A linguistic win for W: or, "What 'I' Means"
This NYT article reports on a paper published in The Journal of Research in Personality in which Richard Slatcher analyzes Kerry's and W's political speech, determining that W's speech "was most like that of an older person, because, as people do when they age, he used fewer first-person singular words, more positive-emotion words, and had "a greater focus on the future...". Kerry's speech on the other hand was more like that of a depressed person, "because of his high use of first-person singular words, physical words like "ache" and negative-emotion words like "hate," along with low use of positive-emotion words, like "happy."
Interesting the relation between first person singular words and depression. It seems intuitive though at some level. The rest isn't so surprising. What is fun though is that W finally wins one in language, especially so given the drubbing he's taken since day 1 for his creative/special use of morphology and syntax.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Linguistics
inguistics, scientific study of language language, systematic communication by vocal symbols. It is a universal characteristic of the human species. Nothing is known of its origin, although scientists have identified a gene that clearly contributes to the human ability to use language.
..... Click the link for more information. , covering the structure (morphology and syntax; see grammar grammar, description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax.
..... Click the link for more information. ), sounds (phonology phonology, study of the sound systems of languages. It is distinguished from phonetics , which is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds; phonology attempts to account for how they are combined, organized, and convey meaning
..... Click the link for more information. ), and meaning (semantics semantics [Gr.,=significant] in general, the study of the relationship between words and meanings. The empirical study of word meanings and sentence meanings in existing languages is a branch of linguistics; the abstract study of meaning in relation to language or
..... Click the link for more information. ), as well as the history of the relations of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behavior. Phonetics phonetics (fōnĕt`ĭks, fə–), study of the sounds of languages from three basic points of view.
..... Click the link for more information. , the study of the sounds of speech, is generally considered a separate (but closely related to) field from linguistics.
Early Linguistics
Before the 19th cent., language was studied mainly as a field of philosophy. Among the philosophers interested in language was Wilhelm von Humboldt Humboldt, Wilhelm, Freiherr von (vĭl`hĕlm frī`hĕr fən h
..... Click the link for more information. , who considered language an activity that arises spontaneously from the human spirit; thus, he felt, languages are different just as the characteristics of individuals are different. In 1786 the English scholar Sir William Jones Jones, Sir William, 1746–94, English philologist and jurist. Jones was celebrated for his understanding of jurisprudence and of Oriental languages. He published an Essay on the Law of Bailments (1781), widely used in America as well as in England.
..... Click the link for more information. suggested the possible affinity of Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and Latin, for the first time bringing to light genetic relations between languages. With Jones's revelation the school of comparative historical linguistics began. Through the comparison of language structures, such 19th-century European linguists as Jakob Grimm Wilhelm Grimm (vĭl`hĕlm grĭm), 1786–1859, and which did much to encourage the romantic revival of folklore.
..... Click the link for more information. , Rasmus Rask Rask, Rasmus Christian (räs`m
..... Click the link for more information. , Karl Brugmann Brugmann, Karl (kärl brk`män), 1849–1919, German philologist.
..... Click the link for more information. , and Antoine Meillet, as well as the American William Dwight Whitney Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Yale.
..... Click the link for more information. , did much to establish the existence of the Indo-European family of languages.
Structural Linguistics
In the 20th cent. the structural or descriptive linguistics school emerged. It dealt with languages at particular points in time (synchronic) rather than throughout their historical development (diachronic). The father of modern structural linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure Saussure, Ferdinand de (fĕrdēnäN` də sōsür`), 1857–1913, Swiss linguist.
..... Click the link for more information. , who believed in language as a systematic structure serving as a link between thought and sound; he thought of language sounds as a series of linguistic signs that are purely arbitrary, as can be seen in the linguistic signs or words for horse: German Pferd, Turkish at, French cheval, and Russian loshad'. In America, a structural approach was continued through the efforts of Franz Boas Boas, Franz (bō`ăz, –ăs), 1858–1942, German-American anthropologist, b. Minden, Germany; Ph.D. Univ. of Kiel, 1881.
..... Click the link for more information. and Edward Sapir Sapir, Edward (səpēr`), 1884–1939, American linguist and anthropologist, b. Pomerania.
..... Click the link for more information. , who worked primarily with Native American languages, and Leonard Bloomfield Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887–1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921–27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927–40), and at Yale (from 1940).
..... Click the link for more information. , whose methodology required that nonlinguistic criteria must not enter a structural description. Rigorous procedures for determining language structure were developed by Kenneth Pike, Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, and others.
See also structuralism structuralism, theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. .
Transformational-Generative Grammar
In the 1950s the school of linguistic thought known as transformational-generative grammar received wide acclaim through the works of Noam Chomsky Chomsky, Noam (nōm chŏm`skē), 1928–, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia.
..... Click the link for more information. . Chomsky postulated a syntactic base of language (called deep structure), which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (called transformations) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentences. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciations, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformations, pronunciation, and word insertion. Another important distinction made in transformational-generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speaker's actual use of language). Although the first work done in transformational-generative grammar was syntactic, later studies have applied the theory to the phonological and semantic components of language.
Other Areas of Linguistic Study
In contrast to theoretical schools of linguistics, workers in applied linguistics in the latter part of the 20th cent. have produced much work in the areas of foreign-language teaching and of bilingual education in the public schools (in the United States this has primarily involved Spanish and, in the Southwest, some Native American languages in addition to English). In addition, such subfields as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics have gained importance.
Bibliography
See F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (tr. 1966); J. Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968), and Language and Linguistics (1981); N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1969); A. Radford, Transformational Syntax (1982); F. J. Newmeyer, Linguistics (4 vol., 1988); W. J. Frawley, ed., International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2d ed., 4 vol., 2003).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia® Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/
linguistics
Study of the nature and structure of language. It traditionally encompasses semantics, syntax, and phonology. Synchronic linguistic studies aim to describe a language as it exists at a given time; diachronic studies trace a language's historical development. Greek philosophers in the 5th century BC who debated the origins of human language were the first in the West to be concerned with linguistic theory. The first complete Greek grammar, written by Dionysus Thrax in the 1st century BC, was a model for Roman grammarians, whose work led to the medieval and Renaissance vernacular grammars.
With the rise of historical linguistics in the 19th century, linguistics became a science. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Ferdinand de Saussure established the structuralist school of linguistics (see structuralism), which analyzed actual speech to learn about the underlying structure of language. In the 1950s Noam Chomsky challenged the structuralist program, arguing that linguistics should study native speakers' unconscious knowledge of their language (competence), not the language they actually produce (performance). His general approach, known as transformational generative grammar, was extensively revised in subsequent decades as the extended standard theory, the principles-and-parameters (government-binding) approach, and the minimalist program. Other grammatical theories developed from the 1960s were generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar, and cognitive grammar. Chomsky's emphasis on linguistic competence greatly stimulated the development of the related disciplines of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Other related fields are anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the philosophy of language.
For more information on linguistics, visit Britannica.com. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1994-2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Linguistics
The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles that constrain the class of all languages. Generative grammar distinguishes between the knowledge of language (linguistic competence), which is represented by mental grammar, and the production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance).
If grammar is defined as the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, then a general theory of language is a theory of grammar. A grammar includes everything one knows about a language; its phonetics and phonology (the sounds and the sound system), its morphology (the structure of words), its lexicon (the words or vocabulary), its syntax (the structure of sentences and the constraints on well-formed sentences), and its semantics (the meaning of words and sentences). See Psychoacoustics, Speech, Speech perception
Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics. The form of language representation in the mind, that is, linguistic competence and the structure and components of the mental grammar, is the concern of theoretical linguistics. The branch of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance, that is, the production and comprehension of speech (or of sign language by the deaf), is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists also investigate how children acquire the complex grammar that underlies language use. See Information processing, Psycholinguistics
..... Click the link for more information. , covering the structure (morphology and syntax; see grammar grammar, description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax.
..... Click the link for more information. ), sounds (phonology phonology, study of the sound systems of languages. It is distinguished from phonetics , which is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds; phonology attempts to account for how they are combined, organized, and convey meaning
..... Click the link for more information. ), and meaning (semantics semantics [Gr.,=significant] in general, the study of the relationship between words and meanings. The empirical study of word meanings and sentence meanings in existing languages is a branch of linguistics; the abstract study of meaning in relation to language or
..... Click the link for more information. ), as well as the history of the relations of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behavior. Phonetics phonetics (fōnĕt`ĭks, fə–), study of the sounds of languages from three basic points of view.
..... Click the link for more information. , the study of the sounds of speech, is generally considered a separate (but closely related to) field from linguistics.
Early Linguistics
Before the 19th cent., language was studied mainly as a field of philosophy. Among the philosophers interested in language was Wilhelm von Humboldt Humboldt, Wilhelm, Freiherr von (vĭl`hĕlm frī`hĕr fən h
..... Click the link for more information. , who considered language an activity that arises spontaneously from the human spirit; thus, he felt, languages are different just as the characteristics of individuals are different. In 1786 the English scholar Sir William Jones Jones, Sir William, 1746–94, English philologist and jurist. Jones was celebrated for his understanding of jurisprudence and of Oriental languages. He published an Essay on the Law of Bailments (1781), widely used in America as well as in England.
..... Click the link for more information. suggested the possible affinity of Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and Latin, for the first time bringing to light genetic relations between languages. With Jones's revelation the school of comparative historical linguistics began. Through the comparison of language structures, such 19th-century European linguists as Jakob Grimm Wilhelm Grimm (vĭl`hĕlm grĭm), 1786–1859, and which did much to encourage the romantic revival of folklore.
..... Click the link for more information. , Rasmus Rask Rask, Rasmus Christian (räs`m
..... Click the link for more information. , Karl Brugmann Brugmann, Karl (kärl brk`män), 1849–1919, German philologist.
..... Click the link for more information. , and Antoine Meillet, as well as the American William Dwight Whitney Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–94, American Sanskrit scholar and lexicographer, b. Northampton, Mass. After studying in Germany, Whitney became professor of Sanskrit and of comparative philology at Yale.
..... Click the link for more information. , did much to establish the existence of the Indo-European family of languages.
Structural Linguistics
In the 20th cent. the structural or descriptive linguistics school emerged. It dealt with languages at particular points in time (synchronic) rather than throughout their historical development (diachronic). The father of modern structural linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure Saussure, Ferdinand de (fĕrdēnäN` də sōsür`), 1857–1913, Swiss linguist.
..... Click the link for more information. , who believed in language as a systematic structure serving as a link between thought and sound; he thought of language sounds as a series of linguistic signs that are purely arbitrary, as can be seen in the linguistic signs or words for horse: German Pferd, Turkish at, French cheval, and Russian loshad'. In America, a structural approach was continued through the efforts of Franz Boas Boas, Franz (bō`ăz, –ăs), 1858–1942, German-American anthropologist, b. Minden, Germany; Ph.D. Univ. of Kiel, 1881.
..... Click the link for more information. and Edward Sapir Sapir, Edward (səpēr`), 1884–1939, American linguist and anthropologist, b. Pomerania.
..... Click the link for more information. , who worked primarily with Native American languages, and Leonard Bloomfield Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887–1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921–27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927–40), and at Yale (from 1940).
..... Click the link for more information. , whose methodology required that nonlinguistic criteria must not enter a structural description. Rigorous procedures for determining language structure were developed by Kenneth Pike, Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, and others.
See also structuralism structuralism, theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. .
Transformational-Generative Grammar
In the 1950s the school of linguistic thought known as transformational-generative grammar received wide acclaim through the works of Noam Chomsky Chomsky, Noam (nōm chŏm`skē), 1928–, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia.
..... Click the link for more information. . Chomsky postulated a syntactic base of language (called deep structure), which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (called transformations) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentences. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciations, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformations, pronunciation, and word insertion. Another important distinction made in transformational-generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speaker's actual use of language). Although the first work done in transformational-generative grammar was syntactic, later studies have applied the theory to the phonological and semantic components of language.
Other Areas of Linguistic Study
In contrast to theoretical schools of linguistics, workers in applied linguistics in the latter part of the 20th cent. have produced much work in the areas of foreign-language teaching and of bilingual education in the public schools (in the United States this has primarily involved Spanish and, in the Southwest, some Native American languages in addition to English). In addition, such subfields as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics have gained importance.
Bibliography
See F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (tr. 1966); J. Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968), and Language and Linguistics (1981); N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1969); A. Radford, Transformational Syntax (1982); F. J. Newmeyer, Linguistics (4 vol., 1988); W. J. Frawley, ed., International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2d ed., 4 vol., 2003).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia® Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/
linguistics
Study of the nature and structure of language. It traditionally encompasses semantics, syntax, and phonology. Synchronic linguistic studies aim to describe a language as it exists at a given time; diachronic studies trace a language's historical development. Greek philosophers in the 5th century BC who debated the origins of human language were the first in the West to be concerned with linguistic theory. The first complete Greek grammar, written by Dionysus Thrax in the 1st century BC, was a model for Roman grammarians, whose work led to the medieval and Renaissance vernacular grammars.
With the rise of historical linguistics in the 19th century, linguistics became a science. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Ferdinand de Saussure established the structuralist school of linguistics (see structuralism), which analyzed actual speech to learn about the underlying structure of language. In the 1950s Noam Chomsky challenged the structuralist program, arguing that linguistics should study native speakers' unconscious knowledge of their language (competence), not the language they actually produce (performance). His general approach, known as transformational generative grammar, was extensively revised in subsequent decades as the extended standard theory, the principles-and-parameters (government-binding) approach, and the minimalist program. Other grammatical theories developed from the 1960s were generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar, and cognitive grammar. Chomsky's emphasis on linguistic competence greatly stimulated the development of the related disciplines of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Other related fields are anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the philosophy of language.
For more information on linguistics, visit Britannica.com. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1994-2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Linguistics
The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles that constrain the class of all languages. Generative grammar distinguishes between the knowledge of language (linguistic competence), which is represented by mental grammar, and the production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance).
If grammar is defined as the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, then a general theory of language is a theory of grammar. A grammar includes everything one knows about a language; its phonetics and phonology (the sounds and the sound system), its morphology (the structure of words), its lexicon (the words or vocabulary), its syntax (the structure of sentences and the constraints on well-formed sentences), and its semantics (the meaning of words and sentences). See Psychoacoustics, Speech, Speech perception
Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics. The form of language representation in the mind, that is, linguistic competence and the structure and components of the mental grammar, is the concern of theoretical linguistics. The branch of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance, that is, the production and comprehension of speech (or of sign language by the deaf), is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists also investigate how children acquire the complex grammar that underlies language use. See Information processing, Psycholinguistics
DESIGNING AND PRODUCING MULTIMEDIA LEARNING PROTOTYPE TO ENHANCE UNIVERSITY STUDENT’S RECEPTIVE SKILLS
With regard to material development, Kitao (1997) asserts that among the five important components in language instruction, which are students, a teacher, materials, teaching method and evaluation, learning materials indeed play an important role. In many cases, teachers and students rely heavily on learning materials which most of the time are in the form of textbooks, for they determine the content, methods, and procedures of learning. However, some students find materials in textbooks uninteresting and tedious because the contents are not useful, meaningful and interesting for them (Kitao, 1997). Thus, besides textbooks, there should be a variety of materials available to students and teachers, such as in the form of video and audio tapes, computer software, and visual aids.
In response to this phenomena above, this study examines the processes involved in developing multimedia learning materials for receptive skills that is called Integrated Listening-Reading Multimedia Activities (henceforth will be called ILRMA). This is designed mainly for the context of Indonesian university students. It is intended for individual learning enhancement as well as supplementary materials in classrooms. The study employed qualitative study with descriptive procedure involving first year students of Telkom Institute of Technology. The instruments used were questionnaire for needs analysis and library research.
The learning materials for listening skills learning materials were developed based on the six types of listening performance provided by Brown (2004), Lund’s six listener functions (Hadley, 2001), and nine listening responses developed by Richards (2005) and modified by Lund (Hadley, 2001). Meanwhile, for reading skills the learning materials were developed based on Nunan’s (1999) five steps in designing reading course, and Barrett’s (1968) taxonomy. The courseware was designed by referring to Plass’ model of interface design (1998), Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning (2003), and Dickinson’s design features for self-instructional materials.
It was found that, in the area of listening the skills that need to be enhanced include literal recognition (for example, making summary) and making inference. On the other hand, inference and analysis are the area for reading skills. Furthermore, aside from the exhaustive processes, the design and production of the multimedia learning materials for receptive skills requires a well plan and involves several people. They are a material developer for developing the learning materials, a software engineer for transforming the learning materials into prototype software, an illustrator for drawing images, and a technician for recording audio. In addition, it requires a well plan and immense amount of budget.
To complete the cycle of the study, it is suggested that an effectiveness study is conducted to evaluate the Integrated Listening-Reading Multimedia Activities.
Keywords: receptive skills, multimedia, learning materials
1. Introduction
All universities in Indonesia, including Institut Teknologi Telkom (henceforth, will be referred to IT Telkom), assign their freshmen to take English as compulsory subject. Particularly in IT Telkom, the English subject is intended to enhance the freshmen’s receptive skills, listening and reading. This is due to the fact that strong receptive skills will provide a lot of advantages for the students to enhance their productive skills which cover speaking and writing.
In terms of learning second or foreign language, one would think that reading, writing, speaking, and listening happen at the same time. As a matter of fact, learning a second or foreign language is not that different from learning the first. Listening precedes speaking, and reading precedes writing. Listening and reading are both receptive skills whereas students are passively receiving and processing information. Hence, listening and reading skills play a key role in the acquisition process.
Many studies have been conducted to explore and investigate the role of listening and reading in learning second and foreign language. The results strengthened the view that comprehension-based activities along with communicative oriented ones facilitate second language acquisition. After all, it is more than apparent that input plays a crucial role in second language acquisition.
With the advancement of multimedia technology, there are numerous learning materials designed and developed for enhancing student’s receptive skills. Indeed, regarding language learning, it has been well noted that there are advantages of using computer based multimedia. Among them are that computers can be programmed to allow users to control both the conditions of viewing and what is viewed (Frommer, 1998 in Hadley, 2001:212) and that it offers interactive learning (Frommer, 1998 in Hadley, 2001:163). The possibility of controlling the conditions of viewing and what is viewed enable a material developer to adapt the information and tasks with the students’ competency level and address their individual interests. Meanwhile, the interactive learning results in the improvement of sensory stimulation (Hoogeven, 1995 in Munir 2002).
Although there are many educational software in the form of CD-ROM and Internet web sites available, Meziane asserts that most software developments were mostly related to business or games-oriented applications (Mukti and Hwa, 2004). As a computer plays as a mediator (Hoven, 1997, 1999), what determines the effectiveness in one’s learning is the pedagogically content embedded in the multimedia software package.
Noting the facts above, this study is designed to develop learning materials and activities to enhance students’ listening and reading skills in the form of prototype software. As Wilbur (2004) stated that to justify the use of multimedia in enhancing learning and allow learning to gain deeper understanding of the instructional materials, the materials should be properly designed.
Thus, this study attempts to explore processes involved in the preparation and the production of listening and reading materials in the prototype software. It is intended that the prototype software developed in this study will be beneficial for IT Telkom’s freshmen to enhance their listening and reading skills, English lecturers to assist them in implementing the new perspective in TEFL, and material developers to further develop multimedia learning materials intended for classroom use as well as individual use.
2. Theoretical Foundation
2.1 Principles in Developing Materials for Receptive Skills in EFL Context
Brown (1995:139) defines materials as “any systematic description of the techniques and exercises to be used in classroom teaching.” Celce-Muria (1991) and Richards (2002; 2005) denote that the goal to create learning materials is to design resources for effective learning. Richards (2002) also notes that designing learning material has a purpose to develop a sequence of activities that leads teachers and students through a learning route that is at an appropriate level of difficulty, is engaging, that provides both motivating and useful practices. Moreover, it is essential for learning materials to be interested and encouraging students to practice (Rowntree cited in Richards, 2002). Learning material should also help students feel at ease and develop their confidence (Tomlinson cited in Richards, 2002). Consequently, learning materials ought to provide opportunities for individual practice and for self-assessment of learning.
