ACTION RESEARCH FOR ESL TEACHING

Improving Teacher-Student Interaction
in the EFL Classroom: An Action Research Report
by Jonathan Snell

A common problem for EFL teachers is dealing with a passive class, where students are unresponsive and avoid interaction with the teacher. This is especially true when a teacher seeks interaction in a teacher-class dialog, such as asking questions to the class as a whole, expecting at least one student to respond. This can be a frustrating experience for both parties. Obviously, there will be times when no student can answer a teacher's question, but often students do not answer even if they understand the question, know the answer, and are able to produce the answer. Furthermore, students can often be very reluctant to give feedback or ask the teacher a question in front of the class. This action research project attempted to explore this problem and sought to create a more interactive teacher-class interchange in one class of Japanese adult English learners.

Action Research Defined

Action research is concerned with trying to improving one specific point in a teacher's technique in a particular classroom using empirical measurement. Richards, Platt & Platt (1992) have defined it as:

Teacher-initiated classroom research which seeks to increase the teacher's understanding of classroom teaching and learning and to bring about improvements in classroom practices. Action research typically involves small-scale investigate projects in the teacher's own classrooms. This usually includes having an observer collect data, and together with the teacher develop a plan to bring about the desired change, act on the plan, and then observe the effects of the plan in the classroom.

Class Description

The class observed was a group of twenty-three sophomores majoring in Japanese at a small private Tokyo women's college. The teacher was an American male with several years teaching experience at Japanese universities. The goal of this required class is to teach the students basic English conversation, reading, listening and writing skills. Their English ability level ranged from upper beginner to intermediate. During the observation period, the students appeared motivated and attentive, and they seemed to be enjoying the class.

Problem Identification

The students, as a class, didn't respond voluntarily to the instructor's questions and did not participate in class discussions. Students also never asked the teacher questions outside one-on-one situations. Thus the teacher received little oral feedback. According to the teacher:
Most of the class members sit looking straight ahead using minimal facial expressions, gestures and verbal utterances. What I want is for the students to be more demonstrative and more overtly communicative in their feedback. I want these behaviors: I want the students to ask questions, make comments and to respond with nods and shakes of the head, with sounds of agreement or sounds of understanding. Also, I want them to be both reactive and proactive.

Preliminary Investigation

I observed the teacher's class in the fourth week of the semester. In the first 45 minutes, the class went through an intermediate level taped dialogue. The students first listened to the tape with their books closed, then again with the books opened. Next, they did a dictation exercise consisting of 25 short sentences based on the dialogue. The teacher then talked about the sociolinguistic and grammar points of the exercise and went on to probe for comprehension:

T : Any questions? Do you understand everything?
Ss : Š(no one responds)
T : Okay, how many people were speaking?
Ss : Š(no response)
T : How many people were speaking?
Ss : Š(no response)
T : There were two. Two people. Were they friends or strangers?
Ss : Š(no response)Š

The teacher asked a few other questions which also drew no response or reaction from the students. The students then had to answer some questions about the conversation in their book. Most of the students seemed to have little trouble doing this, and if there were any questions, they readily asked the student sitting next to them.
The second half of the class was devoted to pair work using the phrases and vocabulary from the taped dialogue in role play. The students seemed to enjoy this, and most tried to create their own dialogues. The teacher circulated the room checking on the progress of each pair. The class atmosphere was markedly different from the first half of the class, with chatter and occasional laughter filling the air. The students answered most of the teacher's questions with alacrity, and some even asked their own questions.

Hypothesis

Because the students seemed to generally understand the teacher's questions, it was felt that there was something else that kept the students from responding voluntarily in the class-teacher dialogues. Since most Japanese students are taught to listen and not to question a teacher in class, Japanese students have little or no experience in in-class interaction with the teacher, such as questioning or commenting or giving feedback. Students are usually taught to be quiet and respectfully listen to the teacher.

By teaching the students that class interaction with the English teacher is not only acceptable, but normal, useful and beneficial, it was believed that the students would become more interactive with the teacher in teacher-class interaction.

Plan Intervention

Following the hypothesis, two steps were taken to implement a plan:
First, on the following class, the teacher distributed an explanatory paragraph about "rules" for asking questions in class in English speaking countries. The teacher made an exercise out of it and had students read the paragraph out loud to the class and explained a few difficult words and spent additional time expanding on the text. The "rules" were extrapolated from a culture point in Helgesen & Brown (1994) and were as follows:
Each culture has different "rules" about how students should act in the classroom. In some countries, students are expected to listen and only the teacher should lecture or talk in class. But in English-speaking countries (and in English class), it is good-and important-to answer the teacher's questions and interrupt with questions of your own. It means that you are interested and paying attention. In English, it is your job to ask questions if you don't understand. (p. 3)
The teacher went on to say that if they still felt uncomfortable asking and answering questions, they had to at least nod or shake their head as a response to the teacher's questions.
Secondly, the teacher reminded the students of the "rules" at the beginning of each subsequent class and further encouraged them to become more active in the class when the instructor was talking.

