RESEARCH IN YOUR OWN CLASSROOM: A Summary of Elizabeth Taylor’s Paper in (Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice)
By Muhammad Rajulain
A. How might I become interested in investigating my classroom?
Teachers’ curiosity in teaching and learning process in the classroom resulted in some questions about the effectiveness of certain things during the lesson itself. Teachers’ may want to know what sitting arrangements work better for the students or further, in a more theoretical level, they want to know what second language acquisition research has to say about whether increasing interaction in the target language by using small groups promotes learning,
B. How might I make these links between practice and theory?
As the teachers’ curiosity increase, they might talk about the issue they face in the classroom with their colleagues informally during the break session and practice the shared ideas in the classroom. However, according to Davison, Taylor, & Hatcher, this kind of informal meetings hardly resulted in the involvement of the discussions about the classroom issues.
On the other hand, other teacher may find the resources on the library and read how other people investigate issues the teacher interested in.
C. Collaborate or go it alone?
As we shared our ideas with our colleagues or find the helpful books or articles, the next question is whether we are going to go ahead alone or with other teachers. The answer depends on us. If we feel comfortable working with other people, that would be fine. In fact, it will be much easier and help us a lot. However, if we are happy working alone, it is also acceptable.
D. What have other researchers found out about my area of interest?
Knowing and reading what other people have done in our area of interest may help us in deciding whether we want to follow the same procedures and carry out those procedures in our classroom or get ideas to try something new. However, we need to realize that the journals published and written in international journals are investigated by researchers from outside and therefore do not provide examples of people studying their own classroom. Yet, reading these kinds of journals will be very useful for teachers. The major differences between those kinds of research and the one we are interested in is that our research may only look at one class, possibly only one lesson, and are not looking for the large numbers to make our research statistically viable and thus generalizable to other contexts. Thus, we may at least begin with our own context.
E. How do I go about investigating my own classroom?
A practical example: learner roles in small-group interaction compared with a teacher-directed lesson.
1. Focusing the investigation
Given the context; Anne has been teaching a small EFL class consisting of six to eight students for two years. The teacher realizes that her teaching is very teacher-directed. She also concerns that the students are not developing learning strategies and, in particular, did not see themselves as independent readers in English. As she reads, increasing learner—learner interaction is helpful, but could not find much research done on differences between learner roles in small groups as compared with teacher-fronted groups. She decides to investigate these roles in her own class.
Anne’s reading tells that in second language learning, group work is considered effective for several reasons: It increases actual participation and thus language learning opportunities; it improves the quality, or naturalness, of student talk, so that it is closer to ‘genuine’ interaction; it helps individualize instruction; it promotes a positive affective climate; and it increases student motivation (Long & Porter, 1985; McPherson, 1992; van Lier, 1988). Second language acquisition research also suggests that negotiation of meaning (which is better carried out in more ‘natural’ smaller groups) actually may lead to acquisition of the target language. As far as learner roles in small groups are concerned, Anne finds that small groups encourage learners to take on new roles which they may not have done in a teacher-fronted lesson. For instance, they may initiate more interaction instead of simply responding to the teacher.
2. Collecting information
The next step for is to collect information in her classroom so that she could examine learner s’ roles. She decided that because one of her concerns to develop more independent reading strategies. Thus she uses a reading-based task to focus on. They had already worked on pre-reading strategies for understanding the content of new texts, so she sets up two activities, one teacher-fronted and one small-group, so that she could compare roles in these. In the teacher-fronted session, Anne attempted to elicit from the students the use of the four cues they had previously studied and then to apply these to the text in that lesson.
These cues are:
a. Looking at pictures/illustrations
b. Looking at the title
c. Looking at headings
d. Looking for easily recognized words in the body of the text.
In the small-group session, the learners’ task was to (a) predict what the reading would be about and to discuss their strategies. The texts Anne chooses are two segments of the same government pamphlet on the environment.
Anne has only two small groups and she groups these in mixed levels, since the class had a wide range of precedency in both oral and literacy skills and she felt the mixed groupings reflect reality in community classes. Anne recorded about I5 to 20 minutes of each session.
3. Analyzing the information
Once the data were recorded, the next step for Anne is to transcribe the recording. Then, Anne finds the terminology and framework in reporting her research. Teacher can create their own framework and categories for analysis or adapt what someone else has done, and this is what many teachers investigating their classrooms for their own purposes have done.
Anne analyses the roles her learners took in the two lessons by looking at four categories of roles: leader; participator; nonparticipator; and negative contributor. (A participator was interpreted as someone who contributed to the group discussion but deferred to a leader.) Anne bases this on work done by Orlich, Harder, Callahan, Kanchak, Prendergrass, and Keogh (1990). These four categories were further subdivided into three ways in which these roles may be oriented in the group. These are task roles (focusing on the task, e.g., initiating, asking questions); maintenance roles (focusing on maintaining group processes, e.g., encouraging, giving feedback, commenting on progress); and self-serving roles (tending to obstruct discussion by serving the learner’s own interests, e.g., blocking others’ contributions, off-task comments).
Anne uses her transcripts to code the learners’ utterances into the functions they are performing (e.g., encouraging), then allocated these to the role they are acted (e.g., maintenance). She finds that there are no nonparticipators and no negative contributors, so she counted the number of times each learner filled the role of leader or participator and what aspect of the role was being carried out (e.g., task, maintenance).
4. Making sense of it
Anne has made some predictions before starting her study. One was that the learners who actively contribute in the teacher-fronted group will assume leadership roles in a small learner-centered group. She found that in the teacher-fronted lesson, the learners adopted the role of leader only 10% of the time, but in the small groups roughly a quarter to a third of the time was spent with learners adopting the role of leader.
This looks as if Anne was only counting utterances and describing her results in terms of percentages. Anne was able to describe and discuss how each student contributed in the small-group activity, supported by quotes from her transcript.
The fact that the groups did not pay much attention to maintaining group cohesion was seen by Anne as a sign of their inexperience at working in groups, but also because they already knew each other well and had a good rapport with their fellow students.
F. How can research in my own classroom help my teaching?
From her simple research, Anne is able to see that even though there may be more interaction going on in small groups, a wide disparity in learner background, particularly in level of education, may result in some learners continuing to adopt ‘participant’ roles, responding to the ‘teacher’ orientation of the most highly educated and most proficient member of the group.
An important discovery for Anne was the effect of the nature of the task itself. She found in follow-up discussion to the task with the students (which was also recorded and transcribed) that the highly educated student was in fact the only one to grasp the ‘learning-to-learn’ focus of the activity.
It shows that the research in our classroom gives a better understanding and may result in the better approach for teaching and learning process.
G. How do I report my findings?
If Anne wants to report her findings, she can talk with other teachers informally during the discussion session by presenting the dialog transcripts or the copy of the findings. In addition, if the teachers have some kind of monthly or annual teacher meeting this would be the perfect time to share the findings. The discussion and further research may arise from this kind of sharing session.
If it is possible, the teacher may also send the findings to the appropriate journal.
Posting Komentar untuk "RESEARCH IN YOUR OWN CLASSROOM: A Summary of Elizabeth Taylor’s Paper in (Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice)"