Using English to Teach English: A Case Study on an Elementary School Teacher in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Lin,Yen-Chin, 林燕勤
• Other Authors: Liang,Jong-Shing
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/03258318616141011760

碩士 === 國立屏東教育大學 === 中國語文學系碩士班 === 95 === The purpose of the study was to explore the problems that an elementary school English faced when using English to English and what strategies she had adopted to deal with such problems. It also investigated how her students responded to this English only learning environment. The participants of the study included the researcher herself as the teacher and the 6 students of her 5th-grade class. Data for this study consisted of transcripts of the video-taped classroom activities, the students’ worksheets and interview transcripts with the students. From multiple analyses of the data, the following findings emerged: 1) The teacher had encountered three major problems while using only English in the class. First, many communication breakdowns occurred between her and the students throughout the semester mostly because the students had difficulties in understanding the target language; second, for the same reason, the teacher had to use a lot of time to explain the teaching materials and the course contents; and third, while the teacher purposely intended to spend much more time caring for the low achievement students, such intention unexpectedly resulted in high learning anxiety in them. 2) The teacher basically had adopted the following strategies to deal with the problems mentioned above. First, she used a lot of body language and pictures or flash cards while teaching in English so as to help the students to better understand the targeted meanings. Second, she intentionally allowed the students longer time to process the English input. Third, she tried to encourage the students to think and speak in English. Finally, she relied on Chinese translation when students could not understand English, mainly to decrease students’ anxiety and maintain disciplinary problems. 3) Concerning the students’ responses to the teacher’s language uses, most of the students perceived that because the teacher made use of some assistance (e.g., body language and pictures), their listening ability seemed to improve and they felt more encouraged to study English. However, most of the students reported that they faced most serious problems in the class when the teacher used English to introduce new words and new sentence patterns. These problems induced a lot of anxiety to them. At last, they felt it was helpful when the teacher used Chinese to explain abstract words and activity rules.