new version (revised) -- Work Group One

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Subject: new version (revised)

Author:
Luciano Valadares

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Date Posted: 14:28:28 08/21/10 Sat
In reply to: Mar�lia Salgado 's message, "question 3" on 13:38:41 08/20/10 Fri

Please, take a look in this new version of Question 3. And send me an OK message. Thank you.

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 get their own conclusions based on data collections and consequently they focus on the recurrent issues that need to be improved.

The article one focus their studies on the spread of English as the 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, writers follow all the steps mentioned above, they will analyze the data and information, aiming to solve problems or at least try to settle them. 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 need to be better prepared for the challenges they may 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 can 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 their teaching expertise to the 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 with a validity character. She uses not 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 dialogue 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 afirmation 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 that said that, 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).

And in the conclusion was shown 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.�

So, the author always underlies her words through theoretical ones, doing this she transmits the idea of being a good researcher and get readers� confidence.

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Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Re: it is ok	Mar�lia	10:35:53 08/22/10 Sun