son from watching them, I am sure he will be left out, or treated badly by friends.‟ (Kodaira, 1990: 135) The AR can be seen to consider whether the familiarity of Disney could provide lessons that evoke personal and shared background knowledge for Japanese young learners and impress upon them a memorable learning experience and recall strategies for a language which, due to limited exposure or need, may be challenging to remember. Vocabulary Recall Nagy & Herman‟s Vocabulary Learning Hypothesis states that most vocabulary is learned gradually through repeated exposure to new and known words in various contexts. They estimate that it may take up to 10-12 encounters before a word is acquired. (Nagy & Herman (1985) in Shaffer, 2005:21) Nation suggests that, in a textbook unit, a new word needs to be met at least five or six times before it has a chance of being learnt. (Nation (1990) in Cameron, 2001:84) Warring suggests it is as broad as 8-20 encounters. (Warring, 2004: 2) A specific concern for young learners appears to be, what it means „to know a word‟ in terms of its form, meaning and use. (Cameron, 2001:78) In this AR, the two-word collocations combine the „content‟ noun with an adjective. The adjectives also have a noun form and could therefore be considered an added challenge to recall. A variety of activities were selected to reinforce meaning and provide different ways to recall. RESEARCH METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

In the first cycle the experimental group used Disney only sections of an English Land, level 2 unit featuring the topic of „My Body‟. The control group worked with a different level 2 unit of „My Toys‟ in a non-Disney context.


The main methods used for data collection and to provide a triangulation of sources, were video observation and a range of questionnaires for both students and teachers. „Where measurement is sought then a quantitative approach is required; where rich and personal data are sought, then a word-based qualitative approach might be more useful.‟ (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000:248) The quantitative data was provided through a baseline test, 2 recall tests, and activity recall counts from the video data. For qualitative data, there were informal meetings, phone-calls, and emails with the teachers, as well as a more structured but open questioned reflective questionnaire. Students were given picture-based questionnaires with a 5-point „ranking‟ system to indicate activity preferences. Both teachers and students were given a final in depth questionnaire after completion of both cycles. Ethical issues and/or specific challenges As a researcher venturing on a „collaborative‟ approach to AR, it was necessary to find teachers willingly to invest time and energy. The teachers came from the private sphere and specific challenges were subsequently encountered. Parental consent was necessary and presented issues about learning potential and disruption to study patterns as well as a concern for any side-effects on their child from being in an experiment. Further, as an after-school club activity, commitments to school events and other clubs can be seen to have affected non-attendance, re-scheduling and cancellations of lessons. The scale and impact of an AR it appears cannot be fathomed until immersed. For collaborative ventures, an awareness of the limitations on the professional (and personal) time of voluntary participants with no vested interest, their self-created teaching programmes and business concerns, should be emphasized.

DATA PRESENTATION

In consultation with the teachers, twenty-one words were set as an achievable target for each 3-week cycle.

Baseline and Recall Tests

It should be noted that in the non-Disney cycle, there are at least 4 „loan‟ words, that is, words that have been incorporated into the Japanese language: yo-yo, kite, ball, and robot. In the Disney cycle, there were none. Further, the experiment group had studied a „My Toy‟s‟ lesson of English Land level 1, 6 months prior to the AR and perhaps already had the non-Disney topic network created in their minds. In addition, one member of this group was unable to take the second recall test in cycle 2 due to school holidays.


Disney Baseline & Recall Test Results

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BL RT1 RT2

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Non Disney Baseline & Recall Test Results

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BL RT 1 RT 2

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BS 2

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The baseline results, given at the outset, revealed that on average students already knew 1/4 of the target words. The first recall test was carried out at the end of the third lesson and the second recall test, 2 weeks after the completion of each cycle. Results show significant differences. In the Disney test, the control group increases their recall, whilst in the experimental group, the level of recall drops. In the non-Disney tests, the first recall test results are closer between students but the control group scores decrease in the second test.

Summative vocabulary recall The total counts in the recall test are shown below as „summative‟ test results for each student. Overall these indicate the majority of students scored higher in the second round of recall tests for the Disney cycle.

KEY

21 TV: Target Vocabulary BL: Baseline

RT 1: Recall Test 1

RT 2: Recall Test 2 BS: Boy Student

GS: Girl Student

BS1-2: Control Group students GS1-2: Control Group students

GS3-5: Experimental Group students


Summative Vocabulary Recall

15

17

19

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Students

Sco

res

Disney RT1 Disney RT2 Non-Disney RT1 Non-Disney RT2

Formative vocabulary recall by student

A closer study of student activity through video observation provides opportunity to measure the formative recall of vocabulary during each lesson, in both cycles. This is formatted below as recall counts in the Disney and non-Disney cycles and uses „mean‟ scores to provide individual results. These show six out of the seven students recall more during the Disney lessons.

Formative Vocabulary Recall

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Students

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an

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ore

Disney non-Disney

Formative vocabulary recall by group

KEY

1: BS1 Boy Student 1

2: BS2 Boy Student 2

3: GS1 Girl Student 1






To analyze the formative recall through a „mean‟ score by group shows that the control group nearly double in the amount of words recalled during the Disney cycle, whilst the experiment group level reduces slightly.

Formative Vocabulary Recall

8.46

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9.78

10.8

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20

non-Disney Disney

Cycles

Mean

sco

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CG EB

The differences in collating data through both summative and formative recall provide perhaps a more complete yet complex picture, which will be discussed, analysed and evaluated in more detail below. DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION Vocabulary recall appears to involve more than purely memorising a list of words. The type of activities planned for these lessons sort to provide a balance between „context‟ activities to reinforce meaning, for example, DVD, Stories, Aladdin Says, Make a Shape craft activity, and „Make a Face‟ collocation activity. Alongside these were opportunities for the students to foster their own recall strategies by either, choosing which words they wanted to recall, seen in Bingo, Ball Toss and Line Dictation, as well as incorporating activities that gave an unpredictability to recall, seen in Bingo, Snap, and Mime and Touch. Further, the teachers were requested by the researcher to allow student to „play teacher‟ as often as possible, if they deemed appropriate, thereby increasing the opportunity for oral participation by the students. Observer statistics Video Observation The researcher considered recall analysis of individual activities for each group across the cycles and between groups.


Comparative analysis between cycles & groups

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Activity

TV

Recall C1CG

C1EG

C2CG

C2EG

These findings highlight discrepancies in the number of activities and recall counts conducted across the cycles and groups. Some activities appear to lend themselves more to recall opportunities than others but this cannot be measured consistently. It is perhaps interesting to note that the final activity in C1 EG [pink] was a group game of Snap. The researcher observed across both cycles, that the students were able to recall the most number of words during this activity. However, as there doesn‟t appear to be a correlation of activities and recall, it could be suggested that, whilst teachers were given the same lesson plans, teachers and students themselves influence activities-in-action and this produces different results. Observer DVD viewing The popularity of the DVD and the opportunity for students to recall in context provided an option to monitor viewing patterns and analyze whether the DVD medium was significant in encouraging independent interactive recall. The Disney DVD appears to engage student‟s attention. For the control group, independent interaction and post viewing comprehension questions demonstrate relatively high levels of recall. For the experimental group, students were engaged but offered no verbal interaction and appeared confused by the comprehension questions. This visual and independent medium enabled a focus on student interaction without the direct aid of teacher and highlighted significant differences amongst students within the groups. Observer Transcripts To balance the data and provide further illumination on the activities-in-action and student interaction, two activities from the Disney cycle, lesson 3 were transcribed.

KEY

Cycle 1 Control Group [non

Disney]

Cycle 1 Experiment Group

[Disney]

Cycle 2 Control Group [Disney]

Cycle 2 Experiment Group [non

Disney]


The activities chosen feature different types of activities; 1) Experimental two-word collocation and 2) Formulaic phrases. The transcripts show that, in general, the control group students seem more comfortable with recalling words in both activities. Both groups recall words easily within the formulaic phrases of „Aladdin Says‟, but in the more abstract „experimental‟ collocation activity the experimental group students show limited interaction. The transcripts provide insight on the nature of teaching and learning within the activities and perhaps signal student‟s personalities and meta-cognitive abilities, group relationships and dynamics as well as teaching styles impacting activities-in-action and subsequent vocabulary recall. Student Questionnaires The purpose of the questionnaires was two-fold. Firstly, the researcher hoped that the students could use this as an opportunity to reflect on the lesson activities and considered which activities helped them to recall best. Secondly, the researchers aim was to compare these with the recall data collated from video observation and analyse if there was a correlation between the use of a Disney context, the enjoyment of an activity and recall levels. Students were asked to rank their favourite activities from 1st to 5th. Activities were classified by the type of materials that were involved and points were awarded 5-1 from 1st to 5th. The DVD appears to score highest overall, followed by the cards in the Disney Cycle compared to the preference for the activity book in the non-Disney cycle.

Group ranking of materials

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CG D EG D CG ND EG ND

Student Book Activity Book Cards Audio DVD

The experimental group [GS3-5] can be seen to favour the card activities irrespective of cycle context. For all students, the highest performance levels during the Disney cycle appear in the card activities, whilst in the non-Disney cycle it is the ball toss activity which scores the highest recall counts. It could be suggested that there was a visual stimulus provided by the Disney illustrations not found in the cards featuring regular illustrations. .

Disney Disney Non-Disney Non-Disney


At the end of the cycle the control group completed an additional questionnaire of the two cycles. The students were asked to consider which cycle context, topic, activity or grouping helped them recall best. The control group results show a majority in favour for a Disney context, but a split in terms of the topic. Choices of favourite activities and groupings reveal that the students were aware of their individual recall preferences. Teachers The teachers were „informally‟ asked to express their thoughts on recall after each lesson and at the end of both cycles a questionnaire was provided to structure reflection and comparison of the cycles. The control group teacher appears to favour the use of Disney illustrations, whilst the experimental group teacher expressed other concerns about the clarity of materials in the Disney cycle and the difference of activity types from those used in his regular lessons.

EVALUATION OF THE AR To evaluate whether the teachers or students themselves felt that Disney could assist recall, questionnaires were used to gauge opinion. In terms of the „validity‟ of questionnaire data and whether it presents a variable, Low suggests, „… validity is not an inherent feature of [questionnaire] data.‟ (Low, 1997:87) Specifically, with the students, they may have not fully understood the questionnaires and in addition activity assessment may have been a new concept. Further, teacher‟s responses may reflect their beliefs of teaching/learning in general. Brewster, Ellis and Girard, in a word association study suggest, that children may make different choices in terms of important words for them to know. (Brewster, Ellis and Girard, 2002:85) In this AR both the summative recall test results and the formative recall counts suggest that the use of Disney characters and scenes does appear to increase vocabulary recall and perhaps significantly over a longer period. In addition, it could be suggested that the research shows how the Disney illustrations evoke a motivation for activities not replicated by the non-Disney illustrations. It might be

Favourite Performance Favourite Performance

BS1 DVD Card Game DVD Student Book

BS2 DVD Card Game / Realia Card games

Ball Toss / DVD

GS1 Card games Audio Activity Book Ball Toss

GS2 DVD DVD Student Book Ball Toss

GS3 Card games Card game Card games Ball Toss

GS4 Card games Ball Toss /Realia Card games

Ball Toss / Student Book

GS4 Card games Card game / Audio Card games Ball Toss


useful to note that the choice of Disney themes may vary in appeal and that the topic could also be an age- appropriate issue. The AR reveals that learning English for young learners is complex. In the classroom there are many factors to consider, learner autonomy in context, topic, activity & material preference, as well as personalities, group dynamics, language learning experience, environment and teaching styles are all seemingly influential on the recall of English vocabulary.