Outcome

In the eighth week of the semester, the class was observed again. A lesson similar to the one in the fourth week was presented. At the beginning, the instructor reminded the class of the "rules." After playing the taped dialogue twice, the teacher began talking about the dialogue, making grammar, usage and sociolinguistic points, interspersed with questions about the passage and the instructor's explanations. This went on for about twenty minutes and included general comprehension check questions such as 'do you understand?' and 'are you okay?' as well as specific questions about the dialogue.

Regarding general comprehension questions, most of the students did nod in response and a few answered 'yes' to these questions. And it was believed that they did, in fact, understand.
With the specific questions, however, something unexpected happened. When the teacher asked a question, he was usually greeted with poker-faced stares, as before. But when he moved closer, looked specifically at a student, or pair of students, and repeated the question, the students usually tried to answer. In general, I noted, the instructor was paying much more attention to the students, moving closer to them, and looking at specific students and trying to make a better connection with them. Instead of asking questions with the feeling that they really weren't going to be answered anyway, as before, the teacher made a greater effort to communicate the questions, and acted as if he expected to get responses.
Also, toward the end of the instructor's talk on the dialogue, two students, without prompting from the teacher, asked questions before the class. Although the questions were not related directly to the dialogue, the fact that the questions were asked before the entire class was considered a breakthrough.

Conclusion

There were some areas where the results of this action research were not as successful as hoped. For instance, the students needed to be prompted with eye contact and a repeated question from the teacher to answer a question, and when they did not understand something, they still did not interrupt the teacher with a question.
And yet some progress was definitely made, especially when the brief span between observations is considered. The students did interact with the teacher by nodding, some did answer the instructor's questions, and two, on their own initiation, even asked questions before the class. The unanticipated side effect of the teacher becoming more concerned with the interaction was a welcome surprise and contributed to the improvement. There seems to have been some success in instructing and reminding and then expecting the students to become more interactive with the teacher.

Reflection

This action research project forced both the teacher and the observer to remember that ESL teachers in Japan are not just teaching a language, but also a culture, and this includes instructing the sociolinguistics appropriate for the native English speaking classroom. Perhaps more importantly, they had to think about why the cultures are different, in this respect, and how to try and bridge that difference. This lead to questioning the conventional notion that Japanese students simply do not like the native English speaking classroom culture.
An additional reason for interest in the problem addressed here was the belief that this was a common problem in Japan. Teachers, especially native English speaking ones, often become frustrated with a lack of initial success in obtaining an interactive dialogue with the class. This often leads them to mistake a lack of familiarity with a lack of interest, and to teach within the students' culturally conditioned classroom expectations, instead of introducing the expectations commonly found in classrooms in English speaking counties. While intending to be more accommodating to students, they are failing to give students a useful sociolinguistic skill, which students would likely want and derive benefit. Some may think encouraging the use of this student-teacher interaction common in native English speaking counties is culturally arrogant. But if it is introduced in a sensitive and reasonable manner, it actually contributes to a more fulfilling English class. After all, most students don't study English just for linguistic competence. They will also want to develop sociolinguistic competence for communicating in different situations in English speaking countries, and this includes the classroom.

Reference
Helgesen, M. & Brown, S. (1994) Active listening: Building skills for understanding. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Platt, H. (1992) Dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics (2nd ed.). Essex: Longman.

Type of Paragraph II

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/cause.html

Type of Paragraph I

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/compcont.html

Basic Essay Structure

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/essaybasic.html

Coherence and Unity

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/cohere.html

Basic Paragraph

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/fwalters/para.html

Methods, Post-method, and Metodos

Methods, post-method, and métodos

A language teaching method is a single set of procedures which teachers are to follow in the classroom. Methods are usually based on a set of beliefs about the nature of language and learning.' (Nunan, 2003, p. 5).

Ask teachers what method they subscribe to, and most will answer either that they don’t follow a method at all, or that they are 'eclectic', and pick and choose from techniques and procedures associated with a variety of different methods. Some might add that, essentially, their teaching follows the principles laid down by the communicative approach, itself a mixed bag, embracing anything from drills to communicative tasks, and everything in between. But the concept of a single, prescriptive 'method' - as in the Direct Method, or the Oral Method – seems now to be dead and buried.

