Commonalities of ROP

Perceptions

-Seeing advantages of creating L2 learning environment.

-New perspectives about students’ L2 use (TA TC).

- A perceptual change of grammar teaching: There are possible grammar teaching approaches through CLT (TA TC)

-Awareness of the differing natures of language learning.

-Noticing a lack of subject knowledge of English (TA).

-Recognizing more attention is needed for studying teaching materials (TA).

-Starting to question heavy reliance on yearly lesson plan (TB).

-A change in attitude about trusting students’ ability to do challenging activities (TC).

- Recalling knowledge “Now I can understand what I learned in the seminar” (TC)

Teaching Behaviors

-A gradual shift in approach allowing for more

student-student and

teacher-students interactions.

-Implementing integrated explicit and inductive grammar teaching.

-Partial extrication from scripted teaching (TA TB).

-Creating activities under a interactive view of learning

-Teacher as a decision maker (TB)

Frictional Forces

-Planning sessions construct new challenges

-Reflective outcomes from students trigger teachers to change their practice (TA TC).

-Need more chances of

co-constructive teacher learning.

-Need more professional discourse.

-High engagement led to higher impact on teaching (TC).

-Moderate engagement and impact on teaching (TB).

-High in engagement and moderate in impact (TA).

8.2.3.1 Commonalities of ROP Teachers’ perceptions

The analysis of all three JTEs had showed that at the start of the study, the COS did not have much of an impact on their actual classes. The JTEs taught their classes from beginning to the end with less concern about giving students chances to use English.

They used a teacher-centered, yakudoku approach. They often stood at the center of the classes, standing on the platform, explaining the grammar structures and reading materials sentence by sentence and correcting the answers from students. However, as the study continued the JTEs began to see these teacher-centered approaches, where most of

the class is covered with the teachers’ one-way explanations in L1, as a limitation in their practice. They began to see advantages in creating an L2 environment, one that did not keep students away from interaction between teacher and students and between students and students for creating a target language focused environment.

An example of forming new perceptions of L2 use emerged in TC, who noticed that there lies a gap between teacher development seminars and teaching realities. Through LSC, where we co-constructed the lesson plans in order to embed the CLT activity as much as possible, gradual perceptional transformations are seen. In the cases of all three teachers, they have come to a realization that their own previous teaching styles were completely teacher-centered approaches. The language activities given to students were limited to repetition or answering to the questions. The JTEs focused heavily on transmitting language knowledge by explaining all the grammatical items and reading materials corresponding to the use of the textbooks.

Throughout the LSC, they gradually organized their classes to create an L2 environment, where students have more chances to ask their teachers about what vocabulary they need to use for expressing what they want to say in English, and whether their grammar was correctly used to express the content of their messages. The change of attitude born in co-constructive dialogues regarding CLT activities during the interventions, produced perceptions and a professional discourse of the JTEs to better understand their role working as facilitators to help and encourage their students’ learning processes. In this way, they saw advantages of creating an L2 learning environment. For example, they recognized that their students tended to interrelate with the newly learned vocabulary and sentences in activities that allowed them to interact with their own contexts connected to their lives in order to conceptualize what they learned.

Correlating what students learned in the class with their actual lives had awakened the JTEs to notice that students can be active learners though the LSC interventions. The new perspectives about students’ L2 largely impacted on the perceptions of TA and TC since they carried out CLT embedded activities compared to TB who could only include incremental changes as discussed in her case.

A change in the JTEs view of grammar teaching emerged in the study among all three JTEs. They thought that that they always needed to explain grammar items in L1, but they saw that these long explanations in Japanese resulted in their students showing low attention and boredom. The notion of the inherent conflict became apparent during the

interventions when they began to see the benefits between viewing the nature of language learning as solely being focused on structure and an approach that is underpinned by an interactive view in language learning (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).

Teaching behaviors

Despite variations of transformation in practices among the classrooms, four common features are seen as teacher behaviors as commonalities in ROP. Firstly, the gradual shift in approach allowing for more student-student and teacher-students interactions was seen during the LCS. For example, this is most notably seen in TC’s classes, where she had more flexibility as to what kind of activities she could adapt. Among the activities, the poster presentation which was recommended by the COS and simultaneously underpinned by principles of CLT gave students chances to work collaboratively and challenged students to take on new roles and responsibilities, which and further allowed students to have chances to negotiate meanings in describing English with their groups.

