How
can I create a more relaxed atmosphere in my College English class in order to
improve learning?
by Sun Weimin,
CECEARFLT, Ningxia Teachers University,
June, 2006.
I am from a rural and a little remote mountainous area. From 1900 to 1996, I finished my secondary school education in my hometown before I came to Guyuan. At that time, the exam-oriented English teaching and learning styles dominated in the middle school I was attending. Because we never had enough training in oral English and in students' class activities, now I am an English teacher, but my teaching method is quite different from my English teachers who taught me in the middle school. I am adopting communication-oriented teaching styles. I have been teaching English majors and non-English majors for over 7 years since September, 1999 in Guyuan Teachers College. Until I conducted my AR (Educational Action Research in Foreign Language Teaching) with the help of Moira, Dean Tian and my colleagues in the English Department I realized my teaching was so passive. I had little chance to exchange opinions and share experiences with my colleagues to help me deal with some puzzles in my College English teaching. I began my AR in September, 2005. I tried to ask myself some questions after each College English class when I found a majority of students are so inactive when I conduct learner-centred teaching method in class. Over the last few months I have thought and observed carefully.
á Why are the students passive in my class?
á Why do a few students like He Liu Junmei never want to be a volunteer to respond to questions in my class?
á Why are almost all students not willing to be called on in class?
á Why do some students seem to lack self-confidence?
á How can I make them more active?
á Why is my class always out of my control when I do some pair work and group work?
á Why is the teacher-dominated teaching method so apparently acceptable by students in my class?
Finally
I realised the greatest relevance of AR question to my College English teaching
would be --- How could I create a more relaxed atmosphere in my College English
class? I considered this AR question was more applicable and practicable for me
at present because both the students and I would benefit a lot in my general
practice. Anxiety is a complicated phenomenon. The students' social and
educational background, English level, previous learning experience and his or
her personality, teacher's teaching method and personality are the factors
causing anxiety in class (Li Lisheng, 1998). By doing the informal inquiry, I
got students were inactive in my English class mainly because of their Anxiety
and my strict teaching method. By 'strict' here I am meaning that I did not
laugh and joke with the students. My face was serious and perhaps I did not
smile enough. I think my AR question will help students and me be aware of
problems with themselves and require me to find out methods of dealing with these
problems in my teaching. By practising some strategies in class, students
probably correct their negative and unhelpful thoughts. In later teaching, this
teaching experience must be useful for me, too. If in the future I am teaching
the five-year students, if I don't make progress in my methods I will stay at
the same level and the students will make the same mistakes. Last term I spent
a lot of time trying to change these methods in order to help the students to
learn. Perhaps in future classes the students' anxiety also exists, so my
colleagues and I can share my experience and gain something from my research.
With
the New Curriculum being carried out (New Curriculum Guidelines, Beijing,
2005), more and more teachers in China have accepted the communicative approach
and applied some principles of it to their classroom teaching (Zhou R., 2004).
I realise the fact of its importance has been generally accepted: that the aim
of language teaching is to foster the learners' ability to express or convey information and communicate ideas and feelings. Therefore the
listening and speaking abilities of students are much more focused on these
days. That means the traditional teacher-centred approach has to gradually be changed
into a learner-centred one. Students should be provided with more opportunities
to practice talking freely in English, particularly in the College English
course I am teaching now, which puts a strong emphasis on developing students
speaking and listening abilities and communicative activities. Meanwhile that
also means a less teacher-centred and rather more relaxed classroom atmosphere
should be created. This is my problem.
As
many people may know, in China we have an NC for the teaching of English. This
requires our teaching to help students 'move from competence to performance',
(Chen, 2003 in Laidlaw, 2005).
College
English books are guided by the New Curriculum. This course carries
student-centred teaching rules throughout; it requires an all-round development
of students in listening, speaking, reading and writing. In the meantime, there
are emphases particularly on listening and speaking. (Li Guilan, 2002)
Five-year
students are quite different from other college students in Guyuan Teachers'
College, now Ningxia Teachers University. All of them were juniors in high
school before enrolling, with an average age of under 16 years old. Their
mentalities are not mature. By this I mean their thoughts are not highly
developed in terms of how they do something. For example, some of them seemed to
think college life is simply to spend five years here without any necessary
ambition to study hard and aim for a job. They appeared unable to accept their
own individual responsibility for their studies. In addition, their English
seemed so poor. For example I once asked a student as an introduction, How
are you? He could answer me. But when I asked him how old are you? He couldn't
answer me at all and looked at me blankly. This happened quite frequently in
the class at the beginning. A 'poor' standard was also frequently evident in
speaking and listening as the following comment attests to:
Teachers
of junior high school hardly train students in these aspects till senior high
school since almost all teachers try to gain the requisite admission-rate to
senior high school (five English teachers in a Middle School - Wang
Jianye, Zhang Xuemei, Yanling, Wangyin, Wang Kecheng - agreed recently.
