Abstract
This article evaluates the use of reflective practice (RP) tools by focusing on the main critiques on RP. In the literature, RP has often been criticised for its design-related problems, RP’s being directed by problem identification purposes rather than empirical data, and RP practitioners’ loss of contact with their discourse communities due to the undue emphasis on practical knowledge. Therefore, this article suggests methodological and data triangulation of RP tools as well as highlighting the community of inquiry framework to overcome the aforementioned problems While doing this, the authors reflect on their own RPs, both of which were conducted at a refugee centre in Philadelphia, USA. In this examination, the critical role of reflective tools is highlighted.
Appendix A: Field Notes/Journal
Name:_________ Date:January, 19, 2011Journal:#1
Class Duration: 2 Hours 30 minutes
| Lesson plan (steps with some details) | Self-observation & description of what happened | Reflection & analysis of teaching; citing literature |
|---|---|---|
| A: Class Objective: Ask and answer Yes/No questions in the context of occupations by paying attention to singular/plural forms and forms of verb ‘BE’. B: Materials: Top Notch Fundamentals Course Book for Low Beginning Level, Pictures for Teaching Occupations, Concentration Game Cards. C: Corrective Feedback Plan: -Any errors related with the pronunciation of the occupations will be corrected. -Any errors related with the use of a/an; yes/no questions and the answers for these questions will be corrected. -Any errors related with the forms of BE verb with different subjects will be corrected. -Any errors related with the use of plural/singular will be corrected. -Any errors related with the use of contractions will be corrected. Steps of the Class: 1: The goal of this activity is to help learners get to know each other. It is a whole class activity. The first learner will introduce herself/himself; the second learner has to repeat what the first learner said and then can introduce herself/himself. The teacher will model the activity with co-teacher and a teacher before beginning the activity. The duration is 10ʹ 2: The goal of the activity is to allow learners to know each other better. Each learner will write a fact about themselves on a piece of paper. Then, the teacher will collect and shuffle the paper. After that, each learner will take one piece of paper and try to find the owner of it. At the end of the activity, learners will be asked to explain who the owner of their paper is. The duration is 10ʹ. It is a whole class activity. pictures of some occupations and will be asked about the pictures. Then, one by one, the occupations will be introduced. Whole class, 5ʹ 4: Concentration Game:Learners will be divided into 3 groups. They will be given pictures and the names of the occupations. They will be asked to open one picture and one word at one time. If the picture and the word match, they keep it, and go on. They try to match pictures and words as soon as possible. The duration is 10ʹ. 5: Listening Activity:Learners will listen for the vocabulary. They will check the occupations they hear. This is a whole class and 5ʹ 6: Grammar Point 1: Contractions: A)Asking learners what they do, the teacher writes the answers on the board (e.g. she is a housewife etc). Then, the teacher writes the shorter forms of the verb ‘Be’. b) Each learner is given one one sentence like ‘I am a teacher.’ Or ‘I’m a teacher.’ Then, learners are asked to match their sentences with the equivalents. Whole Class Activity- 5 ‘ 7: Grammar Point 2: A/An: After getting learners matchings in the previous game, the teacher writes other samples on the board (I am a teacher.) and underlines a teacher, an architect. Then, learners are asked about the difference and the meaning. 10ʹ/Whole class activity. 8: Making sentences: Learners are put into 2 groups. One learner from each group is given a jumbled sentence. With the help of their group, learners try to put the sentences into an order by paying attention to a/an. Group work, 10ʹ. 9: Grammar Point 3: Plural- singular: Learners are shown the pictures of different occupations and asked about the numbers of teachers/doctors in them. In this way, the difference between the singular and plural is tried to be elicitated. 5ʹ/Whole class. 10: Learners are asked to complete the given statements with an occupation by looking at the pictures. They have to be careful with singular/plural forms & a-an. 5ʹ. Individual activity. —–Break Time—— 11: Learners will be asked to complete the given statements with a form of Be. 5ʹ/Pair work. 12: Yes/No questions: The forms of Yes/No questions, will be revised. B) Ls work in 2 groups. One from each group comes to the board, they are asked questions about their occupations. They are expected to say only Yes, I am or No, I am not. If they give other answers, their group lose points. 10ʹ 13: Ls are asked to complete given dialogues in pairs by paying attention to the forms of BE, and short answer forms. 