Although to a lesser degree than TC, TB, who was tightly controlled by pre-constructed yearly lesson plan, found the chance of interacting with students through the new knowledge of ‘teach to the moment’ at the planning session, and in following classes she became to interact differently with students’ questions at opportune times and tried to give students hints rather than directly giving them the answers. Often these questions were done in a way to relate the content to the students’ own lives. In this way, TB’s English proficiency was activated to make her class more meaningfully interactive between teacher and students.

As for TA, since she had already acknowledged an awareness between her own teaching behaviors and a desire to change them upon entering the study, her teaching behavior, which she noticed was with more use of Japanese than she thought, changed after the first SR session. By objectively examining her own teaching behavior at SR sessions, TA recognized that her talk with a lot of explanations in Japanese occupied most of the class-time and that her talk rarely gave students chances to interact with each other. By adopting CLT activities that were student centered, TA also altered her behavior to step away from the center of the class, and performed the role of a facilitator as a part of the activity. TA’s change in teaching behavior transformed the class atmosphere into a teacher-students and students-students interactive environment.

Next is for grammar teaching, which had a significant impact on the JTEs instruction.

The JTEs believed that grammar items needed to be explained in Japanese as isolated items and not for communicative purposes, which resulted in parsing words, structures and sentences with explicit explanations in Japanese, then following substitutive practices until the target grammar is remembered. This teaching approach is somewhat analogous to teaching approach of ‘presentation-practice-production (PPP)’, which is typically promoted in the teacher guides (e.g. Harmer, 2007; Ur, 1996). Since this teaching approach is familiar with JTEs, they provided the students with explicit knowledge of a target feature but they failed to “[f]acilitate the cognitive changes needed for automatic processing”(Ellis, 2015, p.196). In other words, outside of memorization, the students were not given chances to use target structures in a meaningfully and contextual way.

When the JTEs were observed at the beginning of the study, Japanese was used as a medium of grammar teaching, and there was little room of using English for communication for both students and teacher. Translating sentences from English to Japanese (or vice versa) were the typical exercises. However, as the discussions with the JTEs continued during the study, and especially during the SR sessions, it became apparent that they were not complacent about what they were doing, recognizing that their approach to grammar teaching was exactly the same as those that they took in their school days. There were less opportunities for communication in the L2 and further too much explanation in Japanese easily had students bored.

However, the LSC interventions provided the JTEs the chance of facilitating the students’ cognitive challenge to use the target grammar in the activities, where students made errors and these errors were discovered by students and corrected by teachers. For example, TA gave students time to make quizzes after she presented how to use the relative pronoun and practiced them. Students made their own questions such as ‘This is the place which both children and adults can enjoy and which an American made. What is this place?’ (Answer: Disneyland) (TAN-CO3). TB had students make additional comprehension quizzes after answering T/F questions. The question such as ‘How do you think Torajiro get money?’ (TAN-CO4) was uttered from one student after they practiced the pattern of ‘Who do you think he is?’ TC challenged students to write original questions in pairs on the worksheet after parsing words and grammar from the textbook.

The work sheets were collected and the errors were checked by TC. Later in the class students presented their questions, which included previous knowledge learned. Seeing success of the activities helped the JTEs to conceptualize differing ways to integrated

explicit grammar teaching with inductive grammar teaching and the powerful effect that the latter has on learning. Dekeyser (1998) points out that for full automatization to happen, learners need to practice the target feature in real communication (i.e., in communicative grammar task). Consequently, what was attempted with the JTEs in praxis was to create an activity to have students engage in a task that was close to the real communication as much as possible.

The third feature was seen in TA and TB. Their teaching experiences were only in this private school, where they started to teach English as scripted by their senior teachers.

It is true that this scripted teaching helps the inexperienced teachers to give students standardized quality of instruction as a means to overcome their lack of experiences of teaching. However, now that they have three years experience, the classes of TA and TB needed the teachers’ creativity or flexibility of teaching to provide their students more meaningful instruction. That is, they needed to move on from the role of being passive technicians. Through LSC, they began to take a critical view of scripted teaching, which suggested a change in their instruction, moving away from over-explanations of targeted points of the L2 that are encouraged by traditional yakudoku methods into more interactive teaching. By being empowered with the view that they can adopt their own teaching characteristics and knowledge gained at the planning sessions of LSC, they realized that they do not have to rely too much on scripted lesson plan. Conceptualizing their practice in a new light led to a partial change in the practices of TA and TB.