Related to material development, Miller (1995) suggests that it is better to prepare one own materials designed for students and their needs for three reasons: (1) local contexts allow students to focus on language-use rather than battle with strange contexts, (2) materials produced in-house can be easily updated, and (3) students appreciate the personal touch of their teacher in materials produced specifically for them.
2.1.1The Nature of Listening and Reading to Foreign Language
Gebhard (1996), Hadley (2001), and Nunan (1999) point out that listening is not a passive skill, rather; it is a reactive skill for it places many demands involving the processes of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli (Jones and Plass, 2002). Thus, listeners are expected to comprehend spoken language.
Mohammed (2005) asserts at least there are three stages of listening comprehension for EFL students: (1) listening and making no response; (2) listening and making short responses; and (3) listening and making longer responses. More comprehensively, Zengfu (cited in Guo, 2005) proposes that EFL students needs to experience five stages in listening comprehension: (1) hearing a series of sounds for students cannot understand the content at all and since they need to feel for the pronunciation and intonation of English; (2) distinguishing some isolated, content-related words; (3) distinguishing phrases and sentence patterns from the language; (4) distinguishing clauses or sentences in the language flow, knowing their implications, and having a reasonable understanding of the whole content; and (5) generally understanding most spoken texts coherently.
Meanwhile, Anderson (in Nunan, 2003:68) defines reading as a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their own background knowledge to build meaning. The goal of reading is comprehension. This means that the meaning does not only depend on the reader or the text, but depends on the interaction of both. In other words, during reading a reader processes, in his mind, new information from the text by integrating them with his background knowledge. Detailed process of reading is presented in the following section.
2.1.2 The Processes in Listening and Reading to Foreign Language
When it comes to listening, one must “comprehend the text as they listen to it, retain information in memory, integrate it with what follows, and continually adjust their understanding of what they hear in the light of prior knowledge and incoming information” (Osada, 2004). Related to this, Hoven (1999) points out that there are two major principles underlying the understanding of the process in EFL listening comprehension: (1) interactive process; and (2) cognitive activity.
In interactive process, as people listen, they process not only what they hear, but also connect it to other information they already know. Moreover, cognitive activity explained that much of the principle of interactivity are interrelated with the predominantly cognitive nature of listening (Hoven, 1997). This is due to the fact that majority of the processing dynamics occur within the cognitive domain, with some involvement of the metacognitive and socio-affective domain (O’Malley and Rubin cited in Hoven, 1997). Within this process, listening skills being developed include both micro and macro skills.
Micro skills are related to bottom-up process which includes understanding incoming language proceeding from sounds, into words, into grammatical relationship and lexical meaning and so on (Celce-Muria, 1991; Guo, 2005; Nunan, 2003). Here, listening is done in a linear fashion from the smallest meaningful unit (phonemes) to complete texts. It is text-based. The activities involve listening for specific details, recognizing word-order patterns, and recognizing sound distinctions.
Meanwhile, macro skills involve top-down processing, which is listener-based (Guo, 2005). The skills include inferring situations, participants, and goals using real-world knowledge and using non verbal clues such as facial, kinestic, body language to decipher meanings (Brown, 2001). The strategies include listening for main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, and summarizing.
On the other hand, researchers of both first and second language reading have argued against the view that texts are self-contained objects and it is the reader’s job to recover the text’s meaning so that they have proposed a dynamic relationship between text and reader (Wallace, 1939:39). It is explained that texts do not contain meaning but they have potential for meaning. This potential is realized only when there is interaction between text and reader. In this case, Singhal (1998) cites Rumelhart (1977) that reading, whether in a first or second language context involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between the reader and the text. This process is better known as interactive reading models (Barnett in Hadley, 2001; Murtagh, 1989; Anderson in Nunan, 2002; Brown, 2001).
This study uses the interactive approach to reading as the springboard in developing reading materials, when integrating the materials and the exercises, and in presenting them using computer-based multimedia. In other words, the courseware developed should reflect the description of interactive model of reading.
2.2 Developing Materials and Activities for Listening and Reading
2.2.1 The Aspects of Listening Materials and Tasks
There are three important aspects to be well considered in developing listening materials. These aspects are setting conditions for effective listening, text features, and context features. Berne (cited in Osada, 2004) provides nine facts regarding a second or a foreign language listening comprehension: (1) familiarity with passage content will definitely facilitate FL listening comprehension; (2) lower-proficiency FL listeners attend to phonological cue, whilst higher-proficiency FL listeners attend to semantic cues; (3) the degree of FL listening proficiency determines the effectiveness of different types of speech modifications or visual aids (4) repetition of passages should be encouraged. It is necessary to let listeners listen to a passage more than one time; (5) pre-listening activities, for instance, a short synopses of a passage is helpful to facilitate FL listening comprehension; (6) related to attitudinal and attentional factors, compared to audiotape, videotape is more useful; (7) especially for higher-proficiency FL listeners, the use authentic listening passages leads to greater improvement; (8) it is necessary to train and teach how to use listening strategies; and (9) there is a need of wide range of situations where listening is required as well as different types of listening, different types of listening passages, different modes of presentation, and different types of activities or tasks.
Text features cover information organization, familiarity of topic, explicitness, type of input (genre), and level of intimacy (Anderson and Lynch cited in Nunan, 1999; Hoven 1997). Meanwhile, context features deals with those not directly related to the language of the text, such as the rate delivery and length of passage.
Additionally, in order to make an assumption that the text is suitable for the listeners, Eggins (1994) proposes two formulas, which is measuring (1) lexical density and (2) grammatical intricacy. If the number of lexical density is close to 1, it means that the number of content words including verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs is proportional to the number of non-content words including pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. Meanwhile, if the number of grammatical intricacy is equal to 1, it means that the type of sentences in the text is simple sentences, which contains only one clause.
Regarding the aspects of listening tasks featuring the classification of listening performance, listener function and response demand, Brown (2004) provides six types of listening performance: (1) reactive—focuses pronunciation through brief coral or individual drills; (2) intensive—focuses on phonemes, words, intonation and discourse marker; (3) responsive—focuses on the process of understanding and responding to teacher’s talk; (4) selective—focuses on practicing to scan the material selectively for certain information; (5) extensive—requires listeners to invoke other interactive skills; and (6) interactive—focuses on students to focus on discussion, debate and group work. Moreover, Lund (cited in Hadley, 2001:185-186) lists six listener functions: (1) identification—includes identification of words, word categories, phonemic distinctions, morphological distinctions or semantic cues to meaning; (2) orientation—identification of important facts about the text, i.e. the participant, the situation, the general topic, the text type, etc.; (3) main idea comprehension—understanding of the higher-order ideas in the listening passage; (4) detail comprehension—understanding of more specific information; (5) full comprehension—understanding of both the main ideas and supportive details; and (6) replication—ability to reproduce the message through repetition of the content or transcription.
Further, these aspects of listening tasks are combined with the nine listening responses developed by Richards (2005) and modified by Lund (cited in Hadley, 2001:187), i.e. (1) doing—implying a physical response; (2) choosing—involving activities i.e. putting pictures in order or matching a text with picture; (3) transferring—including filling in a graph, tracing a route, and other transferring of information from one modality to another; (4) answering—requiring listener to answer a set of comprehension questions for specific information in the text; (5) condensing—including taking notes based on the listening passage; (6) extending—involving activities i.e. creating an ending, completing a partial transcript, and so on; (7) duplicating—providing evidence that the function of replication has been accomplished; (8) modeling—involving imitation of features of the text; and (9) conversing—implying some kind of interaction with the text.
2.2.2 Developing Materials for Reading Comprehension
Nunan (1999:266-267) suggests five steps in designing a reading course, i.e. deciding overall purpose, identifying text and tasks, identifying linguistic elements, sequencing and integrating texts and tasks, and link reading to other skills. Deciding overall purpose is important because goal statements are used as a basis for developing instructional objectives (Brown, 1995;1999). Identifying or selecting text requires material developer to decide whether the texts are selected from authentic or created materials. Nuttal (1982:25) points out that there are three factors that should be considered when selecting texts, i.e. readability, suitability of content, and exploitability. Meanwhile, (Day, 1999) presents seven factors involved as the criteria in selecting an EFL reading passage i.e. interest, exploitability, readability, topic, political appropriateness, cultural suitability, and appearance.
In relation with identifying reading task, Day and Park (2005) posit that that well-designed comprehension questions can be used to help students interact with the text to create or construct meaning. Such questions demand information that represents outcomes of the comprehension process (cf. Myers and Brent-Harris 2004). Consequently before making the questions, the types of comprehension outputs should be selected first. One reference for comprehension output is The Barrett’s (1968) taxonomy of the Cognitive and Affective Dimension of Reading Comprehension (Myers, 2004; Day and Park, 2005; Hadley, 2001) which consists of five comprehension outcomes, i.e. literal comprehension, reorganization, inferential comprehension, evaluation, and appreciation. The comprehension output then is delivered through several forms of questions (Day and Park, 2005) like yes/no, alternative, true or false, Wh-, and multiple choice questions.
Identifying the linguistic elements refers to analysis on grammatical, lexical and/or discoursal elements (Nunan, 1999). Considering that the materials developed in this present study are presented in computer multimedia, the linguistic elements of the texts used are presented as generic help provided in the same screen with texts and exercises. Students only need to click the grammar help whenever they need.
The fourth steps in designing a reading program is sequencing and integrating the selected texts and tasks. This stage may be started by referring to approaches to syllabus design for the program. Finally, the reading program designed is linked to other language skills of language interactions that mirror sequences in daily life (Nunan, 1999).
2.3 Presenting Listening and Reading Materials in Computer Based Multimedia
In terms of methodological framework of CALL, Hubbard (cited in Hoven, 1997 and 1999) proposes three components: (1) approach, (2) design, and (3) procedure. In the approach, the role of computer is determined. If it is to instruct, then students are responders, not initiator following a set of learning objectives predetermined learning paths. If it is to assist, then there is no predetermined learning path and students are initiators taking responsibilities for their own learning.
Furthermore, the design of a CALL should cover student variables, syllabus orientation, content, program focus, and hardware as well as programming language. Meanwhile, the procedure should consist of the activity types, presentational scheme, input judging, feedback, control options, and screen layouts incorporated into the CALL.
The prototype software being developed is included into the instructional approach in which the activities take place in doing exercises. Here, students are responders, not initiators. The computer instructs them and they learn from the computer. However, the purpose of the prototype software developed in this study is to assist students to support the development of their intellectual capacities as abstract operational thoughts assist them in applying logical thinking to solve complex problems (Brown, 2001).
2.3.1 Cognitive Approach to Multimedia Learning
There are three assumptions underlying how people learn under cognitive approach: (1) humans use one “channel” for processing visual information and a second one for processing auditory information; (2) there is a limit to how much information can be processed in each channel at a time; and (3) humans are active processors of information, not passive receptors (Kinnamon, 2003). Thus, cognitive approach is closely related to information processing and problem solving to interface design in multimedia environment.
In an attempt to design effective multimedia instructional practices, Sorden (2005) combines five principles based on cognitive theory—theory of perceiving and knowing, thinking, remembering, understanding language, and learning. These principles are: (1) Baddeley’s model of Working Memory, Sweller’s Theory of Cognitive Load, and Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning for effects of presenting multimedia learning; and (2) Anderson’s ACT-R Cognitive Architecture and Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory for levels of processing that can occur within or between the visual and verbal systems.
The cognitive theory model of multimedia consists of five modes of knowledge representation. Physical representations represent words or pictures that are presented to the student, while sensory representations represent the ears or eyes of the student. The shallow or short-term memory representations represents sounds or images attended to by the student, and deep working memory representations represent verbal and pictorial models constructed by the student. Moreover, long-term memory representations represent the student’s relevant prior knowledge. Figure 1 shows this cognitive theory model of multimedia learning.
In response to this phenomena above, this study examines the processes involved in developing multimedia learning materials for receptive skills that is called Integrated Listening-Reading Multimedia Activities (henceforth will be called ILRMA). This is designed mainly for the context of Indonesian university students. It is intended for individual learning enhancement as well as supplementary materials in classrooms. The study employed qualitative study with descriptive procedure involving first year students of Telkom Institute of Technology. The instruments used were questionnaire for needs analysis and library research.
The learning materials for listening skills learning materials were developed based on the six types of listening performance provided by Brown (2004), Lund’s six listener functions (Hadley, 2001), and nine listening responses developed by Richards (2005) and modified by Lund (Hadley, 2001). Meanwhile, for reading skills the learning materials were developed based on Nunan’s (1999) five steps in designing reading course, and Barrett’s (1968) taxonomy. The courseware was designed by referring to Plass’ model of interface design (1998), Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning (2003), and Dickinson’s design features for self-instructional materials.
It was found that, in the area of listening the skills that need to be enhanced include literal recognition (for example, making summary) and making inference. On the other hand, inference and analysis are the area for reading skills. Furthermore, aside from the exhaustive processes, the design and production of the multimedia learning materials for receptive skills requires a well plan and involves several people. They are a material developer for developing the learning materials, a software engineer for transforming the learning materials into prototype software, an illustrator for drawing images, and a technician for recording audio. In addition, it requires a well plan and immense amount of budget.
To complete the cycle of the study, it is suggested that an effectiveness study is conducted to evaluate the Integrated Listening-Reading Multimedia Activities.
Keywords: receptive skills, multimedia, learning materials
1. Introduction
All universities in Indonesia, including Institut Teknologi Telkom (henceforth, will be referred to IT Telkom), assign their freshmen to take English as compulsory subject. Particularly in IT Telkom, the English subject is intended to enhance the freshmen’s receptive skills, listening and reading. This is due to the fact that strong receptive skills will provide a lot of advantages for the students to enhance their productive skills which cover speaking and writing.
In terms of learning second or foreign language, one would think that reading, writing, speaking, and listening happen at the same time. As a matter of fact, learning a second or foreign language is not that different from learning the first. Listening precedes speaking, and reading precedes writing. Listening and reading are both receptive skills whereas students are passively receiving and processing information. Hence, listening and reading skills play a key role in the acquisition process.
Many studies have been conducted to explore and investigate the role of listening and reading in learning second and foreign language. The results strengthened the view that comprehension-based activities along with communicative oriented ones facilitate second language acquisition. After all, it is more than apparent that input plays a crucial role in second language acquisition.
With the advancement of multimedia technology, there are numerous learning materials designed and developed for enhancing student’s receptive skills. Indeed, regarding language learning, it has been well noted that there are advantages of using computer based multimedia. Among them are that computers can be programmed to allow users to control both the conditions of viewing and what is viewed (Frommer, 1998 in Hadley, 2001:212) and that it offers interactive learning (Frommer, 1998 in Hadley, 2001:163). The possibility of controlling the conditions of viewing and what is viewed enable a material developer to adapt the information and tasks with the students’ competency level and address their individual interests. Meanwhile, the interactive learning results in the improvement of sensory stimulation (Hoogeven, 1995 in Munir 2002).
Although there are many educational software in the form of CD-ROM and Internet web sites available, Meziane asserts that most software developments were mostly related to business or games-oriented applications (Mukti and Hwa, 2004). As a computer plays as a mediator (Hoven, 1997, 1999), what determines the effectiveness in one’s learning is the pedagogically content embedded in the multimedia software package.
Noting the facts above, this study is designed to develop learning materials and activities to enhance students’ listening and reading skills in the form of prototype software. As Wilbur (2004) stated that to justify the use of multimedia in enhancing learning and allow learning to gain deeper understanding of the instructional materials, the materials should be properly designed.
Thus, this study attempts to explore processes involved in the preparation and the production of listening and reading materials in the prototype software. It is intended that the prototype software developed in this study will be beneficial for IT Telkom’s freshmen to enhance their listening and reading skills, English lecturers to assist them in implementing the new perspective in TEFL, and material developers to further develop multimedia learning materials intended for classroom use as well as individual use.
2. Theoretical Foundation
2.1 Principles in Developing Materials for Receptive Skills in EFL Context
Brown (1995:139) defines materials as “any systematic description of the techniques and exercises to be used in classroom teaching.” Celce-Muria (1991) and Richards (2002; 2005) denote that the goal to create learning materials is to design resources for effective learning. Richards (2002) also notes that designing learning material has a purpose to develop a sequence of activities that leads teachers and students through a learning route that is at an appropriate level of difficulty, is engaging, that provides both motivating and useful practices. Moreover, it is essential for learning materials to be interested and encouraging students to practice (Rowntree cited in Richards, 2002). Learning material should also help students feel at ease and develop their confidence (Tomlinson cited in Richards, 2002). Consequently, learning materials ought to provide opportunities for individual practice and for self-assessment of learning.
Related to material development, Miller (1995) suggests that it is better to prepare one own materials designed for students and their needs for three reasons: (1) local contexts allow students to focus on language-use rather than battle with strange contexts, (2) materials produced in-house can be easily updated, and (3) students appreciate the personal touch of their teacher in materials produced specifically for them.
2.1.1The Nature of Listening and Reading to Foreign Language
Gebhard (1996), Hadley (2001), and Nunan (1999) point out that listening is not a passive skill, rather; it is a reactive skill for it places many demands involving the processes of receiving, attending to and assigning meaning to aural stimuli (Jones and Plass, 2002). Thus, listeners are expected to comprehend spoken language.
Mohammed (2005) asserts at least there are three stages of listening comprehension for EFL students: (1) listening and making no response; (2) listening and making short responses; and (3) listening and making longer responses. More comprehensively, Zengfu (cited in Guo, 2005) proposes that EFL students needs to experience five stages in listening comprehension: (1) hearing a series of sounds for students cannot understand the content at all and since they need to feel for the pronunciation and intonation of English; (2) distinguishing some isolated, content-related words; (3) distinguishing phrases and sentence patterns from the language; (4) distinguishing clauses or sentences in the language flow, knowing their implications, and having a reasonable understanding of the whole content; and (5) generally understanding most spoken texts coherently.
Meanwhile, Anderson (in Nunan, 2003:68) defines reading as a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their own background knowledge to build meaning. The goal of reading is comprehension. This means that the meaning does not only depend on the reader or the text, but depends on the interaction of both. In other words, during reading a reader processes, in his mind, new information from the text by integrating them with his background knowledge. Detailed process of reading is presented in the following section.
2.1.2 The Processes in Listening and Reading to Foreign Language
When it comes to listening, one must “comprehend the text as they listen to it, retain information in memory, integrate it with what follows, and continually adjust their understanding of what they hear in the light of prior knowledge and incoming information” (Osada, 2004). Related to this, Hoven (1999) points out that there are two major principles underlying the understanding of the process in EFL listening comprehension: (1) interactive process; and (2) cognitive activity.
In interactive process, as people listen, they process not only what they hear, but also connect it to other information they already know. Moreover, cognitive activity explained that much of the principle of interactivity are interrelated with the predominantly cognitive nature of listening (Hoven, 1997). This is due to the fact that majority of the processing dynamics occur within the cognitive domain, with some involvement of the metacognitive and socio-affective domain (O’Malley and Rubin cited in Hoven, 1997). Within this process, listening skills being developed include both micro and macro skills.
Micro skills are related to bottom-up process which includes understanding incoming language proceeding from sounds, into words, into grammatical relationship and lexical meaning and so on (Celce-Muria, 1991; Guo, 2005; Nunan, 2003). Here, listening is done in a linear fashion from the smallest meaningful unit (phonemes) to complete texts. It is text-based. The activities involve listening for specific details, recognizing word-order patterns, and recognizing sound distinctions.
Meanwhile, macro skills involve top-down processing, which is listener-based (Guo, 2005). The skills include inferring situations, participants, and goals using real-world knowledge and using non verbal clues such as facial, kinestic, body language to decipher meanings (Brown, 2001). The strategies include listening for main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, and summarizing.
On the other hand, researchers of both first and second language reading have argued against the view that texts are self-contained objects and it is the reader’s job to recover the text’s meaning so that they have proposed a dynamic relationship between text and reader (Wallace, 1939:39). It is explained that texts do not contain meaning but they have potential for meaning. This potential is realized only when there is interaction between text and reader. In this case, Singhal (1998) cites Rumelhart (1977) that reading, whether in a first or second language context involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between the reader and the text. This process is better known as interactive reading models (Barnett in Hadley, 2001; Murtagh, 1989; Anderson in Nunan, 2002; Brown, 2001).