CONCLUSION

The goal of this Action Research was to research the impact of using children‟s favourite Disney cartoon characters as a tool for vocabulary recall in foreign language development amongst 8-9 year old boys and girls in Japan. The assignment defined vocabulary recall and presented a rationale for the AR focus, specifically related to the context. Background reading on recall strategies and what it means to know a word were presented, and adapted to the AR and Japan context. A description and rationale of the research methods of video observations and questionnaires in the AR were considered, before highlighting the AR ethical issues and specific problems. Graphs and charts were used as a basis to present the quantitative formative and summative test data, followed by a more in depth and triangulated analysis and evaluation of the results. Finally, the reliability and validity of the research methods used was considered and the AR focus evaluated. REFERENCES Brewster, J., Ellis, G., Girard, D. The Primary English Teacher‟s Guide, 2002, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, U.K. Cameron, L. Teaching English to Young Learners (2001) Cambridge, U.K. Cohen, L, Manion, L, and Morrison, K Research methods in education, fifth edition. (2000) London: Routledge. Kodaira, S. I. The Development of Programmes for Young Children in Japan, Journal of Educational Television, Vol. 6. No 3, 1990 (Country not specified) Low, G. Research, Validating research questionnaires: The value of common sense, Sia, Selections, (1997) Whistable, IATEFL Richards, J. & Schmidt, R. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 3rd ed. 2002. Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, U.K. Shaffer, J.D. Choosing narrow reading texts for incidental vocabulary acquisition (2005) in The Language Teacher, Vol. 29, No. 7, The Japan Association of Language Teaching, Japan.


Helping children to recognise words and decode texts.

Kerry Powell

INTRODUCTION The school where the action research was conducted is a private bilingual school in Spain where the majority of pupils are native Spanish speakers. The school was in the process of implementing the National Curriculum of England and Wales and the majority of pupils were learning the curriculum through their second language. Some parts of the curriculum are delivered in Spanish but the children learn to read in Spanish and English simultaneously. Each year group was made up of five classes with a maximum of twenty-six pupils per class, the majority coming from professional backgrounds. The class in which the research was conducted was a Year 2 class of boys and girls aged between six and seven. All activities were differentiated within the class. Reading formed part of the curriculum, and was generally included in the „Literacy Hour‟. In general, outside of the reading scheme and story time, language tended to be based on the child's own experiences first talking about it, and then writing up the account. This was done either through copying the sentence scribed by the teacher, or by finding the words and arranging them in order. Different teachers generally seem to have preferred ways of working with this in the classroom.

RATIONALE The research area was chosen as a direct response to the identified needs of children who were experiencing difficulty in learning to read in their second language. In particular, the study was to focus on decoding texts at starter level in the school reading scheme. The question that was to be investigated was to see if the use of focused input activities might aid word recognition and therefore help the children to decode texts. The specific language items that were used came from the reader from which the children were reading. Reading and the reading scheme used in the present context Reading has been described as „…the process of getting meaning from print. It is not a passive, receptive activity, but requires the reader to be active and thinking.‟ (Gibbons 1001:70) However, when it comes to how to approach the teaching of reading in a second language context, there has been difference of opinion. One approach, a bottom-up approach, focuses on phonics and isolated sight words. An alternative approach is a „top-down‟ approach, in which the reader is invited to bring their own knowledge and understanding to the texts in order to understand them. At the time of the research, simultaneous use of both top-down and bottom-up approaches was more commonly accepted; as Goodman suggests, „…reading is an interactive process involving a transaction between the text and the reader.‟

86 This Material is Copyright © Kerry Powell 2010

(Goodman in Gibbons 1991:71) For this process to occur, when considering a fluent reader, they might make use of the semantic system, the syntactic system and the graph phonic system. In the semantic system the reader might „…draw on…links with previous knowledge [which] plays an important part in the process of new information‟ (Gibbons 1991:72). The syntactic system refers to the language system itself and is that which a fluent reader might use to determine whether a text makes sense or not. Finally, the graph phonic system, which is based on the letters, clusters of letters, punctuation and intonation. Reading in a second language classroom In the second language classroom, where the children are already reading in their first language, it has been suggested that „…the development of reading skills in a foreign language is greatly assisted if pupils have developed strong reading skills in their first language.‟ (Cummins in Brewster and Ellis, 2002:110) Skills, which might be transferred from one language to the other, may include an understanding that print carries meaning, an awareness of how language might be used to express something and the knowledge that the individual reader has from their own backgrounds that will aid interpretation of the text. (Adapted from Brewster and Ellis 2002:110). It has also been suggested that „…a child who learns to read in Spanish at home or in school, does not have to start fro the beginning when learning to read in English…‟ (Lanauze and Snow in Baker 1996:323) However, „…if a text contains unknown words, then either the meanings of these need to be explained in advance, or the meanings must be completely obvious from the rest of the text.‟ (Cameron 2001:137) If this is an important factor in the reading process, then it may raise the question of children learning to read in the second language before such a linguistic level has been achieved. The reading scheme

The reading scheme that was used in the study was the Oxford Reading Tree. This scheme is designed for native speakers of English learning to read in their first language. It is made up of core books and big books and accompanied by sets of individual readers, designed to reinforce words that have been introduced through the core books. The scheme is not specifically phonetic and seems to demand a certain degree of sight vocabulary and a level of understanding of the English language. Furthermore, the timetable allowed very little time to listen to the children reading, even though it has been considered „…very important that children regularly read aloud individually to their teacher [as] it is only by listening carefully to how children are making sense of written words that we can understand their progress in learning.‟ (Cameron 2001:142). The students in the project

The children in the project were chosen because they appeared to be having the most difficulty with decoding the texts in class. It was thought that if the support activities worked for these children, they could be adapted for reading support at all levels.


The children were still in the early stages of learning English. This did not appear to be sufficient to understand the full meaning of the texts in the reading scheme. Moreover, at the time of the research, there was very little provision for pre-teaching or exposure to the words in the texts beforehand. As a result, children seemed to have had very limited access to the type of text-decoding skills that they might have had when reading in their first language. The use of the core big books was one way that teachers dealt with this.

Production required For the research, words were taken from the level of the reader that the child was reading from (see example in Appendix 1). The words included ones that the child knew, ones that he or she almost knew and those that he or she was having difficulty with (see example in Appendix 2). The aim was for the child to be able to recognise and say the focus words correctly by the end of the project, both in isolation and in the context of the reader. Learning vocabulary involved The words selected varied between the learners, depending on the level of reader and individual difficulties that they had encountered. The words were selected and changed by the learners. METHODOLOGY The Action Research took place over a period of seven weeks from mid-April to mid-June 2004. First period - initial analysis During the first two weeks of the research the selected group of learners were assessed on their ability to recognise words from the reading scheme. An initial analysis was made of each child's reading ability in the form of a running record (see examples in Appendices 3 and 4). These words then formed the basis of the input activities. A second list of words was going to be given to the children, taken from the high frequency word list for a Year 2 child in the National Curriculum. However, it was decided that this would be too much input for the children to focus on, and so it was not used. Second period - Input activities The second part of the research took place over a three-week period. During this time, the activities focused on the words causing difficulty in the initial analysis. These activities were conducted for fifteen minutes everyday plus five-minute periods with the language support teacher three times a week. The activities used included a 'working-bingo', in which words on the card were changed once recognised (see Appendix 5). These were determined by the children and included words that they did not know but wanted to know, words that were known already, and words that were still in process of being known.


The second activity was based on the game of 'Snap'. These words were the same as the Bingo game, and were changed once words were consistently recognised. The third activity required recognition and production through the „disappearing word‟ game (see Appendix 6). Third period - data collection and analysis of results The third and final part of the research took place over a two-week period. During this phase, the children were given another running record on the book they were reading at the time. Ethical Considerations As this research area was very much part of the normal day to day class programme, it was decided not to inform parents about the project. However, to respect confidentiality, students and teachers remained anonymous. DATA COLLECTION With regard to triangulation, the different sources used included: a running record at the beginning, middle and end of research, tick lists, and interviews with students and teachers. Field notes of general observations were also used in order to try and '...provide evidence of unintended as well as intended effects.' (Elliot 1992:72). The field notes were considered important to note down observations that occurred during the sessions that could not be gleaned from the running record or tick lists. PRESENTATION OF DATA Running record findings: observations and field notes

The initial running record showed the words that were not recognised. These ranged between 39% of the total text to 8%. Of these words some were read completely incorrectly, some were mispronounced, some were read as singular nouns instead of plurals, some omitted the possessive 's', and some regular past tense verbs were read as present tense forms. Field notes In most cases, when the children were not sure of a word, they tended to ask for input from the teacher. This was usually given. The children seemed comfortable with the running record and were aware of its purpose. Input activity findings: observations and field notes In all of the input activities the children were actively involved all the time. They seemed to respond particularly well to choosing their own words and compared each other's lists. In the initial input sessions, there was a large degree of teacher input and observation, but this gradually became more student-centred.


An interesting observation was the spontaneous involvement of the more able readers in the class in wanting to help their classmates. Initially they helped with the games, but then went on to listen to the research group reading. Analysis and discussion of the input stage The spontaneous involvement of the other children in the class resulted in the research group adopting them as mentors. Holt made this observation: children seem 'to learn so well from children a little older than the other child maybe, [it is] not that the other child understands the language of the younger child and can speak in his terms, but that he is a more helpful competence model because he is more within reach.' (Holt 1970:85)

Final running record report findings: observations and field notes

The final running record of the children, except for in the case of one child, showed that more words were read accurately than in the initial record, and that very few showed letter recognition errors. (See Fig. 1) The errors that still occurred tended to be pronunciation or omission of the final 'ed', and the use of singular for plural forms of nouns. Table to show the percentage of words recognised correctly by the students on initial and final running records

Student Initial running record

Final running record

% difference between the two

S1 89% 90% 1% more

S2 85% 89% 4% more

S3 61% 54% 7% less

S4 88% 89% 1% more

S5 92% 95% 3% more

S6 86% 92% 6% more

(Fig. 1) Field notes on final running record The children appeared to show more confidence when tackling the text, including some use of expression. Words that were misread on the first attempt were generally read correctly on the second or further attempt. The errors made suggested that the children were drawing on their level of spoken English, which was still very much in its early stages. DATA ANALYSIS Overall, the results tended to suggest that after the input, errors still occurred. However, with the exception of S3, where more complex learning difficulties existed, the error types appeared to be more specific. Compared to the initial running record, in the final running record, errors tended to be limited to mispronunciations of a phonetic nature, reading a regular past tense form as an infinitive, and reading plurals as singulars.