These
teachers are currently teaching in different junior high schools in a local
region. During my teaching of English majors (five-year students majoring in
English, in other words, students who have failed in some aspects of their
schooling and come to the college to improve their English in particular), I
have found that the application of some communicative activities to our class
has been much more difficult than I anticipated: students seemed unwilling to
participate in communicative activities or to be questioned by the teacher in
the class. Most of the students seem to want to answer questions or discuss
with their desk-mates, thus often initiating fewer conversations with me, with
few examples of silence-breakers, manifesting a short speaking-time with
distortion of sounds or just standing in silence when asked to perform in
communicative practice. All of this caused an embarrassing situation and meant
I was not in control. For instance, in my English class, when I let students
act as speakers and practise the dialogue, some of the bold students conducted
dialogues loudly and naturally but some of the less-brave ones just read by
themselves muttering, especially the students who came from rural areas
like Wang Guoqiang, Ma Donghu, etc.
Over the seven
years of my teaching, by talking casually with students after class, I have
found that it is often rural students who are unwilling to speak. Because their
pronunciation is quite indistinct and confused (owing, it seems, to unqualified
teaching in the countryside), they are afraid of being mocked in
front of others. Ma Donghu told me a very interesting story. When he was a
middle school student, his English teacher who majored in Physics in college
confused 'six' with 'sex' in
pronunciation, and mixed up many, many other commonly-used words. One day Ma
Donghu was called on to describe something in a picture. He said: 'There are
sex people'. All the students laughed. He couldn't
understand what was wrong until his desk-mate told him the different meanings and pronunciations between 'six'
and 'sex'. He felt very ashamed and unwilling to speak any more.
When
I asked all the students a question, either only a few students put up their
hands or nobody did. Sometimes this silence lasted for three or four minutes
until I had to break it. A majority of the students appeared to want to finish
their responses as soon as possible and make them as short as possible when I
called upon them to answer some questions. This is also described by other
colleagues at the Centre when they are trying to help their students (Liu
Binyou, 2006; Ma Hong, 2006; Liu Hui, 2006 etc.) The following is a example of
something that happened in my class when I was teaching the text 'Prince of
Programmers Bill Gates', in unit six of our College English book. I wrote down
2 lead-in questions on the blackboard:
(1) Do you know something about
computers? (Note: the word computer is not a new word for students here.) If you know, please point out the
important parts of a computer.
(2)
Do you know anything about Bill Gates? Say as much as you can.
Sun
Weiming: Now everybody please heads up and look at these two questions. Can you
understand?
Students:
Yes (answered in chorus).
Sun
Weiming: Good, please discuss the questions with your desk-mates and five
minutes later let's try to give answers. Chinese and English both are ok.
Students:
Yes
I
asked eleven students to answer these two questions. Two students said : 'No,
I don't know'. Seven students just said one word: yes, but nothing else. Only two
students said something about computer-parts but still only a few words. To my
surprise, when I walked around classroom, I found almost every student had
written down the answers to my questions.
I was surprised because I had given them a chance to discuss it and they
still seemed unwilling to participate orally. So the problem was not that they
weren't unable to understand, but were simply reluctant to speak. This was my
problem.
Wuyi
set down following answers on a piece of paper:
'Yes,
I know. Line, TV (monitor), Machine (a host machine), yin xiang (sound boxes).'
'Yes,
he has a lot of money.'
But
she only answered the questions with 'yes' and 'no'. When she stood up.
Liu
Junmei wrote down answers on her notebook:
'Yes
, mouse , screen (monitor), keyboard, a main machine ( a host machine)'.
'Yes, he makes first computer, he has a
glass, he is rich.'
But she gave a similar response as well.
When
I talked with students Wuyi, Liu Junmei, Ma Donghu and Wang Guoqiang after
class, I asked them why they were reluctant to participate in communicative
activities and be called on by the teacher in the class. I learnt that they
behaved like this because they felt a lack of self-confidence, and were too
nervous and worried about their poor pronunciation as well as being afraid of
losing face in front of others. Thus, I saw how important it was to create a
more relaxed atmosphere in the class I was teaching then.