This study uses the interactive approach to reading as the springboard in developing reading materials, when integrating the materials and the exercises, and in presenting them using computer-based multimedia. In other words, the courseware developed should reflect the description of interactive model of reading.
2.2 Developing Materials and Activities for Listening and Reading
2.2.1 The Aspects of Listening Materials and Tasks
There are three important aspects to be well considered in developing listening materials. These aspects are setting conditions for effective listening, text features, and context features. Berne (cited in Osada, 2004) provides nine facts regarding a second or a foreign language listening comprehension: (1) familiarity with passage content will definitely facilitate FL listening comprehension; (2) lower-proficiency FL listeners attend to phonological cue, whilst higher-proficiency FL listeners attend to semantic cues; (3) the degree of FL listening proficiency determines the effectiveness of different types of speech modifications or visual aids (4) repetition of passages should be encouraged. It is necessary to let listeners listen to a passage more than one time; (5) pre-listening activities, for instance, a short synopses of a passage is helpful to facilitate FL listening comprehension; (6) related to attitudinal and attentional factors, compared to audiotape, videotape is more useful; (7) especially for higher-proficiency FL listeners, the use authentic listening passages leads to greater improvement; (8) it is necessary to train and teach how to use listening strategies; and (9) there is a need of wide range of situations where listening is required as well as different types of listening, different types of listening passages, different modes of presentation, and different types of activities or tasks.
Text features cover information organization, familiarity of topic, explicitness, type of input (genre), and level of intimacy (Anderson and Lynch cited in Nunan, 1999; Hoven 1997). Meanwhile, context features deals with those not directly related to the language of the text, such as the rate delivery and length of passage.
Additionally, in order to make an assumption that the text is suitable for the listeners, Eggins (1994) proposes two formulas, which is measuring (1) lexical density and (2) grammatical intricacy. If the number of lexical density is close to 1, it means that the number of content words including verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs is proportional to the number of non-content words including pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. Meanwhile, if the number of grammatical intricacy is equal to 1, it means that the type of sentences in the text is simple sentences, which contains only one clause.
Regarding the aspects of listening tasks featuring the classification of listening performance, listener function and response demand, Brown (2004) provides six types of listening performance: (1) reactive—focuses pronunciation through brief coral or individual drills; (2) intensive—focuses on phonemes, words, intonation and discourse marker; (3) responsive—focuses on the process of understanding and responding to teacher’s talk; (4) selective—focuses on practicing to scan the material selectively for certain information; (5) extensive—requires listeners to invoke other interactive skills; and (6) interactive—focuses on students to focus on discussion, debate and group work. Moreover, Lund (cited in Hadley, 2001:185-186) lists six listener functions: (1) identification—includes identification of words, word categories, phonemic distinctions, morphological distinctions or semantic cues to meaning; (2) orientation—identification of important facts about the text, i.e. the participant, the situation, the general topic, the text type, etc.; (3) main idea comprehension—understanding of the higher-order ideas in the listening passage; (4) detail comprehension—understanding of more specific information; (5) full comprehension—understanding of both the main ideas and supportive details; and (6) replication—ability to reproduce the message through repetition of the content or transcription.
Further, these aspects of listening tasks are combined with the nine listening responses developed by Richards (2005) and modified by Lund (cited in Hadley, 2001:187), i.e. (1) doing—implying a physical response; (2) choosing—involving activities i.e. putting pictures in order or matching a text with picture; (3) transferring—including filling in a graph, tracing a route, and other transferring of information from one modality to another; (4) answering—requiring listener to answer a set of comprehension questions for specific information in the text; (5) condensing—including taking notes based on the listening passage; (6) extending—involving activities i.e. creating an ending, completing a partial transcript, and so on; (7) duplicating—providing evidence that the function of replication has been accomplished; (8) modeling—involving imitation of features of the text; and (9) conversing—implying some kind of interaction with the text.
2.2.2 Developing Materials for Reading Comprehension
Nunan (1999:266-267) suggests five steps in designing a reading course, i.e. deciding overall purpose, identifying text and tasks, identifying linguistic elements, sequencing and integrating texts and tasks, and link reading to other skills. Deciding overall purpose is important because goal statements are used as a basis for developing instructional objectives (Brown, 1995;1999). Identifying or selecting text requires material developer to decide whether the texts are selected from authentic or created materials. Nuttal (1982:25) points out that there are three factors that should be considered when selecting texts, i.e. readability, suitability of content, and exploitability. Meanwhile, (Day, 1999) presents seven factors involved as the criteria in selecting an EFL reading passage i.e. interest, exploitability, readability, topic, political appropriateness, cultural suitability, and appearance.
In relation with identifying reading task, Day and Park (2005) posit that that well-designed comprehension questions can be used to help students interact with the text to create or construct meaning. Such questions demand information that represents outcomes of the comprehension process (cf. Myers and Brent-Harris 2004). Consequently before making the questions, the types of comprehension outputs should be selected first. One reference for comprehension output is The Barrett’s (1968) taxonomy of the Cognitive and Affective Dimension of Reading Comprehension (Myers, 2004; Day and Park, 2005; Hadley, 2001) which consists of five comprehension outcomes, i.e. literal comprehension, reorganization, inferential comprehension, evaluation, and appreciation. The comprehension output then is delivered through several forms of questions (Day and Park, 2005) like yes/no, alternative, true or false, Wh-, and multiple choice questions.
Identifying the linguistic elements refers to analysis on grammatical, lexical and/or discoursal elements (Nunan, 1999). Considering that the materials developed in this present study are presented in computer multimedia, the linguistic elements of the texts used are presented as generic help provided in the same screen with texts and exercises. Students only need to click the grammar help whenever they need.
The fourth steps in designing a reading program is sequencing and integrating the selected texts and tasks. This stage may be started by referring to approaches to syllabus design for the program. Finally, the reading program designed is linked to other language skills of language interactions that mirror sequences in daily life (Nunan, 1999).
2.3 Presenting Listening and Reading Materials in Computer Based Multimedia
In terms of methodological framework of CALL, Hubbard (cited in Hoven, 1997 and 1999) proposes three components: (1) approach, (2) design, and (3) procedure. In the approach, the role of computer is determined. If it is to instruct, then students are responders, not initiator following a set of learning objectives predetermined learning paths. If it is to assist, then there is no predetermined learning path and students are initiators taking responsibilities for their own learning.
Furthermore, the design of a CALL should cover student variables, syllabus orientation, content, program focus, and hardware as well as programming language. Meanwhile, the procedure should consist of the activity types, presentational scheme, input judging, feedback, control options, and screen layouts incorporated into the CALL.
The prototype software being developed is included into the instructional approach in which the activities take place in doing exercises. Here, students are responders, not initiators. The computer instructs them and they learn from the computer. However, the purpose of the prototype software developed in this study is to assist students to support the development of their intellectual capacities as abstract operational thoughts assist them in applying logical thinking to solve complex problems (Brown, 2001).
2.3.1 Cognitive Approach to Multimedia Learning
There are three assumptions underlying how people learn under cognitive approach: (1) humans use one “channel” for processing visual information and a second one for processing auditory information; (2) there is a limit to how much information can be processed in each channel at a time; and (3) humans are active processors of information, not passive receptors (Kinnamon, 2003). Thus, cognitive approach is closely related to information processing and problem solving to interface design in multimedia environment.
In an attempt to design effective multimedia instructional practices, Sorden (2005) combines five principles based on cognitive theory—theory of perceiving and knowing, thinking, remembering, understanding language, and learning. These principles are: (1) Baddeley’s model of Working Memory, Sweller’s Theory of Cognitive Load, and Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning for effects of presenting multimedia learning; and (2) Anderson’s ACT-R Cognitive Architecture and Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory for levels of processing that can occur within or between the visual and verbal systems.
The cognitive theory model of multimedia consists of five modes of knowledge representation. Physical representations represent words or pictures that are presented to the student, while sensory representations represent the ears or eyes of the student. The shallow or short-term memory representations represents sounds or images attended to by the student, and deep working memory representations represent verbal and pictorial models constructed by the student. Moreover, long-term memory representations represent the student’s relevant prior knowledge. Figure 1 shows this cognitive theory model of multimedia learning.
Our assumptions as teachers and learners – time to air them
Introduction
The conference workshop and this article are based on the authors’ experience of training ESP teachers from a number of Russian universities with the materials of the ESP Teacher Development Course which were created by a group of Russian professors and consultants from the UK – the project sponsored by the British Council in 2001-2005.
The course was a response to the needs of Russian teachers of English at tertiary level institutions where English is a compulsory subject for all students irrespective of their area of specialization. Preceding the development of the Course, a baseline study was conducted to identify the major problem areas of teaching and learning English for professional purposes in Russian universities. Some of the conclusions of the Baseline Study were that:
• English language classes are “generally teacher-dominated with corresponding error correction techniques and patterns of classroom interaction”
• ESP lessons are “largely based on written texts which are typically read aloud and translated”
• Students “feel comfortable with the old traditional mode of teaching and are satisfied with their teachers’ attitudes, correction techniques and classroom atmosphere as a whole.”(1)
Thus, foreign language instruction in Russia has been until recently oriented rather to learning grammar rules and drilling, memorizing lists of specialist terms, translating texts, with teachers mostly practicing directive teaching techniques. Many ESP teachers see as their primary tasks explaining rules to students, correcting their errors, providing them with materials, telling the learners exactly what to do and when. About half of the students who took part in the survey, “do not feel encouraged by their teachers to discuss the content or goals of their English course, some of them… not even being quite clear as to what it involves.” (2) To address the problem of outdated teaching methodology and to train teachers in ways reflecting the demands of the labour market their learners are preparing to enter, the RESPONSE project with the focus on in-service teacher development was carried out.
Apart from the findings of the survey, our own observations in training sessions with ESP teachers confirm the conclusions of the Baseline Study. Quite a few ESP teachers have by now participated in workshops or professional events informing them about modern methodology, the best ways to teach, the newest teaching materials and aids. Such terms as “learner autonomy”, “communicative competence”, “learning skills and learner strategies”, “content and language integrated learning” are not completely unfamiliar to them, however, when it comes to the question how certain modern concepts and principles can be applied in their everyday practice, the answers quite often reveal that, to quote one of the training course participants, “haute couture fashion displayed by trainers is not for everyday wear.” As a result, teachers stick to the well-trodden path the language instructors from their student years were using, and in the minds of these teachers there seems to exist a chasm between the “ideal’ and the “reality”, seen by many as impossible to bridge. Thus, the primary task of the “ESP Teacher Development Course”, some materials of which are used in the workshop, is to “encourage teachers to revisit and develop further their own individual philosophies of teaching” (4) by first raising their awareness of what they are guided by in their everyday practice.
Aim and focus of the workshop
The aim of the workshop is to involve its participants in reflection on one of the aspects of their practice and the principles underlying it. They will be encouraged to share ideas on their understanding of learner autonomy and how it can be developed. The questions raised are: What is learner autonomy? What should learners do to take more responsibility for their learning? How can the teacher facilitate the process?
These questions are nothing new. There are numerous publications which deal with the issue of learner autonomy, one of the most well-known being Learner Autonomy. A Guide to Developing Learner Responsibility by Scharle and Szabo, in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series (4). However, although teachers generally agree that it would be good to have more responsible learners, our training practice has revealed that the assumptions teachers hold about “autonomy” in the teaching/learning process vary significantly. Russian teachers’ educational background can hardly provide them with guidance regarding “freedom and ability to manage one’s own learning” (p.4), since Russian national culture, as is the case with many other countries, would generally endorse a tightly controlled classroom with clearly defined roles of both teachers and learners, with the teacher traditionally perceived as “a font of wisdom”. Yet, the information age sets its own priorities, making life-long learning part of a young person’s reality in this rapidly changing world. So, if we do not try to develop the ability for independent learning in our students, we may be preparing them for failure, not success, in their future professional lives.
Structure of the workshop
In this workshop, the participants take part in a series of interactive activities. They will mostly benefit from engaging in discussion of the assumptions that underpin their teaching and sharing experiences and ideas. In an international setting, it is likely to provide some new insights into how the concept of learner autonomy should be treated, and how a practitioner can develop further in order to make the teaching/learning process more effective in preparing learners to use L2 in the real world. The presenters will initiate the discussion, monitor its progress and summarise the most important points arising from it.
Workshop activities
1. “Shaking up”
Step 1. (Individual reflection)
Complete the questionnaire below. Consider the following statements to indicate your opinion about each one, by ticking the relevant box 1 to 4.
1 means you strongly agree. 3 means you disagree.
2 means you agree. 4 means you strongly disagree.
1 2 3 4
1. Teachers should always know the right answers and provide students with them.
2. Students learn more effectively when they take responsibility for their own learning **.
3. Encouraging students to correct each other’s work only serves to fossilize those mistakes in their memory.
4. It is the teacher who should decide on the materials and the tasks to be done by the learners.
Step 2. (Small group discussion)
• Work in small groups and discuss your opinions.
• Choose the most controversial issue.
Step3. (Plenary)
• Put forward the most controversial issues and discuss them in a plenary.
Step 3. (Individual reflection and small group discussion)
Choose one of the two questions that follow and think about it for 3-4 minutes, writing your answers down.
Share your ideas in small groups.
1. What should teachers do to develop learner autonomy? (What do you do in your classes?)
2. What students need to de to become more responsible and autonomous learners?
Step 4.(Reflection)
• Complete the quotation ‘The authority of those who teach is often … to those who want to learn.’ (Cicero)
Step5. (Plenary)
Share your ideas with other participants.
2. Metaphorically Speaking
Step1. (Individual reflection and small group discussion)
• Think of a metaphor for your ESP/ELT classroom
• Discuss them in small groups
Step 2 . (Plenary)
• Choose a volunteer to describe the images of your group
• Pick up a poster (from those suggested by the facilitators) and together with representatives of other groups rank the posters reflecting teachers’ perceptions of the process of learning from more teacher-oriented to more learner-centered
• Discuss the underlying assumptions.
Some examples of posters (produced by participants of the TD course in 2005-2008)
• Flower garden (T - sun/rain, Ss - flowers)
• Walk in the forest (T - path, Ss - travellers)
• Organs (T - heart, Ss - brain)
• Woodcarving/Jewel making (T - carpenter/jeweler, Ss - wood/stones)
• Circus (T - tamer, Ss - lions)
• Interconnected vessels
Discussion
Discussion that generally follows the above activities concentrates on what teachers and learners should do in and outside the classroom to foster learner responsibility, students’ active involvement in their own learning.
Much of responsibility for success in language learning rests with individual learners, and their ability to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn. We, language teachers, should heighten their awareness of how to learn, focus on helping our students find, process and apply the information they have found. Teacher’s instruction should help learners become more conscious of the strategies they use or could learn to use - why and when specific strategies are important, how to apply appropriate language learning strategies, how to transfer them to new situations.
Therefore, the role of the teacher should undergo profound changes. The teacher’s status can be no longer based only on hierarchical authority. The teacher’s primary role is to guide and assist discovery. They should create conditions conducive to the learners’ reflection on their work and cooperative development. The new, challenging functions are to be taken on by the teacher, such as facilitator, helper, guide, consultant, advisor, coordinator, and co-communicator.
What often happens in the classrooms so far is vividly described in the following extract from a TD course participant’s diary:
“Some teachers are afraid of creative and clever students, those who ask questions. They want them to be silent and listen. They are not interested in students’ opinions. Some teachers love students too much and ‘water’ them with knowledge. They let them wait for the result to come with the teacher’s help and stay passive. Some teachers look at their students as if they are enemies to fight against. They never try to be patient, tolerant or understanding. Some teachers give all the freedom to students and prefer to observe them without interfering in the process. Students do whatever they want without clear goals or tangible results.” (Yelena Mescheryakova, a university teacher of English)
What should teachers do to develop learner autonomy?
Teachers should share information with learners about planning the classroom process, delegating tasks and decision to them. The process of learning for the students should become more self-directed, problem-oriented and action-based.
Teachers show students the variety of available strategies of learning, encourage them to explore and expand their abilities. They make sure that their teaching is targeted at the real needs of the students. They should also be flexible enough to allow for adjustments that would make the learning/teaching process more relevant to their students’ situation. They clearly establish expectations and provide for consistent control.
The first step towards reaching the goal of autonomy could be a well-thought through system of tasks and activities which integrate all the skills; a better organization of students’ individual research, wider use of the Internet. Teachers let learners make tests and correct mistakes, produce materials for the classroom. They should stimulate their students’ desire to search for information by themselves, which would benefit both teachers and learners, as students can gradually gain greater confidence, involvement and proficiency.
What do students need to do to become more responsible and autonomous learners?
Learners should, first of all, develop awareness of their new role in the process of learning and teaching and understanding of its importance for their future life in the rapidly changing world. They should be prepared to be more active, which involves taking risks. Learners should realize that they can be the source of materials and activities. If students bring to class what is important to them, it motivates them, stimulates interest in the subject and guarantees their maximum involvement. Students’ active participation in lesson planning and preparation of materials can help meet their needs, and make learning meaningful, efficient and relevant to their future occupation. Students learn to reflect on their learning styles and strategies, consciously developing those that are effective for them. They rely on each other. Peer teaching and team tasks train them to work cooperatively, which is a very important social skill. Each has to make a valid contribution that fosters everybody's learning. When students take more responsibility for what happens in the language classroom, more learning occurs, and they should realize it.
Conclusion
The workshop aim can be considered to be reached if meaningful discussion has occurred, in the process of which teachers were able to compare their beliefs and professional experiences with those of the others, have aired their ideas and, ideally, got some insights into what they can change about their ways of teaching and learning. The term “life-long learning” is a fairly recent addition to an educator’s vocabulary but teachers have always known that to be successful in their profession they have to learn continually, and most of us have been doing so throughout their careers. However, teaching being what it is – work done mostly in the confines of the classroom with only one’s learners to observe the process, it has proved very beneficial for teachers to have an opportunity to come together with colleagues, both those who are experienced and new to the profession, and to reflect on our practice, thus getting inspiration to continue this neverending process of learning, teaching and learning further.
References:
1. Simon Winetroube, Ludmila Kuznetsova (eds). (2002) Specialist English Teaching and Learning – the State of the Art in Russia (Baseline Study Report). The British Council, St. Petersburg: Petropolis., p 82, 104.
2. op. cit., p 76.
3. Almabekova, O.A., Gogol, O.V., Guralnik, T.A., Zinkevich, N.A., Kuznetsova, L.B., Penkova, T.V., Petrashova, T.G., Pshegusova, G.S., Rudenko, T.P., Safronenko, O.I., Suchkova, S.A., Cheremisina, I.A.. (2005). ESP Teacher Development Course St. Petersburg: SPSU.
4. op. cit., p 9
5. Scharle, A., Szabo, A. (2000) Learner Autonomy. A Guide to Developing Learner Responsibility. Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers, CUP.
The conference workshop and this article are based on the authors’ experience of training ESP teachers from a number of Russian universities with the materials of the ESP Teacher Development Course which were created by a group of Russian professors and consultants from the UK – the project sponsored by the British Council in 2001-2005.
The course was a response to the needs of Russian teachers of English at tertiary level institutions where English is a compulsory subject for all students irrespective of their area of specialization. Preceding the development of the Course, a baseline study was conducted to identify the major problem areas of teaching and learning English for professional purposes in Russian universities. Some of the conclusions of the Baseline Study were that:
• English language classes are “generally teacher-dominated with corresponding error correction techniques and patterns of classroom interaction”
• ESP lessons are “largely based on written texts which are typically read aloud and translated”
• Students “feel comfortable with the old traditional mode of teaching and are satisfied with their teachers’ attitudes, correction techniques and classroom atmosphere as a whole.”(1)
Thus, foreign language instruction in Russia has been until recently oriented rather to learning grammar rules and drilling, memorizing lists of specialist terms, translating texts, with teachers mostly practicing directive teaching techniques. Many ESP teachers see as their primary tasks explaining rules to students, correcting their errors, providing them with materials, telling the learners exactly what to do and when. About half of the students who took part in the survey, “do not feel encouraged by their teachers to discuss the content or goals of their English course, some of them… not even being quite clear as to what it involves.” (2) To address the problem of outdated teaching methodology and to train teachers in ways reflecting the demands of the labour market their learners are preparing to enter, the RESPONSE project with the focus on in-service teacher development was carried out.
