Empowering EFL Teachers with Interpretive Skills: Analysis of Student Teachers’ Self-Reports

Grażyna Kiliańska-Przybyło, Poland

Grazyna Kilianska-Przybylo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English (University of Silesia, Poland) where she is a researcher, a teacher of English and a teacher trainer. Her academic interests include: reflective teaching, learner-centered approach, foreign language teacher professional development; language and intercultural awareness. E-mail: grazyna.kilianska-przybylo@us.edu.pl

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Why interpretation? – background to the study
Interpretation – definition and characteristics
Study: summary and major findings
Conclusions
References
Webgraphy

Why interpretation? – background to the study

The skill of interpreting classroom events appropriately needs to be developed for several reasons that can be briefly categorized into two groups. The former are related to short- term benefits and quarrantee quick reaction based on teacher’s reflection and deliberate action. The latter, however, are indispensable for teacher professional development, thus brigning long- term benefits.

Tripp (1993: 24) considers interpretation important because we act according to what we think things mean. For Tripp (1993: 28) interpretation indicates the construction and choice of meaning. He enumerates many different types of interpretations, diagnosis being one of them. Tripp (1993: 30) shares the opinion that interpretaion is essential to professional practice because it always comes between observation and action.

Similarly, Woods (1996) looks at interpretation as one of the two key aspects of the language teaching/ learning process. For him, planning process of the teachers (i.e. how teachers go about preparing for what goes on in the classroom and how planned events relate to success in the classroom) enables teachers to pursue an action. At the same time, the teachers’ perceptions and interpretations of classroom events help them realize how their current behaviour is projected backwards to include their background knowledge, assumptions, goals, etc., and thus develop deeper understanding of the classroom events and procedures (Woods 1996: 22).

The skill of interpreting is also essential for keeping balance between teacher’s creativity and critical thinking, thus providing teachers with skills necessary for generating and evaluating their own ideas. Further details are presented below.

(based on Bloom’s taxonomy (1956), http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm)

In brief, interpretiation helps us to focus on the specific, to understand actions/ meanings rather than casues. It may also motivate us to investigate the taken- for- granted as well as to develop individual perspective and create personal constructs (Cohen and Manion 1994: 39).

Interpretation – definition and characteristics

Faccione (2007) defines interpretation as one of the cognitive skills or dispositions that are essential to develop critical thinking. For him, interpretation means the ability to comprehend and express the meaning or significance of a wide variety of situations, data, events, judgements, beliefs, rules, procedures or criteria. Interpretation includes the subskills of categorization, decoding significance and clarifying meaning. It relates to such examples as: recognizing a problem and describing it without bias; distinguishing the main ideas from subordinate ideas; paraphrasing someone’s ideas in your own words; identifying an author’s purpose, theme, point of view).

Apart from interpretation, the following skills or dispositions are said to constitute critical thinking:

• analysis = identifying the intended and actual inferential relationships among statements, questions, concepts, description or other form representations intended to express belief, judgement, experiences, reasons, information or opinions. Subskills: examining ideas, detecting arguments and analyzing arguments.
• evaluation = assessing the credibility of statements or other representations which are accounts or descriptions of a person’s perception, experience, situation, judgement, belief or opinion and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions or other forms of representations. Some examples include: comparing strengths and weaknesses of some alternative interpretations.
• inference = identifying and securing elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions, to form conjectures and hypotheses; to consider relevant information and deduce the consequences. As subskills we can identify: querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives and drawing conclusions.
• explanation = presenting in a cogent and coherent way the results of one’s own reasoning; to be able to give someone a full look at the big picture. Subskills under explanation include: describing methods and results, justifying procedures, proposing and defending with good reasons one’s casual and conceptual explanations of events or points of view and presenting full and well-reasoned arguments in the context of seeking the best understandings possible.
• and self-regulation = the skill allowing all critical thinkers to improve their own thinking. In short, it means the ability to self-consciously monitor one’s cognitive activities. Subskills: self-examination and self-correction.

Thorsten (2003: 4) claims that interpretation is largely dependent on some individual factors and determined by three attitudes, namely: the perception attitude, the information attitude and the verification attitude. In Thorsten’s opinion, perception is a combination of things recognized externally (through the senses), internally (through feelings) as well as mentally (through thought processes). In other words, it is assumed that a mental analysis may have taken place in perceptive concepts (Thorsten 2003: 4). Wallace (1991: 62- 55) adds some other factors that may condition our interpretation, namely: professional status or a degree of training.

