College of foreign languages department of postgraduate studies



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Change Agents


It is often the case that much of the responsibility for the success or failure of innovations is placed on the change agents. This is unfortunate, since in many projects, change agents are inexperienced foreign language teachers who lack knowledge about the wider dynamics within the institutions they are serving. Teachers are the most important change agents, and there are three major teacher variables related to the success or failure of innovation, i.e. teachers’ attitudes, teachers’ training and teachers’ understanding of innovation (Fullan, 1991; Markee, 1997).

Teachers’ attitudes, which are derived from their experience as language learners and teachers, their training and their interaction with colleagues, affect their behavior in the classroom. If teachers’ attitudes are congruent with the innovation, then they are positively disposed towards its implementation. However, teachers who are initially enthusiastic about an innovation may easily become disillusioned if there is a lack of support for the innovation implementation, such as inadequate resourcing or students’ low motivation. There have been a number of recent reviews of unsuccessful attempts to implement learner-centered communicative curricula amongst teachers whose background and experience tends toward more traditional teacher-centered methods (Hui, 1997; Penner, 1995; Holliday, 1994; Karavas-Doukas, 1995; Harrison, 1996).

Teacher training and support are a critical issue in preparing teachers to implement a new curriculum and can play a major role in shaping teachers’ attitudes. Without sufficient training and support, even teachers initially enthusiastic about an innovation may become frustrated by implementation problems (Gross et al., 1971; Verspoor, 1989).

If teachers are to implement an innovation successfully, they need to have a thorough understanding of the principles and practices underlying the innovation. Fullan (1991) warns that “people will always misinterpret and misunderstand some aspects of the purpose or practice of something that is new to them” (p. 199).

For the reason of limited space I just focus on the most important factors that should be looked upon as planning innovation, change agents, here.

Conclusion

This Chapter has reviewed the Literature on teachers’ implementation of innovation or curriculum renewal in ELT. Two critical issues emerge in this review. First, there is a gap between the planned curriculum and the implemented curriculum. In other words, teachers appear to interpret the planned curriculum according to their understandings, experiences and perceptions of contextual factors. Second, the role of the textbook in the context of ELT innovation or the role of the textbook as agent of change in ELT remains under-researched. The gap is even wider in the Vietnamese context. This study is therefore an attempt to narrow the gap and to contribute to the common knowledge of how teachers implement curriculum renewal through their use of the textbook in the classroom.



CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the research questions and research methods used for the data collection as well as research procedures. The first section of the chapter presents the background information of the study, i.e., the recent introduction of the new curriculum for English in the high school in Vietnam and the institutionalization of a new textbook series as the mediator of such innovation. Then it presents the research questions which constitute the focus of this study and a discussion of the methodology which was used to guide the present study. Next, information about the case including the bounded context and participants is provided. The Chapter concludes with a discussion of the instruments of data collection as well as the procedure of data collection.



  1. Background

Responding to the need to increase the number of people who can communicate completely in English to support the recent adoption of a market economy as well as the entry into the ASEAN bloc and World Trade Organization in Vietnam, the Vietnamese MOET has recently decided to reform the English language curriculum for secondary school which starts from Grade 6 through to Grade 12. The new series of English textbooks aim to enable school pupils

  1. To communicate in English at the basic level in all modes of communication, i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing;

  2. To master the basic formal knowledge of the English language; and

  3. To have general understanding of, and a positive attitude towards the cultures of the English speaking countries.

(Ministry of Education and Training, 2006, p. 5)

It is also stated in the new English curriculum for secondary schools that “communicative skills are the goal of the teaching of English at the secondary school while formal knowledge of the language serves as means to the end” (p.6). The new curriculum has become an ordinance, which is promulgated and prescribed by the MOET, for all secondary schools throughout the country.

The innovative textbooks are theme-based and skill-based which adopt the “two currently popular teaching approaches, the learner-centered approach and the communicative approach. A focus is on task-based teaching as the leading methodology” Hoang et al. (2006, p. 12). The topic fields covered in the textbooks are “You and me”, “Education”, “Community”, “Nature and Environment”, “Recreation”, and “People and Places”. The textbook is structured according to standard pattern consisting of 16 didactic units, each comprising five sections: Reading, Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Language Focus which presents the target grammatical structures and phonetic sounds. Each of these sections is prescribed to be dealt within one 45-minute lesson. Although the new textbook was introduced in 2002 for Grade 6, it was not until 2006 that the new curriculum was approved and institutionalized.