The end of methods

The demise of method is consistent with the widely held view that we are now in a 'post-method' era. Thus, as long ago as 1983, Stern declared that 'several developments indicate a shift in language pedagogy away from the single method concept as the main approach to language teaching' (1983, p. 477). One such development was the failure, on the part of researchers, to find any significant advantage in one method over another. As Richards (1990) noted, 'studies of the effectiveness of specific methods have had a hard time demonstrating that the method itself, rather than other factors, such as the teacher’s enthusiasm, or the novelty of the new method, was the crucial variable' (p. 36). Moreover, recognition of the huge range of variables that impact on second language learning fuelled a general disenchantment with the notion of a 'quick fix', or what, in the social sciences, is sometimes called the 'technical-rational approach', i.e. the notion that social change and improvement can be effected through the strict application of scientific method. This had very much been the mind-set that impelled the spread of audiolingualism, founded as it was on (now largely discredited) research into animal behaviour. The last decades of the last century, however, witnessed a challenge to 'scientism' in the social sciences, a challenge associated with the advent of postmodernism, and its rejection of the idea of universalist, objective knowledge. Accordingly, Pennycook (1989) argued that methods are never 'disinterested', but serve the dominant power structures in society, leading to 'a de-skilling of the role of teachers, and greater institutional control over classroom practice'(p. 610).

The postmethod era

At around the same time, Kumaravadivelu (1994) identified what he called the 'postmethod condition', a result of 'the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional concept of method' (p. 43). Rather than subscribe to a single set of procedures, postmethod teachers adapt their approach in accordance with local, contextual factors, while at the same time being guided by a number of 'macrostrategies'. Two such macrostrategies are 'Maximise learning opportunities' and 'Promote learner autonomy'. And in a much-cited paper in 1990, Prabhu argued that there is no one method, but that individual teachers fashion an approach that accords uniquely with their 'sense of plausibility.'

Nevertheless, and in spite of the claims of the postmethodists, the notion of method does not seem to have gone away completely. In fact, it seems to be doggedly persistent, even if the term itself is often replaced by its synonyms. In the on-line advertising for language courses, for example, we find the following:
'Developed and used over years in the classroom, the earworms mbt® method has shown phenomenal success….'
'The Byki approach to learning languages… is the fastest possible way to lock foreign words and phrases in your long-term memory.'
'Rosetta Stone software is built around a concept called Dynamic Immersion, an [sic] unique learning method that uses a computer to mimic the ways in which you learnt your first language.'
It seems that – in the public mind, at least – the method concept is not dead. As Block (2001) notes, 'while method has been discredited at an etic level (that is in the thinking and nomenclature of scholars), it certainly retains a great deal of vitality at the grass-roots, emic level (that is, it is still part of the nomenclature of lay people and teachers)' (p. 72). This is a view echoed by Bell (2007) who interviewed a number of teachers on the subject, and concluded:

'Methods, however the term is defined, are not dead. Teachers seem to be aware of both the usefulness of methods and the need to go beyond them.' (p. 143).
On the other hand, in a recent paper, Akbari (2008) suggests that, in EFL contexts such as Iran, it is textbooks that have largely replaced methods in their traditional sense:
'The concept of method has not been replaced by the concept of postmethod but rather by an era of textbook-defined practice. What the majority of teachers teach and how they teach... are now determined by textbooks' (p. 647).

Textbooks and método

In fact, the conflation of method with textbook is an idea with a long history, especially in the Spanish-speaking world, where the two concepts share a single name: método. Direct Method and Grammar-Translation courses, in particular, were often named after their progenitor, as in El Método Kucera (Barcelona, 1954), El Método Girau (Barcelona, 1925), and the El Método Massé-Dixon (Barcelona, n.d.).

I, too, contend that the concept of method is not only alive and well, but has been reincarnated in the form of coursebooks, such that it would be valid to talk about the Soars and Soars Method, or the Cunningham and Moor Method, since it is coursebook series like Headway and Cutting Edge that – more than any other factor – determine and define current teaching practice. That is to say, rather than the método embodying a specific method, the método is the method.

What is a method?

