Some students have complained that I talk too much about thesis writing in my comments on student work. Actually, I think it's a fair complaint.
First of all, I think it's right to have an MA which is BOTH course work and thesis work, and that means it is right to want a course to be about the course and not about thesis work. My course is not thesis supervision and it shouldn't try to sound like it; it should provide the foundations for thesis work, but part of that foundation is a broad array of course study.
Secondly, thesis topics are really more like husbands than boyfriends; it's better not to have one at all than to have the wrong one. So it's not good to rush students into thesis writing. I remember that you used to have to choose your supervisor almost at the end of your second term, and of course choosing your supervisor is pretty much like choosing your topic these days.
Thirdly, it sometimes can happen that professors show their own supervisees special attention and consideration (particularly with grading). We try to be impartial, but we don't always succeed!
All of that is fair and true enough, and I think I should bear it carefully in mind when I talk about thesis work. But there are three reasons, though, why I think we SHOULD be thinking about the thesis when we do the final anyway.
First of all, this is a degree in Elementary English Education in Korea. It's not really about English generally, or even English education generally, or even elementary English education generally. And there really ISN'T very much first rate literature to study on this specific topic, particularly not in English. Fortunately, there is SOME...and it was written right here at 성울교대 by our graduate students--your 선배. It would be very silly to ignore this literature, and ungrateful not to contribute to it.
Secondly, uptake is always selective. When children listen, they listen to some things carefully, because they know they will need them. They let other things go by, because they know that they will not need them to reply. The same thing is true of grad students, so your thesis topic is part of your course work whether you recognize it or not. You listen differently to material in class when you think you might use it on your thesis, and sometimes you even choose the classes you take accordingly. That's just a fact of graduate school life.
Thirdly, as we said, the thesis is the big obstacle. It's hard to get into our grad school, but you all did it. Once you are in life in class is good, but it's relatively unstressful. The thing that prevents so many grads from graduating is really the thesis, so I think that we need to focus on the real obstacles and not just on things that are relaxing and unstressful.
Now, I love Jiyeong and I love her work. But I don't think ANYBODY can say I am biased--I've been pretty hard on her this semester (sometimes rightly and sometimes maybe just a little too hard on her), and this evaluation is certainly going to be no exception. Still, I urge everybody to read it; it's a pretty good example (both positive and negative) of what you will have to do and NOT do to get a good thesis out of your coursework!
A Change of Conversation Style Between a Novice Teacher and Students
After a Co-teaching with Experienced Teacher
M20071414 Jiyeong SHIN
Ⅰ. Introduction
This thesis is about co-teaching as a way of giving novice teachers opportunities to learn one of the ways to teach in English class. We will quantitatively compare the sentence complexity of 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.
This is a good way to begin your response.
For your presentation, you might want to begin with a question rather than with a complex noun phrase. Something like this:
a) Do children give very different answers to different teachers? If so, how do teachers learn how to get more complex and challenging answers from students?
b) Does a child give a longer answer to one teacher rather than another? If so, why?
c) Does co-teaching make a difference? If so, how and to whom? Does it make a difference in the kind of question that a teacher asks? If so, does it make a difference in the kind of response that a learner makes? If so, how and why?
This thesis seeks to answer these questions....etc.
Ⅱ. Theoretical Constructs
As you know from following the discussion on our thesis cafe, it's not a very good idea to have "empty headers" like this: it's much better to "fill" your headers by saying what you are going to do next.
It's hard to change levels of generality when you write. So you take advantage of headers like this to explain what it is you are going to do.
When you do your theoretical constructs section, you (often) have to:
a) DEFINE your theoretical construct.
b) EXPLAIN your definition (often by referring to other definitions or other work people have done).
c) EXEMPLIFY your definition (often by giving samples from your data).
d) OPERATIONALIZE your definition (often by explaining how you will measure it in data).
So in this section, you just say what you are going to do. Like this:
"In this section, I will define, explain, exemplify the following constructs. First, ..."
Now, which constructs come first? In a thesis, there is almost always a IDEPENDENT variable and a DEPENDENT one.
The INDEPENDENT variable is the "input" variable. You can think of the word "in..." It's the variable we can change and manipulate, the one which influences and ultimately may (or may not) DETERMINE the dependent variable. In this case, it's experience, or expertise.
The DEPENDENT variable is the "output" variable, the variable that gives you results, the one which DEPENDS on other variables. In this case, the dependent variable is the behavior of the novice, and in particular his use of questions.
So which do you think you should talk about first? The independent variable or the dependent one?