After the new textbook set had been piloted, revised and institutionalized, in-service teacher training workshops were organized through a cascading model. The curriculum developer led the workshop with ‘key’ teachers nominated by provincial educational authorities, who then went back to the provinces and ran the workshop for other teachers (among whom were the four teachers in this study). These workshops usually lasted 10 days each during the summer break with key trainers being the textbook writers themselves. During the workshop, teachers were introduced the structure of the textbook, the underlying methodology and classroom techniques that teachers were supported to employ in delivering the textbook.



  1. Research Questions

This is a single qualitative case study. The major goal of the study is to examine the implementation of the new textbook for grade 10 at an upper secondary school on the outskirts of Hanoi. The design and methodology oriented around the following research questions:

  1. How is the new textbook implemented in the classrooms?

  2. To what extent does such implementation match the underlying methodology of the new textbook?

  3. What are teachers' rationales for their innovation implementation?

  1. Rationale for Choosing a Case Study

With regard to the choice of research methodology, Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991) maintain that

What is important for researchers is not the choice of a priori paradigms or even methodologies, but rather to be clear on what the purpose of the study is to match that purpose with the attributes most likely to accomplish it. Put another way, the methodological design should be determined by the research question (p. 14).

What is implied in the above quotation is that it is the purpose of the study that determines the choice of research methodology, not the other way round. The purpose of this study is to explore how teachers implement English language teaching innovation which is promoted by the Ministry of Education and Training in the classroom and the rationale behind their implementation. Such a purpose fits well the choice of a single qualitative case study.

Case studies, as described by Yin (2003) are “the preferred strategy when “how” or “why” questions are being posed, when the investigator has little control over events, and when the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon within some real-life context” (p.1). Yin also goes on to assert that the case study method allows the researcher to get insights into the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events (p. 2). A study on the implementation of innovation in the classroom is, in effect, an exploration of a pedagogical phenomenon in its natural context, i.e., in the classroom.

A case can be defined in a variety of different ways, but fundamentally is referred to as a ‘bounded system’, a term originally coined by Louis Smith, an educational ethnographer (see Stake, 1995). However, the notion of ‘boundedness’ is complex at the operational level. In this study I used Hitchcock and Hughes’ (1995,p 319) definition of ‘boundedness’ according to which a case can be “looked at in terms of ‘key players’, ‘key situations’ and ‘critical incidents’ in the life of the case (McDonough and McDonough, 1997, p. 205). In addition to this, the definition by Miles and Huberman (1994 cited in McDonough and McDonough, 1997, p.205) was also used. Miles and Huberman relate ‘boundedness’ to the following:


  • temporal characteristics

  • geographical parameters

  • inbuilt boundaries

  • a particular context at a point in time

  • group characteristics

  • role/ function

  • organizational/ institutional arrangements

Information about the case in this study regarding the above aspects is presented in the subsequent section.

With regard to typology, Yin (2003) categorizes case studies into three main types: (i) exploratory case studies; (ii) descriptive case studies; and (iii) explanatory case studies (p. 1). This study is a combination of an exploratory study and a descriptive study. It is exploratory in the sense that it sets out to explore the way teachers implement innovation in their classroom and their explanation of the way they implemented innovation. But it is descriptive, too, because it aims to describe the extent to which the methodology underlying the innovation is employed in real classrooms.



  1. The Case

The case in this study is a private senior high school, which is located in the central area of Ha Tay province. Economically, this area is developing fast. The school was founded in 2005. At the time when the study was conducted, the school had a pupil population of almost 1600. Of this pupil population, 560 were in Grade 10. Admission was selected according to their academic records in the junior high school. One of the prerequisites for admission was that the pupils had earned the title “hoc sinh tien tien” for all four years of schooling in the junior high school.

There were 11 English language teachers working for the school. Like teachers of other subjects working in this school, all these English teachers had their permanent jobs in other state-run senior high schools. Most of them had five years or more of teaching experience except for two who had just retired from other schools. All of them were employed on the contractual basis.

