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| Subject: final version question 3 and 4 | |
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Author: Luciana Maia (questions 3 and 4) |
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Date Posted: 17:37:45 08/23/10 Mon 3- How do the article writers validate their own thoughts and conclusions? The writers validate their own thoughts and conclusions studying, reading, going to workshops and observing researcher’s works that bring them support and knowledge to produce and empower their own studies and experiences. That is to say, they can come to their own conclusions based on data collections and consequently focusing on the recurrent issues which need improvements. Article one focus their studies on the spread of English as a global language. Because of this, as they said, “many people from English-speaking countries go to foreign land to work as English teachers.” This article is based on the study conducted by Gingerich (2004). She observed the problems and difficulties that three English teachers from South Africa had in their classes. It is part of a larger study which examines local and foreign English teachers’ collaboration and professional development in intercultural team teaching. To write the article, data were collected via different methods including: interviews, questionnaires, classroom observation, field notes, research journals and document inspection. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed for further analysis. In addition to writers following all the steps mentioned above, they also will analyze the data and information, aiming at solving further problems or at least trying to deal with them in a more constructive way. In this article they noticed the deficiencies related to the teachers and gave solutions to be followed. It was said that for students to gain maximum benefits of intercultural team teaching, the participating foreign teachers needed to be better prepared for the challenges they would have to face in an unfamiliar educational system. Snow (2006) states that foreign English teachers should be encouraged to reflect on their teaching regularly so that, their teaching is guided by more informed decisions. In the case of the Hsinchu Program (Taiwanese program), this reflection could take many forms, such as engaging in casual conversations about the lesson they taught together with their team-teaching partners, writing a reflective journal and exchanging it with their partners and conducting action research to investigate a certain aspect of team-teaching. It is hoped that with better preparation and continued professional development, foreign English teachers can thrive and contribute with their teaching expertise on a foreign land. In the article 3, the author demonstrates her worry about students that are learning English through immersion in the mainstream curriculum. According to her, there are many native speaker students whose learning difficulties are linguistic in origin and require a language-oriented pedagogy in all curriculum areas. After reading her article, we can say that Susan Gray develops a work of great validity. She does not use only her words, but she tries to justify with other authors´ words or with words of people who has a credit position in society. She also searches and quotes other theories that could interconnect with the one she works with. To justify her central arguments, she quotes authors like Ellis, Fisher, Westerman, Pica among others. Quoting Pica’s words while justifying her work: “ … he observed when considering data from a wide range of content-based classrooms where the target language was English that students’ language production was ‘fluent, but linguistically inaccurate` (p. 343); attention in the class was directed to meaning rather than form.” And explain that in her paper: “uses and extends the view of form proposed by Ellis et al. (2002) which incorporates phonological, graphological, lexical, and grammatical form to include discoursal aspects of language. This focus beyond the level of the sentence to text structure is critical for the language demands of academic writing.” Here, once again, when she says: “…proposed by Ellis et al (2002)” she is looking for theoretical justifications. Another important point is that she not only substantiates the principles of the research, but she also defines specific terms as in “Sardo Brown (1993, p. 63) defines teacher planning as ‘the instructional decisions made prior to the execution of plans during teaching`.” Defending her affirmation that many secondary students, not just new learners of English, need informed language focused planning and that each of the secondary learning areas has its own language, she demonstrates that there are other authors who mentions the same, so she puts it in parenthesis “(Bullock Committee, 1975; Vollmer, 2006)” and continue explaining that educational systems are challenged to develop language-oriented pedagogy that benefits native speaker as well as non native speaker students. It is relevant that the author still points out that the research area is relevant: “there is renewed interest in earlier work in language across the curriculum issues which guided teachers to focus on the reading and writing demands in their subject areas (for example, Davies and Greene, 1984; Lunzer and Gardner, 1979; Morris and Stewart-Dore, 1984 and the Council of Europe’s current project on Languages of Education).” Another point used to give validity to her work is the mention of the New Zealander national curriculum: “it argues that each teacher needs to provide specific guidance with the specialist vocabulary, the reading demands, and appropriate ways of conveying knowledge in each subject area (Ministry of Education, 2007).” The author also searches for the words of the Ministry of Education that English language learners will ‘‘need explicit and extensive teaching of English vocabulary, word forms, sentence and text structures, and language uses” (Ministry of Education, p. 16). In the conclusion, we see the principles chosen to assist teachers in their instructional decision and the way teachers have put principles into practice, using a descriptive account. This validates her research showing teachers experiences in their own teaching as well as those of their students. And she justifies: “The descriptive account also enabled a critical examination of the theoretical input in one TESOL teacher education programme teachers in the study used principles as a pivot between the needs analysis and subsequent planning and as the criteria for selecting and sequencing the learning activities.” In other words, the author always underlies her words through theoretical ones, by doing that, she transmits the idea of being a good researcher and get readers´ confidence. 4- How important is the description of procedures and methods adopted in the study being reported. The description of procedures and methods adopted in the study is very valuable since it is the main source for the credibility of the work. To be trustful the researchers must rely their study on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence. With this data the authors can provide evidences for their utterances. The detailed explanation of procedures and methods adopted in the research tells how the author intends to deal with the issue presented. Moreover, he provides the work plan and describes the necessary activities to achieve the ultimate goal of the project. This procedure also allows others researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them in other studies. Article 1 is a research based on a qualitative study. The data collection had begun in August , 2006 and lasted until June, 2007. The study focused on three South African teachers’ performance in the classroom, their background information and their previous professional experience. After analysing the data collected the authors conclude that the common problem suffered by those three teachers was their doubt on their accent. It was also showed how ironic was the hiring procedure of the Taiwanese School. In other words, those three teachers were hired for being considered English native speakers, and so they had also suffered for not sounding genuine native speakers. Therefore, the only conception accepted by Taiwanese people was that English speakers need to sound like Americans. One important fact that happened during the research period was the prejudice suffered by the two black teachers in relation to the students and some co-workers. May and Ivy were the only two black female teachers in the Hsinchu Program during the school year of 2006. May was very upset that School C was turning Ivy down; Mei-ling remarked that May accused Ivy’s colleagues of being racist in one of their casual conversations. In one informal conversation with the first author, May also talked about her sensitivity towards racism in these words, “I’m a very sensitive person. When students misbehave, I sometimes think that ‘Are you misbehaving because I am black?” (fieldnote, 2006/12/05). This incident may have interfered in their work discouraging one of then to continue teaching in Taiwan. The final conclusion was that for the students to have benefited from this program (which hires foreign English teachers) the teachers should have been more prepared to deal with unfamiliar situations in a new environment. Article 3 reports the use of the qualitative research tradition based on Silverman´s (1993) teachings. The author used, as she said: “a hybrid methodology adapting guidelines from case study research (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995, 2000; Yin, 1984) and from action research ( Cohen et al. 2000; Elliot, 1991; Ellis, 1997b; McTaggart, 1997) to make visible the activity of planning. The theoretical input and conceptual tools of the TESSOL programme provided the materials for planning.” On dealing with the qualitative research it is important that the procedures are well detailed and analyzed. The final results can have a greater impact on the research conclusion than they would have in a quantitative one. Being in contact with the language provides the students with the ability of communicating well and making themselves understandable, but not to use the form correctly, mainly because in the class meaning is privileged rather than form. The studies show that most students of English (even native speakers) don’t know surely how to manage the differences between written and spoken language. So, the attention is called for the responsibility teachers have while helping the students to overcome these difficulties. The conclusion of this article is that teachers should not take students’ knowledge for granted and the form of a language is something that should always pointed out as a part of the language as important as grammar or meaning. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
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