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| Subject: UNIT 2- FINAL WORK (it needs revision and approval) | |
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Author: Ludmila |
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Date Posted: 13:11:27 08/22/10 Sun Hey everybody! I'm placing here our final work on UNIT 2. It still needs revision, suggestions and you all have to approve it or not! Reminding you all, that the following information contained here is a collection of contributions and ideas that all of us had posted in the FORUM during the past week until now. CEI- Curso de Especialização em Língua Inglesa Work- UNIT 2 GROUP 2 Members (in alphabetical order) Francisco Hélio Diógenes Ludmila Ameno Ribeiro Marília Batista Defraigne Tânia da Consolação Martins Pereira Viviane Soares de Oliveira Belo Horizonte, 2010 The main purpose of this paper was to contrast and to compare the information contained in the following articles: “A case study on foreign English teacher’s challenges in Taiwanese elementary schools”; and “Reading strategy awareness of Arabic-speaking medical students studying in English”. Besides of comparing the articles, it was intended to answer to those questions: 1-What is the role of theory and previous studies in the article. 2- Do the article writers provide readers with some sort of justification for their work? 3- How do the article writers validate their own thoughts and conclusions? 4- How important is the description of procedures and methods adopted in the study being reported. Preceding the analysis it was made a briefly summary of each article, starting with: “A case study on foreign English teacher’s challenges in Taiwanese elementary schools”, which will be mentioned as Article 1 (A1) in order to simplify the work presented here. This article shows that with the spread of English as the global language, many people from other speaking countries go to other places in hope of becoming English teachers there. The focus of this research was to follow three English teachers from South Africa, and to verify how they had dealt and adapted to a new country, Taiwan. “Reading strategy awareness of Arabic-speaking medical students studying in English”, will be mentioned as Article 2 (A2). It concentrated on analyzing the reading strategies a selected group of Arabic medical students use while reading their biology textbook in English. In the case presented in the article, it was expected to find the level of metacognitive strategies that was used by those readers. The research involved two distinct groups of future doctors from the university in Bahrain, with different English proficiency, Year one and Year four. Theory played a major role in Article 1 and in Article 2, whether to show what had already been done in the same field or to demonstrate what still needed to be concluded. For example, in Article 1 the authors had reviewed the literature of that field in order to explain the terms and to verify previous studies. By doing that they could then be sure that previous studies were not too concerned about the teaching-abroad experience, and for that reason appeared the need for further investigation about this matter. Their investigation had used plenty of theory that concentrates on the same context as their own research. According to the authors in the field of English language teaching has increased the interest in non-native-English-speaking teachers (NNESTs). Some issues were already covered in those previous studies, like pedagogical interventions to empower NNESTs (Bernat, 2008), their employment in western context (Clarck and Paran, 2007) and their preparation process (Kamhin-Stein, 2009). From all those researches made about NNESTs involving other issues, only two researches have conducted studies about this matter: the first is Verity's (2000) who was a well established teacher in her home context and had documented her sense of lost expertise as a novice teacher in Japanese context; the second is Gingerich (2004) who studied three American teachers in Lithuania and developed a knowledge base for teachers who are native speakers of English and teaching in international settings. In Article 2 “Reading strategy awareness of Arabic-speaking medical students studying in English”. The author stated that not many studies in the academic reading had been made, and according to her none of them addressed to the reading practices of a specific group, such as the medical students from an Arabic-speaking country. Previous study had focused on academic reading strategy use of Arabic-speaking learners in EFL settings, not particularly in measuring the strategies used by those Arabic medical students while reading their academic contents. Similar studies which had reported the same type of questionnaires as in this research, was a way that the author used of comparing collected data. Besides that, all theory presented in the article had the purpose of clarifying the author’s explanation and validating the information presented trough other authors’ previous researches. Like for example, while mentioning L1 reading research, Diane Malcom cited Grabe (1991). While referring about skilled readers of L1 and L2 who are able to think better about the reading process, and have been characterized as more metacognitively aware she quoted other authors. But when exposing another point of view that contradicted or supplemented what had been said, the author then had to quote other references. One focus of studies conducted over the past few decades has been determining the extent to which second language reading ability depends on first language reading ability or second language proficiency (Alderson, 1984; Anderson, 1991; Bernhardt and Kamil, 1995; Carrell, 1991; Clarke, 1980; Lee and Schallert, 1997;Olshavsky, 1977). These studies have provided evidence that a low level of familiarity with the second language appears to ‘‘short-circuit” reading ability, forcing readers to a more basic, word by word approach to decoding text, and disabling the use of their already developed L1 reading strategies. The exact nature and extent of L2 knowledge required to permit full and fluent reading strategy use remain to be determined, but it is clear that factors other than language proficiency level contribute to reading success. Bernhardt and Kamil (1995), for example, found that about half of the variance in reading performance of English/Spanish L1/2 participants in their study could be accounted for by L2 knowledge and L1 literacy combined, while the other 50% could be attributed to other factors. The important elements of skillful reading include not only the ability to decode text rapidly, accurately and fluently (at the orthographic, lexical, structural and textural levels) but also background and world knowledge or schemata, reading experience, interest, cognition, motivation, and reading purpose (Grabe and Stoller, 2003). Other researchers have emphasized the importance of vocabulary knowledge as a crucial element of effective reading (e.g., Alderson, 2000; Block, 1992; Grabe, 1991; Laufer, 1997; Nation, 2001; Stanovich, 1980). In order to justify their researches, the authors of both articles had presented the reasons for their work. In Article 1, Cheryl Wei-yu Chen and Yuh-show Cheng presented that while it has increased the numbers of non-native teachers across the world, there is just little field research about native English teachers teaching abroad experiences. So they decided to do a research on this area to follow and to know the situation of the selected group of teachers might face it while teaching abroad. To justify the research, Diane Malcom (author of Article 2) set similar reasons as the other article’s authors (A1) had done. She showed that the focus of reading strategy studies were EFL (English as Foreign Language) and they tended to compare reading practices of less versus more proficient readers. Those works that were previously