With regards to the errors discussed above, Gibbons has suggested that 'The most meaningful words for children are likely to be those they use in their own spoken and written language.' (Gibbons 1991:79) Smith would seem to agree with this when he talks about '...literacy acquisition, like oral acquisition, is also a profoundly social phenomenon. Children make sense of print in the environment because they encounter it as an integral part of interesting and important life activities in which they are engaged with others, such as having a hamburger or purchasing food.' (Smith in Genesee 1994:137) Other error types: Position of word in sentence Errors also seem to have been made depending on the position of a word in a text, for example, when it occurred at the end of the sentence '...everyone said'. When it occurred before a person's name, the word was correctly identified '...said Mum.' Gibbons noted that '...[If children can't read a word as a sight word]...They are almost always able to read the word in the context of the sentence and so nearly always experience success. They will eventually be able to read the word as a sight word, but until they are able to do so, they continue to use the prompt provided by the context...' (Gibbons 1991:78) Similarly, Ellis and Girard suggest that '...when introducing vocabulary, it should ideally be presented in a context, which is familiar to the child. Visual support is very important to help convey meaning and to help pupils memorise new words...Research has shown that words are often remembered in groups which have something in common. (Ellis and Girard 1992:89) INTERPRETATION OF DATA As a result of the input, more words were recognised and the children were reading with more confidence. However, there were many errors of the same nature, which continued to be misread both at the beginning and at the end of the research. When reading in Spanish, the children had no difficulties with regard to both the technical skill of reading, nor the meaning (except S3). However, it was acknowledged that Spanish is a phonetic language, and as it was also many of the students‟ first language, this may have helped. This suggests that it may be more relevant to focus on the mismatch that appears to exist between linguistic level and literacy level rather than specific input activities and review how reading is introduced in the school. Problems that were encountered The initial focus looked at learning to read in a second language before the first language. Due to a change of school, where learning to read in English was started simultaneously with learning to read in the fist language, Spanish, meant that the context and variables of the research needed to be revised. Curriculum pressures


Curriculum pressures also made it very difficult to arrange time to work with the children for the research. Other factors affecting the research

Staff and management relations also affected the teachers‟ willingness to conduct any activities above and beyond their timetable obligations. CONCLUSION This action research project was conducted as a result of a concern over the teaching of a reading scheme that was designed for native speakers with second language children. It set out to see if the use of focused input activities on the specific language items that came up in the readers might aid word recognition and therefore help the children decode the texts. The first part of the project aimed to assess the children's reading level before any input was given. This was then analysed to see the type of error that seemed to be occurring. This was followed by an input period. During this part, the children selected words that they wanted to focus on, including some words that were already known, and played the input games using these words. Field notes were made during this period. The final stage of the project was a further assessment of the children's reading through a running record of words said correctly and these results were then compared with the original test scores. From the findings, it seemed that the input activities helped the children in that they appeared to enjoy doing them. Moreover, their enthusiasm and confidence in reading increased: they were starting to read louder, with less hesitation and with more expression. However, it was also noted that many of the errors made in the final running record were very similar to those found in the initial record. This suggests that the activities that were designed for the input might not have been as helpful as they could have been. However, the study does appear to highlight that the errors made seemed to reflect of the level of oral linguistic competence of the children. Possible action As a result of this research, one recommendation might be to review how and when reading is taught in the school, and to determine whether or not a certain level of linguistic competence should be achieved before the reading scheme is used. A further recommendation might be that more use is made of the big books for specific language work, before children start to use the readers. REFERENCES Baker, C. (1996) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Cameron, L. (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


Donaldson, M. (1987) Children's Minds. London: Fontana Ellis, G. & Girard, D. (1992) The Primary English Teacher's Guide. London: Penguin Ellis, G. & Gerard, D. (2002) The Primary English Teacher‟s Guide. London: Penguin Fiderer, A. (1995) Practical Assessments for Literature-Based Reading Classrooms. New York: Scholastic Professional Books Fiderer, A. (1998) 35 Rubrics and Checklists to Assess Reading and Writing. New York: Scholastic Professional Books Genesee, F. (1994) Educating Second Language Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Gibbons, P. (1991) Learning to learn in a second language. Oxford: Heinemann Gregory, E. (1996) Making Sense of a New World. London: Paul Chapman Holt, J. (1970) How Children Learn. London: Pelican Wray, D. & Medwell, J. (1994) Teaching Primary English. The state of the art. London: Routledge.

Appendix 1 Key words in the Oxford Reading Tree scheme used in the focus activities Level 1

Biff Floppy The Chip Mum

And Kipper Dad A

Level 2

Cross everyone Got Had he

In it Made Pulled pushed

Put said They To wanted

Was went

Level 3

Am at Barked Children climbed

couldn't down Gave Get he

I jumped Looked On played

Tree up What Wilf

Wilma Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday

Wednesday Thursday Friday


(The individual readers also had other words not included in the key

word list, above, but which do appear in the input activities)

Appendix 2 Summary of word type that children experienced difficulty in recognising in initial and final running record

Total number of occurrences – all students

Type of error Initial Final Difference

Present tense form of verb for past tense form

11

16

+5

First part of word or first letter recognised only

22

12

-10

Singular form of noun for plural

6

9

+3

Completely misread

6

7

+1

Pronunciation

4

2

-2

Not attempted

٭(28+) 12

14

+2 (-26)

words not attempted include S6, who was diagnosed as having visual problems - ٭( )

Appendix 3 Oxford Reading Tree Running Record Sheet (blank copy) Level 2 Text A: Floppy the hero A fire engine went by. There was a fire. Everyone went to see. 'Get back,' said a fireman. A barn was on fire. A little dog ran to the fire. She barked and barked. Floppy ran to the barn. He jumped in the window. 'Get Floppy,' said Chip. The fireman pushed the door down. Floppy ran out. He had some puppies. Everyone looked at Floppy. 'What a good dog!' everyone said. What a hero! Text B: Kipper's birthday It was Kipper's birthday. Kipper wanted a party. Everyone wanted to come. Biff put up balloons. Mum made a cake. Dad took a sandwich. 'Stop it,' said Mum. Everyone came to the party. Dad wanted to play a game. But Kipper put the television on. 'Oh no!' said Mum. 'What a mess!' The children played with the bubbles. ' What a good party!' everyone said. Text C: Kipper's laces Kipper wanted new shoes. He couldn't tie his laces. Dad helped him. Kipper was at school. The class had P.E. Kipper couldn't tie his laces. Miss Green helped him. Kipper was upset. He told Dad. Dad made a block. Kipper tried...and tried... and tried. 'Hooray!' said Kipper. Kipper was a t school. He did up his laces. 'Oh no!' said Kipper.


Text D: Spots Kipper had spots. Biff and Chip had spots, too. The doctor came. 'Stay in bed,' she said. Mum had spots. 'Stay in bed, too,' said the doctor. Dad looked after everyone. He put the washing out. He went shopping. 'What a job!' said Dad. Everyone got better. 'Oh no!' said Mum. Dad had spots. Text E: Biff's aeroplane Biff made an aeroplane. Mum helped her. The aeroplane looked good. Biff wanted to fly it. She went to the park. the aeroplane flew up. It went over the trees. It went over the houses. Biff looked for the aeroplane. Everyone helped. Biff looked and looked. She couldn't find it. She wanted to cry. She went upstairs. The aeroplane was on the bed.

Appendix 4 Examples from running record results

Student 1 (S1)

Text A Page number

Word in text Miscue Comments

1 1 5 6 7 8 11 11

fire by barn barn barked barn pushed down

fight back bar bar bark bar pulls out

Past tense recognition x 2

Initial part of word/letter recognised x 5

Misread completely x1

S1

Text E Page number

Word in text

Miscue

Comments

4 6 8 10 13 15

Fly Flew Houses Helped Cry was

- - house help - went

past tense x1

not attempted x3

word misread x1

singular/plural x1

Student 4 (S4)

Text A Page number


1 1 3 7 9 11 13 16 17

Engine By Everyone Barked Jumped Down Puppies Everyone hero

Ingin Bee Every Bark Jump Pon Poopies Every He

past tense x2

initial part/letter x3

pronunciation x3

misread x1

S4


Text E Page number


1 2 6 6 8 12 12

An helped flew up houses couldn't find

A help fly ay house cown -nd

past tense x2

initial part/letter x2

singular/plural x1

end part x1

misread x1

Appendix 5 Copy of the set of Bingo cards selected by Teacher and Student 3 Initial card (S3)

went

Said

By

Was

the

ran

what

Out

Stop

play

wanted

Put

Helped

And

couldn't

2nd card

went

Said

By

Was

the

ran

what

Out

*they

*made

wanted

*everyone

Helped

And

couldn't

3rd card

went

Said

By

Was

*looked

ran

*jumped

Out

They

made

wanted

everyone

*pushed

And

couldn't

4th card

went

**what

By

Was

played

ran

jumped

*gave

They

made

**stop

everyone

Pushed

And

*children


5

th card

was

*got

by

Went

looked

ran

wanted

gave

Pushed

play

what

put

*climbed

Said

children

6

th card

was

got

**out

Went

looked

ran

**jumped

gave

Pushed

*down

*am

put

climbed

Said

couldn't

Final Bingo card – all words (S3)

jumped

to

At

Couldn’t

said

he

pushed

wanted

a

went

and

Up

got

barked

gave

looked

children

what

in

played

on

they

am

the

cross

was

had

made

Put

everyone

pulled

down

it


Appendix 6 Disappearing word game

Instructions

The teacher had used this game had with the children before, as a means of introducing new vocabulary; they were therefore familiar with the format it took. On those occasions pictures were used. In the present situation, the game has been used as a means for teaching word recognition. The words selected were the same as those chosen for the games of Bingo and Snap. One of the words would be selected and put down in front of the child. The teacher would say the word and the child would repeat.

went

A second word would be put down. The teacher would say this word and again the child would repeat. She would then indicate the first word for the child to say again on his/her own. If they could not recall the word, the teacher said it again and they had another opportunity to repeat.

went

Stop

A third card would be put as before and a further word said. Each time, the teacher would go back over the previous words although not necessarily in the same order. Once all the words in the initial game had been put down the teacher checked once again that all could be recognised. Then, she pointed to one of the cards and asked the child what it was. If it was correctly said, the card was turned over and the child was asked to say what word had been turned round. If it was said correctly, a second card was indicated, not necessarily the card next to the first, and the child was asked to say what it was. Again, if this was recognised, the card was turned over and he/she was asked to say what the word was on the other side.

The teacher then indicated the previous word, and the child recalled the word. A third card was then indicated, and the game continued as with the first and second card. As more cards were turned over, the teacher would point to the turned-over words in random order, and the child had to remember the word from its position on the table.


Once all cards had been turned over, the teacher asked the child to find a word and they tried to remember where it was and turn it over. He/she continued to do this until all the cards were correctly found.

went

stop

by

was

the

ran

what

out

said

wanted

put

helped

and

couldn't

play


The effect of hand-raising on the amount of times English is used in the classroom

Marilyn Roberts INTRODUCTION

Would requiring students to raise their hands before speaking affect the number of times they use English in class?