Finally, the JTEs’ teaching approaches have shifted gradually from a ‘structural view’

(Richards & Rodgers, 2001) approach, where the nature of language learning is seen as a system of related parts for the unlocking of meaning, aiming to control of the parts of the system including phonology, grammar, and vocabulary to a ‘functional view’ (Richards &

Rodgers, 2001) approach, which treats language as a tool for communication focusing on meaning and communication rather than on grammar and to an ‘interactional view’, where language is seen as a device for building and keeping social relationships. (Richards &

Rodgers, 2001). Richards and Rogers (2001) state, “[they] focus on the patterns of moves, acts, negotiation, and interaction found in conversational exchanges”(p.21). By objectively examining their own teaching behavior through SR of LSC, they recognized the value of communicating with students with more meaningful approaches compared to the just focusing on transmitting the knowledge of forms.

Frictional forces

As to frictional forces of commonalities, which stimulated JTEs to move toward change, four factors emerge. The first factor mainly arose at planning sessions through LSCs, where the awareness of the lack of the knowledge of the nature of how language is learned came out through the co-constructed, dialogic conversations. In theory, regardless of the experiences, teachers are expected to act, teach in classes and talk with students once they started teaching as professionals. However, as Ingvarson (2003) points out,

“there are no short cuts to education improvement”(p.63), teachers need to take rather complicated steps to be improved. In the LSCs, all three teachers, to a greater or lesser extent, had chances of talking, bringing their problems, building up their professional capacity of teaching, negotiating possible teaching approaches with themselves and finally implementing their constructed activities in the lesson plans. Among these steps, the planning sessions, where we assimilated the students’ learning behavior into the plan in order to give students more chances to engage in the classroom activity and avoid putting students in situations of being just passive learners were considerably constructive. These constructive sessions created a positive frictional force that stimulated teachers to gain more theoretical knowledge of nature of the language learning, and challenge the new knowledge gained through co-constructive conversations in practice through the praxis cycle.

The second frictional force in ROP comes out of the students’ reflective outcomes aligned with the implementations of co-constructive activities that impacted on the teaching of TA and TC. The approaches adopted through LSC provided impetus to have students become more interactively involved in activities. The teachers began to conceptualize their practices that cohered with an emerging view of the nature of language learning that moved along the continuum from a structural view to more of an interactive one in the planning of lessons. The friction caused by confronting new ways to view language learning were supported by student feedback, which helped move the process along. For example, TA’s students started to ask her whether she prepared more interactive type activities, and during activities what English phrases they could use to most nicely fit to what they wanted to convey. TC’s students reflected in a constructive manner after the poster presentation that they were lacking of the knowledge of English and oral proficiency. They showed their feeling of taking on a positive challenge by telling her that they would do better in the next poster presentation. These positive

reflective outcomes from students trigger teachers to challenge their practices or to reconceptualize ways for creating more interactive conditions for language leaning.

The third factor of commonality is the JTEs’ desire to have more chances of co-constructive teacher learning. Solely constructing lessons is always challenging for JTEs, and even more so for those who have less experience. However, the JTEs saw that the co-constructive teacher learning process especially at the stage of planning saves a lot of time of planning. The comments from TA and TC similarly expressed that they need to collaborate for learning. “I usually spend two or three hours for making a teaching plan for each class myself thinking back and forth but this time we can make a plan within one hour” (TA: TAN-2). “I need someone to talk about the teaching and create the activity, which is difficult to do by myself” (TC: TAN-3). TB, who had less chances to talk over the lessons with her senior teachers, who suggested that following the yearly lesson plan was enough, also expressed her hope to collaborate for teaching “…but I think I had better talk about teaching more” (TB: TAN-5).

The fourth commonality is that JTEs felt a need to develop more ‘professional discourse’ as a professional language teacher, which would distinguish them from a layman’s level to those who should know about their practice and be able to articulate why they are doing what they are doing (see Freeman, 1996, for developing a secondary

‘professional’ discourse in Chapters 2, 4). The JTEs began to be able to articulate and understand the importance of being a facilitator; of creating student-centered activities, and allowing students to inductively learn target points, and therefore a secondary discourse was being acquired. Next, the differences of ROP are described. The differences of ROP are not negative but rather supportive in details from the each teacher’s perceptions through LSC.

8.2.3.2 Differences of ROP