Five Word Rule

[kellogg]

숙련교사와의 코티칭 후

신규 교사와 학습자 사이의 의사소통 양식의 변화

M20071414 신 지 영

Ⅰ. Introduction

This thesis is about co-teaching as a way of giving novice teachers opportunities to learn how to teach in English class.

This is a big claim.  But in the very next sentence, Jiyeong makes a much smaller claim; that is, that the thesis will compare the percentage of complete sentences the kids give the FT to the percentage of complete sentences the kids give the KT.

Of course, the two claims are connected. But if you just leave it like this, you are in trouble. It sounds like you think that learning how to teach in English class is PURELY a matter of getting complete sentences from kids.

That’s not the case. We know a very simple way of getting complete sentences from kids, and it’s easy to learn too: “Listen and repeat”. But that’s not all there is to learning, and it’s not all there is to teaching either.

We will quantitatively compare the percentage of the complete sentences from the students when they talk to the experienced teacher and when they talk to the novice, before and after one semester of co-teaching. We will also discuss the reasons for this qualitatively, by looking at the types of the questions and answers among them.

Ⅱ. Theoretical Constructs

2.1. Co-teaching

In co-teaching, two or more teachers collectively do their jobs in one classroom (Roth, 2000; Seo Jeonyeong, 2010). Unlike other subjects, co-teaching in Elementary English classroom has more than 10 years' history in public schools. However, it has not been considered as a way of training novice teachers, and its implications for situations beyond the cooperation of foreign teachers with native Korean teachers have not been considered as an object of research.

2.2. Novice and Experienced Teacher

There's no clear line about the number of years to be between novice and experience teachers and it's not always the case the experienced teachers are better than the others.

For many novice teachers, the first solo effort in the classroom is a 'sink or swim' experience (Green, 2006).

No Novice Teacher Left Behind: Guiding Novice Teachers to Improve Decision-Making Through Structured Questioning

Kitty Green

For many novice teachers, the first solo effort in the classroom is a “sink or swim” experience.  With good pre-service preparation that includes extensive field experience, the beginning teacher may feel more confident, but even those with the most confidence still find the complexities of decision-making bewildering.  For those novices who are less confident, frustration and depression may ultimately drive them from the classroom.  In fact, nearly half of all new teachers leave teaching within the first five years (Boles & Troen, 2002).

Clear violation of the five word rule. The five word rule says that you CANNOT

a)    Take more than five consecutive words from ANY published text without quotation marks and citations. Jiyeong has the citation, but she doesn’t have the quotation marks, so it’s not clear who actually WROTE this until you Google it, in which case it becomes clear that Jiyeong just copied and pasted it from the internet instead of writing it.

b)    Take more than five content words from ANY published sentence without citation. Jiyeong COULD paraphrase this:

Beginning teachers often find that the first solo lesson is “sink” or “swim” (Green)

But she would still have to source it (that is, attribute it Kitty Green) and it’s not a very unusual idea, so there’s really no point in doing this. You might as well just write what YOU think, Jiyeong.

It's hard to draw a clear line between the novice and the experienced. Therefore, with the length of the year that they've worked for, the percentage of the complete sentences from their students should be considered.

Non sequitur. Although Jiyeong says “therefore”, it’s hard to draw a line between her statement that it’s hard to draw a clear line between the novice and the experienced and her conclusion that the percentage of complete sentences from the students should be considered.

Perhaps Jiyeong might turn this around. Instead of arguing that novice teachers need to learn how to get whole sentences out of children, we start by saying that novice teachers learn to behave LIKE skilled teachers. But how do skilled teachers behave?

Well, when we look at Jiyeong’s data, we see that one of the things skilled teachers try to do is to get whole sentences out of their learners. There are various reasons for this.

Some of these reasons may actually reflect a fairly narrow kind of technical expertise, e.g. skilled teachers know that whole sentence realizations of the communicative function of the week are what the lesson is REALLY about, or that’s what they know how to do well, or that’s what they’ve been doing for years and they are not about to change.

But for the moment it is enough that these kinds of behavior are what skilled teachers do. And our question is how to unskilled teachers acquire them.

2.3. Complete and Non-complete

Levels of sentence completion from students can be categorized like this:

2.3.1. LEVEL ONE: Non-Complete

Teacher wants students to answer with words only. The sentence has no verb.

<ex> NT: O, if you like banana.

S1: Okay.

2.3.2. LEVEL TWO: Complete with repetition

Teacher wants students to complete the sentences by repeating what (s)he says perviously.

<ex> ET: Say, I like pears.

SS: I like pears.

2.3.3. LEVEL THREE: Complete with non-repetition

Teacher wants a response with a full sentence.

<ex> ET: Tell me about me.

S1: You can dance.

Good. Jiyeong makes it very clear what we are after, by giving examples straight out of the data. Nice!

BUT we don’t usually want to end a section with raw stuff like this. You might want to explain a little. You said that you CAN categorize stuff like this. But WHY do you want to? What has it got to do with expertise? Explain:

a)    Talk about what you just did. You still haven’t told us why full sentences are so important (and in fact one can argue that they are a MAIN ACTIVITY and not a LEADING activity, right?) You haven’t talked about why the distinction between repetition full sentences and nonrepetition full ones are important either.

b)    Talk about what comes next. Clearly, the kind of answer that kids give depends a lot on questions. So how can we categorize questions?