The researcher taught a class of 10-11 year old Korean students in Korea. There were nine boys and five girls. They were identified by a number preceded by a letter, „B‟ for a boy and „G‟ for a girl („B1‟,„B2‟,„G1‟,„G2‟,etc). The students were in the early stages of learning English and had a knowledge of perhaps 50-100 English words. The teacher had tried to encourage them to use their small English vocabulary by allowing them to call out answers to her questions unrestrained. Some of the students appeared to be more confident and more vocal than others and seemed to dominate the amount of language that was used in the classroom. The researcher felt this may have been disadvantaging and overwhelming the quieter or less confident students and wished to study if this was, in fact, the case. Because the students had an extremely limited vocabulary, utterances such as „yes/no‟, „teacher‟, „me/my‟ were considered by the researcher as „speaking‟ or „using English‟ in the classroom. Harris‟s (in van Lier 1988:100) definition of an utterance as a „stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person‟ was adopted for this particular project. METHODOLOGY

The researcher felt the best way to ensure reliability and validity of her research was to adopt a triangulation approach and so she chose to use video recordings, independent observation and student questionnaires. All three forms of data provided quantitative material, which is measurable and tends to be „objective‟ (Wallace 1998:38), as well as qualitative material, which tends to be more „subjective‟ because it is „not amenable to being counted or measured in an objective way‟ (Wallace 1998:38). Analysed data was considered from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Video recordings The researcher videoed the class in three cycles over the course of two months. The first two cycles consisted of three days of videoing, the last cycle two days of videoing. Data gathered from these eight video recordings was marked up on a „spatial observation schedule‟ („SOS‟) (Wallace 2001:116). An account of the video recordings is set out in the narrative section below. Independent observer An independent observer was asked to observe three classes in all, one in each of the three cycles. He observed these classes on November 9, 24 and December 6, 2005 and filled in SOS‟s almost identical to those used by the researcher on each of these occasions. The researcher‟s and observer‟s data was later compared.

100 This Material is Copyright © Marilyn Roberts 2010

Student questionnaires The students were asked to fill in four questionnaires, one each on November 9 and 24, December 8, 2005 and February 16, 2006. The November questionnaires asked the students to check a box corresponding to how many times they thought they had spoken English in class that day. The December 8 questionnaire asked the students if they liked having to raise their hands before answering questions in class, and the fourth questionnaire (February 16) asked the same question, but also asked the students to give a reason for their answer. NARRATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE RESEARCH First cycle: Recordings made on November 7, 8 and 9, 2005:

The first cycle was undertaken to establish the baseline data and to determine if in fact some students were speaking English in class more often than others. The researcher‟s data gathered from these recordings is set out in Fig.1

Second cycle: Recordings made on November 21, 22 and 24, 2005

The teacher introduced a change into her teaching practice which required the students to raise their hands before they spoke English in class. Three video recordings were made, and the researcher completed an SOS form for each recording. On this form she marked the number of times students spoke English in class whether or not they had raised their hands. The researcher then completed a second set of SOS‟s for each of the videoed classes. On this second set, she isolated the times the students raised their hands and the amount of times they were called on by the teacher to speak following hand-raising (see Figs.2,3,4).

Fig.1

Amount of English spoken by students in class:

Comparison of researcher's baseline data recorded over 3

days November 7, 8 and 9, 2005

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Nu

mb

er

of tim

es E

ng

lish

sp

oke

n b

y s

tud

en

t

7-Nov

8-Nov

9-Nov


Fig. 4

November 24, 2005 - Second cycle, third video

recording - hand-raising data (sorted by student number)

Absent: B4

0

10

20

30

40

50

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Number of times handsraised

Number of timesrequested by teacherto answer question

This hand-raising data was then compared to the amount of times the students spoke English in class overall (whether they raised their hands or not). The results of these comparisons can be seen at Figs.5,6, and 7.

Fig. 2

November 21, 2005 - Second cycle, first video

recording: hand-raising data (sorted by student number)

Absent: B4

0

10

20

30

40

50

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Number of times hand

raised

Number of times

requested to answer

questions

Fig.3

November 22, 2005 - Second cycle, second video

recording: hand-raising data(sorted by student number)

Absent: B6, B7, G2, G5

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B8 B9 G1 G3 G4

Number of times handraised

Number of timesrequested by teacher toanswer question


Fig. 5

November 21, 2005 - second cycle, first video recording

Comparison of number of times English spoken overall with number of times

English spoken following handraising

Absent: B4

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Num

ber

of tim

es

English s

poken b

y

stu

dent

Number of times English

spoken overall

Number of times requested

to speak following

handraising

Fig. 6

November 22, 2005 - Second cycle, second video recording



Absent: B6, B7, G2, G5

0

10

20

30

40

50

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B8 B9 G1 G3 G4

Student number

Num

ber

of tim

es

English s

poken b

y

stu

dent


spoken overall

Number of times requested to

speak following handraising

Fig. 7

November 24, 2005 - Second cycle, third video recording



Absent: B4

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Num

ber

of tim

es

English s

poken b

y

stu

dent Number of times English

spoken overall

Number of times requested tospeak following handraising


Third cycle: Recordings made on December 5 and 6, 2005

The change that had been introduced was monitored two weeks later by video recordings on December 5 and 6, 2005. SOS‟s were completed as per the second cycle. English spoken following handraising during the December 5 and 6 recordings was isolated and can be seen at Figs.8 and 9.

For comparisons of English spoken overall on December 5 and 6 with English spoken while obeying the handraising rule, see Figs.10 and 11.

Fig.8

December 5, 2005 - Third cycle, first video recording

hand-raising data(sorted by student number)

Absent: B4

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Number of times hand raised

Number of times requestedto answer question

Fig. 9

December 6, 2005 - Third cycle, second video recording:

hand-raising data(sorted by student number)

Absent: G2, G4, G5

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G3

Number of times handsraised

Number of times requested toanswer questions


Selective data chosen for evaluation

Student absences Throughout the research period, students were occasionally absent from class. The researcher could not be sure what effect the absence of those students had on the amount of English spoken by those who did attend class on those days. It is for this reason that she chose to analyse only the portion of the data recorded where the same students were present. Therefore, data from the November 7 recording was used as a baseline („the baseline data‟), and data from the November 21, 24 and December 5 recordings was used for comparative purposes. The researcher thereby hoped to increase the validity of her research and the reliability of her data.

Teacher inconsistent with handraising rule Although this research project was based on the premise that the teacher would introduce a change by way of enforcing hand-raising before the students could speak in class, „old habits die hard‟ and she was not always consistent with this rule. Although handraising was insisted upon for a large percentage of the

Fig. 11

December 6, 2005 - Third cycle, second video recording

Comparison of number of times English spoken overall compared to number of

times English spoken following handraising Absent: G2, G4, G5

0

10

20

30

40

50

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G3

Student number

Nu

mber

of tim

es E

nglis

h

spoken b

y s

tude

nt


spoken overall

Number of times

requested to speak

following handraising

Fig. 10

December 5, 2005 - Third cycle, first video recording Comparison of number of times English spoken overall compared to number of

times English spoken following handraising

Absent: B4

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Nu

mber

of tim

es E

nglis

h

spoken

by s

tudent


spoken overall

Number of times requested

to speak following

handraising


videoed sessions following introduction of the change, occasionally the teacher would lapse back into allowing students to respond to questions in a general and unrestrained manner.

It is for this reason that the researcher completed a second spatial observation chart, as outlined in the narrative section above, for six of the video recordings made from November 21 until December 6. On these alternative SOS‟s, the researcher isolated the number of times the students raised their hands and the number of times she called on each student to answer following hand-raising. PRESENTATION OF THE DATA The answer to the research proposition: „Would requiring students to raise their hands before speaking affect the number of times they use English in class?‟ appears to be both „yes‟ and „no‟. Fig.12 shows the results of a comparison of the baseline data, where students were not requested to raise their hands before speaking in class, with data gathered from those sections of the November 21, 24 and December 5 recordings where handraising was implemented. From this data, it would appear that when the hand-raising rule was enforced, English was spoken more or less equally by all students within the classroom.

Evidence appeared to suggest that the amount of English spoken by the louder, confident and more dominant students in the class (B1, B8) was considerably restricted when the hands-up rule was in place, but so too was the amount of English spoken by the quieter girls in the class. For the majority of the boys, the amount of English they spoke, whether they raised their hands or not, appears to have remained relatively unaffected. So while the hands-up rule seemed to have served the teacher well in giving her a sense that she was maintaining order and giving everyone an equal chance to answer questions, if the rule had been rigidly enforced the major effect of hand-raising would probably have been to decrease the amount of English spoken in class overall. However, the reality was that many

Fig.12

Baseline comparison

with Nov 21, 24 and Dec 5 data Amount of times English is spoken when handraising rule is imposed

(discounting times when students spoke when they were not asked to do so)

compared with baseline data when no rule was imposed

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Num

ber

of tim

es E

nglish s

poken

by e

ach s

tudent

Nov 7 - Baseline

Nov 21 - Handraising


Dec 5 - Handraising


of the students spoke English spontaneously in class or called out answers without being asked to do so, regardless of the hand-raising rule. An example of what the researcher considered to be speaking English „spontaneously‟ is demonstrated by B8 in the following excerpt:

T: What‟s this word? [Holds up flashcard with the word „many‟ written

on it] SS: //Many. B8: Many. Teacher, how many, how many.

When this spontaneous use of English was taken into account, the effect of the hand-raising rule on the amount of English spoken in class throughout the study appears to have been negligible (see Fig.13).

ANALYSIS OF THE DATA

An analysis of the baseline data appeared to show that students B1, B8 and, to a lesser extent, G5 seemed to be speaking English in class more often than the other students (see Fig.1). Overall throughout the study, this trend appeared to continue (see Figs.5-7, 10-11). Possible reasons for this will be suggested below.

Personality type Richards & Lockhart (1994:145-146) suggest that a learner‟s personality may influence the way in which they participate in a classroom. It could be argued that assigning a personality-type to a student is fraught with subjectivity and certainly hard to quantify. However, it was the researcher‟s opinion that personality type may have been an influential factor in her study. The researcher believed it was the apparently more confident, outgoing and/or loudest voiced of the students in the class, namely B1, B8, G5 and G2, who were the ones prepared to take risks when speaking the L2 and who ended up doing a lot of the talking. The baseline

Fig.13

Comparison of baseline data (Nov 7) with data following

introduction of change (Nov 21, 24 and Dec 5) including

spontaneous use of English

Who is speaking English and how often are they speaking overall?

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Student number

Num

ber

of

tim

es

Englis

h s

poke

n b

y

stude

nt Nov 7 - Baseline



Dec 5 - Handraising


data appeared on the whole to confirm this belief (see Fig.1). B2, B3, B7 and B9, with their apparently easy-going, less forceful personalities, appeared to be keen to participate and speak English in class, but they seemed to need time to think about their English and in most cases did not appear to be able to formulate answers in the L2 as quickly as the more dominant B1 or B8. B5 and B6 seemed to lack confidence and would generally only speak if the teacher called on them to do so. G1, G3 and G4 seemed to have extremely retiring personalities and, although competent L2 speakers and readers, they barely spoke above a whisper and their voices could rarely be heard above the louder boys.