Literature review shows that inexperienced teachers lack the skill of interpreting. Gonzalez and Carter (1996: 39- 40) point out that novice teachers are less efficient and accurate in comprehending, interpreting and predicting classroom events than expert teachers. For novices, the teacher’s knowledge and experience is not event- structured as for expert teachers (Gonzalez and Carter 1996). Sherff and Robb Singer (2012) add that novices’ observations and interpretations are often simple, narrow and chaotic. Another characteristics is that inexperienced teachers devote less time for in-depth analysis of various classroom situations than expert teachers (Rollett 2001: 27). Krull et al (2007) show that novice teachers tend to be less sensitive to various classroom events and atmosphere than expert teachers. They notice a smaller number of them and reflect upon them in a less detailed manner. Novice teachers also display a tendency to provide fewer verbalized comments and opinions, which are often indirectly related to particular teaching situations. They are not willing to modify their perception and evaluation of the events and have problems with adopting multidimensional evaluation of the situation. (Krull et al. 2007). Additionally, novices are not skillful in reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. The research also proves that novice teachers experience confusions and trouble with interpreting classroom phenomena appropriately (Berliner 2001: 24). Consequently, they encounter difficulties in approaching the task of teaching and deciding upon a suitable course of action. This calls for further inquiries into the issue of helping teachers develop their interpretive skills.

Study: summary and major findings

The study conducted aimed at finding the answer to the following questions:

1. What classroom practices and procedures capture inexperienced teachers' attention?
2. What are their interpretations of classroom situations? (The question is supposed to raise student teachers' awareness and help them to verbalize and articulate their own interpretations)
3. What difficulties do inexperienced FL teachers face when interpreting classroom situations? How do they respond to them?

The subjects participating in the study are 39 students of FL teacher training course (English Philology Department, University of Silesia, Poland). They have rather limited, mostly informal experience with English teaching (usu. one-to one tutorials or occasional part time teaching during evening courses). At the moment of study, they have completed basic theoretical training in EFL pedagogy and methodology. Their teaching practicum (90 hours) is supervised by more experienced teachers. The subjects are free to choose the location (i.e. the type of school) and the supervising teacher.

The idea of the research was to prepare the subjects to the teaching practice and develop their interpretive skills so as to make them fully benefit from the training and gain skills essential for their further teaching careers. Consequently, the trainees were exposed to structured observation tasks, the aim of which was to make the subjects sensitive to certain situations that take place in the classroom. As Woodwards (1991: 65) states, trainees need practice in the skills of observation. She further enumerates some problems that might negatively affect our perception, such as: “We can be misled by what we think we see” or “It’s hard to judge things if you’re not party to the inner logic of what you’re seeing” (Woodwards 1991: 64- 65). To increase and sharpen students’ observational skills, the teacher observation/ evaluation report was introduced.

Additionally, to facilitate the process of interpretation, the trainees were provided with a list of questions that helped them to interpret classroom phenomena appropriately.

First of all, the trainees were supposed to notice and enumerate some strengths and weaknesses in the period of their teaching practice. It must be emphasized that the subjects showed optimistic bias and displayed the tendency to focus on the positive sides of the observed events (the subjects’ comments were more or less elaborate, ranging from one up to three positive aspects). At the same time, 24 subjects (i.e. 61%) were able to notice one negative thing only. To give more precise data, 25 out of 39 provided one positive feature; 11 out of 39 listed 2 positive features and 3 subjects enumerated 3 positive features. In contrast, 24 out of 39 noticed 1 negative feature. As many as 15 subjects (39%) avoided giving any answer, thus, providing no negative feature.

As far as qualitative analysis of the strengths and weaknesses is concerned, again certain tendencies could be observed. When comes to strengths, the trainees provided a multitude of examples representing diverse categories. The trainees were satisfied with a number of things ranging from: the ability to create an atmosphere conducive to learning, the effective ways of presenting the material, up to the optimal use of the target language. Contrary to that, the list of negative features contained fewer examples, yet the problems enumerated were shared by the majority of the subjects. The lists are presented below.

Table 1. Strong and weak points of the lessons – teacher trainees’ evaluation

When asked about things to focus on for improvement, the trainees enumerated the following:

• better organization of time/ better planning, e.g. by reducing the amount of the material (9),
• attracting students' attention more to the task / motivating students (7),
• helping students to express their opinions in English more spontaneously and logically/ promoting interaction and authentic communication (7),
• discipline (5),
• using less explanation and more elicitation from the students (3),
• paying more attention to pronunciation and pronunciation errors (3),
• paying more attention to grammar / applying practical exercises to revise grammatical rule, e.g. sentences to illustrate rules (3),
• lengthening STT and shortening TTT (2),
• providing students with more info about the topic/ more examples (2),
• more English, less Polish (2),
• developing vocabulary/ make students define words more effectively (2).

The next section presents final conclusions from the study.

Conclusions

The study enabled to draw the following conclusions and remarks:

1. Teacher trainees have problems with WHAT to teach and HOW to manage. WHAT refers to:

• what content to select or focus on,
• what amount of material to select for a lesson,
• in what proportion.