5ʹ & Pair. 14: Hot Seat: This activity will be played at the end of each class. One person comes to the front each time. The rest of the class ask questions to that person especially about the topic of the day. E.g. Only yes/no questions- Occupations- self descriptions (15 ‘) 16: Need Assessment Forms: Learners are given forms to fill. These forms ask learners about their own ways of learning. The data we get via these forms will be used in the following weeks to design our program. Generally, it takes time to explain students what these forms are, what they are about etc. Thus, 20 minutes will be given. | In this class, there are normally 11 registered students; however, 2 of them were missing on the first day. One student was going to take one day Beginning Level-1 class and one day Beginning Level Conversation Class. Related with the Corrective Feedback Plan of that day’s plan, I did two things: 1) I allowed learners to correct each other with regard to their pronunciation errors, or grammar errors. I observed that learners were more involved with the class when they were asked to correct their peers. 2) I made immediate corrections if I did not ask learners to make peer corrections at the beginning of the activity. Steps of the Class: 1: At the beginning of the activity, I demonstrated it with my teaching assistant. After modelling the activity, I initiated it. Learners found it a bit challenging, but they did not request me to demonstrate it for a second time, which give me a clue about their English level. However, even if they could do the steps of the activity smoothly, they were having troubles with differentiating between ‘her/his’ and ‘she/he’ while introducing their partners to us. They made sentences like ‘she name is ‘. Even though that was not the aim of that class, when I observed this error more than two times, I started to correct them. Ten minutes was too much for this activity. 2: The first thing for this activity was also about the timing. It finished earlier than I expected it to finish. Again, at the beginning of the activity, I made an example with my teaching assistant. Then, I gave two minutes to learners to write one sentence about themselves. They generally wrote sentences about their ages/nationalities/countries. These sentences were mostly grammatically correct and they did not have spelling errors. 3: The timing for this activity was again a bit problematic. It took longer time than I expected because there were some students who needed more explanation or who couldn’t understand what the pictures were about. While introducing the jobs, I showed the pictures to everybody and asked them to make guesses about the job. After getting a few answers, I wrote the name of the job on the board and sticked the picture next to it. After completing teaching the jobs, I wanted to focus on the pronunciations of the words. Actually, that was a little spontaneous idea because I thought that was missing in my plan. I put learners into pairs, and they read the words to each other, and checked their pronunciation. They were pretty good at correcting the pronunciation of their partners. Sometimes even if they also could not make the correct pronunciation, they insisted that how their partner was pronouncing the word was also not correct. After pronunciation part, I inserted another activity. In this activity, I first demonstrated it with my teaching assistant. Learners had to mime the given word in this activity to the rest of the class. They could also do that in a very short time. All in all, this vocabulary demonstration part took 15 minutes. 4: Concentration Game: I gave 8 minutes to complete this activity. Even if I demonstrated how to play this game, I had to explain it again to some of the learners. They could match the pictures with the words soon once they understood how to play it. 5: Listening Activity: Learners could identify the words they hear and complete the activity easily. 6: Contractions: The moment I showed the equivalents in the demonstration part, one of the learners said ‘contractions’. Even though this student knew the term for this part, I had to explain it by giving more examples for other students. They could also match their sentences with their friends easily. 7–9: Grammar Points 2–3: A/An – Plural- singular: This part was kind of revision for students. It seemed that they already knew what a singular and plural is, and where they needed to use a and an. 8: Making sentences: As I mentioned above, while talking about a and an, it seemed that students knew about how and where to use a and an. However, while making sentences; there were students who had difficulty in deciding which one to put. Thus, at the end of the activity, I made a revision. I gave more examples with an and a. I asked them the difference between their usages. Then, I explicitly explained them that we generally used a with words whose pronunciation start with a consonant, and an with the words whose pronunciation started with a vowel. I introduced the vowels and consonants too. This part took a lot of time, which affected the timing in the rest of the class. In this activity, I also gave corrections to the writing of students with regard to their spelling, punctuation, capital letter use etc. 10: since this activity was an individual activity, I checked how each learner was doing and corrected them when necessary. However, they could complete this activity successfully. 