A Study on Teacher as an Anchor in an Interactive English Class

Background of the Study

Although much has been done in the research of interactive English class, the cramming teaching method with teacher’s monologue instead of teacher-student’s dialogue still prevails in most of the English classes in mainland China. Theory sometimes goes too far away and forgets to pause at the reality. The purpose of this study is to probe the applicability and effectiveness of the interactive English class mode in which the teacher acts like a talk show anchor conducting the streams of dialogues between the teacher and students individually or collectively. The teacher is expected to contrive bunches of meaningful and relevant (Slavin, 2003) questions to help students construct knowledge and develop multi-skills. The study focus its research population on the middle school students and frames its field research within the extracurricular training school, in that students, who are undergoing Piaget’s formal operational stage (Berk, 2004) but have very few chances to open their mouths in the big-size class in public middle school, can be exposed to a small-size class and communicative context in the extracurricular counterpart. Also, a limitation of this study is that only teacher-student interaction is to be under investigation and that student peer interaction will not be discussed in the research, the reason of which is that this mode of teacher as an anchor in an interactive class highlights a teacher’s steering and anchoring function as an initiator and sustainer in keeping the students from falling prey to tangential chitchat and other behavior that is off-course from the class objectives. (Brown, 2001)

Therefore, the applicability and effectiveness of this mode of interactive class fall on the teacher’s performance, the students’ responses and the dialogic way to help develop their multi-skills in each and every class, all of which form the framework of this study.

Action research will be chosen for this study, in which interviewing method and observational method of qualitative research are to be conducted for examining the teacher and the students’ performance in class, and questionnaire method and evaluation of quantitative research are to be implemented to measure students’ multi-effective outcome.

The expected outcome of this study is that the empirical interactive class mode to be discussed will bear an optimal policy on students’ learning style and teachers’ professional development when theoretically grounded.

Relevant Literature

Role of the Teacher and as in a Communicative Context

According to Bruce J. Biddle (1997), the teacher role can be interpreted into three major concepts: role as social position, role as characteristic behaviors and role as expectations. Studies of role as social position “have focused on newer activities or functions that have appeared for teachers, and also note problems that teachers have experienced in occupying those ‘roles’”(Biddle, 1997, p.507). To what extent a teacher’s traditional ‘centralized authority’ in the classroom should be decentralized and to what extent teachers would accept learning and schools can afford new technology to help students learn to take charge of their own learning. These are also questions that confront the teachers and researchers in mainland China today. Authors of characteristic behaviors believe that teacher behaviors are existential events that can be observed directly, but that classroom events are very complex, and many of their most striking effects are context-specific. (Biddle, 1997) Thus, observational research in classroom in which the details of teacher behavior are noted by use of audio and video recordings will prove an efficient way in this study, though expensive then in 1980s, but available and convenient in extracurricular training schools nowadays. Authors who follow Biddle’s role as expectation ‘tend to view teachers (and those with whom they interact) as persons capable of rational, reflective thought. Role expectations for teachers are thought to be learned through experience and, once they are formed, to affect the behaviors of those who hold them in predictable ways.’(Biddle, 1997, p.502) This third concept will strongly underpin the fact that a teacher, in an interactive class or communicative context in this study, can learn to be an ‘anchor’ through teaching experience instead of receiving special training to be an anchor.

To narrow the scope of the literature to the role of the teacher in a communicative class, most authors hold the concept of the role of the teacher as a facilitator of students’ learning rather than a director or merely an instructor. (Breen & Candlin, 1980; Brown, 2001; Littlewood, 1981; Liu, Liu & Lin, 2004; Richards & Rodgers 2008) Littlewood (1981) classifies a variety of specific roles a teacher may need to perform, as general overseer, as classroom manager, as language instructor, as non-intervener in communicative activity, as consultant or adviser and as co-communicator. Liu et al. (2004) further define the teacher as organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, resource, controller or psychologist. The teacher acting like a talk show anchor in class in this study may alternatively play the roles just cited in different teaching activities. However, more importantly and artistically, he is supposed to play a role as a ‘talk-show anchor’, who develops proper classroom atmosphere from the first day (Rivers 1997) in which students feel relaxed and talkative to be his ‘gusts’. He is also supposed to design topics for each of the five sections: vocabulary, grammar, text, extended drills and exercises, about which students are stimulated to keep on talking. All and all, he is highly expected to fulfill, with the role awareness of a talk-show anchor through the whole class, the task of facilitating the students’ acquisition process of the language knowledge and maximizing the development of their language skills.

