2014 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Developing the Concept of Ecologically Appropriate Communicative Language Teaching for Novice English Teachers
| Project/Area Number |
25870036
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| Research Institution | Iwate University |
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Principal Investigator |
HALL James 岩手大学, 教育学部, 准教授 (80361038)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2013-04-01 – 2017-03-31
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| Keywords | critical incidents / CLT / novice English teachers / post-methodology / teacher cognition / teacher education |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The objective of this research is to describe how novice teachers develop their own form of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). From October, 2013 to March, 2015, I have conducted ethnographic field work on 3 novice junior high school English teachers.
In June, 2014, I analyzed the data collected thus far using teachers' "critical incidents" as a way to reveal the dilemmas they faced when attempting to incorporate a communicative element into their class and how they overcame them. A critical incident (CI) is an unexpected event in the classroom that changed teachers' beliefs about the way languages should be taught or learned.
I demonstrated how this methodology can be used to understand teacher development in the Doing Research in Applied Linguistics conference in Thailand and my paper was chosen for the selected proceedings of the conference. In addition to this, I used CIs collected in this research to reveal information about "Developing effective English teaching methods in the Japanese EFL context " at the Chubu English Language Education Society annual conference in June, 2014.
I also used this methodology to analyze the development of pre-service teachers. In August, 2015, at the Japan Society of English Language Education conference, I chaired a symposium of pre-service teacher development introducing the concept of CIs. Additionally, at the Japan Association of Language Teaching conference in November, 2015, I used this methodology to discuss Japanese pre-service teacher development in a teacher education practicum in Thailand (A paper is forthcoming).
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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
The steps in which the research has been conducted is slightly different from that of the original plan. In the original plan, data collection was to begin in the second year and end in the third. However, I began data collection in the first year and ended this year. The reason for this was that I was able to find schools willing to cooperate with the study much easier than expected.
In total, I have observed and recorded 50 classes and conducted approximately 39 interviews. There are field notes and/or transcriptions for all classes as well as transcriptions for all the interviews.
An essential part of conducting ethnographic research is thorough background research of the field. Because data collection began earlier than expected, I was not able to conduct the literature review on popular teaching methodology books in Japan. This will be done in the third year. However, rather than focusing on popular methodology books which the participating teachers in this study have not read and have had a negligible influence on their teaching, it makes more sense to focus on the books the teachers have read.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Data analysis has begun. In the first stage of the analysis, I have started to analyze the interview transcripts. In the transcripts I look for dilemmas the teachers mention or what the teachers described as critical incidents. After identifying and categorizing these critical incidents I will look at classroom field notes, recordings and transcriptions to find the classroom scenes which exemplify them. Through doing this I hope to develop a thick description of the dilemmas teachers face trying to do communicative language teaching and how they resolve them. It is my hope that this will lead to a "Concept of Ecologically Appropriate Communicative Language Teaching."
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| Remarks |
I have been using E-Portfolios as a way to collect critical incidents of pre-service teachers and research their development trajectory in learning to teach CLT. The URLs show these E-Portfolios.
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