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Section
8 – Further steps of the
cycle In
this short period of research I have focused my attention only on some
aspects of the experience under investigation. They are surely relevant
aspects since I have concentrated my action on finding evidence about the
effectiveness of the content based approach to English learning in my
classes and whether its two assumptions of content acquisition and
language learning could be verified. The conclusion seems to be “yes,
all this is possible”, but there is the doubt that I have seen what I
wanted to see in the students’ responses to the activities proposed and
in the data collected. Of course my enthusiasm is big and someone can say
I have not been totally impartial in my analysis. As a matter of fact, in
these last three years I have already received “informal”
confirmations of the effectiveness of this approach from observing how the
students have been improving their strategic competence in trying to
exploit all their skills and the language they are able to use (grammar
forms, words, conversational expressions, etc) to acquire, develop and
process contents of interest. Even the weaker students, after a period of
disorientation and after gaining the necessary confidence in taking risks,
have been involved in the activities and have first improved their
capacity to understand both oral and written communication, then their
capacity to intervene in class, even if prompted and guided by the teacher.
In such an approach an environment marked by a strong collaboration
between teachers and students is fundamental together with a climate of
respect for every kind of contribution, which can generate self-confidence
and self-esteem in the students. The enthusiasm of the teacher is another
indispensable ingredient and it is difficult to define the extent to which
this last ingredient is able to hide objective difficulties and negative
aspects. And
now the last question: which are the next steps of the spiral cycle of my
Action Research process?
“The contents follow an action-reflection spiral of identifying a
problem; imagining a solution; implementing the solution; observing the
effects; evaluating the outcomes; modifying actions and ideas in the light
of evaluation; re-planning for the next action step.” (Macintyre
2000, p. 73). Many problems have arisen during the lessons for which it is
worth imagining, implementing and observing
possible solutions; these are the ones on which I want to
concentrate my action in the next steps: 1)
the students tend to use simple sentences; they do not take risk in
speaking; 2)
the students tend to use Italian in pair or group work. In
the other lessons of the week (two hours) I will use the recordings of
their class presentation as
material to be exploited in order to correct mistakes and try to
paraphrase or reformulate in different ways some utterances they have
produced. I’ll monitor these activities by using my observations, as
usual, and giving a student-observer the task to literally count how many
ways the class has found to express the same concept. In
the next lesson of the content based module I will introduce more pair or
group work and I will record the students while working together. Then,
with the class, I will group all the expressions they have used, I suppose
mainly in Italian, according to their communicative purpose (suggesting,
agreeing, disagreeing, taking turns in the conversation, interrupting, etc);
I will create with the students some posters with pattern sentences and
prompts related to each group and stick them on the walls of the classroom
so that they can always have them as suggestions at their disposal while
speaking in class. I will monitor the results of the introduction of these
aids by recording the next lessons, and by asking the outside observer to
come back after a couple of weeks and consider the amount of Italian used
during the lesson, “Studying
the first schedule and the last would give evidence of any time change”.
(Macintyre 2000, p. 93). |