What is it, after all, that defines a method? In their Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002), Richards and Schmidt make the reasonable claim that 'different methods of language teaching... result from different views of:

a. the nature of language
b. the nature of second language learning
c. goals and objectives in teaching
d. the type of syllabus to use
e. the role of teachers, learners, instructional materials
f. the activities, techniques and procedures to use'
(p. 330)

Even a cursory glance at their content and at the way they are marketed confirms the fact that the writers and publishers of coursebooks take particular positions, either explicitly or implicitly, with regard to each of these areas. The theory of language that coursebooks instantiate, for example, is clear from their contents pages, where language is typically construed as a system of 'accumulated entities' (Rutherford, 1987), or what I have referred to elsewhere as grammar McNuggets. As Basturkmen (1999) concluded, after reviewing the cover blurbs of a number of current coursebooks, 'the emphasis [is] on the underlying generative base or language rules rather than on surface level aspects of use' (p. 34).
Coursebooks and second language learning
The 'nature of second language learning', as evidenced from coursebooks, seems generally to follow a cognitive model, where declarative knowledge is proceduralised through successive practice activities. The back cover of Inside Out (Kay and Jones, 2001), for example, makes the claim that 'easy-to-use exercises put rules into practice – and are then recycled as speaking activities'. As for 'the goals and objectives of language learning', these tend to be loosely aligned with those of the communicative approach. Inside Out, for example, 'has been designed to develop real-life communicative skills and powers of self-expression' (Kay and Jones, op. cit), while Cutting Edge (Cunningham and Moor, 1998) aims at 'improved confidence and fluency' as well as 'a clearer understanding of how language is used'. (There is, of course, no recognition that the discrete-item focus of the syllabus might be at odds with these more holistic objectives.) With regard to the syllabus, the grammar 'canon' predominates, but the influence of the lexical approach (Lewis, 1993) and of corpus linguistics is now apparent. Innovations (Dellar and Hocking, 2000) 'has a strongly lexical syllabus, presenting and practising hundreds of natural expressions which students will find immediately useful', and Natural English (Gairns and Redman, 2002a) offers 'a new syllabus area called natural English – accessible, high-frequency phrases which intermediate students can pick up and use'.

The role of the teacher

The 'role of teachers, learners and instructional materials' is most clearly demonstrated in the Teacher’s Book component, where the teacher’s role is both didactic and facilitative, and serves primarily to mediate the coursebook materials, by, for example, explaining, demonstrating and modelling language items, and by setting up and monitoring student interactions. For example (from Gairns and Redman, 2002b):
'Once learners have thought about exercise 1, go over the language in the natural English box. You could model the phrases and replies yourself and ask learners to repeat them, then practise the two-line dialogues across the class' (p. 24).
The guidelines typically construe the teacher as the locus of control in the classroom and even at times imply that the learners are potentially disruptive:
'Don’t let the false beginners dominate the real beginners or pull you along too quickly… Encourage [the false beginners] to concentrate on areas where they can improve (e.g. pronunciation) and don’t let them think they know it all!' [Oxenden and Seligson, 1996, p. 15]
Nevertheless, occasional reference is made to the need to encourage learner agency and autonomy. For example, 'Choices within tasks encourage learners to take charge of interactions' (Kay and Jones, op. cit). Unsurprisingly, though, the coursebook forms the core component of instruction: it is both the medium and the message.

Finally, the types of 'activities, techniques and procedures to use' draw on a range of methodological approaches (but scarcely ever involve translation, or encourage the use of, or any reference to, the learners’ L1). The influence of the communicative approach appears to be strong, with most courses including information-gap tasks, and texts that, if not authentic, attempt to simulate the same. There is a strong skills focus, and the distribution of the material is weighted more towards skills-based activities than language-focused ones. The dominant model for representing English is a native-speaker one, and both the topics and the design of the materials reflect an 'aspirational culture' (Gray, 2002) of travel, consumerism and popular culture.

Conclusions

Here, then, are the ingredients of a method, enshrined in a método. Teachers who claim not to be following a method, but who are using a coursebook, are as much method-bound as the Direct Method practitioners of Berlitz’s day, or the Audiolingualists of Lado’s. Of course, teachers will argue that they use coursebooks selectively, in accordance with their own principles as well as the needs of the learners. Fair enough, but however selective a teacher is, he or she is still tied to a theory of language, embodied in the way that the course selects and describes language, and to a theory of learning, as manifested in the way the course prioritises certain types of activity over others.

References

Akbari, R. (2008). Postmethod discourse and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 42/4.Basturkman, H. (1999) A content analysis of ELT textbook blurbs: reflections on theory-in-use. RELC Journal, 30/1.
Bell, D. (2007) Do teachers think that methods are dead? ELT Journal, 61.
Block, D. (2001) An exploration of the art and science debate in language education. In Bax, M, and Zwart, J.-W (eds.) Reflections on language and language learning: In honour of Arthur van Essen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.