Apart from the findings of the survey, our own observations in training sessions with ESP teachers confirm the conclusions of the Baseline Study. Quite a few ESP teachers have by now participated in workshops or professional events informing them about modern methodology, the best ways to teach, the newest teaching materials and aids. Such terms as “learner autonomy”, “communicative competence”, “learning skills and learner strategies”, “content and language integrated learning” are not completely unfamiliar to them, however, when it comes to the question how certain modern concepts and principles can be applied in their everyday practice, the answers quite often reveal that, to quote one of the training course participants, “haute couture fashion displayed by trainers is not for everyday wear.” As a result, teachers stick to the well-trodden path the language instructors from their student years were using, and in the minds of these teachers there seems to exist a chasm between the “ideal’ and the “reality”, seen by many as impossible to bridge. Thus, the primary task of the “ESP Teacher Development Course”, some materials of which are used in the workshop, is to “encourage teachers to revisit and develop further their own individual philosophies of teaching” (4) by first raising their awareness of what they are guided by in their everyday practice.
Aim and focus of the workshop
The aim of the workshop is to involve its participants in reflection on one of the aspects of their practice and the principles underlying it. They will be encouraged to share ideas on their understanding of learner autonomy and how it can be developed. The questions raised are: What is learner autonomy? What should learners do to take more responsibility for their learning? How can the teacher facilitate the process?
These questions are nothing new. There are numerous publications which deal with the issue of learner autonomy, one of the most well-known being Learner Autonomy. A Guide to Developing Learner Responsibility by Scharle and Szabo, in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series (4). However, although teachers generally agree that it would be good to have more responsible learners, our training practice has revealed that the assumptions teachers hold about “autonomy” in the teaching/learning process vary significantly. Russian teachers’ educational background can hardly provide them with guidance regarding “freedom and ability to manage one’s own learning” (p.4), since Russian national culture, as is the case with many other countries, would generally endorse a tightly controlled classroom with clearly defined roles of both teachers and learners, with the teacher traditionally perceived as “a font of wisdom”. Yet, the information age sets its own priorities, making life-long learning part of a young person’s reality in this rapidly changing world. So, if we do not try to develop the ability for independent learning in our students, we may be preparing them for failure, not success, in their future professional lives.
Structure of the workshop
In this workshop, the participants take part in a series of interactive activities. They will mostly benefit from engaging in discussion of the assumptions that underpin their teaching and sharing experiences and ideas. In an international setting, it is likely to provide some new insights into how the concept of learner autonomy should be treated, and how a practitioner can develop further in order to make the teaching/learning process more effective in preparing learners to use L2 in the real world. The presenters will initiate the discussion, monitor its progress and summarise the most important points arising from it.
Workshop activities
1. “Shaking up”
Step 1. (Individual reflection)
Complete the questionnaire below. Consider the following statements to indicate your opinion about each one, by ticking the relevant box 1 to 4.
1 means you strongly agree. 3 means you disagree.
2 means you agree. 4 means you strongly disagree.
1 2 3 4
1. Teachers should always know the right answers and provide students with them.
2. Students learn more effectively when they take responsibility for their own learning **.
3. Encouraging students to correct each other’s work only serves to fossilize those mistakes in their memory.
4. It is the teacher who should decide on the materials and the tasks to be done by the learners.
Step 2. (Small group discussion)
• Work in small groups and discuss your opinions.
• Choose the most controversial issue.
Step3. (Plenary)
• Put forward the most controversial issues and discuss them in a plenary.
Step 3. (Individual reflection and small group discussion)
Choose one of the two questions that follow and think about it for 3-4 minutes, writing your answers down.
Share your ideas in small groups.
1. What should teachers do to develop learner autonomy? (What do you do in your classes?)
2. What students need to de to become more responsible and autonomous learners?
Step 4.(Reflection)
• Complete the quotation ‘The authority of those who teach is often … to those who want to learn.’ (Cicero)
Step5. (Plenary)
Share your ideas with other participants.
2. Metaphorically Speaking
Step1. (Individual reflection and small group discussion)
• Think of a metaphor for your ESP/ELT classroom
• Discuss them in small groups
Step 2 . (Plenary)
• Choose a volunteer to describe the images of your group
• Pick up a poster (from those suggested by the facilitators) and together with representatives of other groups rank the posters reflecting teachers’ perceptions of the process of learning from more teacher-oriented to more learner-centered
• Discuss the underlying assumptions.
Some examples of posters (produced by participants of the TD course in 2005-2008)
• Flower garden (T - sun/rain, Ss - flowers)
• Walk in the forest (T - path, Ss - travellers)
• Organs (T - heart, Ss - brain)
• Woodcarving/Jewel making (T - carpenter/jeweler, Ss - wood/stones)
• Circus (T - tamer, Ss - lions)
• Interconnected vessels
Discussion
Discussion that generally follows the above activities concentrates on what teachers and learners should do in and outside the classroom to foster learner responsibility, students’ active involvement in their own learning.
Much of responsibility for success in language learning rests with individual learners, and their ability to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn. We, language teachers, should heighten their awareness of how to learn, focus on helping our students find, process and apply the information they have found. Teacher’s instruction should help learners become more conscious of the strategies they use or could learn to use - why and when specific strategies are important, how to apply appropriate language learning strategies, how to transfer them to new situations.
Therefore, the role of the teacher should undergo profound changes. The teacher’s status can be no longer based only on hierarchical authority. The teacher’s primary role is to guide and assist discovery. They should create conditions conducive to the learners’ reflection on their work and cooperative development. The new, challenging functions are to be taken on by the teacher, such as facilitator, helper, guide, consultant, advisor, coordinator, and co-communicator.
What often happens in the classrooms so far is vividly described in the following extract from a TD course participant’s diary:
“Some teachers are afraid of creative and clever students, those who ask questions. They want them to be silent and listen. They are not interested in students’ opinions. Some teachers love students too much and ‘water’ them with knowledge. They let them wait for the result to come with the teacher’s help and stay passive. Some teachers look at their students as if they are enemies to fight against. They never try to be patient, tolerant or understanding. Some teachers give all the freedom to students and prefer to observe them without interfering in the process. Students do whatever they want without clear goals or tangible results.” (Yelena Mescheryakova, a university teacher of English)
What should teachers do to develop learner autonomy?
Teachers should share information with learners about planning the classroom process, delegating tasks and decision to them. The process of learning for the students should become more self-directed, problem-oriented and action-based.
Teachers show students the variety of available strategies of learning, encourage them to explore and expand their abilities. They make sure that their teaching is targeted at the real needs of the students. They should also be flexible enough to allow for adjustments that would make the learning/teaching process more relevant to their students’ situation. They clearly establish expectations and provide for consistent control.
The first step towards reaching the goal of autonomy could be a well-thought through system of tasks and activities which integrate all the skills; a better organization of students’ individual research, wider use of the Internet. Teachers let learners make tests and correct mistakes, produce materials for the classroom. They should stimulate their students’ desire to search for information by themselves, which would benefit both teachers and learners, as students can gradually gain greater confidence, involvement and proficiency.
What do students need to do to become more responsible and autonomous learners?
Learners should, first of all, develop awareness of their new role in the process of learning and teaching and understanding of its importance for their future life in the rapidly changing world. They should be prepared to be more active, which involves taking risks. Learners should realize that they can be the source of materials and activities. If students bring to class what is important to them, it motivates them, stimulates interest in the subject and guarantees their maximum involvement. Students’ active participation in lesson planning and preparation of materials can help meet their needs, and make learning meaningful, efficient and relevant to their future occupation. Students learn to reflect on their learning styles and strategies, consciously developing those that are effective for them. They rely on each other. Peer teaching and team tasks train them to work cooperatively, which is a very important social skill. Each has to make a valid contribution that fosters everybody's learning. When students take more responsibility for what happens in the language classroom, more learning occurs, and they should realize it.
Conclusion
The workshop aim can be considered to be reached if meaningful discussion has occurred, in the process of which teachers were able to compare their beliefs and professional experiences with those of the others, have aired their ideas and, ideally, got some insights into what they can change about their ways of teaching and learning. The term “life-long learning” is a fairly recent addition to an educator’s vocabulary but teachers have always known that to be successful in their profession they have to learn continually, and most of us have been doing so throughout their careers. However, teaching being what it is – work done mostly in the confines of the classroom with only one’s learners to observe the process, it has proved very beneficial for teachers to have an opportunity to come together with colleagues, both those who are experienced and new to the profession, and to reflect on our practice, thus getting inspiration to continue this neverending process of learning, teaching and learning further.
References:
1. Simon Winetroube, Ludmila Kuznetsova (eds). (2002) Specialist English Teaching and Learning – the State of the Art in Russia (Baseline Study Report). The British Council, St. Petersburg: Petropolis., p 82, 104.
2. op. cit., p 76.
3. Almabekova, O.A., Gogol, O.V., Guralnik, T.A., Zinkevich, N.A., Kuznetsova, L.B., Penkova, T.V., Petrashova, T.G., Pshegusova, G.S., Rudenko, T.P., Safronenko, O.I., Suchkova, S.A., Cheremisina, I.A.. (2005). ESP Teacher Development Course St. Petersburg: SPSU.
4. op. cit., p 9
5. Scharle, A., Szabo, A. (2000) Learner Autonomy. A Guide to Developing Learner Responsibility. Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers, CUP.
Learning/Acquiring English Phrasal Verbs
Introduction
The dichotomy learning/acquisition has raised debates and controversies as to the nature and the development of the processes which contribute to their realisation. For a long time, it has been established that we acquire one’s first language and we learn any other language which is not our first language. Nowadays, this distinction no longer satisfies our understanding derived both from day to day observation and more organised research.
In this paper, we will refer to the foundations of Second Language Acquisition and will analyse the case of phrasal verbs, an area of grammar not always focused on and not always understood because of its complexity. We will report on the results of an investigation of the degree of acquisition of phrasal verbs by advanced learners of English as a foreign language at University level.
1. Foundations of Second Language Acquisition
Foreign language acquisition research took place around the 1960s where empirical research was directed at describing the characteristics of the learner’s language and how these change as acquisition takes place.
The starting point of foreign language acquisition investigation is the identification of the universal characteristics of foreign language acquisition. The description of the language learner provides an account of the learner’s competence in terms of grammatical competence, discourse competence (the ability to use grammatical competence to make cohesive and coherent texts), sociolinguistic competence (the ability to use language appropriately in different contexts) and strategic competence (the ability to compensate for difficulties and make the use of language effective)(Canale and Swain, 1980,cited in Ellis and Roberts, 1987:19).
The next step is an explanation of how learners develop knowledge of the foreign language and how they use this knowledge in communication. Both external and internal factors play a role in foreign language acquisition. External factors relate to the role played by the social situation in which learning takes place and how the input accounts for acquisition through observation of the output. The choice of the language used is seen to be affected by whom the learner is speaking to (the interlocutor), where, when, why (the purpose of communication) and what is to be communicated. Internal factors relate to the mental processes that the learners use to convert input into knowledge, to internalise knowledge of the foreign language.
Krashen (1981, 1982, 1985) puts forward a theory of second language acquisition that consists of five hypotheses. First, the Acquisition / Learning Hypothsis states that there are two ways of developing ability in the foreign language: acquisition – an unconscious process that involves the natural development of language proficiency through understanding language and using language for meaningful communication that results in “knowing how” the language functions – and learning – a conscious process that results in “knowing about” the language, learning the rules that make up the language. The acquisition process results in an implicit store of knowledge and the learning process in an explicit store of knowledge viewed as a facilitator of implicit knowledge, as it enables learners to notice features in the input and compare them with their interlanguage – the internal system that a learner has constructed over time, the mental grammar that a learner has constructed in the process of acquiring a foreign language. Second, according to the Natural Order Hypothesis, we acquire the rules of a language in a predictable order, some rules tending to come early and others late. Third, the Monitor Hypothesis considers that our ability to produce language comes from our acquired comprehension; learning serves only as a monitor. We resort to learning – our conscious knowledge of the language – to make corrections in the output of the acquired system. Fourth, according to the Input Hypothesis, acquisition takes place through receiving and understanding “Comprehensible Input”. If there is enough comprehensible input, the necessary grammar is automatically provided. Fifth, the Affective Filter Hypothesis is based on the idea that when the affective filter – this mental block preventing learners from fully assimilating the comprehensible input they receive – is up as when they are unmotivated, lacking in self-confidence or anxious, the input may be understood, but it will not reach the acquisition process.
Empirical evidence has shown that certain language items are learnt, others acquired. In some cases, acquisition has taken place, but the rules are not used. This corresponds to the process of “fossilisation”, the process by which non-target forms become fixed in the interlanguage. This takes place when there is insufficiant quantity of input, inappropriate quality of input, acquisition of deviant forms and when the affective filter and the output filter which prevent acquired rules from being used are up.
2. Place of Phrasal Verbs in Grammar Books
We will now look at one case of learning / acquiring a foreign language – phrasal verbs. We believe that in order to develop a rapid acquisition, the teaching methodology has to be appropriate to the type of element to be acquired. We do not teach all the elements of the language the same way, with the same amount of time. Besides, teaching overtly certain language elements does not always produce a rapid acquisition of these elements; they have to go through their natural route of development. For example, the “s” third person singular rule is a very easy rule to teach, to apply in exercises, but it takes years for the Algerian learners to acquire it. Why is such a simple rule to learn difficult to acquire? The likely reasons are lack of reciprocity in the first language and incoherence of the rule – “s” is a mark for plural nouns and a mark of singular for verbs. Lack of systematicity of the rule makes it a very late acquired rule.
What is the case of phrasal verbs? Before we investigated the degree of acquisition of phrasal verbs of advanced learners of English as a foreign language at university level, we looked at the place and methodology of teaching phrasal verbs in a certain number of Grammar books (See References for 2. : The Place of Phrasal Verbs in Grammar Books).
Allsop (1983) uses the expression “phrasal verbs” to refer to three patterns:
• V + Adv. : Give up.
• V + Prep. : Look after.
• V + Adv. + Prep. : Get down to.
and the term “particle” to refer to the adverb or preposition which follow the verb. He gives a list of particles which function :
• only as prepositions :
- after : Look after your sister.
- against : Don’t go against the rules.
- at : Get at the meaning.
- For : Stand for what you believe in.
- from : She comes from the South.
- into : Go into the question.
- like : It looks like it.
- to : Get down to work.
- With : Put up with your sister.
- Without : Go without food.
• only as adverbs :
- away : Don’t run away.
- Back : Take it back.
- Forward : Bring the date forward.
- Out : Put the lights out.
• as prepositions or adverbs : most particles may function as a preposition or an adverb. The most common ones are about, across, along, around, before, up, under, through, round, behind, by, down, in, off, on, over.
What distinguishes the prepositional verb (V+Prep.) and the phrasal verb (V+ Adv.) is :
1. the place of the object : when the object can be inserted between the verb and the particle, the latter is an adverb ; when it cannot, it is a preposition.
Eg : Look it up .
Adv.
Eg : Look up the street .
Prep.
In the first case, “up” is part of the meaning of the verb (what must I look?) .
In the second one, it relates to the object (Where must I look?).
2. The stress pattern: in a V + Prep., stress is on the verb ;
in a V + Adverb.,stress is on the particle or equally on the verb and the
particle.
In relation to the word order in phrasal verbs, in other words, should the object be between the verb and the particle or at the end, the choice may depend on a slight change of meaning, on the rythm of the sentence or on personal preference of the speaker.
Eg : - Put away your toys.
- Put your toys away.
- Put them away.
(a personal pronoun object is always between the verb and particle).
- Put away all what you have bought today.
(a long object is always at the end).
Phrasal verbs are very common and widely used by native speakers of English, both in everyday speech and in writing. They form a great part of the language and are constantly being created or other meanings of the already existing ones are added.
A certain number of phrasal verbs have a corresponding one word verb, usually of classical (Latin or Greek) origin (to give up: to abondon), but the single word can often sound odd or too formal in everyday speech where the phrasal verb is expected.
On the whole, the meaning of phrasal verbs can be derived from the verb, from the particle or from the two if the parts of the phrasal verb have their literal meaning or only a slightly transferred meaning (not literal, metaphorical).
Eg : He sat down. (Literal meaning).
Eg : He tore the notice do. (Slightly transferred meaning).
We can guess the meaning of many phrasal verbs like to get up, to go up / down, to send away, to take away, to bring back. However, many phrasal verbs have a meaning which cannot easily be deduced from the meaning of the parts of the verb, a transferred or metaphorical meaning.
Eg : He gave up smoking. (stopped).
These kind of phrasal verbs can only be learned by experience and with the help of a dictionary. What also creates difficulty in understanding phrasal verbs is that sometimes a phrasal verb has several meanings.
Eg : Take your glasses off. (remove).
Eg : The plane took off. (left the ground).
Eg : He is a wonderful mimic, he can take off most people. (impersonate).
Eg : Do you think this book will take off? (be a success): this is a metaphorical use
of “take off” associated to the planes and is typical of the way in which the
meaning and use of phrasal verbs grows.
Chalker (1984) draws the attention to the fact that what distinguishes the prepositional and the phrasal verb is the place of an adverb: in a prepositional verb, it can be between the stem and the preposition, not in the case of a phrasal verb.
Eg : He looked (briefly) at the timetable.
Adv.
Eg : He (eagerly) looked up the word in the dictionary.
Adv.
Eastwood (2006) gives a list of the phrasal verbs which have as equivalent a one word verb usually from Latin origin and considered formal.
- to find out : to discover.
- to go back : to return.
- to go on : to continue.
- to leave out : to omit.
- to make up (a story) : to invent.
- to put off : to postpone.
- to hand (send) out : to distribute.
- to throw away : to discard.
- to turn up : to arrive.
We note that these one-word verbs are easier for us to remember .
Fucks & al (2003) and Maurer (2004) explain the difference between phrasal verbs in terms of separable phrasal verbs where the object can be inserted between the stem and the particle, and inseparable phrasal verbs where the stem and the particle cannot be separated by the object.
Inseparable :Eg : She ran into the man in front of her .
Eg: She ran into her friend in the market .
Separable : Eg: She looked up the information in the dictionary.
She looked the information up. She looked it up.
Leech and Svartvick (1975) clearly distinguish between prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs. They mention the three reasons we have already mentioned :
1. the difference of stress,
2. the difference in the place of the object,
3. the difference in the place of the adverb,
and add a fourth reason:
4. the difference in the use of a relative pronoun: prepositional verbs accept a relative pronoun after the preposition, not phrasal verbs.
Eg: The men (whom) they called up.
but not The men (whom) they called on.
In Lekeu (1997), each unit has a section about phrasal verbs. The directions are “add an ‘adverbial particle’ to the verbs”. For example, “Our summer dresses were cheap and sold ........ fast (were all quickly sold)”. The expected ‘adverbial particle’ is “out”.
Lott (2005) has an extensive list of phrasal verbs per category with examples (V+Adv. (Transi.), V+Adv.+ing. Form, V+O+Adv. and V+Adv.+Prep.+O) followed by exercises including these phrasal verbs.
In Loughed (2006), the mystery of prepositions (as the title of the book says) is tackled throughout the book in chapters labelled in types of prepositions: time, place, cause ... . The methodology used is to:
1.choose the appropriate preposition in context : a guided activity,
2.select an appropriate preposition in a narrowly defined situation:a guided activity,
3.use prepositions in sentences, which is a free production.
Murphy (2004) deals with phrasal verbs through a series of exercises and some reference to general rules about the place of the preposition. The units about phrasal verbs are divided in terms of the nature of the preposition: in, out, ... .