I
therefore fixed on five representative students with very obvious features of
anxiety in my class as my subjects for this research. They are respectively He
Shengmei, Wang Guoqiang , Ma Donghu, Wuyi and Liu Junmei. They behaved
anxiously in class, but they were not worse than other students, even He
Shengmei and Wuyi performed reasonably in every test. When I asked why they
always kept their heads down and seemed afraid of eye contact with me, the most
essential things I got from the conversation between us were as follows:
Wuyi:
We are too afraid of being called by teacher to answer any question or speak
in front of teacher and my classmates individually, so I didn't want to say
anything and sometimes even could think of nothing when I stood up.
Liu
Junmei: Most of the time, I wanted to say something in class but I gave up
at last because I thought my answers were possibly wrong or inaccurate.
He
Shengmie: I worried about my poor pronunciations and being laughed at by my
classmates because when I was a middle school student, my English teacher's bad
accent and non-standard pronunciation with local dialect had affected me too
much. I also worried about whether you would blame us for our inaccurate
responses or some grammatical mistakes made during answering. Therefore, in
class I think silence is golden, it is better for me to talk as little as
possible.
Wang
Guoqiang: I come from a rural and remote mountainous area. I think
pronunciation is the most elementary practice in foreign language learning, but
owing to the exam-oriented language teaching and learning in the middle school,
we have hardly had enough chance to develop our speaking in front of others in
class and out class. So I haven't any self- confidence at all.
Ma
Donghu: I felt very very nervous and as if my heart would jump out of my
mouth when you walked towards me every time in class, If you stood on the
platform or a little bit far from me, I certainly felt better. (2005.10.17)
From
the above inquiry and subsequent analysis, we can identify the fact that those
students' anxieties in my class were related to a variety of sources and they
could also be interrelated. I would also like to draw your attention to my own
Middle School experience, when some teachers' English pronunciation was so
poor, that I struggled to learn well. I think this has influenced my choice of
my AR question, because I can understand my students' feelings and I feel
worried for them.
Taking
above five students who were interviewed by me as an example, Wuyi had a very
serious personal anxiety in class. Liu Junmei was lacking in self-confidence.
He Shengmei's belief about English learning wasn't necessarily helpful and
suggests a lack of self-confidence. Wang Guoqiang seemed to have low
self-esteem. Low self-esteem was a very common source of anxiety in the class
as students told me often (Sun, 2006, data archive). It seems to me that most
of the students have these problems. Thus, I think it is very necessary and important to help students learn
and me teach better in class by creating a more relaxed classroom atmosphere.
In my following teaching:
1)
Getting students to become aware of their anxiety
I
tried to make students aware of their anxiety in class on purpose. For example,
at the beginning of a class, I called on a few students to tell me their own
fears in class and then I wrote them down on the blackboard . In this way
students including Liu Junmei could see they were not alone in their anxieties. This measure has given
students like Liu
Junmei and Wuyi great encouragements. In later class, they became active more and
more.
After class I asked Wu Yi if she felt more confident than before. Here are
some words from Liu Junmei.
'Yes I am gradually confident of trying to speak
in class and front of my classmates since you encouraged me last time ( 7 weeks
ago ) , especially when I saw more and more classmates didn't just keep silence
in class any longer like before , they are really a great spur for me . Why can they change themselves so much? Why can't I do? I asked myself. I know the teacher and my classmates
don't always cavil about my mistakes and say nothing of mocking me .I realize
if I always escape, I'll drop behind. (October 2005)
2) Helping students develop their self-confidence:
I tried to help
students build up their self-confidence. I am aware from my experience that a
skilful error-correction method is quite important for a student lacking
self-confidence in class Despite my belief that correcting mistakes made by
students can improve their knowledge, I avoided using harsh words or sentences
like 'You are completely wrong. You are so poor in English. You really
shouldn't make a mistake at all, because it is as easy as abc, etc. On the
contrary, I told students that mistakes are made by every language learner; I
took myself as an example and told students when I was the same age I also made
lot of mistakes while speaking. But I was very confident and never felt I lost
my face in front of others. Practice makes perfect, I told them! During my
teaching I tried to create a friendly classroom environment too in which
students could feel more confident about expressing their ideas and feelings
freely. For instance, when I taught Unit Two 'keeping a diary', I started the
lesson by saying some words like: 'ladies and gentlemen!'[1] These words were filled
with a sense of humour, and when I greeted students using them they laughed. I
went on to say,
Good
morning, Guoqing![2]
This is also an
affectionate a form of address. Students laughed and clapped.