16: Need Assessment Form: since we could not complete some parts on the given time, I had to skip other activities and ask learners to fill in the need assessment forms. I observed and helped learners when necessary. Even though they had some points that they could not understand, their completing this form and their answers made me notice that the level of this class with English was better than I expected. | *One of the problems I came across in this class was about the timing. Some activities took longer time and some activities finished very quickly. There were some points when I could understand that learners found some activities really easy (they had questioning faces indeed). I believe that the reason for this situation was partly my insufficient knowledge about the level of learners. The first class helped me see that I need to bear this in mind in the coming weeks. Since I noticed that my learners’ proficiency level was better than I expected, I will bring more challenging activities to the class in the following weeks. Moreover, to prevent myself from spending too much time on some activities *Need assessment forms were also helpful for me to make some guesses about the expectations of the students from my class. I observed that most of my students wanted me to focus more on speaking and pronunciation. While helping them understand the questions in the need assessment form, some of them told me that they could understand what other people tell them in Philadelphia, but they had difficulties in being understood by other people. Thus, they told, they wanted to focus on their pronunciation more than other elements of the language. As an answer to this need, I plan to get into contact with other teachers who are teaching the same level and get ideas about pronunciation based activities. Moreover, I will also try to find a book with pronunciation and speaking activities and will cover it more in my classes. *Need assessment forms also helped me observe the attitudes of learners towards being corrected. Since learners mostly underlined that they were not understood by other people and they wanted to improve their speaking and pronunciation, I got the sense that they expected me to correct them frequently. *The pronunciation activity that I inserted simultaneously into my class was also showed me that learners liked its being brought to the class. Moreover, this activity was helpful in showing learners how to correct each other. I also observed that they had positive attitude towards being corrected by their peers. As I mentioned previously, I could see that when they were asked to correct each other, they were more involved with the lesson and more attentive. *The reason to bring ice breakers to the first class was to help learners overcome their anxieties and get to know each other in a fun way. I believe that it was efficient to help learners overcome their anxieties. *Since that was the first day of the class, I tried to understand the real level of learners in English by observing their participation in the activities. Their overall performance showed me that I had to bring more challenging activities to the class in the following weeks. *Another issue is about the matching/pairing of learners. Some learners were obviously better or more talkative, participative than some other learners were. At some point, I believe that, this situation caused some of learners’ being forgotten in the class. Moreover, since that was the first class, I allowed learners to be paired with the same students. Thus, while some students could finish earlier, some were still unfinished. As a solution to this situation, I will match learners with different people in each class in the following weeks so that I can give chance to each one of them to participate equally. *Another point is about the issue I want to focus on in my paper this semester. I want to work on how to integrate the corrective feedback in the communicative classes without being intrusive with regard to interactive nature of the class. Fisher, Fray and Lapp (2010) suggest that teachers need to help learners improve their understanding about the language by providing them with some questions such as “What is your reason to use this structure in this way?”. Moreover, Fanselow (1987) defines teaching as “providing feedback”. However, that might result in teachers’ giving focus on the form rather than content and communication. I believe that allowing learners correct each other can prevent this situation. Thus, in the following classes I will try to observe the role of peer correction and its role in improving the interactive nature of the class. Actually, in this first class, at some points, I allowed learners to correct their peers or check their rival groups. That was very successful. So, in the following weeks, I will integrate more pair or group work. Moreover, I will observe how other teachers are integrating corrective feedback into their classes. *In one of the sources I previously read, I was surprised to see that teachers had to be very careful while providing positive feedback in addition to the corrective feedback (Wong and Waring 2010). In this book, it was pointed out that the overuse of positive statements like ‘very good’ could prevent the learning of students since these kinds of remarks might mean “no more questions are expected about that issue” to some students (Wong and Waring 2010). Since I read this article, I try to control myself while using positive feedback in the class. However, at some point in the class, I found myself using “very good/wonderful/great” again and again. In the following classes, I aim to add questions like “ Any questions?” or use a softer voice with these positive statements even if I use them repeatedly or too much. |
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