Seating position and teacher‟s action zone Before starting her project, the researcher had considered the possibility that where students sat in class may have had an effect on the degree to which they participated and spoke English in the class. In a study carried out in Pakistan, Shamim (1996:143) found this tended to be the case, suggesting that students sitting in the front of the class frequently fall under the direct gaze of the teacher and „their interest and motivation to work increases in direct proportion to the amount of attention (supervision) they receive from the teacher.‟ Richards and Lockhart (1994:139) refer to the area which comes under the direct gaze of the teacher as the teacher‟s „action zone‟, and believe „despite a teacher‟s best intentions, teachers sometimes interact with some students in the class more frequently than others.‟ Data from this research seemed to support Shamim‟s and Richards and Lockhart‟s findings. In the initial stages of the research, the boys sat at the front of the class, with the outgoing B1 and B8 choosing to sit centre front. Baseline video evidence appears to show that the girls were aware of the boys‟ overall dominance in the classroom and appeared to stop trying to get the teacher‟s attention early on in each lesson. During the November 7 recording for example, although the girls tried calling out answers, they were positioned at the back of the classroom and the teacher appeared to be unable to hear them, acknowledging more frequently the replies of the boys at the front. When the girls were moved to the front of the class by the teacher on November 21 and the hands-up rule had been imposed, the boys from the back of the classroom still appeared to vie for the teacher‟s attention by standing up, waving their hands wildly in the air and screaming out answers despite not being asked to do so. The teacher appeared to adjust her action zone in response to where the most vocal students were so that the students in the back row of the class were given as much opportunity to answer questions when they raised their hands as those at the front (see Fig.14).


However, sitting at the front in combination with the hand-raising rule did appear to have had a positive psychological effect on the girls. On the November 22, 2005 SOS, the researcher made a note that G4, who was sitting in the front row, was „unusually animated and enthusiastic‟. However, G4 continued to answer questions so quietly that the teacher had to bend down close to her in order to hear her. It is possible the teacher may have avoided asking G4 questions because she had to make an effort to hear the answers.

Although the data indicated the girls did not appear to be speaking English more in class than they did during the baseline study (and in actual fact were speaking less) (see Figs.12 and 13), this does not appear to have been their own perception of the situation when they completed their questionnaires (see Figs.15 and 16). This may have been because they felt they were being heard more because their contributions were being acknowledged by the teacher.

Fig. 14

November 21, 2005 - second cycle, first video recording Comparison of English spoken overall in class with number of times requested

to answer questions following handraisingAbsent: B4

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5


spoken overall

Number of times

requested to answer

questions following

handraising

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

B2 B3 B5 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Number of times student

spoke in class

Students' perception of how

often they spoke in class

Fig. 15 November 9, 2005 – Number of times English spoken in class

compared with students’ perception of how often they spoke in class (A number value has been given to the students ratings of „many times‟ (10), „a few

times‟ (5) „not at all‟ (1)) Questionnaire not completed by B1, B3, B4, B6


Eventually over the next four weeks the boys gradually moved back to the front of the classroom, albeit on the periphery of the front row, and this appears to have had the effect of relegating the girls to the back seats once again. This may have resulted in some girls speaking a little less in class than when they were in the front of it (see Fig.13). During most of the recordings, B1 and B8 sat together, apparently aware that despite their outward show of competitiveness, they stood a better chance of commanding the teacher‟s attention if they sat together. This strategy appears to have succeeded as video recordings reveal that the teacher, although ostensibly facing the entire class, does either turn slightly towards B8 or sometimes positions herself closer to the side of the room where he is sitting. This also appears to have disadvantaged B2 who rarely managed to get a seat near B1 or B8 and as a result appears to have been outside the teacher‟s action zone. In informal discussion after the observation on November 24, the independent observer referred to B2 as „Mr Invisible‟ and asked why the teacher continually overlooked him (a fact backed up by the video recording). On December 6 the teacher appears to have tried consciously to rectify this apparent bias, and a number of times she appears to deliberately turn away from B1 and B8 and to include B2 as much as possible.

Horbury (1994:236) suggests that at an early stage in their education, children are encouraged to speak spontaneously but as they get older and move to higher grades, they have to „acquire and assimilate certain rules [particularly the hands-up rule] which, when followed, promote behaviour which is consonant with the expectations of the teachers.‟ It was apparent that the students in this study were aware that when a hands-up rule was in place, the teacher was assuming control and the manner in which they responded to questions needed to be modified. However, although the students raised their hands in response to questions, they did not, on the whole, remain silent when doing so (cries of „me‟ or „my‟ frequently accompanied each handraising).

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

B1 B2 B3 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Number of times Englishactually spoken in class

Students' perception of howoften they were speaking inclass

Fig. 16 November 24, 2005 – Number of times English spoken in class compared

with students’ perception of how often they spoke in class (A number value has been given to the students ratings of „many times‟ (10), „a few

times‟ (5) „not at all‟ (1)) Questionnaire not completed by B1, B2, B4


EVALUATION OF THE AR METHODOLOGY

Video Video recordings not only enabled the researcher to view and review the lessons and gather quantitative data regarding the students‟ participation in class, they also provided qualitative data, highlighting aspects of her teaching practices which may have had an effect on the amount of English some students spoke in class (for example, an unconscious bias towards B8 and against B2). Although Richards and Lockhart (1996:11) caution that videoing lessons may be disruptive for the students, this was not the researcher‟s impression. The students appeared, following initial curiosity, to be unconcerned by the camera‟s presence.

Independent observer The independent observer was able to look at the lesson objectively and provide the researcher with valuable insights on ways in which her teaching style may have affected the amount of English spoken in class.

The major problem with independent observation was finding a place for the observer to sit where he was unobtrusive yet able to observe all the students in the class.

Student questionnaires The researcher was initially concerned about including student questionnaires as part of her triangulation approach because she believed their use raised issues of validity and reliability. Taking into account the young age of the students and their limited knowledge of English, the researcher decided that the questionnaires should be (a) as simple and straightforward as possible, and (b) written in Korean. Addressing the issue of validity first, the researcher could not be sure that the following statements were true: the questionnaire she devised was clear and unambiguous; the Korean translation accurately conveyed her intentions; the students understood exactly what they were being asked to consider; and the translation from Korean back into English was accurate. The researcher believed there was the potential for her to misinterpret the data if any one of these points was misunderstood. Addressing the issue of reliability, the researcher was concerned that the students may have wanted to „please the teacher‟ and may have filled out their questionnaires according to what they believed she wanted to see. CONCLUSION This action research was carried out in order to study the effect of hand-raising on the amount of English spoken in the classroom. The researcher used video recordings, student questionnaires and an independent observer in order to gather data which she could analyse from a number of different perspectives. Although there may have been shortcomings in each of these methods of data collection, when used in conjunction with one another they appeared to provide a system of checks and balances which resulted in data which the researcher felt she could confidently rely on.

The research has concluded that primarily hand-raising appears to have evened-out the talking time and enabled all students to participate more or less equally in the lessons (see Fig.12). Although the hands-up rule appears to have given the


teacher some control over who she chose should speak in class, the students did not usually remain silent when they raised their hands, nor did it prevent some of them, when they were not chosen, from answering questions directed at other students. However, comparative data shown in Figs.5,6,7,10 does appear to indicate that, apart from B1 and B8, the more accustomed the students became to the hands-up rule, the less they spoke out of turn in class and the more effective the teacher appeared to be in allocating equal speaking time.

The hand-raising rule did appear to have some effect on the amount of English the students themselves perceived they were speaking, although this perception was not entirely backed up by the evidence. Although most students spoke English in class at some time during each lesson, they appear to have judged their own participation by the number of times the teacher paid attention to them and this appears to have equated in their minds to how many times they were called on individually to answer questions following hand-raising. Evidence seems to suggest that the teacher focused her attention on where the most vociferous and demanding were sitting.

It would appear that the allocation of equal speaking time achieved through hand-raising may have had at best, no effect, and at worst, an adverse effect, on the amount of times some of the students spoke English in class. For the majority of the boys who mostly „played by the rules‟ throughout the study and who spoke only when asked by the teacher to do so, adhering to the hands-up rule does not appear to have affected to any large extent the number of times they spoke English in class (see Figs.12,13). In comparison with the baseline data, it would appear that all the girls spoke considerably less when the hands-up rule was in place although this did not appear to be their own perception of their participation. Overall, as demonstrated in Figs.7 and 10, the hands-up rule seems to have actually disadvantaged the obedient students, because while they waited for permission to speak, others in the class who disregarded the hands-up rule began to monopolise the amount of English spoken once more.


REFERENCES Brown, H. D. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, USA: Addison Wesley Longman. Cervantes, J. (2000) Let‟s Go. In Literacy Place (pp24-33), New York : Scholastic Inc. Horbury, A. (1994) Procedural Rules in the Management of Pupils in the Primary School, Practitioner research in the Primary School, (pp233-243) Webb R. (ed), Falmer Press: London McIlvain, A. (1993) Feedback: Improving the Quality of Teachers‟ Listening, MET 2 (1), pages 52-54. Researcher‟s personal journal, 2005-2006. Richards, J. and Lockhart, C. (1996) Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shamim F., (1996) In or out of the action zone: location as a feature of interaction in large ESL classes in Pakistan (pp123-143). In Bailey K.M, Nunan D., (eds) Voices from the Language Classroom: Qualitative Research in the Second Language Classroom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge van Lier, L. (1988) The Classroom and the Language Learner. London: Longman. Wallace, M. (2001) Action Research for Language Teachers.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

113 This Material is Copyright © Fiona Schmidt-Dowling 2010

Can the use of television influence language motivation in an EFL classroom?