2.4. Types of Question

   Types of questions from teachers can be categorized like this:

2.4.1. Prompt-based: Teacher encourages or help students to continue

 <ex> ET: (Putting up the picture card straight) fish

2.4.2. Wh-question: Teacher asks with Wh-question sentence (When, Where, What, Why, Which and How)

<ex> ET: How about this?

SS: I like pears

2.4.3. Etc.

<ex> NT: Do you have cards?

SS: I have no cards.

Again, you can:

a)    Talk about what you just did and WHY.

b)    Talk about what you are going to do next!

Ⅲ. Method

3.1. Participants

  3.1.1. Novice Teacher: 23-year-old Korean-American male with no experience of teaching

  3.1.2. Experienced Teacher: 34-year-old Korean female with 8 years' experience of teaching English in Elementary School in Seoul

3.1.3. Students: Thirty 3^rd graders from one class in Seoul D Elementary School (18 boys & 12 girls)

3.2. Data collection

  3.2.1. Data: Eight regular English class periods

  3.2.2. Date collection period: September 1^st, 2009 ~ Novenmer 27^th, 2009

  3.2.3. Date collection method: Mp3 voice recording, Participant observation, Non-invasive

3.3. How to code data 

The whole class periods were transcribed and the data is coded by categories like this.

Speaker	Novice teacher(NT)
	Experienced teacher(ET)
	Student(S)
Level of Students' Sentence Completion Dependent (output) variable	0(non-complete)
	1(complete with repetition)
	2(complete with non-repetition)
Types of Teachers' Question Independent (input) variable	1(prompt-based question)
	2(Wh-question)
	3(etc.)

You can see that Jiyeong’s not really ordering this according to what we did in class. She’s actually ordering it according to what she did in her 연구방법 class.

Fortunately, I am not a picky eater! I don’t mind at all if you serve me left-overs from somebody else’s class. But you DO have to warm them up a little.

For example, why do you think Jiyeong is putting the OUTPUT variable first? And the INPUT variable afterwards? Wouldn’t it make more sense if she did it the other way around?

3.4. Research Question

  3.4.1. 신규교사와 경력 교사의 코티칭 후 신규교사가 학생들에게서 받는 대답의 문장 완성도 %가 높아지는가? Do the percentages of sentence completion from the students with NT get higher after NT co-teaches with ET?

  3.4.2. 신규교사가 경력교사와의 코티칭을 통해 습득한 질문법은 무엇인가? What are the question types that NT picks up from ET after co-teaching.

There is a big advantage to letting Jiyeong get away with serving the same food to two different professors.

It’s VERY important that our graduate students learn the right format for doing a thesis (and that includes the FIVE WORD RULE, of course!)

So if I let Jiyeong get away with this rather obvious piece of LAZINESS, maybe her classmates will learn something quite important about how to write a thesis.

On the other hand, there’s a disadvantage. We can see that the problems that she’s laid out here really CAN’T be answered in this paper. You can’t prove causaility (“NT picks up”) in the short space of this paper. The most you could do is document a change in behavior and offer “picking up” as ONE possible mechanism for the change.

I think I would RATHER see some discussion of the “leading activity” and the “main activity”. That seems rather more important to me. But maybe what I am interested in doesn’t matter! After all, you aren't going to serve MY stuff to other professors.

[11기신지영]

You're totally wrong with the guess that this thesis work is from 연구방법론. Back then, I compared the ways to correct the mistakes of Ss through T's modeling, recasting and uptake, which you really hated because the data was from an open class. So I had to do this again. Can't beleve you could think I'm that lazy. But I can't complain because I didnt obey the five word rule being this lazy. I'll keep it in mind! I know I didn't use your way for this, but it's only because the ET has item-baed expressions only. I wish I could. But I can do 'leading' and 'main' activity with this. Thank you :

[kellogg]

So why are the RQs in Korean, Jiyeong? I don't understand.

[11기신지영]

It's only because I'm still looking for a good expression in english, thinking this thesis could be a base for my real thesis work. Also it gives me a power to think more concretely when I write things in Korean.I sent this topic to you lase February to ask if I could do a proposal with other teachers like 은실, which was pretty late. since then, I'm updating it. Sorry for the confusion and I'm still working on it with a leading and main activity, professor. I understand you're way too busy and many grads to take care of. I currently ask 하영 to do a propasal and she said she has her 3rd baby.

[11기신지영]

So I have to be alone. Is there anyone else for a proposal except 동균 for gesture in August?

[kellogg]

Not sure. Yura is still thinking about it. But Donggyun is definitely going to go for it. I think you have enough for a PROPOSAL. But if you are very interested in the teacher training aspect, we will have to look more closely at causation--specifically, UPTAKE. How are you getting on with Nystrand's Class Four programme?

[11기신지영]

I got it right(after several trial --;) but the data hasn't got many uptakes. But still, I'll check. If I use it for a propasal, do I need to get new data for the thesis work, Mr.K? I'm happy that there's one more person and I know동균 personally.