Shrampfer Azar (2002) devotes eight appendixes to phrasal verbs with the directions: “Supply appropriate prepositions for these two and three-word verbs”.
The following table sums up the major terms used in relation to phrasal verbs.
Term Definition and / or Example
1. One word verb Eg: to look. He looks ill.
2. A two-word verb Eg: to look up. Look up the street
3. A three-word verb Eg: to look up to. He looks up to his father.
4. Prepositional verb V+Prep. Eg: He looks at her.
5. Phrasal verb V+Adv. + Prep. Eg: He looks forward to meeting.
6.Particle/Adverbial An adverb or preposition used in a multi-word verb.
7. Preposition A word that precedes a word which it governs, usually a Nor a N phrase.
8. Adverb A word that modifies or qualifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb.
9. Adverbial Any word, phrase or clause used like an Adverb.
10.Separable Phrasal Verb A multi-word V which can be separated by an O. Eg: Look it up.
11.Inseparable Phrasal Verb Amulti-word Vwhich cannot be separated by an O.Eg:Look up the street.
3.Acquisition of Phrasal Verbs by Advanced Learners of English as a Foreign Language at University Level
As further back as my early years of learning my first and second language (French and Strandard Arabic), I have always expressed the need to understand why such a language element is formed and functions in such a way . When I studied English, my urge to understand why has not stopped. I remember asking my English teacher “Why can’t we say I can to work”? and I distinctly remember her shocked face and her “arrogant” answer: “you ask too many questions, it’s just like that.” I knew “it was like that”, but I wanted to understand WHY it was like that. Can grammar tell us why it is like that?!It tells us how it is more than why. It is clearly the case of phrasal verbs.
Teaching phrasal verbs is one of the most difficult area in grammar because of the lack of systematicity of the rule – if there is one , and as we have just said , not all grammar books deal with this aspect, and when they do, they do it in a variety of ways. We undertook to find out how much of this teaching background has produced acquisition in advanced learners of English as a foreign language at university level, how much knowledge of this thorny area learners who have gone through four years of English at university level, who are presently teaching at the university has been acquired. We invited all the teachers in our Department, holding a B.A or a Master and having graduated in the last ten years to take part in the study (75) and 57 came to take part in this investigation. The informants were formally invited to take part in this study but were not told the object of the investigation so that they would answer the test spontaneously – without any special preparation. The informants are classified into three categories: holders of a B.A; not registered in a Master (20), holders of a B.A, registered in a Master (26: this year : 15, in the past three years : 11) and holders of a Master (11: registered in a Ph.D :05, not registered in a Ph.D : 06).
Before the test the informants answered, we wanted to find out whether they knew the expression “Phrasal Verbs” , and if “yes”, what they thought it meant. Only four informants from Category I said that they did not know the expression; the others gave a satisfactory definition.
The test is made up of four parts – Definitions, Matching, Multiple-Choice and Cloze Procedure – each part involving ten phrasal verbs. The choice of these activities is related to the nature of the task required to be performed. As to Definitions, if an informant can define a word, an expression, it shows understanding. Matching offers the possibility to identify the phrasal verbs, think about their meaning, definition, use before inserting them in the blanks. Multiple Choice offers the same type of activity as Matching, except that for each blank, three possibilities are provided – one distractor is made up of the right base verb plus another particle, and the other distractor is made up of another verb plus the right particle. The Cloze Procedure is made up of a text with blanks to be freely filled in. This activity is the one which tells us most about whether the informants know a phrasal verb – whether the one we have omitted or another one which fits the context. These four activities, requiring different performances, different strategies will enable us to see to what extent they can put words on a phrasal verb (Definition), identify the right phrasal verb (Matching), choose (and use) the right phrasal verb (Multiple Choice) ,and use phrasal verbs (Cloze Procedure).We had thought about the highest level – free production, but we decided against it because it requires a large scale operation, and there is no guarantee that the informants would use phrasal verbs (avoidance phenomenon).
The fourty phrasal verbs included in the four activities (ten per activity) have been selected according to three criteria.
• I know the phrasal verb .
• The likelihood that the majority of the informants can at least understand the phrasal verbs .
• An advanced learner of Category III of the informants knows the majority of the phrasal verbs.
The phrasal verbs combine a variety of particles and relate more to a formal use (academic use).
The texts used for Matching, Multiple Choice and Cloze Procedure were selected according to the nature of:
• the topic: topics specific to women or men or requiring a specific knowledge were discarded,
• the discourse, style, vocabulary, structure: the combination of these elements had to be at the informants’ level.
Table 1: List of Phrasal Verbs per Activity
Definition Matching Multiple Choice Cloze Procedure
1. to call in to go through to go through to open up
2. to catch up to mark down to put away to break into
3. to hand over to check against to look for to switch off
4. to identify with to lie down to ask for to cut off
5. to knock out to drift off to hand in to send for
6. to keep at to give out to put off to arrive at
7. to narrow down to come up with to call off to write down
8. to pass out to tear up to talk over with to sweep up
9. to sleep on to believe in to come across to carry out
10. to show off to say about to leave behind to beat up
Looking at the phrasal verbs which had the highest scores in Category I, we see that these phrasal verbs had higher scores in Category II and Category III, except for “to knock out” which had slightly lower scores in Category II and for “to identify with” which had lower scores in Category III; 45.46% of Category III of the informants, the most advanced learners , said they were not sure about “to identify with”. This seems strange, but in fact it shows that when they were sure, they gave the right definitions. “To show off” is less known by Category I, but on the whole, it is an acquired phrasal verb which must have been come across in different texts and focused on in teaching.
The phrasal verbs known by the majority of Category II and Category III are the same, except for “to pass out” (to become unconscious or to give something to somebody), which is not known by the majority of Category II. As we will see later, this phrasal verb is easily confused with “to pass away” (to die).
Our next analysis focuses on the definitions provided by the informants when they said they knew the phrasal verb and gave the right or wrong definition, and when they said they were not sure and gave the right or wrong definition.
If it is rather expected to give a wrong definition when we are not sure about a definition, it is less expected to get a wrong definition when we say we know the definition.
The dichotomy learning/acquisition has raised debates and controversies as to the nature and the development of the processes which contribute to their realisation. For a long time, it has been established that we acquire one’s first language and we learn any other language which is not our first language. Nowadays, this distinction no longer satisfies our understanding derived both from day to day observation and more organised research.
In this paper, we will refer to the foundations of Second Language Acquisition and will analyse the case of phrasal verbs, an area of grammar not always focused on and not always understood because of its complexity. We will report on the results of an investigation of the degree of acquisition of phrasal verbs by advanced learners of English as a foreign language at University level.
1. Foundations of Second Language Acquisition
Foreign language acquisition research took place around the 1960s where empirical research was directed at describing the characteristics of the learner’s language and how these change as acquisition takes place.
The starting point of foreign language acquisition investigation is the identification of the universal characteristics of foreign language acquisition. The description of the language learner provides an account of the learner’s competence in terms of grammatical competence, discourse competence (the ability to use grammatical competence to make cohesive and coherent texts), sociolinguistic competence (the ability to use language appropriately in different contexts) and strategic competence (the ability to compensate for difficulties and make the use of language effective)(Canale and Swain, 1980,cited in Ellis and Roberts, 1987:19).
The next step is an explanation of how learners develop knowledge of the foreign language and how they use this knowledge in communication. Both external and internal factors play a role in foreign language acquisition. External factors relate to the role played by the social situation in which learning takes place and how the input accounts for acquisition through observation of the output. The choice of the language used is seen to be affected by whom the learner is speaking to (the interlocutor), where, when, why (the purpose of communication) and what is to be communicated. Internal factors relate to the mental processes that the learners use to convert input into knowledge, to internalise knowledge of the foreign language.
Krashen (1981, 1982, 1985) puts forward a theory of second language acquisition that consists of five hypotheses. First, the Acquisition / Learning Hypothsis states that there are two ways of developing ability in the foreign language: acquisition – an unconscious process that involves the natural development of language proficiency through understanding language and using language for meaningful communication that results in “knowing how” the language functions – and learning – a conscious process that results in “knowing about” the language, learning the rules that make up the language. The acquisition process results in an implicit store of knowledge and the learning process in an explicit store of knowledge viewed as a facilitator of implicit knowledge, as it enables learners to notice features in the input and compare them with their interlanguage – the internal system that a learner has constructed over time, the mental grammar that a learner has constructed in the process of acquiring a foreign language. Second, according to the Natural Order Hypothesis, we acquire the rules of a language in a predictable order, some rules tending to come early and others late. Third, the Monitor Hypothesis considers that our ability to produce language comes from our acquired comprehension; learning serves only as a monitor. We resort to learning – our conscious knowledge of the language – to make corrections in the output of the acquired system. Fourth, according to the Input Hypothesis, acquisition takes place through receiving and understanding “Comprehensible Input”. If there is enough comprehensible input, the necessary grammar is automatically provided. Fifth, the Affective Filter Hypothesis is based on the idea that when the affective filter – this mental block preventing learners from fully assimilating the comprehensible input they receive – is up as when they are unmotivated, lacking in self-confidence or anxious, the input may be understood, but it will not reach the acquisition process.
Empirical evidence has shown that certain language items are learnt, others acquired. In some cases, acquisition has taken place, but the rules are not used. This corresponds to the process of “fossilisation”, the process by which non-target forms become fixed in the interlanguage. This takes place when there is insufficiant quantity of input, inappropriate quality of input, acquisition of deviant forms and when the affective filter and the output filter which prevent acquired rules from being used are up.
2. Place of Phrasal Verbs in Grammar Books
We will now look at one case of learning / acquiring a foreign language – phrasal verbs. We believe that in order to develop a rapid acquisition, the teaching methodology has to be appropriate to the type of element to be acquired. We do not teach all the elements of the language the same way, with the same amount of time. Besides, teaching overtly certain language elements does not always produce a rapid acquisition of these elements; they have to go through their natural route of development. For example, the “s” third person singular rule is a very easy rule to teach, to apply in exercises, but it takes years for the Algerian learners to acquire it. Why is such a simple rule to learn difficult to acquire? The likely reasons are lack of reciprocity in the first language and incoherence of the rule – “s” is a mark for plural nouns and a mark of singular for verbs. Lack of systematicity of the rule makes it a very late acquired rule.
What is the case of phrasal verbs? Before we investigated the degree of acquisition of phrasal verbs of advanced learners of English as a foreign language at university level, we looked at the place and methodology of teaching phrasal verbs in a certain number of Grammar books (See References for 2. : The Place of Phrasal Verbs in Grammar Books).
Allsop (1983) uses the expression “phrasal verbs” to refer to three patterns:
• V + Adv. : Give up.
• V + Prep. : Look after.
• V + Adv. + Prep. : Get down to.
and the term “particle” to refer to the adverb or preposition which follow the verb. He gives a list of particles which function :
• only as prepositions :
- after : Look after your sister.
- against : Don’t go against the rules.
- at : Get at the meaning.
- For : Stand for what you believe in.
- from : She comes from the South.
- into : Go into the question.
- like : It looks like it.
- to : Get down to work.
- With : Put up with your sister.
- Without : Go without food.
• only as adverbs :
- away : Don’t run away.
- Back : Take it back.
- Forward : Bring the date forward.
- Out : Put the lights out.
• as prepositions or adverbs : most particles may function as a preposition or an adverb. The most common ones are about, across, along, around, before, up, under, through, round, behind, by, down, in, off, on, over.
What distinguishes the prepositional verb (V+Prep.) and the phrasal verb (V+ Adv.) is :
1. the place of the object : when the object can be inserted between the verb and the particle, the latter is an adverb ; when it cannot, it is a preposition.
Eg : Look it up .
Adv.
Eg : Look up the street .
Prep.
In the first case, “up” is part of the meaning of the verb (what must I look?) .
In the second one, it relates to the object (Where must I look?).
2. The stress pattern: in a V + Prep., stress is on the verb ;
in a V + Adverb.,stress is on the particle or equally on the verb and the
particle.
In relation to the word order in phrasal verbs, in other words, should the object be between the verb and the particle or at the end, the choice may depend on a slight change of meaning, on the rythm of the sentence or on personal preference of the speaker.
Eg : - Put away your toys.
- Put your toys away.
- Put them away.
(a personal pronoun object is always between the verb and particle).
- Put away all what you have bought today.
(a long object is always at the end).
Phrasal verbs are very common and widely used by native speakers of English, both in everyday speech and in writing. They form a great part of the language and are constantly being created or other meanings of the already existing ones are added.
A certain number of phrasal verbs have a corresponding one word verb, usually of classical (Latin or Greek) origin (to give up: to abondon), but the single word can often sound odd or too formal in everyday speech where the phrasal verb is expected.
On the whole, the meaning of phrasal verbs can be derived from the verb, from the particle or from the two if the parts of the phrasal verb have their literal meaning or only a slightly transferred meaning (not literal, metaphorical).
Eg : He sat down. (Literal meaning).
Eg : He tore the notice do. (Slightly transferred meaning).
We can guess the meaning of many phrasal verbs like to get up, to go up / down, to send away, to take away, to bring back. However, many phrasal verbs have a meaning which cannot easily be deduced from the meaning of the parts of the verb, a transferred or metaphorical meaning.
Eg : He gave up smoking. (stopped).
These kind of phrasal verbs can only be learned by experience and with the help of a dictionary. What also creates difficulty in understanding phrasal verbs is that sometimes a phrasal verb has several meanings.
Eg : Take your glasses off. (remove).
Eg : The plane took off. (left the ground).
Eg : He is a wonderful mimic, he can take off most people. (impersonate).
Eg : Do you think this book will take off? (be a success): this is a metaphorical use
of “take off” associated to the planes and is typical of the way in which the
meaning and use of phrasal verbs grows.
Chalker (1984) draws the attention to the fact that what distinguishes the prepositional and the phrasal verb is the place of an adverb: in a prepositional verb, it can be between the stem and the preposition, not in the case of a phrasal verb.
Eg : He looked (briefly) at the timetable.
Adv.
Eg : He (eagerly) looked up the word in the dictionary.
Adv.
Eastwood (2006) gives a list of the phrasal verbs which have as equivalent a one word verb usually from Latin origin and considered formal.
- to find out : to discover.
- to go back : to return.
- to go on : to continue.
- to leave out : to omit.
- to make up (a story) : to invent.
- to put off : to postpone.
- to hand (send) out : to distribute.
- to throw away : to discard.
- to turn up : to arrive.
We note that these one-word verbs are easier for us to remember .
Fucks & al (2003) and Maurer (2004) explain the difference between phrasal verbs in terms of separable phrasal verbs where the object can be inserted between the stem and the particle, and inseparable phrasal verbs where the stem and the particle cannot be separated by the object.
Inseparable :Eg : She ran into the man in front of her .
Eg: She ran into her friend in the market .
Separable : Eg: She looked up the information in the dictionary.
She looked the information up. She looked it up.
Leech and Svartvick (1975) clearly distinguish between prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs. They mention the three reasons we have already mentioned :
1. the difference of stress,
2. the difference in the place of the object,
3. the difference in the place of the adverb,
and add a fourth reason:
4. the difference in the use of a relative pronoun: prepositional verbs accept a relative pronoun after the preposition, not phrasal verbs.
Eg: The men (whom) they called up.
but not The men (whom) they called on.
In Lekeu (1997), each unit has a section about phrasal verbs. The directions are “add an ‘adverbial particle’ to the verbs”. For example, “Our summer dresses were cheap and sold ........ fast (were all quickly sold)”. The expected ‘adverbial particle’ is “out”.
Lott (2005) has an extensive list of phrasal verbs per category with examples (V+Adv. (Transi.), V+Adv.+ing. Form, V+O+Adv. and V+Adv.+Prep.+O) followed by exercises including these phrasal verbs.
In Loughed (2006), the mystery of prepositions (as the title of the book says) is tackled throughout the book in chapters labelled in types of prepositions: time, place, cause ... . The methodology used is to:
1.choose the appropriate preposition in context : a guided activity,
2.select an appropriate preposition in a narrowly defined situation:a guided activity,
3.use prepositions in sentences, which is a free production.
Murphy (2004) deals with phrasal verbs through a series of exercises and some reference to general rules about the place of the preposition. The units about phrasal verbs are divided in terms of the nature of the preposition: in, out, ... .
Shrampfer Azar (2002) devotes eight appendixes to phrasal verbs with the directions: “Supply appropriate prepositions for these two and three-word verbs”.
The following table sums up the major terms used in relation to phrasal verbs.
Term Definition and / or Example
1. One word verb Eg: to look. He looks ill.
2. A two-word verb Eg: to look up. Look up the street
3. A three-word verb Eg: to look up to. He looks up to his father.
4. Prepositional verb V+Prep. Eg: He looks at her.
5. Phrasal verb V+Adv. + Prep. Eg: He looks forward to meeting.
6.Particle/Adverbial An adverb or preposition used in a multi-word verb.
7. Preposition A word that precedes a word which it governs, usually a Nor a N phrase.
8. Adverb A word that modifies or qualifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb.
9. Adverbial Any word, phrase or clause used like an Adverb.
10.Separable Phrasal Verb A multi-word V which can be separated by an O. Eg: Look it up.
11.Inseparable Phrasal Verb Amulti-word Vwhich cannot be separated by an O.Eg:Look up the street.
3.Acquisition of Phrasal Verbs by Advanced Learners of English as a Foreign Language at University Level
As further back as my early years of learning my first and second language (French and Strandard Arabic), I have always expressed the need to understand why such a language element is formed and functions in such a way . When I studied English, my urge to understand why has not stopped. I remember asking my English teacher “Why can’t we say I can to work”? and I distinctly remember her shocked face and her “arrogant” answer: “you ask too many questions, it’s just like that.” I knew “it was like that”, but I wanted to understand WHY it was like that. Can grammar tell us why it is like that?!It tells us how it is more than why. It is clearly the case of phrasal verbs.
Teaching phrasal verbs is one of the most difficult area in grammar because of the lack of systematicity of the rule – if there is one , and as we have just said , not all grammar books deal with this aspect, and when they do, they do it in a variety of ways. We undertook to find out how much of this teaching background has produced acquisition in advanced learners of English as a foreign language at university level, how much knowledge of this thorny area learners who have gone through four years of English at university level, who are presently teaching at the university has been acquired. We invited all the teachers in our Department, holding a B.A or a Master and having graduated in the last ten years to take part in the study (75) and 57 came to take part in this investigation. The informants were formally invited to take part in this study but were not told the object of the investigation so that they would answer the test spontaneously – without any special preparation. The informants are classified into three categories: holders of a B.A; not registered in a Master (20), holders of a B.A, registered in a Master (26: this year : 15, in the past three years : 11) and holders of a Master (11: registered in a Ph.D :05, not registered in a Ph.D : 06).
Before the test the informants answered, we wanted to find out whether they knew the expression “Phrasal Verbs” , and if “yes”, what they thought it meant. Only four informants from Category I said that they did not know the expression; the others gave a satisfactory definition.
The test is made up of four parts – Definitions, Matching, Multiple-Choice and Cloze Procedure – each part involving ten phrasal verbs. The choice of these activities is related to the nature of the task required to be performed. As to Definitions, if an informant can define a word, an expression, it shows understanding. Matching offers the possibility to identify the phrasal verbs, think about their meaning, definition, use before inserting them in the blanks. Multiple Choice offers the same type of activity as Matching, except that for each blank, three possibilities are provided – one distractor is made up of the right base verb plus another particle, and the other distractor is made up of another verb plus the right particle. The Cloze Procedure is made up of a text with blanks to be freely filled in. This activity is the one which tells us most about whether the informants know a phrasal verb – whether the one we have omitted or another one which fits the context. These four activities, requiring different performances, different strategies will enable us to see to what extent they can put words on a phrasal verb (Definition), identify the right phrasal verb (Matching), choose (and use) the right phrasal verb (Multiple Choice) ,and use phrasal verbs (Cloze Procedure).We had thought about the highest level – free production, but we decided against it because it requires a large scale operation, and there is no guarantee that the informants would use phrasal verbs (avoidance phenomenon).
The fourty phrasal verbs included in the four activities (ten per activity) have been selected according to three criteria.