Originally I planned to conduct the study in a state-run school. However, after I tried with two schools, I failed to get the permission from the teachers who did not agree to get involved in the study. This private school was my third choice, and the reason for choosing it was just for convenience. I did not have to travel very far to the school when I paid field trips to the school. But more important was the permission I got from the school leadership and the teachers who were teaching English in the school. Although this was a private school, it had many similar characteristics of many other state-run senior high schools in the rural area. On average, 50 pupils were put in one classroom which was basically furnished with rows of long desks. Every five pupils shared one desk. Between rows of desks was a narrow aisle for the teacher to move around.

Although the area is economically developing, there are very few opportunities for the students to use English outside the school because this is not a tourist destination. Neither is it an industrial area which accommodates joint–venture or foreign-owned companies. Local people live chiefly by working as state officials or having their own business.



  1. Participants of the study

Participants were four female teachers of English (ranging from 29 to 45 years old) who had been teaching both the old textbook and the new one at the high schools (both private and state-run) in Ha Tay province. All of them were university graduates and they all have at least six years of English teaching experience at different high schools in urban as well as suburban areas of Ha Tay. All these teachers attended a short in-service training workshop organized by the MOET on using the new textbook, and three of them were even trained in using the new textbook by the English Language Trainer Training Project (ELTTP) with British trainers.

  1. Instruments

McDonough and McDonough (1997) have cautioned that cases are objects to be explored rather than methods or techniques of data collection. According to them, the battery of possible instruments for a case study typically includes:

  • naturalistic and descriptive observation

  • narrative diaries

  • unstructured and ethnographic interviews

  • verbal reports

  • collection of existing information (p. 208)

For the purpose of this study, a triangulation of three different methods was used for data collection. These included classroom observation, post-observation semi-structured interviews and an analysis of the existing information related to the English language teaching innovation in the secondary school, i.e., the curriculum and the textbook (student’s book and teacher’s book).

Of these methods, classroom observation assists the researcher in understanding accurately the innovation implementation in the natural setting whereas post-observation interviews helps to provide more useful information about how and why teachers taught the new textbook in the way they did . In other words, interviews help to obtain in-depth and rich information about the observed behaviors. All these instruments will be discussed in detail in the following sections.



    1. Classroom observation

According to Hopkins (cited in Mr Donough, J and Mr Donough, S. 1997, p.101) “Observation is a pivotal activity with a crucial role to play in classroom research”. Observing classrooms helps to see the various interactions between the instructor and students. Over time patterns of interaction that are complex in nature will emerge. These in turn will assist the researcher in exploring accurately and quickly how the instructional processes carry out, then the validity of information in the way that teachers empirically use to implement the new textbooks can be tested and clarified.

In this study, I observed all four teachers who are in charged of 10th grades, and among the classes I observed, there were two lessons of speaking skill, two of reading skill, two of language focus, one of listening and one of writing skill.



    1. Post-observation interview

According to Nunan (1992), in a research interview “the agenda is totally predetermined order and the types of interview one chooses will be determined by the nature of the research and the degree of control the interviewer wishes to exert” (p. 149). As the aim of this study was to explore the implementation of the new textbook, it is of naturalistic inquiry by nature. The aim of the interviews was to understand the rationale of teachers’ behaviors in the classroom, and for this aim all post-observation interviews were unstructured. The design of unstructured interviews helped me to gain understanding of why teachers taught the way they did in the classroom.

The interviews were conducted after the classroom observation if the teachers were having an interval waiting for their next period. Otherwise I had to wait until they had free time later in the day. Each interview lasted around 25 minutes and the language of the interview was Vietnamese to ensure mutual understanding between the teacher and myself as an interviewer. The interviews were not recorded. Instead I took notes of important points during the interviews.