2.1. 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.
You can see that these two clauses do not really follow logically. You start by saying that there is no clear DISTINCTION between novice and experienced teachers. But that doesn't tell us what "novice" means, and what "experienced" means.
You continue by saying that experienced teachers are not always better than others. But this doesn't tell us what "novice" means either. It just introduces another term which is even more difficult to define and operationalize: "better".
Basically, many novice teachers find it hard to teach alone before being experienced. Novice teachers try to teach all the sentence complexity levels in the textbook just like what experienced ones do, which takes time when they put their students in confusion. The complexity of their students' sentences should be considered. as a way to check if a teacher is experienced or not.
This might be a good introductory problem, Jiyeong. It might work okay as an introduction. But of course it really doesn't give us a definition, and a definition is what we need to get started.
Now, I said that we had to DEFINE, EXPLAIN, EXEMPLIFY and OPERATIONALIZE. Here's what I mean.
a) DEFINE your theoretical construct. A good definition usually has three parts: the term, a superordinate hypernym, and a relative clause which specifies the kind of hypernym we are talking about (either in genetic, functional, and/or structural terms).
Genetic: "In this paper, a novice is a teacher who has just begun to teach."
Functional: "In what follows, a novice is a teacher who has been apprenticed to a master in order to learn how to teach."
Structural: "For the purposes of this thesis, a novice is a teacher who has less than five years of on-the-job experience.
b) The next step is for you to EXPLAIN the construct. Now, ONE way to explain the construct is to classify it (that is, to say that there are different kinds of novice, and different degrees of novitiate).
1) Pre-service trainees who are still students at 교대.
2) New graduates from the 교대 system.
3) Newly recruited "conversation specialists"
4) Foreign language teaching assistants.
But that's really only one way. For what we want to do, it's even more interesting to discuss the LITERATURE on expertise. This includes (of course!) Amy Tsui's book, but it will also include Bereiter and Scardamalia, perhaps Devon Woods, perhaps work on scaffolding, and some of your 선배‘s work: Shin Jieun, Bak Hayeong, Seo Chaeheun.
c) Finally, you want to "rise the concrete" by talking about your DATA. I think the "first day" data would be very useful here. Of course, when you introduce data, you have to explain the context, quote the data, and then interpret it by referring back to it (e.g. quoting in parentheses).
That's a lot of stuff! The advantage is that you do the SAME thing with every construct. That is, you do the same thing with "expert" and then you do the same thing with....
2.2. Co-teaching and Observation
In co-teaching, two or more teachers collectively do (Roth, 2000; Seo Jeonyeong, 2010) their jobs in one classroom.
Good. This is a definition. But it's only a sentence, and you need to write it into a paragraph at the very least. One way to do this is to compare and contrast this with other definitions in the literature (e.g. Kitty Green, or Seo Jeonyeong, etc.).
But you also need an explanation , or explain how it is related to the theoretical issue of expertise, or explain how co-teaching happens (genetically), what it does (functionally), and what it is made up of (structurally).
And then you need an example, preferably one from your own data.
Unlike other subjects field, co-teaching in Elementary English classroom has more than 10 years' history in public schools.
Good. This is a GENETIC explanation. But it's only a sentence, and you will need to write it up into a paragraph at least. One way to do this is to talk about the EPIK programme, and the various programmes for elementary school, menion Professor Noh's article in PEE (see the refs to Shin and Kellogg), etc.
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 has not been considered as an object of research.
Co-teaching can be a replacement of observation for training novice teachers. The novice teacher programs have not been more than observation and solo-teaching for years.
Good. This is a FUNCTIONAL explanation. But again, it's only a long sentence,
and you need to write it up as a paragraph. One way to do this would be to
explain the VARIOUS functions of co-teaching. The current co-teaching seems
to be aimed at LANGUAGE expertise and not a TEACHING expertise, no?
Being a third person, only there for observation, novices in the classroom sit back and watch.
You can see the muddle you are in because you didn't really specify the different TYPES of novices when you had a chance. Here are three (very different) types of novice:
a) Pre-service trainees who are still students at 교대.
b) New graduates from the 교대 system.
c) Newly recruited "conversation specialists"
d) Foreign language teaching assistants.
Now, you can see that what you say about novice teachers MAY be true of a) (but it's not always true, because some 실습생 really do teach). But it's certainly not true at all of b), c), or d), and yet these are also novices, and in fact the novice in YOUR study is NOT an a) at all.