• I know the phrasal verb .
• The likelihood that the majority of the informants can at least understand the phrasal verbs .
• An advanced learner of Category III of the informants knows the majority of the phrasal verbs.
The phrasal verbs combine a variety of particles and relate more to a formal use (academic use).
The texts used for Matching, Multiple Choice and Cloze Procedure were selected according to the nature of:
• the topic: topics specific to women or men or requiring a specific knowledge were discarded,
• the discourse, style, vocabulary, structure: the combination of these elements had to be at the informants’ level.
Table 1: List of Phrasal Verbs per Activity
Definition Matching Multiple Choice Cloze Procedure
1. to call in to go through to go through to open up
2. to catch up to mark down to put away to break into
3. to hand over to check against to look for to switch off
4. to identify with to lie down to ask for to cut off
5. to knock out to drift off to hand in to send for
6. to keep at to give out to put off to arrive at
7. to narrow down to come up with to call off to write down
8. to pass out to tear up to talk over with to sweep up
9. to sleep on to believe in to come across to carry out
10. to show off to say about to leave behind to beat up
Looking at the phrasal verbs which had the highest scores in Category I, we see that these phrasal verbs had higher scores in Category II and Category III, except for “to knock out” which had slightly lower scores in Category II and for “to identify with” which had lower scores in Category III; 45.46% of Category III of the informants, the most advanced learners , said they were not sure about “to identify with”. This seems strange, but in fact it shows that when they were sure, they gave the right definitions. “To show off” is less known by Category I, but on the whole, it is an acquired phrasal verb which must have been come across in different texts and focused on in teaching.
The phrasal verbs known by the majority of Category II and Category III are the same, except for “to pass out” (to become unconscious or to give something to somebody), which is not known by the majority of Category II. As we will see later, this phrasal verb is easily confused with “to pass away” (to die).
Our next analysis focuses on the definitions provided by the informants when they said they knew the phrasal verb and gave the right or wrong definition, and when they said they were not sure and gave the right or wrong definition.
If it is rather expected to give a wrong definition when we are not sure about a definition, it is less expected to get a wrong definition when we say we know the definition.
talk about Christmas – an EFL lesson plan
Introduction
In 1983, Howard Gardner, the creator of the Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory, suggested that all individuals have personal intelligence profiles that consist of combinations of seven different intelligence types. These intelligences were verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Gardner 1983, 1993). Gardner later added an eighth intelligence type to the list, that of naturalist intelligence, and at the same time suggested that there might also exist a ninth intelligence type, that of existentialist intelligence (Gardner 1999).
The purpose of this paper is to outline a lesson plan that caters for these intelligence types and at the same time optimises learners’ talking time. The lesson is aimed at secondary school-level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and focuses on a recurring festival: Christmas. Its main goal is to enable learners to discuss this religious event with English-speaking friends. In order to maintain maximal learner activity and interest throughout the lesson, it comprises a variety of language activities and teaching techniques. Special attention has been paid to co-operative learning and peer teaching because, as pointed out by e.g. Anita Woolfolk, the best teacher for a student is another student (Woolfolk 2001).
The sample lesson:
Phase One
The teacher introduces the teaching goals of the lesson.
Phase Two
The teacher hands out a worksheet containing two columns of Christmas-related vocabulary items (homework from the previous lesson). One column lists English words and the second words in the learners’ mother tongue. The learners’ task is to match the English words with their mother-tongue equivalents.
Phase Three
The teacher displays the correct answers on an OH transparency and divides the class into five groups. S/he next provides each learner with an individual worksheet and invites the groups to work at five independent learning stations (one group per station), i.e. pre-designated places in the classroom where each place has been allocated to a specific type of language task. The learners are told that although they have to work as a group, each learner is responsible for filling in all answers in his or her worksheet. They are also told that they have no correct answers at their disposal. At five-minute intervals (timed and announced by the teacher) the groups move on to the next learning station.
At Station A learners have to study a detailed picture of a living-room decorated for Christmas (suitable pictures can be found in course books and on the internet or they can be created or modified by the teacher for the present purposes). There are various kinds of mistakes in the picture, both misspellings (e.g. in Christmas greetings) and logical inconsistencies (e.g. a wall calendar displaying July the 31st or an object placed upside down). The learners’ task is to spot as many mistakes as possible.
At Station B learners have to categorise given objects (e.g. a reindeer, a sleigh, and a snowman) according to what one can do with them. Which of the objects can be found in a forest, bought in a department store, eaten, wrapped up in a parcel, or put into somebody’s pocket?
At Station C there is a computer preset to show a video clip selected from the Video Nation website. In the video clip, entitled “Christmas List”, a little girl called Sheri is writing her Christmas list to Father Christmas. The learners’ task is to watch the video clip and answer the following questions: What presents does Sheri want? Where does she send the letter? How will she get her presents? What will she do when she wakes up at Christmas?
At Station D learners have to match the halves of about twenty words that have been chopped in half. One of the words, however, is not a Christmas word. Which word is it?
At Station E there is a computer preset to play “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, selected from the Christmas carol collection presented on the Twelve Days of Christmas website. The learners’ task is to listen to the song while reading the song text displayed on the computer screen. When the learners have listened to the song they have to turn away from the screen and fill in the missing words in their individual worksheets (indicated by gaps in the song text).
Phase Four
When all learning stations have been visited by all groups, the teacher divides the learners into new groups. In groups of three or four, the learners compare the notes in their worksheets and agree upon the correct answer for each task.
Phase Five
The teacher introduces a communicative task requesting learners to move around in the classroom and interview their classmates about their Christmas habits (this is a modified version of a task entitled “On Christmas Eve”; Christison 2005). More specifically, the learners have to find out at what time their friends normally get up, go to bed, have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, exchange presents, and watch television. They also have to make notes in the individual worksheets provided by the teacher.
Phase Six
After ten minutes the teacher invites the learners to compare their notes in order to specify the range of times that people prefer to perform the various activities. What is the biggest time difference between the earliest time and the latest time at which someone prefers to perform a certain activity?
Phase Seven
Next, the teacher organises the learners into new groups consisting of four to six people. The task is to decide which activity has the biggest time difference (it will most probably be either exchanging presents or watching television) and to discuss the possible reason/s for this.
Phase Eight
The teacher asks the learners to start working on individual essays entitled “What Christmas means to me” based on the group discussions and to finish them at home for the next EFL lesson. He or she also challenges the learners to incorporate as many different Christmas words as possible into their essays.
Characteristics of learners representing different intelligence types
According to Gardner (1983, 1993, 1999), Berman (2002) and Christison (2005), verbal-linguistic learners enjoy expressing themselves orally and in writing and love wordplay, riddles and listening to stories. Logical-mathematical learners display an aptitude for numbers, reasoning and problem solving, whereas visual-spatial learners tend to think in pictures and mental images and enjoy illustrations, charts, tables and maps. Bodily-kinaesthetic learners experience learning best through various kinds of movement, while musical-rhythmic learners learn best through songs, patterns, rhythms and musical expression. Intrapersonal learners are reflective and intuitive about how and what they learn, whereas interpersonal learners like to interact with others and learn best in groups or with a partner. Naturalist learners love the outdoors and enjoy classifying and categorising activities. Existentialist learners, finally, are concerned with philosophical issues such as the status of mankind in relation to universal existence.
Catering for the various intelligence types
The various intelligence types are catered for (especially) during the following phases of the EFL lesson outlined above:
verbal-linguistic learners: all phases;
logical-mathematical learners: phase 3 (stations A & D) & phase 6;
visual-spatial learners: phase 3 (stations A, C & E);
bodily-kinaesthetic learners: phase 3 (moving between stations) & phase 5;
musical-rhythmic learners: phase 3 (station E);
interpersonal learners: phases 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7;
intrapersonal learners: phases 1, 2 & 8;
naturalist learners: phase 3 (station B);
existentialist learners: phases 1 & 8.
Conclusion
As early as 1976, Earl Stevick pointed out that memory works at its best when the new subject matter appeals to the learners and they can organise what they are learning into familiar patterns (Stevick 1976). The ability to remember new vocabulary items is further increased when learners are allowed to use their imagination during the learning process. Conscious effort (referred to by Stevick as ‘depth’) is required from learners in order to enable the target vocabulary to be properly processed and transferred from the short-term memory into the long-term memory.
From a teaching point of view, therefore, the important thing is not whether teachers elect to base their teaching on specific course books or whether they reserve the right to interpret, select and use the types of classroom activities that can cater for the intelligence profiles of their particular learner group. It is far more important for teachers to realise that learners are in fact different and therefore require different types of classroom activities and techniques in order to code the new information successfully and store it in their long-term memory. Only in doing so can teachers fully encourage their learners to try harder and at the same time make the learning environment as meaningful and enjoyable as possible for the parties involved.
References
Berman, Michael (2002). A Multiple Intelligences Road to an ELT Classroom. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing. Second edition.
Christison, Mary Ann (2005). Multiple Intelligences and Language Learning. San Francisco: Alta Books.
Gardner, Howard (1983). Frames of mind. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard (1993). Multiple Intelligences. The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard (1999). Intelligence Reframed. Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books.
Stevick, Earl (1976). Memory, Meaning and Method. Rowley: Newbury House.
The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Video Nation..
Woolfolk, Anita (2001). Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Eighth edition.
In 1983, Howard Gardner, the creator of the Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory, suggested that all individuals have personal intelligence profiles that consist of combinations of seven different intelligence types. These intelligences were verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Gardner 1983, 1993). Gardner later added an eighth intelligence type to the list, that of naturalist intelligence, and at the same time suggested that there might also exist a ninth intelligence type, that of existentialist intelligence (Gardner 1999).
The purpose of this paper is to outline a lesson plan that caters for these intelligence types and at the same time optimises learners’ talking time. The lesson is aimed at secondary school-level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and focuses on a recurring festival: Christmas. Its main goal is to enable learners to discuss this religious event with English-speaking friends. In order to maintain maximal learner activity and interest throughout the lesson, it comprises a variety of language activities and teaching techniques. Special attention has been paid to co-operative learning and peer teaching because, as pointed out by e.g. Anita Woolfolk, the best teacher for a student is another student (Woolfolk 2001).
The sample lesson:
Phase One
The teacher introduces the teaching goals of the lesson.
Phase Two
The teacher hands out a worksheet containing two columns of Christmas-related vocabulary items (homework from the previous lesson). One column lists English words and the second words in the learners’ mother tongue. The learners’ task is to match the English words with their mother-tongue equivalents.
Phase Three
The teacher displays the correct answers on an OH transparency and divides the class into five groups. S/he next provides each learner with an individual worksheet and invites the groups to work at five independent learning stations (one group per station), i.e. pre-designated places in the classroom where each place has been allocated to a specific type of language task. The learners are told that although they have to work as a group, each learner is responsible for filling in all answers in his or her worksheet. They are also told that they have no correct answers at their disposal. At five-minute intervals (timed and announced by the teacher) the groups move on to the next learning station.
At Station A learners have to study a detailed picture of a living-room decorated for Christmas (suitable pictures can be found in course books and on the internet or they can be created or modified by the teacher for the present purposes). There are various kinds of mistakes in the picture, both misspellings (e.g. in Christmas greetings) and logical inconsistencies (e.g. a wall calendar displaying July the 31st or an object placed upside down). The learners’ task is to spot as many mistakes as possible.
At Station B learners have to categorise given objects (e.g. a reindeer, a sleigh, and a snowman) according to what one can do with them. Which of the objects can be found in a forest, bought in a department store, eaten, wrapped up in a parcel, or put into somebody’s pocket?
At Station C there is a computer preset to show a video clip selected from the Video Nation website. In the video clip, entitled “Christmas List”, a little girl called Sheri is writing her Christmas list to Father Christmas. The learners’ task is to watch the video clip and answer the following questions: What presents does Sheri want? Where does she send the letter? How will she get her presents? What will she do when she wakes up at Christmas?
At Station D learners have to match the halves of about twenty words that have been chopped in half. One of the words, however, is not a Christmas word. Which word is it?
At Station E there is a computer preset to play “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, selected from the Christmas carol collection presented on the Twelve Days of Christmas website. The learners’ task is to listen to the song while reading the song text displayed on the computer screen. When the learners have listened to the song they have to turn away from the screen and fill in the missing words in their individual worksheets (indicated by gaps in the song text).
Phase Four
When all learning stations have been visited by all groups, the teacher divides the learners into new groups. In groups of three or four, the learners compare the notes in their worksheets and agree upon the correct answer for each task.
Phase Five
The teacher introduces a communicative task requesting learners to move around in the classroom and interview their classmates about their Christmas habits (this is a modified version of a task entitled “On Christmas Eve”; Christison 2005). More specifically, the learners have to find out at what time their friends normally get up, go to bed, have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, exchange presents, and watch television. They also have to make notes in the individual worksheets provided by the teacher.
Phase Six
After ten minutes the teacher invites the learners to compare their notes in order to specify the range of times that people prefer to perform the various activities. What is the biggest time difference between the earliest time and the latest time at which someone prefers to perform a certain activity?
Phase Seven
Next, the teacher organises the learners into new groups consisting of four to six people. The task is to decide which activity has the biggest time difference (it will most probably be either exchanging presents or watching television) and to discuss the possible reason/s for this.
Phase Eight
The teacher asks the learners to start working on individual essays entitled “What Christmas means to me” based on the group discussions and to finish them at home for the next EFL lesson. He or she also challenges the learners to incorporate as many different Christmas words as possible into their essays.
Characteristics of learners representing different intelligence types
According to Gardner (1983, 1993, 1999), Berman (2002) and Christison (2005), verbal-linguistic learners enjoy expressing themselves orally and in writing and love wordplay, riddles and listening to stories. Logical-mathematical learners display an aptitude for numbers, reasoning and problem solving, whereas visual-spatial learners tend to think in pictures and mental images and enjoy illustrations, charts, tables and maps. Bodily-kinaesthetic learners experience learning best through various kinds of movement, while musical-rhythmic learners learn best through songs, patterns, rhythms and musical expression. Intrapersonal learners are reflective and intuitive about how and what they learn, whereas interpersonal learners like to interact with others and learn best in groups or with a partner. Naturalist learners love the outdoors and enjoy classifying and categorising activities. Existentialist learners, finally, are concerned with philosophical issues such as the status of mankind in relation to universal existence.
Catering for the various intelligence types
The various intelligence types are catered for (especially) during the following phases of the EFL lesson outlined above:
verbal-linguistic learners: all phases;
logical-mathematical learners: phase 3 (stations A & D) & phase 6;
visual-spatial learners: phase 3 (stations A, C & E);
bodily-kinaesthetic learners: phase 3 (moving between stations) & phase 5;
musical-rhythmic learners: phase 3 (station E);
interpersonal learners: phases 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7;
intrapersonal learners: phases 1, 2 & 8;
naturalist learners: phase 3 (station B);
existentialist learners: phases 1 & 8.
Conclusion
As early as 1976, Earl Stevick pointed out that memory works at its best when the new subject matter appeals to the learners and they can organise what they are learning into familiar patterns (Stevick 1976). The ability to remember new vocabulary items is further increased when learners are allowed to use their imagination during the learning process. Conscious effort (referred to by Stevick as ‘depth’) is required from learners in order to enable the target vocabulary to be properly processed and transferred from the short-term memory into the long-term memory.
From a teaching point of view, therefore, the important thing is not whether teachers elect to base their teaching on specific course books or whether they reserve the right to interpret, select and use the types of classroom activities that can cater for the intelligence profiles of their particular learner group. It is far more important for teachers to realise that learners are in fact different and therefore require different types of classroom activities and techniques in order to code the new information successfully and store it in their long-term memory. Only in doing so can teachers fully encourage their learners to try harder and at the same time make the learning environment as meaningful and enjoyable as possible for the parties involved.
References
Berman, Michael (2002). A Multiple Intelligences Road to an ELT Classroom. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing. Second edition.
Christison, Mary Ann (2005). Multiple Intelligences and Language Learning. San Francisco: Alta Books.
Gardner, Howard (1983). Frames of mind. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard (1993). Multiple Intelligences. The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard (1999). Intelligence Reframed. Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books.
Stevick, Earl (1976). Memory, Meaning and Method. Rowley: Newbury House.
The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Video Nation.
Woolfolk, Anita (2001). Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Eighth edition.
Effects of the Competency-based Integrated Training (CBIT) on the Secondary School English Teachers’
Issues in teacher self-efficacy beliefs have received significant attention for the last three decades. Although there are still differences in terms of the constructs, researchers seem to suggest that teacher efficacy is an important aspect of teachers’ professional life. This paper discusses findings of a survey about the effect of Competency-based Integrated training (CBIT) initiated by the Indonesian MoNE on the secondary school English teachers’ self efficacy beliefs for curriculum implementation in Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia.
The findings discussed in this paper are based on two types of data collected in January – February 2007. The first type of data was collected from 152 English teachers in the province using a five subscale questionnaire in a two-time frame and was analysed using the Repeated Measures MANOVA. The second type of data was collected using an interview protocol and was analysed using the QSR NVivo 7 packages.
Although findings from quantitative data suggest that there are significant differences in the teachers’ efficacy beliefs before and after the CBIT, interviews with some of the teacher sample, however, reveal different aspirations when asked about the contribution of such trainings on their confidence in implementing teaching in the classroom. The findings provide an important implication on the efforts of improving the teaching quality in Indonesian context.
Key words: Competency-based integrated training, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs
A. Introduction
Teaching English in Indonesia
English has become an important foreign language in Indonesia. This perceived importance is recognized by the Indonesian government in the Law No. 20, 2003 concerning the National Education System. Item 36.1.3 of Chapter Explanation of the law, states that foreign languages, in this case English, is an important international language in establishing global relationships. Another part of the law emphasizes the government’s awareness of the need of good education system in global life (Department of Justice, 2003). The importance of the teaching of English is also signalled by the government program that includes English language teaching in the elementary school curriculum. Furthermore, since 2004 the government has established a pilot program to include English in grades four, five and six of elementary school curriculum, especially for schools in cities.
In addition, issues in English teaching in Indonesia have been interesting, especially when concerned with the teaching philosophy, methods, curriculum, assessment and more importantly the students’ achievement. In terms of the philosophy of learning English, Dardjowidjojo (2000 in Lee, 2004) has stated that there have been changes in the philosophy of teaching English in Indonesia. These changes have affected the approaches and methods in the English teaching. Lee (2004) has noted several approaches of English teaching implemented in Indonesia, such as the Grammar Translation Methods (GTM) in 1940s to the beginning of 1960s, the Oral-Aural Methods from 1968 to early 1970s, the Audio-lingual in 1975, the Communicative approach in 1984, the Meaningfulness approach in 1994, and the Literacy approach, which is the latest approach recommended in the teaching of English in Indonesia (Lee, 2004). These changes in the approaches do not end the long debate among experts in English teaching in Indonesia concerning the best suited teaching methods for the subjects.
Debates are also common in terms of the curriculum and the assessment implemented in the teaching of English in the country. Curriculum which normally changes every ten years in the Indonesian context seems to stimulate a never ending discussion among experts. Among the issues, one concerned with students’ achievement seems to be very crucial. This is perhaps because students’ achievement is not only the concern of schools, but also the parents, and even the society and the government. The issue of students’ achievement seems to be ever present whenever forums of English teachers are held. Although English has been a compulsory subject at junior secondary school early from the first year or Year Seven, it does not bring about satisfactory result in both their communication skills and their English National Exam score at the end of the Junior secondary school period. As reported by the Ministry of National education, the National Examination national average score of English is 6.61 for Junior high school students, which was only 0.60 above the national passing grade standard for year 2005-2006. Abas Ali even says that the teaching of English in Indonesia is of total failure because the ability of the students in all four language skills is not operational (Media Indonesia, 2000). The issue of low achievement is very often said as due to the changing of curriculum, low relevance in education program and low quality of teachers.