Could you do
a class report today?
Then I divided
all the students into groups to let them discuss something about 'What do
people usually write in their diary?' The five students mentioned above were
arranged in different groups by me deliberately. I was observing two of the
groups carefully with the students He Shengmei and Wuyi respectively when they
were talking. They were quite active in their own group and encouraged other
students in the same group to discuss and speak more though some words were
said in Chinese.
He Shengmei: 'I
often write diary in middle school, I write everything, like what I like and
dislike. my father, my mother, my private things'. (She asked me how to
express '心事'in English and, I told her 'private things'.) And then she asked another student Ma
Lan in the group:
'What do you
usually write in your diary?'
'I never
write diary at all', Malan said.
'Do you
think what do else people often write in their diary?'
'Love , ideas, their feelings', Malan said.
After
discussion, He Shengmei put up her hand and stood up voluntarily to say her
ideas on behalf of her group.
3)
Help students raise their self-esteem
People
with low self-esteem worry about what their peers think, they are concerned
with pleasing others, and that I think has to do to a great degree with
anxiety. (Horwitz et al. 1991:15)
I
tried to help students raise their self-esteem. Self-esteem may be closely
related to how classmates and the teacher look at them and how they treat them.
So low self-esteem is very common phenomena among students like the student
Wang Guoqiang. For example, in class, I found that Wang Guoqiang often seemed
afraid. He even trembled in front of me. So, after class I would call him to
the office and carefully talk with him about his feelings. He said his
pronunciation was so poor and his vocabulary so limited. He believed he
couldn't even speak a whole sentence in English correctly. He went on to say
that he knew his classmates would laugh at him if he tried.
So,
I find the teacher plays an important role in influencing the students'
self-esteem. Therefore I tried to give the students with low self-esteem
positive encouragement and high praise when they stood up to answer questions
voluntarily in class. These students then were more able to build
self-confidence and they became more active to continue to try and work hard. I
think I have this responsibility as a teacher to help the students like Wang
Guoqiang to build up their self-esteem because otherwise the students, in not
having help from the teacher in time, will not develop their potential in the
future and this is a waste of time and learning possibilities. This is not
educational.
In
class I encouraged Wang Guoqiang and tried to answer his questions. When I
encouraged him, using the phrase, don't be shy, just try. Don't worry. There
are still some classmates who are like you, with poor pronunciation and limited
vocabulary, but they are still trying, so how about you?
His
progress is not very obvious, but I still feel that he is much better than
before. I am saying this because when I question the class, sometimes he puts
up his hand and would say: 'Teacher, can I try?' And I said, 'Certainly
you can!' This didn't happen frequently, but it happened a little. And in my
opinion, that means my encouragement and methodology were having an educational
influence with this student.
I
continued this process for about seven weeks, excepting the examination time
for all the students. During this time the students, especially those with the
high anxiety already mentioned, gradually became more active in class. At the
end of term, He Shengmei and Wuyi felt motivated to answer my questions and do
performances in class with the help of my positive encouragement, although as I
have said, Wang Gupqiang's progress was rather small. The other students quite
frequently put up their hands now in my class. Wuyi didn't have distortion of
sound any longer:
'I
am always a timid girl in class and out class, but now I am sure I have been
changed. I am not shy in front of my classmate and the teacher at all. I am
ready to do anything in class to improve myself now,' she said to me when I asked her whether
she felt nervous or not. (2005. 12.17)
Conclusion
All of the above-related experiences touch on experiences I and my
students have in all our classes together. Students' anxiety in class is a
complex and wide-ranging phenomenon. The students' previous learning
experiences, social backgrounds, English proficiency, teachers' attitude to
students and methodology, even classroom circumstances seem to have a great
influence on students' abilities to perform. The New Curriculum advocates
performance rather than competence (NC Guidelines, 2005), but anxiety is a
stumbling block to this. This anxiety is quite unnecessary and unprofitable for
students, therefore English teachers should try to create a more relaxed
atmosphere for students by taking a number of measures, such as helping
students develop their self-confidence, self-esteem, and using a suitable
mistake-correction approach. A more relaxed atmosphere can help the students
study actively and enthusiastically and will help them to improve their
communicative ability. Through my AR research, I realize a more relaxed class
atmosphere is very important in all teaching procedures. A sense of humor is
essential for a teacher to create a harmonious and comfortable teaching
condition. After my one-term's hard work, the students' communicative ability
had obviously improved, not only in terms of the five students but also the
others. The following photographs may imply
something about their improvement:
1)
Number One:
Before conducting my AR research when I asked the question of the students,
only a very few put up their hands and volunteered any answers. This photograph
was taken towards the end of term. Wu Yi is sitting near the back at the window
and her hand is covering her face. She is still a little shy, but she is
trying. Ma Donghu, who is sitting at the back of the classroom furthest from
the window in a blue and white jacket. He is smiling at the moment. Liu Junwei
is sitting in from of Ma Donghu, two rows in front, with a pink jacket. From
her facial expression I believe I can see more confident than before.