Fiona Schmidt-Dowling

INTRODUCTION This paper describes a small-scale piece of Action Research (AR) that was carried out in Switzerland with teenage English language learners. It asked whether the introduction of authentic materials, in this case the use of television produced for native-speakers and not specifically for the purpose of language learning, into the classroom, might influence the language motivation of teenage students. The researcher had noted a strong focus on exam preparation and a certain „tiredness‟ and routine in classrooms with older young learners (YLs). According to literature available on the teaching of teenagers, it would seem that motivation plays a major part of language learning success and might be influenced by various factors which may either motivate or de-motivate learners. Lambert & Gardener (in Cook 1983) refer to two types: Instrumental i.e. learning a language as a means to an end or integrative i.e. trying to identify with the target culture. During this AR the term „motivation‟ is used to define learners‟ levels of interest in the EFL classroom. This paper suggests that if students are motivated in the classroom, they will not only show greater interest in EFL lessons but perform better both on task and at formal tests. It also looks at how students‟ attitudes, performance in regular EFL class and their motivation changed during and after the AR. AIMS AND RATIONALE The view that teenagers seem much less motivated at school to learn than younger learners would seem widespread (Puchta & Schratz 1993) and was confirmed in the results of the reflective questionnaire given to students in this AR as they answered the question Do you like school?, 45% answered sometimes and 55%, No (Appendix A). In terms of teaching approach while it would seem to have become widely accepted that both a bottom-down i.e. learning individual items of language, and a top-down which encourages learners to focus on the purpose of message of the language, are necessary for the successful processing of the target language (Nunan 1998:4), there still seems to be little use made of both approaches in language learning with teenagers. This AR asked if the introduction of authentic material, suitable to the interests and needs of the learners, might increase motivation and improve language performance. For “Input should vary in style, mode, medium and purpose and should be rich in features which are characteristic of authentic discourse in the target language”, according to Tomlinson 1998:13). According to Cunningsworth (1984:59) “motivation determines the student‟s level of attention during class, and … has a deep influence on the effectiveness of learning. Capel, Leak & Turner (2001) suggest that low motivation might result


from boredom, whereas learners might be motivated positively by a number of factors which include: achievement, pleasure, prevention or stopping less pleasant activities, satisfaction and success (Capel, Leak & Turner 2001). Eastment (1998) suggests, technology has become an important part of life. It would also seem a generally accepted fact that teenagers are particularly interested in various forms of technology and multi-media including computer games, music and television. It would seem to follow that if input is authentic, appears relevant to the interests of teenagers and involves use of multi-media technology, might not this motivate teenagers in the EFL classroom? It was, therefore, decided that „authentic material‟, in this project, would be represented by a TV drama series produced for native English speaking teenagers, as drama can provide “a wealth of transactional language”. (Capel, Leak & Turner 2001:259). The series was introduced into the EFL classroom over a period of five months where the researcher attempted to monitor the students‟ reactions and in light of the findings tried to assess whether the project might have influenced learner motivation. TEACHING CONTEXT This AR project was carried out in a state run Secondary school situated about 16 kilometres outside Zurich, Switzerland. The Swiss Secondary School System, in this region comprises of 3 years of schooling and classes are streamed according to ability; A (for the more able learners, B (for slower learners) or C (for learners with more serious learning disabilities). This AR project was carried out with the two top stream classes, 3Aa & 3Ab, with an average of 14 students, aged 15/16 years in each class. In this school, the majority of the students spoke German as their first language (L1). French was introduced as their first foreign language (FL), in 5th grade of primary school (i.e. two years prior to the introduction of English). At the start of the AR the students had, therefore, had two and a half years of EFL. Language learning in the classroom seemed to centre around students‟ course books and workbooks which were produced by the Zurich Board of Education for teaching EFL at this level.

After an initial discussion with the class teacher, who was strongly in favour of collaborating on such a project, permission was obtained from the headmaster as well as the school board to carry out a small-scale AR which would look at this area of motivation in teenagers. It was further decided that student participation should not be mandatory and as there were two classes of third-year students, the project should involve both groups. After much consideration, it was decided that an American series would be more suitable than a British one as the accents tended to be more neutral for EFL students. Drama was chosen over comedy, as it was felt that certain cultural differences might make humour more difficult to interpret. The series „Smallville‟, which depicts the fictional character of Superman in his early years was chosen as most appropriate as it seemed to include issues of interests for teenagers i.e. school, family, romance and adventure. Issues concerning copyrights were considered and found to be intact as the use of the materials was not for commercial profit.


DATA COLLECTION During this AR a procedure referred to as „triangulation‟ by Van Lier 1988 was applied in order to double check data gathered. The procedures and techniques used to gather this data included: keeping a research journal, use of questionnaires, formal assessment and semi-formal interviews with students (Appendices A-D). Questionnaires, which might be seen as quantitative or countable data, however, provided the main source for gathering data, at the beginning, during and at the end of the AR. Questionnaires attempted to gain general information on student motivation, their attitudes to television and teenager series and to language learning at school. Semi-formal interviews with students aimed to provide more qualitative or more subjective data. The decision to use both forms intended to support the evaluation of data received. As Wallace (1998:38) states, “Quantitative data can throw light on qualitative insights and vice-versa”. The research methods used intended to be „complementary‟ as opposed to „intrusive‟, providing an extension to the normal classroom language lessons (Wallace 1998). Planning The project was carried out over five months. It included the gathering of baseline data and was followed by four cycles of research. Finally, semi-formal interviews were carried out with students during class time, a week after the final viewing and questionnaire. Interviews took place in a separate classroom with groups of 2/3 students. 1. Baseline The project was introduced to the students of Classes 3Aa and Class 3Ab during a double 50-minute lesson, the researcher explained the concept of AR to both classes and that the project would entail watching eleven individual episodes of the series „Smallville‟ instead of a regular English language lesson. The students watched a first episode in the series in English without the support of subtitles and were then asked to complete a questionnaire. The questionnaire aimed to establish the students‟ present attitudes toward television and the learning of English. The data gathered from Class 3Ab indicated that all students have at least one television at home and that 65% enjoyed TV series for teenagers. Findings also indicated that 86% of learners were aware that some of these series can be watched in the original English version on Swiss television but that only 21% did so. The majority consider television a form of relaxation as opposed to a learning tool (Appendix A). The questionnaire also aimed to confirm how many students would be interested in taking part in the „Smallville‟ project. As all the students were interested in participating in the project, two groups were formed for the AR: a pilot group (Class 3Aa) and the main research group (Class 3Ab). It was decided the pilot group would be used not only to check data collection instruments as well as timing and any possible technical difficulties but also compare and validate certain findings within the AR. The pilot group (Class 3Aa) were then shown nine further episodes of the Smallville (2 – 10) series, which were in turn broken into 3 cycles, one episode per week over a 12-week period. The main research group was also shown a further nine episodes but twice a week over a 7-week period. Each episode was shown in the students‟ darkened English classroom during a 50 minute lesson, using the school‟s data projector and DVD player. During the series episode viewings, the


class teacher was absent and the researcher acted as an observer recording the students‟ reactions and body language during the viewings. Baseline data indicated a positive attitude towards the English language and to learning it in Class 3Ab (86%). The majority of students (58%) appear to find grammar and writing most difficult, the majority (51%) perceive speaking their strongest area. What do you find most difficult?

reading

0%

grammar and writing

58%speaking

21%

listening and

understanding

21%

When asked how they felt they could best improve their English, the students answered as follows:

paying more

attention in class

21%

learning vocabulary

0%

visiting a language

camp during the

holidays

29%

reading English

books

50%

watching English

television

0%

Student reaction to the project The reactions showed by both Class 3Aa and Class 3Ab were, interestingly, very different: Class 3Aa appeared very interested and enthusiastic about the research, seemed to understand most of the content, asked questions concerning relating to


the project and claimed to have understood 50% – 70% of the first episode. Class 3Ab on the other hand, were very reserved, didn‟t ask any questions and showed little input during an oral comprehensive check but claimed to have understood 20%– 50%. All students from both classes expressed interest and confirmed their wish to participate on the follow-up questionnaire. THE FOUR CYCLES Four cycles of three lessons or episodes were carried out with each group over a combined period of five months. During the lessons, the researcher kept field-notes in a journal (Appendix C) and attempted to gauge students‟ understanding and attitudes by questionnaire feedback (Appendix A). Cycle 1 This cycle was divided into three individual lessons and episodes of the series „Smallville‟, which were shown in English with German subtitles. This intended to support and give students confidence. A questionnaire attempted to establish to what extent the students had understood the aims of the project and oral comprehension questions were asked to establish how much they had understood from the episode they had just watched. While 3Aa (pilot group) appeared very interested and active, Class 3Ab (research group) appeared reluctant to answer questions. However, at the end of the first cycle, a written comprehension activity on what they had just watched, showed Class 3Ab (15 students) had two mistakes, whereas Class 3Aa (13 students) had five mistakes which would seem to indicate Class 3Ab understood just as much if not more than Class 3Aa but were hesitant to speak up during the session. Cycle 2 Again, this second cycle was divided into three individual lessons and episodes were shown in English with English subtitles with the intention of moving the students gradually away from an L1 dependency. An interesting study by Robert Vanderplank (1988), which looks at the value of using English subtitles in language learning, suggests that not only do subtitles offer students with what Krashen refers to as “authentic and comprehensible language input” (Krashen in Vanderplank 1988) but they also reduce stress or defensive behaviour and produce a “low affective filter, by which intake may be encouraged” (Vanderplank 1988:273-277). This would also seem to be confirmed in the chart below.


Which cycle did you like best?

1 - with German

subtitles

19%

2 - with English

subtitles

50%

3 - no subtitles

31%

Initially a few students reacted negatively to the change from German subtitles to English and “one student complained he wouldn‟t understand anything” (Appendix B) but gradually concentrated on the viewing. And as can be seen below, the majority of Class 3Ab felt they could gradually understand more. Did you understand more this week than last week?

Yes

55%

No

36%

Don't know

9%

Cycle 3 During this cycle three episodes were shown in English, without subtitles. This was regarded as the next step away from showing the episodes with subtitles and towards what might be called a more „authentic‟ use of the materials i.e. without subtitles. This time there was a wave of – “we won‟t understand anything” However, with the exception of one student, they soon appeared concentrated, sometimes asking and giving one another explanations or translations. Cycle 4 In the fourth and final cycle a new TV series was introduced, in this case „The Simpsons‟, a well-known popular cartoon series about a character called Bart Simpson and his family in order to establish if the choice of series might have had an impact on the outcome of this AR. It seems interesting to note in a final questionnaire, although 75% of the students liked the „Smallville‟ series, 69% would have, in fact, preferred to watch a different series.


Interviews with Class 3Ab (Appendix D) were then carried out as a follow-up and marked the completion of the AR project. The students in Class 3Ab were given a copy of the questions a day prior to the interview and a German translation offered to those who felt they needed it. Due to the fact that the students might feel more at ease in twos rather than individually, it was decided that the students should be interviewed in groups of two. . EVALUATION AND ANALYSIS OF THE DATA From the data gathered it would appear that the students in both classes enjoyed the „Smallville‟ project (Appendix A) . A reflective questionnaire shows that the majority of Class 3Ab (67%) enjoyed it better than regular lessons. The majority of Class 3Ab (94%) found that the project was beneficial to their English learning in the classroom especially in the areas of speaking(25%) and understanding (56%). The results of the test (Appendix C) given to Class 3Aa by the class teacher appeared to confirm that, although these students were taking part in the research project as opposed to having regular lessons, their average oral performance in the EFL classroom, had improved after completing the research project. Students were also asked if they watched any TV programmes in English at home before and then after the AR:

43

64

21

44

0

20

40

60

80

100

Before AR After AR

%

Class 3Aa

Class 3Ab

The chart above also shows what might be considered a further benefit to the students in both groups. The number of students who had started to watch television in English at home had increased in both groups by over 20%, which suggests very strongly that motivation towards the English language has increased for these students outside the classroom. REFLECTIONS AND FURTHER RECOMMENDATIONS Although this AR might be considered a success, in that it did attain clear results in many aspects, there would appear to be a need for certain adaptations before the use of television series with teenage language learners might be recommended on a broader scale to schools. As this project was small a further, larger project might offer more conclusive results and establish more persuasively, an increase in learner motivation and improved performance. There would, however, seem to be a need for a more structured use of the materials as “the materials should also stimulate learner interaction with the input rather than just passive reception of it” (Tomlinson 1998:13). Based on Class 3Ab‟s comments during the interview (appendix D), the researcher feels that the students would have benefited more from a brief introduction and some form of


language related exercises or discussion on what had happened during the episode. During the interview when students were asked if they would like to add comments on either the project or on EFL in general, they appeared to confirm this view as can be seen in the following extracts:

S6: You just left after it. It would have been better if we could have discussed it.