done implied pedagogical action to be taken in an English classroom and planned to help those students who were not considered as good readers. The author’s main justification for researching was to understand how the selected group of Arabic medical students coped with reading academic texts and what strategies they used. What was happening under in the described situation was that many Academic students from L1 needed to read technical texts in English. Since most of them were not proficient in the language, they end up having to find different metacognitive strategies in contemplation of achieving their goals. That is to say, be able to comprehend the information. Diane Malcom had based her research, on the lack of studies about reading strategies of technical academic texts in English, by readers of L1 in Arabia. To validate their thoughts and conclusion, the authors of both articles had taken some action steps and followed a method to perform the research itself. In addition they had also quoted other authors that were influent in the same field and had previously done some similar research in the same subject. In Article 1 the authors had observed the selected teachers. By doing this they were able to understand and prove their initial hypothesis. That was to know the challenges that foreign English teachers had when performing their job in a completely different environment, and what actions could be taken after this observation. For example, when concluding their final notes, Chen and Cheng had quoted Snow (2006). From that one can notice how willing the authors are to convincing the academic world of their own ideas. What suggests that they were not the only two to find those statements about the role of foreign English teachers. Snow (2006) had also researched and quoted before the two authors. The purpose of quoting other authors while researching is to reinforce a similar finding that an author had discovered. In Article 2 the same had happened, the author exposed her ideas and proved their validity of her thoughts with the research itself and with quotations of other authors. With that research it was able to put into practice what was proposed by the author with the study, evaluate the two groups of Arabic medical students a total of 160 people. The description of procedures and methods that were chosen in the research was very important for both articles. First it was to clarify to the academic world and to the readers what was being done, the importance of their work, and also to support and to prove how they had achieved those results. In “A case study on foreign English teacher’s challenges in Taiwanese elementary schools”, that was a research based on the qualitative study, in other words, it was a work that was concerned to examine a small group and to obtain the results or to take conclusions, after observing the behavior of those people. The authors of this article had selected and followed three elementary school teachers, who came from South Africa to teach English. The data collection had begun in August of 2006 and lasted until June of 2007. For obtaining this data, it was used different methods such as; interviews, questionnaires, classroom observation, fieldnotes, research journal and document inspection. The study focused on the three teachers’ performance in their classroom, their background information and their previous professional experience, and to verify the challenges that those foreign English teachers had in Taiwan. With the data collected the authors could then conclude that the common problem suffered by those three South African teachers, was the doubt on their accent. The data collected was also able to show how ironic was the hiring procedure of Taiwanese Schools. Because although those three teachers were hired for being considered as native speakers of English language, they had also suffered for not sounding genuine native speakers, in other words, the only conception accepted by Taiwanese people was that English speakers needed to sound more like Americans. The final conclusion that the authors had taken, is that in order for students in Taiwan benefit from this program (which hires foreign English teachers) the teachers should more prepared to deal with unfamiliar situations in a new environment. In Article 2 “Reading strategy awareness of Arabic-speaking medical students studying in English”, the author had also showed all the procedures and data used to obtain the final results on this research, although the method used was different than the other article presented above (Article 1). In this article Diane Malcom had used the quantitative study, which is scientific results obtained trough measuring statistic and quantitative data. With this research the author chose 160 medical students at a University in Bahrain and gave to them some questionnaires. Those forms that they had to answer it, was able to measure what kind of strategies they were using while reading. Trough all the Methodology part of this article, the author had presented all the details of procedures and steps taken to achieve the final conclusion. It was given a general description of the students’ body that participated on the research, it was explained what procedure used to collect the data (in this research it was used an Arabic version of the SORS- Survey of reading strategy) with those questionnaires students had to answer what strategies they used while reading academic material, like their biology textbook. The students were also divided into two groups: Year one, that were medical students who were in the first year of academic study, and Year four, who were medical students on the fourth year of their academic work. The research was divided in two parts that tried to answer to these questions proposed by the author: ‘Are there differences in the reported use of academic reading strategies among Arabic-speaking medical students studying through the medium of English at different years of instruction?’ and ‘Do students of low initial English language proficiency repot using different reading strategies than students with high initial proficiency in English?’. The first results obtained was that nineteen out of 30 reading strategies were used by Year one students, and the same number for Year four students, although they were not the same reading strategies. Overall, Year four students reported higher use of metacognitive strategies higher than Year one students. The second part of the research concluded that there were not too many differences in the reported reading strategy use, among students with low or high English proficiency. After this part, the author compares the ranking of reported reading strategies by these Year one and four students, which according to her is quite similar and distinguished only by the frequency that these two groups use them. In other words, students of Year one tend to translate from English to Arabic language and think about this information, more often than students from Year four. To finish the article, the author concludes with the idea that the research was made and able to show the reports in this specific situation, but further investigation is needed in order to verify and to confirm how often and reading strategies are used when reading academic material. Before ending this writing is appropriate to add that after reading those two articles one can easily perceive that all ideas expressed in a research have to be validated, trough research and citations. When writing an article the author has to be very sure about every single thought or measure taken in a research. In the scientific world there is no space for guessing or writing just as one may desire. But if one happens to have great ideas, then it will be useful that he or she put them into practice with a research. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Re: UNIT 2- FINAL WORK (it needs revision and approval) | Vivi | 17:37:37 08/22/10 Sun |