Increased perceived importance of teachers’ roles
The significant roles of teachers have also been increasing since the implementation of the competency-based education, which was marked by the launch of the draft of the Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) which was initially called the Competency-based Curriculum (MoNE, 2003). Since the preparation of this curriculum, the roles of teachers have been considered vital not only in conducting teaching in the classroom but also in preparing the lessons. Teachers are considered know best about the appropriate classroom activities and interaction for the students, more specifically concerning the levels and the needs of the students. This is because teachers are assumed to better understand the special characteristics of their students, the availability of the teaching equipment in the school, and even the support of the society around the school. Therefore, based on this assumption teachers have been assigned new tasks related to the development of materials to be presented in the classroom. This is new because they used to implement materials prescribed by the curriculum (MoNE, 2003)
Through the assignment of these new tasks, teachers are expected to be ready not only to decide whatever materials to bring into the classroom but also to take the responsibility for what they have chosen. In doing so, teachers are expected to have access to the power of decision making. More importantly, teachers are supposedly ready to act autonomously given access is available for them.
The significant increase in the perceived importance of teachers’ roles and function in education was further emphasized through the issue of Law No. 14, 2005 concerning the work of teachers and lecturers. In this regulation, the government acknowledges the importance of teachers in shaping and supporting the development of future generations. With this law the government emphasizes the importance of both empowering teachers and at the same time improving the quality of teachers. This law is designed to support the improvement of access to education, educational quality, relevance and accountability in the face of local, national and global demand (MoNE, 2006).
B. Review of the Literatures
Teacher self-efficacy beliefs
Teacher self-efficacy beliefs have received significant and increasing attention over the last three decades. At an early stage, Bandura (1977) defined perceived self-efficacy as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercises influence over events that affect their lives (Friedman, 1998). In its development, however, the concept was extended to embrace people’s beliefs about their ability to exercise control over events that affect their lives (Bandura, 1989), and extended even further to encompass beliefs in peoples’ capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources and course of action needed to exercise control over task demands (Bandura, 1990).
Based on this general definition of efficacy beliefs, teacher self-efficacy has been defined as teachers’ judgment about their capability to bring about desired outcome of students’ engagement and learning, even among those students who may be difficult and unmotivated (Bandura, 1977b; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). In terms of teachers’ efficacy beliefs, researchers have come to suggest that teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs are held to be instrumental in affecting the effort teachers put into teaching, in setting goals, and in the aspiration teachers have for themselves and their students.
However, over the course of the development of research in the field of efficacy beliefs, researchers have arrived at somewhat different constructs of these beliefs. Although there are definitional differences, researchers insist that teacher efficacy is an important dimension of teachers. For example, a high sense of efficacy is considered influential in the teachers’ level of enthusiasm for teaching (Alinder, 1994; Guskey, 1984), commitment to teaching (Coladarci, 1992), with highly efficacious teachers tending to exercising higher levels of planning and organization (Alinder, 1994). As well as being willing to persist in dealing with problems and being more resilient in the face of setbacks (Ashton & Webb, 1986), highly efficacious teachers are more open to new ideas and are willing to experiment with new methods (Guskey, 1988; Stein & Wang, 1988). Even though teacher efficacy remains an elusive constructs (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2002), it nonetheless appears to be important in the working life of teachers suggesting that it needs to be explored and examined in varying social and cultural contexts.
Sources of teacher self-efficacy beliefs
Although there are differences in the terms for the concept of teacher self-efficacy beliefs used by researchers, there seems to be a shared idea concerning the source of the beliefs. A common understanding comes to suggest that self-efficacy beliefs develop from four principal sources of information: enactive mastery of experiences that serve as indicators of capability; vicarious experiences that alter efficacy beliefs through transmission of competencies and comparison with attainments of others, verbal persuasion and allied types of social influences that one possesses certain capabilities; and physiological and affective states from which people partly judge their capableness, strength and vulnerability to dysfunctions (Bandura, 1997).
Enactive mastery experience according to Bandura (1997) derives from experiences of success, while failures, on the other hand, undermine sense of efficacy beliefs. Experience of success does not necessarily mean without difficulties. Bandura further states that when people experience easy successes all the time, they will be easily discouraged when facing problems because they expect quick results. Strong resilient efficacy beliefs require the ability to solve problems through perseverant efforts. That is why easy successes do not support the development of one’s efficacy beliefs. Difficulties, on the other hand, do. This is because difficulties provide people with experiences to learn how to turn failure into success by exercising better control over the events.
The second source of efficacy beliefs is vicarious experience which is mediated by modeled attainment (Bandura, 1997). Individual beliefs in his or her ability can be promoted by an existing successful model. The more aspects individual have in common with the referral model, the more vicarious effect the model has on the individual. Although vicarious experiences are said to be not as strong as mastery information, it indeed contributes to boost one’s confidence in the ability of doing something, more particularly when there is a doubt with respect to the amount of success one might get. When one doubts his ability of achieving success in a certain activity, successes of a referral model will lessen the doubt, thus increase the efficacy beliefs. That is to say that vicarious experience will have its highest effect when the amount of uncertainty of the individual is most. When an individual has no prior success on certain ability, s/he will tend to look at relevant model to base on his/her efficacy judgment. Mixed experiences of success and failure are also conditions of vicarious experience effects. In this case continuous appraisals from the environment might be needed to boost the efficacy beliefs.
The third source of self-efficacy beliefs is verbal or social persuasion (Bandura, 1997). Although the power to strengthen efficacy sense is not as strong as enactive experiences or the vicarious experience, one’s sense of efficacy is indeed strengthened when there are others who persuade verbally that one has the ability to do a certain task. Verbal persuasion usually takes the form of evaluation feedback. When people are told that they have the capability of doing some task regardless of the problems, they usually build the sense that they are capable of doing it based on the feedback. Feedback is usually given in indirect and subtle ways so that it lifts the sense of confidence.
The last source of efficacy according to Bandura (1997) is the physiological and emotional states which convey the somatic information. In terms of physiological states, people tend to consider their fatigue, windedness, aches and pains as indicators of inefficacy, especially in health functioning and activities involving strength and stamina. Furthermore, people often perceive low sense of efficacy when they have to do physiological activities in stressful and taxing situation. And they, therefore, consider the stressful and taxing situation as signs of vulnerability or dysfunctions (Bandura, 1997) p.106).
Teacher professional development
Gordon (Gordon, 2004) has proposed three elements to be covered in a successful professional development program. Those aspects include the capacity building, the core element and the purpose of professional development. Those three aspects can further be explained into seven elements that should be combined to optimize the effect of a professional development. He further said that,
“… a successful professional development includes a combination of experiences that empower 1) individual educators, 2) educational teams, and 3) the educational organization to improve 4) curriculum, 5) instruction, and 6) student assessment in order to 7) facilitate student growth and development” (Gordon, 2004: p. 5).
According to Gordon, the first three elements belong to the capacity building, which have no direct effect on student learning but increase the ability of individuals, groups, and schools to affect student learning. The next three elements belong to the core element of a professional development program and have direct effect on student learning. The last element, to facilitate student growth and development, is the ultimate purpose of professional development (Gordon, 2004).
In terms of the models of teacher professional development, many have often proposed categories like (skill) trainings, workshops, seminars, action research, and some other models. Recently, however, there seem to be more simple classification of professional development. Little (Little, 1993), for example, uses the term alternative models of professional development to refer to what she assumes to be ‘more reformed’ models that trainings. Although she seems to be unsupportive to teacher training as a model of professional development, she suggests that the present practices of teacher trainings have demonstrated greater sophistication.
Although training has been one of the most widely used models of professional development research has suggested that it is the least favor professional empowerment and often been discussed with a negative connotation and portrayed as antithetical to authentic professional development (Gordon, 2004: p. 33). Such negative responses are mainly based on the common practices conducted in the training in which there are no adequate opportunities for the participants to implement the newly trained skills with good supervision. This is also caused by the lack of consultation participants might have when they try to implement the new skills. This is in line with what Little’s idea about what an effective training should provide (Little, 1993; p. 132) In discussion the professional development that supports education reform, she has recommended that the level of effectiveness of training is related to the ability of the training to provide teachers with opportunity for practice, consultation, and coaching (Little, 1993).
In terms of the effects of trainings on teachers’ sense of efficacy beliefs, a number of research has suggested that there is effect of training as professional development on teachers’ sense of efficacy. Ross and Bruce (2007) for example stipulate the possibility of professional development on the level of efficacy beliefs. They theorize that professional development contributes in multiple ways to the four sources of efficacy information (Ross & Bruce, 2007). By attending a training, there is a possibility for teacher to feel that there is an increase in their level of mastery on the field transferred through the training. The increase of perceived mastery will potentially elevate the level of efficacy. Communicating with colleagues and seeing other teachers’ success while in the training can also provide vicarious experience, which in turn will also increase the teachers’ sense of efficacy.
Further, using the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001), Ross and Bruce find that there is positive contribution of professional development in all three dimensions measured, especially on teachers’ expectation about their ability to manage students in the classroom.
“Although there were slight increases in the other dimensions of teacher efficacy measured by the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale, only changes in classroom management were statistically significant. We suspect that teachers’ confidence in their ability to engage student interest and to use new instructional strategies follow confidence in classroom management” (Ross & Bruce, 2007)
C. Methods
Participants
Data were collected during the period of December 2006 – February 2007 in four districts and one municipality of the province with the target population of Junior Secondary School English teachers in the province. Criteria of sampling picked only teachers that had already attended the Competency-based Integrated Trainings (CBIT) conducted by the Ministry of National Education (MONE) as the appropriate sample of the research. Data collection was done while teachers were attending the teacher forum meetings in their respective districts and municipality.
There were two groups of participants in this research. The first group was one hundred and fifty two English teachers and the second group was four teachers who were members of the first group. Teachers in the first group were those who had been selected on the basis that they had attended the CBIT in 2004 to 2006 and had agreed to participate in this research by returning the questionnaire. Teachers in the second group were selected based on the teacher instructors’ nomination. This nomination was based on the grouping of high, medium and low performance teachers. The decision of asking the nomination from the teacher instructors was based on the assumption that they knew the teacher participants better due to their duties, especially because they were the people who had access to the performance records of the teachers.
Criteria and the recruitment of research sample
The sample of the survey in the present study was determined using two main criteria for selection. First, they were junior secondary school English teachers who taught in the four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province. Second, those English teachers had to have attended the Pelatihan Terpadu Berbasis Kompetensi (PTBK) or the Competency-based Integrated Training (CBIT). It was a training designed by the Indonesia Ministry of National Education (MoNE) to prepare the teachers to implement the newly issued curriculum, Kurikulum Berbasis Kompetensi (KBK) or Competency-based Curriculum (CBC).
The second criterion of the selection of the sample was accessed directly when the survey was conducted in the district teaching forum meetings. By only asking participation from those teachers who had attended the CBIT, it was expected that the survey data collection would disqualify those who had not. The recruitment, therefore, was done with no special invitation. Instead, the researcher went to the monthly English Teacher Forum meetings in all the districts and municipality. To maximize the number of responses, the researcher came to all teacher forums within the periods of December 2006 to February 2007. This was done in case there were teachers that could not attend the meeting in one of the meetings.
The second group of sample was selected based on the nomination of teacher instructors in the province. There were four teachers resulted from the second recruitment process. These four teachers were nominated by the teacher instructors from the members of the first group. The nomination was based on the participants’ English proficiency. The participants, therefore, represented teachers from high, middle and low English proficiency.
At the nomination stage, there were actually nine nominated teachers representing high, middle, and low proficiency respectively. Upon responding to the further research invitation, however, only four of the nominated teachers expressed their participation. Among these four teachers, one teacher was identified as having low English proficiency, two teachers were in the middle, and the other one was the high English proficiency. These four teachers participated in the follow-up study focusing on their teaching practices in the classroom. Participants were asked to complete a consent form and their participation was also voluntary. Data collected from this group of participants were gained through semi-structured interview and classroom observations.
D. Measures
There were two types of instrument used to collect the data. The first instrument, the teacher efficacy scale, was used to collect the quantitative. The second was in the form of interview protocol.
Teachers’ self-efficacy scale
The teachers’ self-efficacy scale used in this study consisted of two parts. The first part was a three-subscale questionnaire drawn from the long version of the Ohio State Teacher Self-efficacy scales (OS-TES) developed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). They consisted of eight items in every subscale. The first eight-item sub-scale, the efficacy for instructional strategy scale, tried to measure the beliefs of the teachers in their ability in planning, executing and evaluating their classroom English instruction. The second sub-scale, the efficacy for classroom management scale, dealt with measuring teachers’ efficacy beliefs in managing the classroom. The third sub-scale, the efficacy for student engagement scale, was aimed to measure teachers’ efficacy beliefs in engaging students in the classroom activities.
There were some considerations of using the survey. The first reason was related to the fact it was developed through a thorough review and analysis on the existing teacher self-efficacy measures. It was, therefore, reasonably valid, given the positive correlation with the existing measures (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). The second reason was related to the evidence that the survey had high reliability coefficient when used in different context of participant. For example, when applied in the United States context, it had the overall alpha coefficients of .94 and the sub-scale alphas of .91, .90 and .87 for the efficacy for instructional strategy, classroom management and student engagement subscales (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2002). Similarly in the Malaysian context, Murshidi et.al, (2006) found that the overall alpha coefficient were .80 with alphas of .77, .93 and .94 for the three subscales (Murshidi, Konting, Elias, & Fooi, 2006). Although the OS-TES had proven to be highly reliable for both the USA and Malaysia participants, there was no guarantee that the same findings would be found when it was applied to an even more specific context of Indonesia with teachers teaching English as a foreign language. Cultural and social aspects of Indonesian teachers might give a rise to issues related to the findings. This research, therefore, was expected to provide cross-cultural validation on the existing teacher efficacy scales.
The second part of the teachers’ efficacy survey consisted of two subscales developed by the researcher. They were designed to address the specific context of this study, the junior secondary English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in the context of curriculum changes in Indonesia. The first subscale, the teachers’ efficacy for English, consisted of seven items addressing the English-related skills needed by teachers in doing their daily teaching duties. The items covered both productive and perceptive skills as well as both English for communication and instruction purposes. The second subscale, the efficacy for curriculum implementation sub-scale, was developed to investigate teachers’ self- efficacy beliefs in the implementation of Curriculum 2004 in Indonesian Secondary School English teaching. This eight-item sub-scale was designed to address the contextual issues regarding the teaching of English in Indonesian secondary schools as a result of the changing in curriculum from the Curriculum 1994 to the Curriculum 2004 and then to the School Level Curriculum 2006. Aspects measured in this sub-scale concerned mostly with the concepts and practices in the competency-based language teaching and the contextual teaching and learning. These two aspects of the measure were relevant with the materials given to teachers through the CBIT.
E. Procedure of data collection and analyses
Collection of quantitative data was done in four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province and was facilitated by the teacher forums in each area for the survey. All participants were directly contacted by the researcher at the teacher forum meetings in every district and municipality between January – February 2007. In the meetings, teachers who fit the sample criteria were invited to participate in the research and were asked to fill in the teacher efficacy questionnaire. Participation of the teachers was voluntarily.
Prior to the data collection, the researcher explained the research project and asked the teachers to participate in the research by completing a survey. Upon requesting the participation, the researcher explained the purposes of the research, the information required in the research, and the significance of their participation. Issues on confidentiality were also discussed in the preliminary explanation. Participation, however, was voluntary, which was signaled with the voluntarily returning the completed questionnaire by the participants together with the participants’ consent forms. This first group was required to complete a questionnaire consisting of seven sub-scales that took approximately 30 minutes of their time. The questionnaire focused on the teachers’ self efficacy beliefs in English and English teaching in general and in relation to the implementation of the new curriculum in particular. It was also aimed to investigate whether there were changes with respect to the teachers’ self efficacy beliefs before and after teachers’ attendance in the CBIT.
Data were in the form of teachers’ self-report concerning their level of efficacy before and after attending the CBIT. In collecting the data, the researcher asked teachers to respond to the efficacy questionnaire twice. In the first session teachers were asked to report their level of efficacy at the time the data were collected. These data showed the level of teachers’ self-efficacy after they attended the CBIT. In the second session, on the other hand, teachers were asked to reflect their level of efficacy before they attended the CBIT. All responses were anchored on a seven-point Likert-type scale ranging from Not at all to Great deal. The recorded data were then coded into the Efficacy_NOW and Efficacy_THEN formats. Efficacy_NOW referred to the level of the teachers’ efficacy at the time the data were collected or after attending the trainings, while Efficacy_THEN referred to the level of teachers’ efficacy beliefs before they attended the trainings.
Qualitative data were collected using an interview protocol. The collection of the data about contribution of CBIT on teachers’ self-efficacy was a part of a wider construct of teacher efficacy in general. There were only two items in the interview protocol that were used to assess the level of efficacy in relation to the training they had attended.
Quantitative data were analysed in two steps. First data were analysed descriptively to identify the groups created by the categorical independent variables. Second, the data were then analysed using the repeated measures MANOVA of the SPSS package. The Multivariate value of the analysis provides the basis to determine whether the effect of the training was significant. Qualitative data from the interview were analysed following the qualitative data analyses. First, the data were transcribed from the recorded interviews before they were coded. The coding process in the present study was conducted in two steps using the NVivo 7. First data were coded into themes. Then the connection among themes was used to formulate categories, and from these meaningful categories was an interpretation and explanations on the findings were built.
F. Findings
Descriptive analyses on the data resulted in the description and distribution of the sample. There were seven independent variables involved in the data collection. Such variables included the gender, age, educational background that covered whether the participants had English teaching background in their college or university, teaching experience, teacher status, schools, and the districts where the teachers taught. Table 1 showed the description and distribution of the sample based on the independent variables.
From the descriptive analysis, it was found that there were more female teachers in the sample, with most participants were between 31 to 50 years of age, and had more than five years of teaching experience. Very few teachers in the sample did not have English teaching background. Participants were from four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province teaching mostly in public schools.
Repeated measures MANOVA was used in this study to investigate the differences of the Secondary school English teachers’ efficacy beliefs in Yogyakarta province as a result of the teachers’ attendance in the Competency-based Integrated trainings (CBIT). In general, Multivariate tests in the Repeated Measures MANOVA suggested that there were significant differences between the level of teachers’ efficacy beliefs before and after their attendance in the Competency-based Integrated trainings, F (38, 114) = 3.511, p < .05. Differences in the means of the teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs can be seen in Figure 1, with time_1 (the lower line in the figure) representing the level of teachers’ efficacy before attending the CBIT and time_2 representing the levels of teachers’ efficacy after the trainings.
The findings discussed in this paper are based on two types of data collected in January – February 2007. The first type of data was collected from 152 English teachers in the province using a five subscale questionnaire in a two-time frame and was analysed using the Repeated Measures MANOVA. The second type of data was collected using an interview protocol and was analysed using the QSR NVivo 7 packages.
Although findings from quantitative data suggest that there are significant differences in the teachers’ efficacy beliefs before and after the CBIT, interviews with some of the teacher sample, however, reveal different aspirations when asked about the contribution of such trainings on their confidence in implementing teaching in the classroom. The findings provide an important implication on the efforts of improving the teaching quality in Indonesian context.
Key words: Competency-based integrated training, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs
A. Introduction
Teaching English in Indonesia
English has become an important foreign language in Indonesia. This perceived importance is recognized by the Indonesian government in the Law No. 20, 2003 concerning the National Education System. Item 36.1.3 of Chapter Explanation of the law, states that foreign languages, in this case English, is an important international language in establishing global relationships. Another part of the law emphasizes the government’s awareness of the need of good education system in global life (Department of Justice, 2003). The importance of the teaching of English is also signalled by the government program that includes English language teaching in the elementary school curriculum. Furthermore, since 2004 the government has established a pilot program to include English in grades four, five and six of elementary school curriculum, especially for schools in cities.
