The learning environment

The learning environment in a setting needs to be interpreted in its own right, rather than be compared with or judged against other more familiar settings.

There were a number of incidents that led to the realisation that the learning environment in the setting was very different from the one I was used to in my usual working environment. Though I had a general awareness of this before starting out on the study, it was the incidents described here, as well as the two incidents described in Section 1.1.1, which I referred to as The liste i g o kshop a d How do you punish ou stude ts he the ake istakes? , that brought this home to me. These events also made me realise that, rather than making comparisons between the research

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setting and my usual working environment, I needed to be looking at the research setting in its own right.

One area that I found intriguing within the learning environment was the apparent level of formality in the setting and apparent social distance between the teacher, or anyone seen as an authority figure, and the students. The two incidents below relate to this.

Sta di g up : The first time I visited the setting, prior to starting this study, I was taken to visit schools and colleges, and given the opportunity to observe classes. For these observations, the immediate thing that struck me was the fact that all students stood up when their teachers or when I walked into the classrooms.

M . Ke i : On the same visit, I was struck by the use of sir or a a when students were addressing teachers or visitors. The sense of formality and perception of social distance were also exemplified in other ways, such as students being expected to run errands for their teachers including carrying the tea he s ags o esou es a d deli e i g essages to othe pa ts of the institution.

(Adapted from field notes, June 2008)

Although these differences initially manifested themselves in terms of more overt status differences between the teacher or presumed authority figure and the students in the setting than I was used to, what they helped me to see more broadly was the degree of difference between my own usual work setting and the research setting, and by implication, that my existing knowledge and ways of thinking about ELT and ELT methodology may not be applicable in the research setting. I had doubts, for example, about whether Weste TE“OL i flue ed student-centred approaches, which in my own usual work setting I saw as requiring the teacher to have what Weste TE“OL might describe as a close relationship with the students in terms of social distance, or a good appo t ith the stude ts, could be applied in the research setting.14

14 _I this e a ple I a , as stated, taki g a Weste TE“OL ie of a lose elatio ship et ee tea he and students, which often involves first names and seemingly less formality, However, this does not

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Related to this, e pe tatio s o e i g stude ts eha iou were clearly different in the research setting compared with my usual work setting, as the following incident further illustrates.

She s a slouche : This incident concerns a group of teacher trainees and their lecturers at a teacher training college for secondary teachers, and came about during the second visit to the institution in August 2010, at which time I facilitated a workshop at the college based around teaching English communicatively. During this workshop, one teacher trainee stood out as particularly well-informed on the topic, and I commented to her lecturers afterwards that she must be doing well. However, I was told that she was not ell thought of ithi the i stitutio e ause she as a slou he . That is, athe than sit up straight during classes, she tended to lean back in her chair, a position that was seen to imply disrespect. Although I would have considered this a minor issue with body language, the implication here seemed to be that the lack of respect that this teacher trainee was perceived as showing outweighed the fact that she had acquired a significant amount of subject knowledge. (Adapted from field notes, August 2010)

This made me question my own preconceptions and prejudices, and helped me to understand the need to try to put to one side my own feelings about how things ought to work. It again served to focus my mind on seeing the research setting and the ways in which people behaved in that setting in their own right, rather than in terms of how they differed from my usual work setting, which I had been doing, to a large extent subconsciously, at the outset of the study.

Another area where my own prejudices surfaced was in my classroom observation notes. Having collected data from a total of 15 observations by the end of the second visit to the setting after starting the study, I wrote the following field otes o the o se atio sites :

necessarily mean greater closeness in reality, as it may simply be that hierarchies are more hidden within Weste TE“OL .

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The Observation Sites: These generally share a number of common features: 1. School classrooms are approximately the same size as in the U.K., though

class sizes are typically larger, with typically between 35 and 45 in school classes, more in college classes, making the classrooms appear cramped. 2. The seating arrangement, except at the teacher training college, involves

students sitting in rows on benches facing the front. At the teacher training college, students sit in movable chairs, though still in rows.

3. Where possible, boys sit on one side of the classroom and girls on the other. When there are slightly uneven numbers, this division still remains but with the extra numbers of one sex necessitating squeezing up on benches rather than moving to the other side. When there are students predominantly of one sex in the class, some boys or girls move to the other side of the classroom, but still cluster together, with an empty row (or several rows) separating one sex from the other. There is more mixing in the college and teacher training college classes, though the division between the sexes in terms of seating choices is still apparent.

4. All but o e of the lass oo s I e o se ed has been open to the elements in that they have doorways but no doors and openings for windows but no glass, so classes are generally open to outside noise. In three cases, different classes have been taught in the same physical space as another class with no partition between them, so one class could see as well as hear the neighbouring class being taught.

5. Electricity has only been present in two of the classrooms observed. This has meant that classrooms have not generally been well-lit.

[Field notes, July 2009]

Reviewing these notes during data analysis, I could see that I was perceiving the lass oo setti gs as ot the o a d fo the ost pa t i a egati e se se - large classes, students sitting in rows on benches, boys on one side and girls on other, no doors or glass in the windows, outside noise, a lack of electricity. However, within the

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setting, this is the norm and, for those working in the setting, these features are not seen as negative, just as different aspects of their everyday working lives.

Again, I had come to realise that my own preconceptions may be clouding my judgements concerning the classroom environment. I was focusing on differences between the research setting and my own usual work setting, rather than focusing on the classroom environment in the research setting in its own right. Further, I was focusing on the most common teaching situation I experience in my usual work setting, which involves small groups sitting in a horseshoe-shaped seating arrangement around the tea he , as is ofte ad o ated i Weste TE“OL . I doi g this, I as ig o i g the fact that on some occasions my classes are similar to the classes described above - quite large, with students sitting in rows, probably feeling that the classroom is quite crowded.