Students’ Psychological State and Role in a Communicative Context

In mainland China, middle school has two stages, junior stage (grades 7–9, some places are grades 6–9) and senior stage (grades 10–12). Middle school students, aged from around 12 to around 18, according to Piaget, are undergoing the formal operational stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract, scientific thinking. (Berk 2004, p.552) Two of the consequences of abstract thoughts are self-consciousness in which young teenagers regard themselves as always on stage and go great lengths to avoid embarrassment, and self-focusing in which they feel that they are special and unique. (Berk 2004, p559) In language development, subtle but important changes take place in adolescence. Their improved capacity for reflective thought and abstraction enhances their ability to think about language as a system. Abstract thinking also permits adolescents to master irony and sarcasm. Figurative language is better grasped, and more elaborate grammatical constructions – long sentences that consist of a greater number of subordinate clauses. (Berk 2004, p.564) This psychological state of the adolescents and their language development which takes place in the first language learning, yet may likely have a familiar aptitude in second language learning, determine the colorfulness of learners’ role in the talk-show like class in this study. To be a ‘honored gust’ in the setting of a classroom, they have no stage fright to risk, but have many chances to express themselves. In the teacher-student interaction, the learner is more a negotiator (Breen & Candlin, 1980) with the teacher than one with their peers. This may generate competition rather than collaboration. But more often than not, they have to work together to give responses to the teacher’s questions. Both these competitions and collaborations will do them good in their personal growth. Nunan (1989) concludes that a learner is involved in a social activity, and the social and interpersonal roles of the learner cannot be divorced from psychological learning processes. Richards and Rodgers (2008) worry that the cooperative (rather than individualistic) approach to learning stressed in communicative language teaching may be unfamiliar to learners. ‘Often there is no text, grammar rules are not presented, classroom arrangement is nonstandard, students are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than with the teacher, and correction of errors may be absent or infrequent.’ (p.166) Nevertheless in the teacher-anchored interactive class in this study, text, grammar, vocabulary and exercises all become topics, under which learners are stimulated to speak out freely without any less initiatives and with many chances to develop an identity (Berk 2004) in class.

Questioning Skills in Developing Multi-skills in Stratified Topic-based Teaching

The constructive view of learning emphasizes the teacher’s giving students ladders that lead to higher understanding and the must of students’ climbing these ladders by themselves (Slavin, 2003). Ladders in the teacher-anchored interactive class in this study are the questions the teacher designs strategically and skillfully under one topic after another. In the topic-based teaching, students’ language skills are enhanced through focal attention to topic, and peripheral attention to language. (Brown, 2001)

Literature of questioning techniques and strategies is huge. Most authors agree that questions can be classified as either lower-order or higher-order (Borich, 2000; Brown, 2001; Gall & Artero-Boname, 1995; Ornstein, & Thomas, 2004), and that both categories should combine in an appropriate ratio. In the teacher-anchored interactive class in this study, rote repetition in lockstep always provides necessary stepping stones to the ladders or scaffoldings of lower-order questions and all the way to higher-order ones. Rote repetition is necessary in class here in mainland China because English is a language that students do not often hear outside the walls of their classroom. Both lower-order and higher-order questions will be posed in line with the relevance principle of effort and effect (Sperber & Wilson, 2001). ‘Holistic practice’ (Richards & Rodgers, 2008) is implemented in which phonetic, syntactic and semantic stumbling blocks are moved away by questioning and answering (Q-A) under topics to pave the way to Slavin’s ladders. Rote repetition, low-order questioning and high-order questioning all go through a process of ‘whole-part-whole’ (to be discussed in methodology). Students’ confidence is thus gained and intrinsic motivation (Brown, 2001) (which serves as the norm of this study) builds up.

Methodology

Research Questions

This study attempts to probe the applicability and effectiveness of the mode of teacher as an anchor in an interactive class. Three research questions are raised:

       RQ1: What questioning skills does the teacher display and develop in class?

       RQ2: How do students build up intrinsic motivation