2014 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Constructing an educational model for collaborative team teaching
| Project/Area Number |
25370731
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| Research Institution | Tokai University |
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Principal Investigator |
コリンズ ピーター 東海大学, 外国語教育センター, 准教授 (10307241)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
ファイン ゲーリー 東海大学, 高輪教養教育センター, 准教授 (70515022)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
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| Keywords | Team teaching / Curriculum design / Teacher collegiality / Nativeness / Non-nativeness / Ownership of English / EFL vs. EIL |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This year our research entered its second phase as we began working with teams of Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) and assistant language teachers (ALTs) at two public high schools. After obtaining approval from the schools’ administrators, we visited several Communication English I, English Conversation, and English Expressions I classes at each school, collecting the relevant teaching plans and materials. Follow-up interviews with the teams revealed the dichotomy between the goals, contents, and teaching styles featured in the three different English subjects. Classroom visits and interviews conducted at a high school in Salamanca, Spain revealed assumptions about “native” and “non-native” English teachers that seemed fundamentally different from those underpinning team teaching in Japan; in Spain, there is relatively little reliance on teachers from “Inner Circle” countries. With these assumptions in mind, further individual and group interviews were carried out at the two public high schools here in Japan to ascertain JTE and ALT perceptions of the “ownership” of English by native speakers. Narrative data from these interviews suggest that few of the JTEs, reflecting on their own high school learning experiences, are confident that they have either a command of the language, or a sense of English as primarily a tool for communication. On the other hand, while none of the ALTs had studied foreign languages with “native” teachers, they questioned neither their teachers’ fluency nor the communication goals of their second language courses.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
In 2013, the first year of this research project, our affiliation was Tokai University’s Research Institute of Educational Development (RIED), which was dedicated to supporting and advising teachers at secondary schools. At the end of the year, however, RIED was closed, and we were transferred to different departments within the university and took on full teaching duties at the university level. Still, in 2014, we have managed to forge and maintain connections with English teachers at two public schools, one in Kanagawa Prefecture and one in Tokyo, and to present concrete research proposals to the principals of both schools. By the end of the academic year, we had reached agreements about proceeding with class visits, lesson design, and materials creation, and allayed both the teachers’ and principals’ fears about placing unreasonable extra burdens on their shoulders. We have also begun studying the MEXT-approved textbooks being used at these two schools and are now ascertaining how much integration between English Communication I, English Conversation, and English Expressions I can reasonably be expected. Class visits and interviews, as well as informed consent forms, have helped us gain the credibility and trust we need to proceed effectively. In addition, we are now considering the kinds of data the project will generate, and how we can best extrapolate from them in order to construct a meaningful model of team teaching that is concrete enough to be consistent and easily applicable, yet flexible enough to be adapted to a variety of school situations.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
In Semester I of 2015, we will make numerous visits to both Yamato Nishi High School in Kanagawa Prefecture and Tokyo Toritsu Higashi High School in Tokyo, the schools whose teachers we approached as research partners in 2014. Class visits will help the first-year students in these classes get comfortable with being observed. Follow-up interviews will begin focusing on the JTE-ALT teams’ 1) collegiality and collaboration, 2) use of English in the classroom, and 3) reflection on student outcomes. In Semesters II and III, we will target textbook lessons from Communication English I with which English Conversation and English Expressions I units can be integrated. Students learning outcomes will be analyzed and compared to those of non-integrated units. Additionally, students and teachers will be surveyed to determine the impact of clarified JTE-ALT-student roles on student attitudes. At the same time, we will follow up on plans to survey current university students on the team teaching they experienced as high school students and whether it impacted their perceptions of English and its usefulness as a tool for communication. We also have plans to continue surveying both professors and students involved in training programs for pre-service JTEs here in Japan to determine, even if on a small scale, whether and how perspectives toward team teaching are evolving. Finally, we hope to continue contextualizing team teaching within a wider perspective by learning more about how it is conducted in other countries and contexts.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Our data collection has been ongoing over the course of the year, and its processing and analysis is as yet incomplete. We found inaccuracies in our research assistants’ transcriptions of some team taught class visits and ALT interviews and have halted progress on them until alternate assistants can be arranged. In addition, we had planned to invest in data collection and analysis software, but delayed purchasing it while we weighed several options. Finally, although we were hoping to develop a research relationship with professors studying team teaching in Vietnam, as well as with team teachers at a high school in Taiwan, it has proven difficult to schedule visits due to overlapping teaching calendars.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
We are currently seeking assistants to continue transcribing class visits and interviews with JTEs, ALTs, and teams so that we can catch up with our data processing. In addition, we have narrowed our data collection and analysis software choices down and are planning to purchase SPSS Software that will help us clarify our research findings. Finally, we have maintained correspondence with our contacts in Vietnam and Taiwan, and plan to visit a high school in each country to determine the similarities and differences between these international contexts and Japan. Scheduling visits will likely be challenging, but we are optimistic that the insights gained will be valuable.
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