S10: I would like more conversation in English class. A15: It would have been easier if more was explained before and after watching

the series. The paper would also like to suggest, based on further students‟ comments and the researcher‟s observations, that the combination of text and image provide the learner with valuable and comprehensible input, and the use of subtitles as Vanderplank (1988) suggests, support the learner by providing a positive form of reinforcement. CONCLUSION This paper looked at an Action Research project which asked whether the use of authentic materials, in this case a television series, might influence motivation in a teenage EFL classroom. The AR was carried out over a period of five months and involved two classes of Swiss teenagers, a pilot group (3Aa) and the main research group (Class 3Ab). Procedures and techniques used for the gathering of information included; the use of a researcher‟s journal, student questionnaires, interviews and some formal assessment supplied by the class teacher. However, the majority of the data presented in this paper, originates from the research group. Findings from this piece of Action Research indicated a more positive attitude towards the English language in general. Learners stated they felt the project had helped comprehension and oral skills and a formal test carried out by the class teacher suggested an improvement in listening and understanding abilities during a comprehension exercise. Further findings indicated an increased level of motivation outside the classroom environment. The researcher feels the use of authentic materials and especially the use and integration of television, a medium very present and accessible today, is an area which needs to be further explored with particular relevance to the interests of young learners in an EFL situation. “Motivation is a major factor in language-learning success. We should look for material that has variety and pace, is of genuine interest to the learners” (Cunningsworth 1984:63). REFERENCES Capel, S., Leask, M. and Turner, T. (2001) Learning to Teach in Secondary Schools. Routledge Falmer. Cook, V. J. (1983) What should language teaching be about? In ELTJ37(3) 229-234. Cunningsworth, A. (1984) Evaluating and Selecting EFL Teaching Materials. London Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.


Eastment, D. (1998) Computer-Assisted Language Learning. University of York: EFL Unit. Nunan, D. (1998) Language Teaching Methodology. Longman Puchta, H. and Schratz, M. (1993) Teaching Teenagers. London: Longman. Tomlinson, B. ed. (1998) Materials Development in Language Teaching Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vanderplank, R. (1988) The value of teletext sub-titles in language learning in ELTJ 42(4) 272-281. Van Lier, L. (1988) The Classroom and the Language Learner. London: Longman Wallace, M. (1998) Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


Appendix A (The following are extracts from the baseline and final questionnaires)

1. Do you like the English language?

No

13%

Yes

87%

2. Do you enjoy English lessons in school?

Yes

68%

Sometimes

13%

No

19%

3. Did you enjoy the 'Smallville' project?

Very much

31%

Hated it

6%

Yes

38%

Okay

25%

Not really

0%


3. Which cycle did you like the best?

1 - with German

subtitles

19%

2 - with English

subtitles

50%

3 - no subtitles

31%

4. Do you think it helped your school English?

Yes

94%

No

6%

If yes, which area? (One answer only)

Listening

19%

Speaking

25%

Understanding

56%

Writing

0%

Reading

0%


Appendix B (The following is an extract from researcher‟s journal)

Appendix C – Listening comprehension

Class 3Aa Class 3Ab

Oral text 3 mistakes 4.5 mistakes

Written text Grade 4.5 (max.6) Grade 4.47 (max. 6)

Appendix D (Extract from final student interviews)

10. Has the project helped you improve in English? If yes, how?

No not really

Yes

I understand more / Yes, a bit

Yes in listening & understanding / a „little‟ in reading

Yes in listening

Yes Understanding & vocabulary

Yes Listening & under-standing

Yes Listening & Under-standing but not in grammar

11. Did you like doing the project a. Why

Yes The main actor was very handsome

Yes I liked the series and the main actor. So, so. It was sometimes funny but sometimes stupid.

Yes / No It was fun I‟d rather read a book

Yes It was easier

Yes It as a change / no tests

Yes An easy lesson You learn to understand Liked the series

Yes Good stories Exciting Not like „real‟ School A change

125 This Material is Copyright © Kate Vivian 2010

Cohesiveness in Mixed L1 and ESL Young Learner Group-work

Kate Vivian

INTRODUCTION As an international school teacher in China, the researcher had a long-standing interest in how to enhance the working of English Second Language (ESL) young learners in small groups with native speaker (L1) peers. In her experience, such groupings frequently put ESL students at a great disadvantage in terms of participation and inclusion in the group, as little allowance was made by the teacher or peers for their language learning needs. A weekly English Club, independent of any school, was chosen as the focus for this Project. This club aimed to bring together roughly equal numbers of English native speakers and local Chinese children, aged 8-12, to learn English through pedagogical tasks in small groups. The Club was not part of any compulsory curriculum so the environment was more relaxed than the usual language classroom. The project was conducted over thirteen, two-hour, weekly sessions from February to June 2006. After gathering baseline data during the initial 5-week cycle, the researcher decided to focus on whether the cohesiveness of group-work could be improved by raising the language learning awareness of the L1 participants. Action was taken during two further cycles and quantitative and qualitative data were collected to monitor and evaluate the effect of changes.

Definition of Terms from Literature This project was based on the researcher‟s assumptions about the value of co-operative group-work in promoting language learning and language learning awareness in mixed groups of ESL and L1 students and the importance of group “cohesiveness” to the success of this process. The researcher believed that a establishing a “co-operative goal structure” as defined by Jacobs (1988:98) would help individuals to equate their success with that of the group. Flowerdew (1998: 324) comments that a co-operative approach may accord well with Chinese Confucian values of “interdependence, co-operation and social awareness”. The researcher also took Thompson‟s (2002:56) concept of “peer mentor” to add to the scope of roles which Richards and Rodgers (2001:196) deem appropriate to co-operative learning. In planning sessions, the researcher used Cameron‟s (2001: 32) three task design stages of preparation, core activity and follow-up and took special note of „relevance beyond language learning‟ (Cameron 2001: 31) in designing a range of creative tasks to engage the L1 participants and simulate the conditions prevalent in a mixed L1/ESL international school classroom. As the focus of the project shifted to the language learning awareness of the L1 participants, the researcher considered Fisher‟s proposal (1995:93) that peer tutoring “helps the child to understand more about the learning process” and Brewster, Ellis and Girard‟s view (2002: 59) that group-work may be a good place to develop child-appropriate metacognitive awareness.


In order to measure group cohesiveness, the researcher chose to use broad definitions of participation proposed by Carless (2002:394) to include evidence of paying attention, such as looking and turning towards other group members, and doing tasks towards the group goal such as cutting and sticking (Carless 2002: 395). The researcher adapted Dörnyei and Malderez‟ (1999: 164) definition of group cohesiveness as the “extent to which individuals feel a strong identification with their group” to relate specifically to the interaction between ESL and L1 group members. The Participants The three groups involved in the AR Project were the ESL members, their L1 peers and adult facilitators. The ESL membership, mainly Chinese with a few of Japanese origin, was fairly consistent, with an average of 12 members, aged 8-12, attending each week. A core of six L1 boys and girls, aged 9 to 12, from UK, USA and Australia, remained fairly consistent throughout the study period, with others joining occasionally. These young learners were divided into six groups of 3-5 participants, each including at least one or two L1 speakers, as shown in Table 1 below:

Group ID L1 ESL Comment

A 2 girls 2 girls Remained consistent

B 2 boys, 1 girl 2 girls +1 boy - 1 girl - 1 boy

1 ESL girl added in 2nd Cycle but stopped attending; sporadic LH attendance

C 2 girls 2 girls 1 L1 occasional, otherwise consistent

D 2 boys 3 boys - 1 boy

This group split for 3rd Cycle due to new ESL boy. Two boys transferred to Group E

E 1 boy 1 boy 2 girls - 2 girls + 2 boys

Core group of 2 boys who resisted others until 2 more boys added in third cycle

F 1 boy 2 boys 1 girl

Group started 2nd Cycle

The researcher took the role of main facilitator in group sessions, with three other adult facilitators attending some sessions to circulate during group-work and help with interviewing the ESL participants.

The Pilot Study The English Club came into being as a holiday club during the Chinese New Year holidays. These sessions constituted a „pilot study‟ for the AR Project. Groups of mixed age and sex were formed by the main facilitator with at least one L1 member. No special instructions were given to the L1 participants, some of whom


showed initial hostility to being „press-ganged‟ by parents into a language learning activity. During the Pilot Study, the researcher gathered data on participants, such as age, school and grade level, and kept a journal record of the sessions. THE FOCUS Wallace (1998: 15) defines action research as “the process of answering questions by using various kinds of evidence in some kind of reasoned way”. This project began by asking the question of how the cohesiveness of mixed groups of ESL and L1 young learners could be improved. In the second cycle, the focus shifted to the role of the L1 participants in promoting cohesiveness and then to investigating language learning awareness as a factor in the efficacy of their role. The Action The researcher took action at various stages in the project with the aim of improving the participation of ESL members and small-group cohesiveness. After the Pilot Study, the L1 participants were given the job title of „Language Helper‟ and a briefing meeting was introduced before each session to discuss session content and key language input. The 1st Cycle video was shown at one meeting. Participants were encouraged to share strategies for including all members and a sheet of “Instructions for Language Helpers”, including social and communication strategies was distributed. Having viewed the 1st Cycle video, the researcher decided to reorganize some groups and create one new group (Group F) to limit group sizes to three or four members and create better conditions for some obvious „outsiders‟. In addition, an attempt was made to curtail language helper dominance by making a rule that ESL members should choose the first game and act as group scribe. The session instruction sheet was redesigned to elicit a choice or opinion from each group member. Language helpers viewed the 1st cycle video at a briefing meeting. The researcher asked one Group D participant to comment on the remarkable cohesiveness evident in his group. He explained that he tried to make eye contact and delegate jobs to everyone. As a result, the researcher decided to focus on the effects of raising language learning awareness among the L1 participants. DATA COLLECTION METHODS The researcher chose three main methods to gather data on the action taken: the researcher‟s journal, participants‟ feedback and video observation. The researcher used an action research journal to record details and impressions of sessions throughout the project. Three to eight video „snapshots‟, lasting between a few seconds and over a minute, of each group were taken during group-work in four of the sessions and then transcribed for further analysis. Language helpers completed two questionnaires, one at the beginning of the 2nd Cycle and one at the very last session. The first asked for general impressions of the club with one question about how to help the ESL participants. The second was less structured, asking for “two or three tips on how to be a good language helper”. The ESL participants were interviewed in English during the 1st and 2nd Cycles to gain some insight into their impressions of the activities and the group. This process was


repeated with a modified questionnaire in the 3rd Cycle, this time in the student‟s L1. PRESENTATION OF THE DATA Each video „snapshot‟ was analyzed to obtain participation and cohesiveness data. Participation, broadly defined as “paying attention”, was expressed as a ratio of participating members to the total group membership. Cohesiveness, defined as the amount of verbal and non-verbal interaction observed between L1 and ESL members, was rated on a scale of 0-2 as follows: 0: No observable attempt by L1 members to interact with ESL members or

vice versa. 1: Some observable interaction between L1 and ESL members, but not

including all group members. 2: Observable interaction between all L1 and ESL group members. Total participation and cohesiveness ratings were calculated for each group and expressed as percentages for ease of comparison. A summary of the results obtained for all six groups during the three cycles is presented in Table 2 and Table 3 below. Table 2: Comparison of Average Participation (%)

Group

1st Cycle

2nd Cycle

3rd Cycle

A

84

94

100*

B

68

96

89

C

85

88

96

D

100

84

100

E

75

90

75

F

**

100

85


Table 3: Comparison of Average Group Cohesiveness (%)

Group

1st Cycle

2nd Cycle

3rd Cycle

A

44

66

N/A*

B

31

38

50

C

75

75

66

D

94

70

100

E

25

33

66

F

** 57

50

* ESL members absent ** Group not yet formed. The quantitative findings for Groups B, C, D and E were compared with qualitative observations from video transcriptions, questionnaires and interviews. These four groups were selected on the basis of the amount of data available and representation of more and less cohesive groups. Group B This group had a stable L1 boy and ESL girl, but otherwise fluctuating membership. Although participation rose significantly between the first and second cycles, the final cohesiveness rating of 50% remained the lowest of the four groups. The video data indicates a repeating pattern of more interaction in the warm-up games and more isolation of the ESL members in the main task: “[ESL1 is sitting slightly to the side not touching anything. LH 1 is playing with the dough]”. A change of language helper in one of the second cycle sessions seemed to break down the cohesiveness even in the warm-up games, evidenced by two interventions by the main facilitator. However, despite her observed passivity during group tasks, ESL1‟s first interview response indicated that she liked her group because of the “English people in group”. Written evidence from materials and journal entries show that she did participate as scribe and in choosing the opening game.