At the same time, HOW seems to relate to:

• how to manage the time properly,
• how to create suitable conditions for learning, i.e. provide opportunities to speak and prevent discipline problems,
• how to generate students’ motivation and interest in the lesson and language learning.

2. The subjects are good at categorization and classification of the areas that need improvement, but they are poor at decoding significance and clarifying meaning. They seem to pay attention to some superficial characteristics (e.g. ”lesson should begin with ‘a bang’”, “better planning” ) and cannot specify what they mean by that. They do not see the correlation between the components of the teaching/ learning process, e.g. pacing and motivation or presentation, practice and discipline. When asked about the solutions, the trainees provide very general solutions to their problems and have vague plans for improvement. Some of their ideas are listed below:

• by exposing students to more spoken language in the form of rhymes, poems / analyzing language patterns (4),
• more detailed lesson planning/ better organization (3),
• involving students in a given subject, discussing it with them beforehand (3),
• encouraging my students to talk and praising them as much as possible (3).

Some of the trainees expressed the opinion that it is enough to be creative or persistent in what you are doing to get rid of the problems. Others focus on simply informing students or brining additional visual aids (e.g. pictures, posters or maps). It seems that the student teachers are good at stating some context- free rules, yet they lack the skill of discriminating what to choose for a particular teaching situation. The only exception concerns language issues, here some of the subjects suggested specific techniques that could be applied (example: “presenting students with phonetic alphabet and a model to follow” – 2 responses; "Simple Present must be practiced with rods and visual methods” ).

3. It seems that the trainees need some practice in other skills that constitute critical thinking, namely: analysis and evaluation. For example, they tend to blame themselves for presenting relatively few language data, but on the other hand their plans are often overloaded with information. This may denote the trainees’ difficulties with selecting and structuring material appropriately as well as difficulties in setting realistic goals.

4. The study brought some changes in the subjects themselves and their perception of the profession. In a sense, it also allowed them to confront their own expectations and beliefs about the teaching profession. During one of the post-study sessions, the trainees shared some strong, emotionally loaded remarks about the experiences they gained during the research period. They confessed to having realized how difficult it was to be a FL teacher. Additionally, they admitted to having sharpened their observational skills and becoming more sensitive to some FL classroom situations. They appreciated the fact that some of the problems they had faced were also shared by their colleagues. This freed them from negative and self-debilitating thoughts that questioned their predispositions towards foreign language teaching. While evaluating the study, the trainees expressed their surprise at the amount of planning that needed to be done before any lesson. They were also astonished by the unpredictability of the final outcome, namely that the planning did not always guarantee the success during the lesson.

Finally, the teacher trainees declared the need and willingness to engage in all kinds of tasks and activities that would aim at modeling their perception of various classroom processes. This, in turn, would definitely lead to greater awareness and better understanding of the classroom phenomena as well as the role of the teacher.

References

Berliner, D. (2001) Teacher expertise. In: F. Banks and Shelton Mayes, A. (eds.) Early Professional Development for Teachers (pp. 20- 26). London: David Fulton Publishers

Cohen, L. and Manion, L. (1994) Research Methods in Education. London: Routledge

Faccione, P.A. (2007) Critical Thinking: What it is and why it counts. Millbrae, CA: California Academic Press, www.insightassessment.com/pdf_files/what&why2007.pdf

Gonzalez, L.E. & Carter, K. (1996) Correspondence in Cooperating Teachers’ and Student Teachers’ Interpretations of Classroom Events. In: Teaching and Teacher Education, vol. 12, no.1, pp. 39- 47

Krull, E.; Oras, K.& Sisack, S. (2007) Differences in teachers’ comments on classroom events as indicators of their professional development. In: Teaching and Teacher Education vol. 23, issue 7, October 2007, pp. 1038- 1050

Nunan, D. and Tripp, D. (1996) The Self-directed Teacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Philips, J.K. (2008) Foreign language standards and the contexts of communication. Language Teaching (2008) 41:1, 93-102

Rollett, B.A. (2001) How do expert teachers view themselves? In: Banks, F. & Shelton Mayes, A. (eds). (2001) Early Professional Development for Teachers. London: The Open University

Sherff, L. and Robb Singer, N. (2012) The preservice teachers are watching: Framing and reframing the field experience. In: Teaching and Teacher Education vol. 28, issue 2, February 2012, pp. 263- 272

Thorsten, L. (2003) Basic Interpretive Skills. The Course Manual. Werleshausen: Bildungswerk Interpretation; www.interp.de/dokumente/topas_course_manual.pdf; retrieved: 03.10.2011

Tripp, D. (1993) Critical Incidents in Teaching. Developing Professional Judgement. London and New York: Routledge

Wallace, M.J. (1991) Training Foreign Language Teachers. A Reflective Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Woods, D. (1996) Teacher Cognition in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Woodwards, T. (1991) Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Webgraphy

Critical and Creating Thinking – Bloom’s taxonomy; http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm)

Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.