'I think I am better
than before, I have quite stronger desire to speak more, participate in
discussion and answer questions in class now' (Liu Junmei). (Sun, 2006, data archive)
From this
photograph I believe you might be able to see that the students are interested
in the class.
2)
Photograph Two:
This is a close-up of Ma Donghu, wearing a black jacket sitting behind the
young women. He is holding a pen in his hand in order to point out some ideas
to his classmate and for discussion. His facial expression is concentrated and
serious. He is clearly paying attention to the task. He is acting as an
organiser for his small group, which shows initiative. In addition there is He
Shenmei, sitting in profile, some of her face obscured. However, from this I
can see her attempts to discuss some ideas with her classmates. She acted as an
organiser for the other two. She wrote down their ideas and encouraged them to
speak more. In He Shenmei's group, I can also see a desire to learn and to
concentrate on the task in hand.
I am claiming
from these photographs, that before my AR work, these students would not so
readily participate in their own learning processes and take responsibility for
them.
My new AR question is: How can I help my
students learn more effectively through treating each one of them as unique
individuals?
Why is this my
new question? In my years of teaching, I have noticed students' personalities,
motivation and ways of study influence students a great deal and also challenge
teachers' abilities. If we treat all students alike it's probably less
difficult to teach them, because we wouldn't have to think up different ways.
But this isn't educational. When I look back my teaching in past seven years,
these differences of individuals directly or indirectly influenced their
efficiency of English leaning. For instance in a class some students were eager
to answer the teacher's questions, some were afraid of examinations, some liked
to sit at the back of the classroom quietly, hoping neither to bother anyone
else nor be bothered themselves. Some disliked any noise including the
teacher's walking around in classroom when they were reading etc. Some extroverted students were always
more active than introverted students in class and therefore they were
noticeable in class and were helped more. On the other hand, introverted
students were often thought of as dull and backward students. I know now that
the stronger motivation the students have, the harder they will work. All these elements impact on my
practice, so in my AR research, I will try to research what kinds of students'
personality-traits influence their progress in learning English and how I can
help them to influence themselves to improve my teaching
and their learning.
From my
experience and the use of photographs I hope to be able to encourage my
colleagues' educational development, by showing my ways of doing something,
that they might be able to use these methods themselves in order to help their
students learn more efficiently. I think it is important for us to share our
experiences as teacher-researchers (Stenhouse, 1983). I believe the phenomena I
have encountered are affected by the students' rural backgrounds, and that this
is very common here in this part of China. I also feel that my AR is therefore
practical and relatable (Bassey, 1998) on a wider footing because of the values
underlying my research. I want my research to be valuable not just for me and
for my colleagues but for other universities in China and in the world.
Bibliography:
Bassey, M., (1998) Enhancing teaching through
research, Professional Development Today, 1, 2, 39-46 (A shortened version was published in Research
Intelligence, July 1997)
Horwitz,
E.K. & Yong, D.J. 1991, Language Anxiety: From Theory and Research to
Classroom Implications, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
Laidlaw,
M., (2005), 'From Competence to Performance: A Handbook of Communicative
Methodology', Guyuan Teachers College Press, Guyuan.
Li
Guilan, (2002), 'College English', Foreign Language Teaching and Research
Press.('five-year student's book used at present)
McCarthy, M., (2002), 'Discourse analysis for
language teachers' Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
McNiff,
J., and Whitehead, J., (2005), (Second Edition) Action Research: Principles and
Practice, London and New York.
Stenhouse, L., (1983), 'Research as a
basis for teaching', in Stenhouse, L., Authority, Education and Emancipation,
Heinemann, London.
Sun,
W., (2006), 'Data Archive', NTU.
Zhou,
R., (2004), 'Teachers' Feedback and Students' Communicative Competence, In
Teaching English in China, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Shanghai .
张民选, 对"行动研究"的研究.华东师范大学学报（教科版），1992（1）