In addition, issues in English teaching in Indonesia have been interesting, especially when concerned with the teaching philosophy, methods, curriculum, assessment and more importantly the students’ achievement. In terms of the philosophy of learning English, Dardjowidjojo (2000 in Lee, 2004) has stated that there have been changes in the philosophy of teaching English in Indonesia. These changes have affected the approaches and methods in the English teaching. Lee (2004) has noted several approaches of English teaching implemented in Indonesia, such as the Grammar Translation Methods (GTM) in 1940s to the beginning of 1960s, the Oral-Aural Methods from 1968 to early 1970s, the Audio-lingual in 1975, the Communicative approach in 1984, the Meaningfulness approach in 1994, and the Literacy approach, which is the latest approach recommended in the teaching of English in Indonesia (Lee, 2004). These changes in the approaches do not end the long debate among experts in English teaching in Indonesia concerning the best suited teaching methods for the subjects.
Debates are also common in terms of the curriculum and the assessment implemented in the teaching of English in the country. Curriculum which normally changes every ten years in the Indonesian context seems to stimulate a never ending discussion among experts. Among the issues, one concerned with students’ achievement seems to be very crucial. This is perhaps because students’ achievement is not only the concern of schools, but also the parents, and even the society and the government. The issue of students’ achievement seems to be ever present whenever forums of English teachers are held. Although English has been a compulsory subject at junior secondary school early from the first year or Year Seven, it does not bring about satisfactory result in both their communication skills and their English National Exam score at the end of the Junior secondary school period. As reported by the Ministry of National education, the National Examination national average score of English is 6.61 for Junior high school students, which was only 0.60 above the national passing grade standard for year 2005-2006. Abas Ali even says that the teaching of English in Indonesia is of total failure because the ability of the students in all four language skills is not operational (Media Indonesia, 2000). The issue of low achievement is very often said as due to the changing of curriculum, low relevance in education program and low quality of teachers.
Increased perceived importance of teachers’ roles
The significant roles of teachers have also been increasing since the implementation of the competency-based education, which was marked by the launch of the draft of the Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) which was initially called the Competency-based Curriculum (MoNE, 2003). Since the preparation of this curriculum, the roles of teachers have been considered vital not only in conducting teaching in the classroom but also in preparing the lessons. Teachers are considered know best about the appropriate classroom activities and interaction for the students, more specifically concerning the levels and the needs of the students. This is because teachers are assumed to better understand the special characteristics of their students, the availability of the teaching equipment in the school, and even the support of the society around the school. Therefore, based on this assumption teachers have been assigned new tasks related to the development of materials to be presented in the classroom. This is new because they used to implement materials prescribed by the curriculum (MoNE, 2003)
Through the assignment of these new tasks, teachers are expected to be ready not only to decide whatever materials to bring into the classroom but also to take the responsibility for what they have chosen. In doing so, teachers are expected to have access to the power of decision making. More importantly, teachers are supposedly ready to act autonomously given access is available for them.
The significant increase in the perceived importance of teachers’ roles and function in education was further emphasized through the issue of Law No. 14, 2005 concerning the work of teachers and lecturers. In this regulation, the government acknowledges the importance of teachers in shaping and supporting the development of future generations. With this law the government emphasizes the importance of both empowering teachers and at the same time improving the quality of teachers. This law is designed to support the improvement of access to education, educational quality, relevance and accountability in the face of local, national and global demand (MoNE, 2006).
B. Review of the Literatures
Teacher self-efficacy beliefs
Teacher self-efficacy beliefs have received significant and increasing attention over the last three decades. At an early stage, Bandura (1977) defined perceived self-efficacy as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercises influence over events that affect their lives (Friedman, 1998). In its development, however, the concept was extended to embrace people’s beliefs about their ability to exercise control over events that affect their lives (Bandura, 1989), and extended even further to encompass beliefs in peoples’ capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources and course of action needed to exercise control over task demands (Bandura, 1990).
Based on this general definition of efficacy beliefs, teacher self-efficacy has been defined as teachers’ judgment about their capability to bring about desired outcome of students’ engagement and learning, even among those students who may be difficult and unmotivated (Bandura, 1977b; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). In terms of teachers’ efficacy beliefs, researchers have come to suggest that teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs are held to be instrumental in affecting the effort teachers put into teaching, in setting goals, and in the aspiration teachers have for themselves and their students.
However, over the course of the development of research in the field of efficacy beliefs, researchers have arrived at somewhat different constructs of these beliefs. Although there are definitional differences, researchers insist that teacher efficacy is an important dimension of teachers. For example, a high sense of efficacy is considered influential in the teachers’ level of enthusiasm for teaching (Alinder, 1994; Guskey, 1984), commitment to teaching (Coladarci, 1992), with highly efficacious teachers tending to exercising higher levels of planning and organization (Alinder, 1994). As well as being willing to persist in dealing with problems and being more resilient in the face of setbacks (Ashton & Webb, 1986), highly efficacious teachers are more open to new ideas and are willing to experiment with new methods (Guskey, 1988; Stein & Wang, 1988). Even though teacher efficacy remains an elusive constructs (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2002), it nonetheless appears to be important in the working life of teachers suggesting that it needs to be explored and examined in varying social and cultural contexts.
Sources of teacher self-efficacy beliefs
Although there are differences in the terms for the concept of teacher self-efficacy beliefs used by researchers, there seems to be a shared idea concerning the source of the beliefs. A common understanding comes to suggest that self-efficacy beliefs develop from four principal sources of information: enactive mastery of experiences that serve as indicators of capability; vicarious experiences that alter efficacy beliefs through transmission of competencies and comparison with attainments of others, verbal persuasion and allied types of social influences that one possesses certain capabilities; and physiological and affective states from which people partly judge their capableness, strength and vulnerability to dysfunctions (Bandura, 1997).
Enactive mastery experience according to Bandura (1997) derives from experiences of success, while failures, on the other hand, undermine sense of efficacy beliefs. Experience of success does not necessarily mean without difficulties. Bandura further states that when people experience easy successes all the time, they will be easily discouraged when facing problems because they expect quick results. Strong resilient efficacy beliefs require the ability to solve problems through perseverant efforts. That is why easy successes do not support the development of one’s efficacy beliefs. Difficulties, on the other hand, do. This is because difficulties provide people with experiences to learn how to turn failure into success by exercising better control over the events.
The second source of efficacy beliefs is vicarious experience which is mediated by modeled attainment (Bandura, 1997). Individual beliefs in his or her ability can be promoted by an existing successful model. The more aspects individual have in common with the referral model, the more vicarious effect the model has on the individual. Although vicarious experiences are said to be not as strong as mastery information, it indeed contributes to boost one’s confidence in the ability of doing something, more particularly when there is a doubt with respect to the amount of success one might get. When one doubts his ability of achieving success in a certain activity, successes of a referral model will lessen the doubt, thus increase the efficacy beliefs. That is to say that vicarious experience will have its highest effect when the amount of uncertainty of the individual is most. When an individual has no prior success on certain ability, s/he will tend to look at relevant model to base on his/her efficacy judgment. Mixed experiences of success and failure are also conditions of vicarious experience effects. In this case continuous appraisals from the environment might be needed to boost the efficacy beliefs.
The third source of self-efficacy beliefs is verbal or social persuasion (Bandura, 1997). Although the power to strengthen efficacy sense is not as strong as enactive experiences or the vicarious experience, one’s sense of efficacy is indeed strengthened when there are others who persuade verbally that one has the ability to do a certain task. Verbal persuasion usually takes the form of evaluation feedback. When people are told that they have the capability of doing some task regardless of the problems, they usually build the sense that they are capable of doing it based on the feedback. Feedback is usually given in indirect and subtle ways so that it lifts the sense of confidence.
The last source of efficacy according to Bandura (1997) is the physiological and emotional states which convey the somatic information. In terms of physiological states, people tend to consider their fatigue, windedness, aches and pains as indicators of inefficacy, especially in health functioning and activities involving strength and stamina. Furthermore, people often perceive low sense of efficacy when they have to do physiological activities in stressful and taxing situation. And they, therefore, consider the stressful and taxing situation as signs of vulnerability or dysfunctions (Bandura, 1997) p.106).
Teacher professional development
Gordon (Gordon, 2004) has proposed three elements to be covered in a successful professional development program. Those aspects include the capacity building, the core element and the purpose of professional development. Those three aspects can further be explained into seven elements that should be combined to optimize the effect of a professional development. He further said that,
“… a successful professional development includes a combination of experiences that empower 1) individual educators, 2) educational teams, and 3) the educational organization to improve 4) curriculum, 5) instruction, and 6) student assessment in order to 7) facilitate student growth and development” (Gordon, 2004: p. 5).
According to Gordon, the first three elements belong to the capacity building, which have no direct effect on student learning but increase the ability of individuals, groups, and schools to affect student learning. The next three elements belong to the core element of a professional development program and have direct effect on student learning. The last element, to facilitate student growth and development, is the ultimate purpose of professional development (Gordon, 2004).
In terms of the models of teacher professional development, many have often proposed categories like (skill) trainings, workshops, seminars, action research, and some other models. Recently, however, there seem to be more simple classification of professional development. Little (Little, 1993), for example, uses the term alternative models of professional development to refer to what she assumes to be ‘more reformed’ models that trainings. Although she seems to be unsupportive to teacher training as a model of professional development, she suggests that the present practices of teacher trainings have demonstrated greater sophistication.
Although training has been one of the most widely used models of professional development research has suggested that it is the least favor professional empowerment and often been discussed with a negative connotation and portrayed as antithetical to authentic professional development (Gordon, 2004: p. 33). Such negative responses are mainly based on the common practices conducted in the training in which there are no adequate opportunities for the participants to implement the newly trained skills with good supervision. This is also caused by the lack of consultation participants might have when they try to implement the new skills. This is in line with what Little’s idea about what an effective training should provide (Little, 1993; p. 132) In discussion the professional development that supports education reform, she has recommended that the level of effectiveness of training is related to the ability of the training to provide teachers with opportunity for practice, consultation, and coaching (Little, 1993).
In terms of the effects of trainings on teachers’ sense of efficacy beliefs, a number of research has suggested that there is effect of training as professional development on teachers’ sense of efficacy. Ross and Bruce (2007) for example stipulate the possibility of professional development on the level of efficacy beliefs. They theorize that professional development contributes in multiple ways to the four sources of efficacy information (Ross & Bruce, 2007). By attending a training, there is a possibility for teacher to feel that there is an increase in their level of mastery on the field transferred through the training. The increase of perceived mastery will potentially elevate the level of efficacy. Communicating with colleagues and seeing other teachers’ success while in the training can also provide vicarious experience, which in turn will also increase the teachers’ sense of efficacy.
Further, using the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001), Ross and Bruce find that there is positive contribution of professional development in all three dimensions measured, especially on teachers’ expectation about their ability to manage students in the classroom.
“Although there were slight increases in the other dimensions of teacher efficacy measured by the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale, only changes in classroom management were statistically significant. We suspect that teachers’ confidence in their ability to engage student interest and to use new instructional strategies follow confidence in classroom management” (Ross & Bruce, 2007)
C. Methods
Participants
Data were collected during the period of December 2006 – February 2007 in four districts and one municipality of the province with the target population of Junior Secondary School English teachers in the province. Criteria of sampling picked only teachers that had already attended the Competency-based Integrated Trainings (CBIT) conducted by the Ministry of National Education (MONE) as the appropriate sample of the research. Data collection was done while teachers were attending the teacher forum meetings in their respective districts and municipality.
There were two groups of participants in this research. The first group was one hundred and fifty two English teachers and the second group was four teachers who were members of the first group. Teachers in the first group were those who had been selected on the basis that they had attended the CBIT in 2004 to 2006 and had agreed to participate in this research by returning the questionnaire. Teachers in the second group were selected based on the teacher instructors’ nomination. This nomination was based on the grouping of high, medium and low performance teachers. The decision of asking the nomination from the teacher instructors was based on the assumption that they knew the teacher participants better due to their duties, especially because they were the people who had access to the performance records of the teachers.
Criteria and the recruitment of research sample
The sample of the survey in the present study was determined using two main criteria for selection. First, they were junior secondary school English teachers who taught in the four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province. Second, those English teachers had to have attended the Pelatihan Terpadu Berbasis Kompetensi (PTBK) or the Competency-based Integrated Training (CBIT). It was a training designed by the Indonesia Ministry of National Education (MoNE) to prepare the teachers to implement the newly issued curriculum, Kurikulum Berbasis Kompetensi (KBK) or Competency-based Curriculum (CBC).
The second criterion of the selection of the sample was accessed directly when the survey was conducted in the district teaching forum meetings. By only asking participation from those teachers who had attended the CBIT, it was expected that the survey data collection would disqualify those who had not. The recruitment, therefore, was done with no special invitation. Instead, the researcher went to the monthly English Teacher Forum meetings in all the districts and municipality. To maximize the number of responses, the researcher came to all teacher forums within the periods of December 2006 to February 2007. This was done in case there were teachers that could not attend the meeting in one of the meetings.
The second group of sample was selected based on the nomination of teacher instructors in the province. There were four teachers resulted from the second recruitment process. These four teachers were nominated by the teacher instructors from the members of the first group. The nomination was based on the participants’ English proficiency. The participants, therefore, represented teachers from high, middle and low English proficiency.
At the nomination stage, there were actually nine nominated teachers representing high, middle, and low proficiency respectively. Upon responding to the further research invitation, however, only four of the nominated teachers expressed their participation. Among these four teachers, one teacher was identified as having low English proficiency, two teachers were in the middle, and the other one was the high English proficiency. These four teachers participated in the follow-up study focusing on their teaching practices in the classroom. Participants were asked to complete a consent form and their participation was also voluntary. Data collected from this group of participants were gained through semi-structured interview and classroom observations.
D. Measures
There were two types of instrument used to collect the data. The first instrument, the teacher efficacy scale, was used to collect the quantitative. The second was in the form of interview protocol.
Teachers’ self-efficacy scale
The teachers’ self-efficacy scale used in this study consisted of two parts. The first part was a three-subscale questionnaire drawn from the long version of the Ohio State Teacher Self-efficacy scales (OS-TES) developed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). They consisted of eight items in every subscale. The first eight-item sub-scale, the efficacy for instructional strategy scale, tried to measure the beliefs of the teachers in their ability in planning, executing and evaluating their classroom English instruction. The second sub-scale, the efficacy for classroom management scale, dealt with measuring teachers’ efficacy beliefs in managing the classroom. The third sub-scale, the efficacy for student engagement scale, was aimed to measure teachers’ efficacy beliefs in engaging students in the classroom activities.
There were some considerations of using the survey. The first reason was related to the fact it was developed through a thorough review and analysis on the existing teacher self-efficacy measures. It was, therefore, reasonably valid, given the positive correlation with the existing measures (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). The second reason was related to the evidence that the survey had high reliability coefficient when used in different context of participant. For example, when applied in the United States context, it had the overall alpha coefficients of .94 and the sub-scale alphas of .91, .90 and .87 for the efficacy for instructional strategy, classroom management and student engagement subscales (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2002). Similarly in the Malaysian context, Murshidi et.al, (2006) found that the overall alpha coefficient were .80 with alphas of .77, .93 and .94 for the three subscales (Murshidi, Konting, Elias, & Fooi, 2006). Although the OS-TES had proven to be highly reliable for both the USA and Malaysia participants, there was no guarantee that the same findings would be found when it was applied to an even more specific context of Indonesia with teachers teaching English as a foreign language. Cultural and social aspects of Indonesian teachers might give a rise to issues related to the findings. This research, therefore, was expected to provide cross-cultural validation on the existing teacher efficacy scales.
The second part of the teachers’ efficacy survey consisted of two subscales developed by the researcher. They were designed to address the specific context of this study, the junior secondary English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in the context of curriculum changes in Indonesia. The first subscale, the teachers’ efficacy for English, consisted of seven items addressing the English-related skills needed by teachers in doing their daily teaching duties. The items covered both productive and perceptive skills as well as both English for communication and instruction purposes. The second subscale, the efficacy for curriculum implementation sub-scale, was developed to investigate teachers’ self- efficacy beliefs in the implementation of Curriculum 2004 in Indonesian Secondary School English teaching. This eight-item sub-scale was designed to address the contextual issues regarding the teaching of English in Indonesian secondary schools as a result of the changing in curriculum from the Curriculum 1994 to the Curriculum 2004 and then to the School Level Curriculum 2006. Aspects measured in this sub-scale concerned mostly with the concepts and practices in the competency-based language teaching and the contextual teaching and learning. These two aspects of the measure were relevant with the materials given to teachers through the CBIT.
E. Procedure of data collection and analyses
Collection of quantitative data was done in four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province and was facilitated by the teacher forums in each area for the survey. All participants were directly contacted by the researcher at the teacher forum meetings in every district and municipality between January – February 2007. In the meetings, teachers who fit the sample criteria were invited to participate in the research and were asked to fill in the teacher efficacy questionnaire. Participation of the teachers was voluntarily.
Prior to the data collection, the researcher explained the research project and asked the teachers to participate in the research by completing a survey. Upon requesting the participation, the researcher explained the purposes of the research, the information required in the research, and the significance of their participation. Issues on confidentiality were also discussed in the preliminary explanation. Participation, however, was voluntary, which was signaled with the voluntarily returning the completed questionnaire by the participants together with the participants’ consent forms. This first group was required to complete a questionnaire consisting of seven sub-scales that took approximately 30 minutes of their time. The questionnaire focused on the teachers’ self efficacy beliefs in English and English teaching in general and in relation to the implementation of the new curriculum in particular. It was also aimed to investigate whether there were changes with respect to the teachers’ self efficacy beliefs before and after teachers’ attendance in the CBIT.
Data were in the form of teachers’ self-report concerning their level of efficacy before and after attending the CBIT. In collecting the data, the researcher asked teachers to respond to the efficacy questionnaire twice. In the first session teachers were asked to report their level of efficacy at the time the data were collected. These data showed the level of teachers’ self-efficacy after they attended the CBIT. In the second session, on the other hand, teachers were asked to reflect their level of efficacy before they attended the CBIT. All responses were anchored on a seven-point Likert-type scale ranging from Not at all to Great deal. The recorded data were then coded into the Efficacy_NOW and Efficacy_THEN formats. Efficacy_NOW referred to the level of the teachers’ efficacy at the time the data were collected or after attending the trainings, while Efficacy_THEN referred to the level of teachers’ efficacy beliefs before they attended the trainings.
Qualitative data were collected using an interview protocol. The collection of the data about contribution of CBIT on teachers’ self-efficacy was a part of a wider construct of teacher efficacy in general. There were only two items in the interview protocol that were used to assess the level of efficacy in relation to the training they had attended.
Quantitative data were analysed in two steps. First data were analysed descriptively to identify the groups created by the categorical independent variables. Second, the data were then analysed using the repeated measures MANOVA of the SPSS package. The Multivariate value of the analysis provides the basis to determine whether the effect of the training was significant. Qualitative data from the interview were analysed following the qualitative data analyses. First, the data were transcribed from the recorded interviews before they were coded. The coding process in the present study was conducted in two steps using the NVivo 7. First data were coded into themes. Then the connection among themes was used to formulate categories, and from these meaningful categories was an interpretation and explanations on the findings were built.
F. Findings
Descriptive analyses on the data resulted in the description and distribution of the sample. There were seven independent variables involved in the data collection. Such variables included the gender, age, educational background that covered whether the participants had English teaching background in their college or university, teaching experience, teacher status, schools, and the districts where the teachers taught. Table 1 showed the description and distribution of the sample based on the independent variables.
From the descriptive analysis, it was found that there were more female teachers in the sample, with most participants were between 31 to 50 years of age, and had more than five years of teaching experience. Very few teachers in the sample did not have English teaching background. Participants were from four districts and one municipality in Yogyakarta province teaching mostly in public schools.
Repeated measures MANOVA was used in this study to investigate the differences of the Secondary school English teachers’ efficacy beliefs in Yogyakarta province as a result of the teachers’ attendance in the Competency-based Integrated trainings (CBIT). In general, Multivariate tests in the Repeated Measures MANOVA suggested that there were significant differences between the level of teachers’ efficacy beliefs before and after their attendance in the Competency-based Integrated trainings, F (38, 114) = 3.511, p < .05. Differences in the means of the teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs can be seen in Figure 1, with time_1 (the lower line in the figure) representing the level of teachers’ efficacy before attending the CBIT and time_2 representing the levels of teachers’ efficacy after the trainings.
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