For solo teaching, however, there are nothing but people who want their help in the classroom when they need help. We need to find out how a co-teaching with the experienced helps the novice in English class.
I don't understand what this means. But it doesn't seem to follow logically.
Before you move on to the next construct, it makes sense to give an EXAMPLE of what you are talking about, no? And to explain how you are going to MEASURE it?
Remember that a thesis is not a powerpoint. It's not a shopping list. It's a set of LINKED arguments: you have to try to show how EVERYTHING you write in this section is preparation for what you are going to do in your study.
2.3. Sentence Complexity Completion? Completeness?
Again, you need a definition. Are we talking about phonological complexity, morphological complexity, or grammatical complexity?
Next, you've got to explain why this matters. In particular, you'll need to talk about:
a) fluency
b) accuracy
c) complexity
These are well known GOALS in language teaching, and a large number of researchers (e.g. Skehan) have written a large amount of material about a) and b). Those who accept that learners have a fixed level will argue that:
a = 1/b
That is, the more fluent we are, the less accurate we are, and:
b = 1/a
The more accurate we are, the less fluent we are.
Now, as it happens, both statements are quite wrong. There is a THIRD component which influences BOTH, namely complexity.
Microgenetically, we often notice that complexity has a negative effect on BOTH components. That is, the more complex we are, the less fluent AND the less accurate. But ONTOGENETICALLY, in the long run, we can easily see how complexity might DEVELOP both.
By using complex sentences, we develop fluency, because complex sentences allow us to continue our thoughts without repeating words and halting all the time. By using complex sentences, we develop accuracy, because complex sentences allow us to master the structural rules which underlie them.
There's a lot to say here, Jiyeong. I don't think you can say it in ONE sentence. I think at least ONE paragraph for definitions and ONE paragraph for explanations would be a good place to start.
Then you want to give some examples. And finally you can move on to operationalization.
:
Levels of sentence complexity 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.
This is a good operationalization, and it also contains good examples.
But for that very reason, it's not clear what the NEXT paragraph does.
For third graders, it's common to answer with non-complete sentence-one word like yes or no. They don't have to try very hard to do this level 1. It's their main activity. But the sentence complexity becomes higher if they repeat full sentences like level 2, being a leading activity. Now, the level 3 is a leading activity, not to have mere repetition with subjects and verbs, to make level 2 a main activity.
These students answers are dependent a lot on teachers' questions. The types of questions are need to be considered.
We need a definition of leading activity (from Elkonin, or Leontiev, or Karpov, or perhaps Kellogg 2009). Then we need an explanation. Then we need examples.
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
You can see that this is not a wh-question sentence. And in fact when we look at the data as a whole we notice that it's a BOUND question--that is, part of a previous question.
Bound questions are very important--they are part of the inter-mental construction of grammar, because the predicator (the verb phrase) is in one mind and the argument (the noun phrase) is in another.
So one possible research question involves the use of bound questions. Are they a feature of expert discourse or of novice discourse? Nobody really knows.
What happens when we get a wh-bound initiate to a prompt based question? How do we code it?
2.4.3. Etc.
<ex> NT: Do you have cards?
SS: I have no cards.
The limitation of the number of words teachers can use with third graders unlimit the ones of prompt like showing the picture cards, giving out a portion of a target sentence, giving a signal, and etc.
The number of words that teachers can use with third graders is limited (presumably by the small vocabulary size of the learners). But the number of prompts which a teacher can use is unlimited, because a teacher can use and be understood with an infinite variety of picture cards.
But this really ISN'T true of giving out a portion of a target sentence or giving a signal, Jiyeong. A portion of a target sentence has to be understood and so does a signal.
And there's another problem you need to discuss. Although picture prompts are certain understandable, it's not the word that the child is understanding. In this sense, it doesn't seem to me that there is any difference in principle between using a picture prompt and using a translation (in Korean); the child understands the substitute and not the word itself.
Now, all of these problems make sense in the context of theories. Here are two theories to consider:
a) Language acquisition is caused by the understanding of input (Krashen). When the child understands the word with the help of the prompt (but notice, not INSTEAD of the prompt) the child will acquire the word. We know that the child has acquired the word when the child uses the word, but use is the effect and not the cause of understanding.
b) When children learn language, they are doing three things at the same time: using language, learning through language and learning about language (Halliday). Children can and do use words they do not understand, and it is precisely through the use of words that they do not understand that they fully learn their grammatical as well as their semantic properties. Understanding is the effect and not the cause of use.