The researcher noted in her journal that the combination of two male L1 participants and two female ESL members did not work well. She also recorded that the main language helper in this group usually missed briefing meetings. His rather imprecise responses to the final questionnaire, e.g. “try to speak to them a lot”, may reflect a consequent lack of language learning awareness input. Group C This group consolidated as an all-girl group with two Language Helpers and two Japanese-speaking ESL members, who were also sisters. Participation remained high over the three cycles. Cohesiveness also started high, at 75%, but dropped slightly to 66% in the 3rd Cycle. However, this was still a high score compared to the other groups. One ESL member was very reluctant to use English, yet the video shows the language helpers making efforts to interact with her: LH3: Do you want to buy it? (.) Yes or no (..) [holding up four fingers] Four. A notable feature of this group was that both language helpers sought to include the whole group with words, eye contact, and gestures: LH1: [Looking at ESL1] Cardboard? (2) Cardboard. [She starts to stick it on the

sheet. She addresses the group] Where‟s cardboard? (3) [ She picks up bubblewrap] What‟s this one? (4) [offering bubblewrap around the group] Feel it.

The journal entry for the third cycle session records that Group C members were “animated and cohesive”. In their interview, ESL1 and 2 both liked their group because “it is fun”. The language helpers‟ responses to the 3rd Cycle questionnaire included specific communication strategies, such as making eye contact, speaking clearly, using signs and paraphrasing, and organizational strategies, such as “keep people busy” and “spread the work between everyone”. Group D Group D was an all-boy group which seemed to surpass all the other groups in participation and cohesiveness, despite having more than average (5) members for much of its life. The transfer of two ESL members in the third cycle did not damage this trend. A wealth of qualitative data gives some insight into the success of Group D. One language helper‟s response to the first questionnaire stated that he came “to help” and that he liked “communication” in his group. Early journal entries recorded that he took his role seriously, applying instructions given in the briefing. For example, in one early session, LH1 was overheard to tell LH2 that the ranking of presentations had to be decided democratically. When asked to comment on the remarkable cohesiveness evident in Group D in the 1st Cycle video, he was able to verbalise two conscious strategies: making eye contact and delegating jobs. His final questionnaire response showed a strong role consciousness: “Try to have a smile and be strict, but not too strict, and to try and involve them as much as possible”.


In the initial interview, the ESL members reported liking their group, because it was “fun” and because of “many ideas”. Two of them were also conscious of learning from their English-speaking friends as well as the teacher. In the final interview, the ESL members both preferred “doing things with our group”. One also noted that “using our hands more” would help him to understand better. This may indicate an awareness of non-verbal communication strategies. One language helper tended to use Chinese to explain activities. This led to one curious moment when he counted in Chinese, while the ESL participants counted in English: LH2: [moving ESL2‟s piece] Yi, er, san, si ESL members: One, two, three, four. Interestingly, there was no observed decline in cohesiveness in the 3rd Cycle video when he was absent. One ESL member stated that he disliked “speaking Chinese” on his final questionnaire. Overall, this group was characterized by enthusiastic dialogue, more concerned with communication than self-conscious about language: ESL2: Yesss! (1) [trying to read his next card] „pop er‟ population. Group E This group had two male core members: a language helper who was a proficient Chinese speaker, and the oldest ESL boy in the Club. These two initially resisted interaction with the two girls in the group, exemplified by the low cohesiveness rating. The cohesiveness rating remained low even after the two girls were moved and a comment from the journal may throw light on this: “LH1 and ESL1 seem quite happy as a group unto themselves, even though it puts them at a disadvantage in group exercises. Notably, LH1 wrote on his feedback that the way to improve his group would be for him to be alone!” On his first questionnaire, the language helper commented that “speak Chinese” was the best way to help his ESL group members to participate. The 1st Cycle video showed much evidence of him using Chinese and of the main facilitator intervening to try to switch the language to English. In the 3rd cycle, he persists in using Chinese, even though the two new group members make efforts to use English. However, on his final questionnaire, the language helper wrote “speak English as much as possible” as a tip for other language helpers. Specific Problems Encountered The researcher had to consider which questions to ask, how to ask them and which language to use. Responses to the first ESL participant interviews were sometimes ambiguous and children were noticeably more reticent when interviewed by the main facilitator. Consequently, the researcher enlisted other facilitators to conduct third cycle interviews in the learner‟s L1. Some ambiguous responses were also received to the language helper‟s questionnaire, such as “not talk so much” to a question about how to improve their


group. The third cycle questionnaires produced clearer responses, although recording the briefing meetings may have yielded richer data. The recording of one second cycle session was partially damaged and only half of another was recorded. This may make the comparison with the data from the first and third cycles less reliable. The “snapshot” technique used to collect group-work data was sometimes frustrating when speakers were inaudible or out of shot. EVALUATION OF THE DATA Despite the difficulties mentioned above, some positive trends in the data would suggest that the language learning awareness of the Language Helpers did increase during the project and that this may have contributed to increased participation and group cohesiveness. A summary of the strategies mentioned on the language helper final questionnaire is given below: Table 4: Summary of “Tips for Good Language Helpers”

No. of Responses

Response

6 Give the group members jobs to do

4 Look at them/make eye contact

3 Speak slowly

3 Speak clearly

2 Rephrase and try again

2 Speak English as much as possible

2 Make sure they know what to do

2 Check if they understand

2 Don‟t exclude any member

1 Repeat words over and over again

1 Smile, but be strict

1 Help with the activities

1 Use gestures

1 Encourage them to do the activities

1 Try and speak to them a lot

In the early stages of the Project, two language helpers in Groups A and E, who were both proficient Chinese speakers, found it difficult to accept that they could communicate in English with their group. However, the Group A speaker quickly revised her opinion as shown by 2nd Cycle video evidence and her response to the 2nd Cycle questionnaire: “They speak a lot of English”. Group D also had a Chinese-proficient language helper, LH2, who sometimes served as group interpreter, but the 3rd Cycle video evidence suggests that this intervention was not essential to the working of this group. Another interesting finding is that many of the strategies mentioned on the second L1 questionnaire, such as speaking clearly/slowly, giving out jobs and making eye contact, were the main ones discussed at briefings and observable in the behaviour of the most successful language helpers. One Group D language helper was able to verbalise his conscious strategies after watching the 1st Cycle video and his final questionnaire responses showed heightened role-awareness that can be seen in many video snapshots. Likewise, the Group C language


helpers displayed an awareness of communication strategies in video sequences and in their responses. By contrast, although the Group B language helpers occasionally paid lip service to including ESL members, they never really seems to „own‟ their role in the observable evidence. An unnatural silence prevailed over the warm-up games in this group and remarks were made by L1 members about the ESL members rather than to them, while in group D the enthusiastic exchanges between language helpers seemed to stimulate the ESL members to join in. Therefore, there would seem to be a correlation between an awareness of language learning strategies and observable group cohesiveness. However, other factors, such as age and boy/girl ratio may play a part in the success of Groups C and D. The Group C language helpers were older (aged 12/13) and could therefore be expected to be more metacognitively aware than their younger counterparts. The seniority of the Group E dominant ESL member undoubtedly affected the power-play in that group. However, Group D language helpers were only 10 and 9 respectively, yet still managed to hold their group together, while the main Group B language helper was12 and yet struggled to integrate his group. Within the age group concerned (8-12), therefore, age alone does not appear to have much effect on LH awareness. It is noteworthy that the most successful groups were single-sex (A, C and D) while two of the more struggling groups, B and F, were mixed. However, although Group E actively resisted the inclusion of girls, cohesiveness hardly improved after they were moved. Further investigation over a longer period would be necessary to ascertain the influence of boy/girl ratios on group cohesiveness. CONCLUSION This project was an attempt to investigate how to promote cohesiveness in mixed small groups of L1 and ESL learners. The researcher chose a particular focus on raising the language learning awareness of the L1 participants. Video observation was used to produce analyzable data on participation and cohesiveness during group-work. This quantitative information was compared with other kinds of evidence such as the researcher‟s journal, structured interviews with the ESL learners and language helper questionnaires to enhance the quality and reliability of the findings. Although the project was limited by its shortcomings, notably the ambiguity of some interview and questionnaire data and the lack of consistency of video recordings, the findings provided some evidence of a link between the language learning awareness of the L1 participants and the cohesiveness of the group, suggesting that the input received by language helpers over the duration of the project had a positive effect on group cohesiveness. This short-term action research project could only scratch the surface of the topic. A longer-term study of similar groups, with a focus on other aspects, such as the language learning awareness of the ESL participants and the relevance of boy/girl ratios could broaden and deepen understanding of cohesiveness issues.


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ed. Harlow: Pearson Education Cameron, L. (2001) Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carless, D. (2002) Implementing Task-Based Learning with Young Learners, ELTJ, 56 (4) 389-396. Dörnyei, Z. and Malderez, A. (1999) The role of group dynamics in foreign language learning and teaching. In Arnold, J. (ed.) Affect in Language Learning (pp. 155-169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, R. (1995) Teaching Children to Learn. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes. Flowerdew, L. (1998) A cultural perspective on group work. ELTJ, 52 (4) 323-328. Jacobs, G. (1988) Co-operative goal structure: a way to improve group activities. ELTJ, 42 (2) 97-101. Richards, J. C. and Rodgers, T. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, S. (2003) Can a peer mentoring system encourage a young learner to participate more? In Begley, J. and Hughes, A. (eds.) Second International TEYL Research Seminar (pp. 53-60) York: EFL Unit, University of York Wallace, M. J.(1998) Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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