    1. Data collection and data analysis procedures

      1. Datacollection procedures

In order to get empirical information about teachers’ implementation of the intended syllabus innovation in their real classroom and the rationales for their implementation, on the 18th of March I decided to come to meet the leader of the school to ask for cooperation for my study. It was really lucky for me to be given warm welcome by all four English teachers of 10th graders. Some days later, on March 27th 2008, I wrote them a letter to inform them of my visits to their lessons in advance. Data collection methods used for the study comprised classroom observation and post-observation in-depth interviews. Classroom observations were conducted for two lessons for each teacher in three weeks, totaling 2 lessons per teacher or 8 lessons altogether for four teachers. Because teachers were not comfortable with their lessons being video or audio-recorded, I took extensive field notes of all the observed events in the classroom in the most possible naturally detailed manner to determine the teaching styles of a single case. As a result, classroom observation helped me collect the data “which is not what participants have written on the topic (what they intend to do, or should do), not what they say they do”. (Gillham, 2000, p. 47). The interviews were conducted after the classroom observation if the teachers were having an interval waiting for their next period. Otherwise I had to wait until they had free time later in the day. Since teachers were not comfortable with their interviews being audio-recorded, I took notes of important points focusing on the critical issues arising from the observed lessons as well as issues related to teachers’ rationale underlying their implementation of the intended syllabus innovation.

Each interview lasted around 25 minutes and all the interviews were conducted in Vietnamese in order for the participants to fully articulate their views without being constrained by the use of English or it helped them to avoid getting confused in understanding the English interviewing questions and giving answers to the asked questions. They were then translated and analyzed by the researcher to uncover the emerging themes. The full transcript of the interviews is given in Appendix 4. Each interviewee was asked seven questions:



  1. How long have you been teaching English?

  2. Can you name the teaching methodology underlying the curricular innovation?

  3. Does the new teaching methodology tally with the teachers and the students’ English learning purpose at your school? Why? And Why not?

  4. Do you find any advantages or disadvantages of the new teaching methodology underlying the new curricular innovation? What are they?

  5. Do you focus on teaching vocabulary and grammar or teaching language skills? Why?

  6. Do you agree with the recent survey that the quality of English teaching is very poor?

  7. In your mind what should be done to appraise the quality of English teaching?

      1. Data analysis procedures.

The procedures of collecting data took me only a month but it took me about months to analyze the data. Data collected from the above different sources were categorized into i) Teachers’ classroom practice and ii) Factors affecting teachers’ teaching. The data was categorized this way simply for seeking answers to the research questions established for this study. The data was then analyzed both descriptively and interpretively. The qualitative data from classroom observation and the interviews were presented by quoting relevant responses from the respondents.

  1. Conclusion

This chapter presented the research questions, the research methodology and a description of the instruments for data collection. Given the aims and objectives of the study as stated in Chapter I the researcher decided to use mixed instruments in qualitative method with a hope to get a provision of reliable and valid data for analysis in the following chapter.

CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

The first Chapter presents the rationale and the aims of the study as well as the research questions and the research methods. Chapter II reviews the literature on the role of the textbook in ELT innovation and factors affecting the way to use the textbook in the context of innovation. Chapter III presents the research questions and research methods used for the data collection as well as analysis procedures. This Chapter presents and discusses the findings that arise from the data which were collected for answering the intended research questions. There are two types of data which were analyzed and presented separately, i.e. classroom observation data and post-observation interview data.

Firstly, the analysis of the classroom observation data will be presented to provide empirical information of how the intended innovation embedded in the new textbook was actually implemented in the classroom. Secondly, the data collected from the post-observation interviews will be analyzed and presented. The outcome of this part will be used to answer the second research question about why teachers taught the textbook the way they did. In other words, this will help to understand the factors that affect the way teachers implemented the intended innovation from the teachers’ perspectives. Finally, a discussion of these findings will be presented.

Collecting data from classroom observation and post-observation interviews I decided to categorize into two main issues: 1) Teachers’ classroom practice and 2) Factors affecting teachers’ teaching. The data was categorized that way simply for answering the research question presented in chapter I. Following is the description of the data in detail.



I. Findings

In order to get empirical information about the way teachers implemented the new English textbook for grade 10 I came to visit 8 English lessons which were conducted by four different teachers, the participants of the study, at a private senior high school for three weeks from 27 April 2008 to 20 April 2008. Due to technical constraints as well as getting the permit and approval from the participants of the study, I informed them of my visits to their lessons in advance and while I was attending their classroom I did not videotape or audio-tape the lessons I observed. Instead, I took notes of classroom procedures and activities in the most possible naturally detailed manner which determining teaching styles to reflect on a single case. After collecting the data from classroom observations and post observation interviews, some most interesting and significant findings were selected to present below.




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