You can see that the prompt makes a lot of sense if you believe in a). But if you believe in b) it becomes extremely important to have USE of the language (on the part of the child) and the child is not likely to use the language in a full sentence unless the child hears many examples of that use.
It's prompt-based question. It's not really a question type but it requires an answer.
Also Wh-question including how is experienced teacher's favorite type of question(Kellogg, ?).
I don't understand what you mean by "favorite". I wonder what I said? It's true that I babble a lot in class sometimes....
What needs to be done is to compare the change of the Wh-question percentage by which a novice teacher use before and after a co-teaching.
Does it NEED to be done? There are many other research questions to pursue. This one is very INTERESTING. But why is it absolutely NECESSARY?
You might get away with this rather bossy style of writing if you had just introduced the 연구의 필성 part of the thesis--you say, for example:
a) Elementary English teaching is in a CRISIS!!!!!!!!
b) Our classrooms are beeing FLOODED with INEXPERIENCED TEACHERS.
c) The #^*(*&(&*!!! government refuses to provide ADEQUATE MONEY for training!
d) Even when there IS money for training, there's no TIME!!!!!!
e) Even when there is TIME for training, the training is INEFFECTIVE!!!!
f) To prevent our country from being INVADED and TAKEN OVER by inexperienced foreigners, we HAVE to have a method of training which costs NOTHING takes NO time, and is VERY effective.
g) Maybe apprenticeships are the answer? We need to find out.
h) How can we find out? "Effectiveness" is very hard to measure. But...
i) Question techniques are an important area of expertise. So...
j) We need to find out if there is a change in the wh-question percentage before and after co-teaching experience!
Now, you can see that's not a simple argument, even when I put it in this extremely simple and extreme (and unreasonable) form. You will have to write quite a bit more to make it work as a gentle, reasonable, well thought out argument.
Ⅲ. Method
As you know, from reading the materials on the thesis writing cafe, I don't like empty heads! That is, I don't like a text heading with no text after it. When you start a section "Method" you need to say something about what is in the section, about what "method" means, about how it's linked to what you just said in the Theoretical Constructs section, about how it's linked to what follows in the results section, and about how you are going to go about talking about it.
But of course that gives you a little bit of a problem. If you say what is going to be in the section, then when you get to the section itself, you have to repeat what you just said. That makes what you are going to say REDUNDANT.
The trick is to say the same thing at DIFFERENT levels of generality. You see, headers are an important opportunity to go "mountain climbing". That is, you climb up the from the details of the previous section and the next section. You look briefly backwards over the distance you have come. Then you look BOLDLY forwards over what you are going to do in the next section.
There's a lot to look at! Two KEY questions need discussion. We'll call the first one INTERNAL validity. We'll call the second one EXTERNAL validity.
Internal validity means you are sure you know what you are looking at INSIDE your data. That is, when you talk about complexity, are you sure it's REAL complexity? What kind of complexity?
For example, when you look at a question like "How about this?" are you sure that it is more complex than just pointing at a picture? Isn't it quite possible that the children simply hear you make a noise, and think of the picture of an apple you pointed at earlier?
Perhaps some of them recognize the word "pear" and they understand the question correctly. Perhaps some of them think the word "pear" just means some kind of apple, or some kind of fruit generally (they are not too clear on what "apple" means!).
That's internal validity. Now you can see that for a study like this, what is most important is that your data should be quite representative of what the people INSIDE your study normally do. So is your first day a TYPICAL sort of pre-co-teaching day? Maybe he was just sick that day!
Once we are sure that the data has internal validity we need to worry a little about EXTERNAL validity. External validity means we know that what we are looking at happens OUTSIDE the data too. That is, when we talk about experts and novices, are we ONLY talking about the people in the study or can we use these results to talk about other experts and novices too?
For example, when you look at the novice in this study, are you sure that his lack of wh-questions is typical of other novices? WHICH other novices? ALL of them? We know that there are many different kinds of novices--remember?
Are you sure it's the result of his being a novice and not simply the result something else? Isn't it possible that it might be the result of his being a foreigner or his being a male or his being Korean-American?
3.1. Participants
3.1.1. Novice Teacher: A 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 3rd 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 1st, 2009 ~ Novenmer 27th, 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.
첫댓글 I should start with definitions. Still working on the transcription, I'm afraid(New one of this semester). Tried to meet you on Wednesday with 동균 teacher, but i went to a camp for my school last week, and finish late this wednesday (like 7:30). I'll finish the transcription and work on the definitions of words. Thank you so much for your all the work which is unbelievable:>