Preliminary study research instruments

a) Students’ questionnaire

Purpose, construction and content of the students’ questionnaire

The overall purpose of the students’ questionnaire (section 2.4/appendix-2), based on the sub-research question, was to ascertain the difference between the English language learning opportunities and experience of the students in low-performing and high-performing schools. The fact that the performance of the low-

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performing school teachers was compared (by educational authorities) with the high performance of high-performing school students required the researcher to investigate whether the high-performing school teachers provided more effective teaching of English than the low-performing school teachers: Did high-performing school teachers conduct the lesson in really effective ways? Or did they have less problems in the classroom than low-performing school teachers? Or did the high- performing school students have more facilities to learn more English than their counterparts?

The researcher tried to find answers to the aforementioned questions by focusing the questionnaire on two areas. One was to obtain frequency data on the learning opportunities of students based on certain assumptions which prevailed in the educational context of Jaffna; assumptions regarding the learning ability of students, availability of learning opportunities at schools and the socio-economic status of students which were viewed either as advantages or challenges for students to learn English. From the contextual knowledge of the researcher the assumptions of ordinary people, parents and teachers suggest that on the one hand, a few schools were able to show high performance in public examinations because they select students with high ability for learning on the basis of success in the Grade Five scholarship examination (cf Chapter Three/section 3.1.2). On the other hand, many schools in the district of Jaffna had to accommodate the student populace most of whom did not succeed in the Grade Five scholarship examination and thus teachers had to struggle teaching the English language. It was also assumed that students at high-performing schools became more competent in English than their counterparts because of the educational background of their parents who were likely to help their children with their English lessons and English homework. Moreover it is not unusual, as Bourdieu (1986) and Hartas (2011) claimed that the parents with higher educational and social class background enable their children to gain higher educational credentials. Another assumption was that the high-performing schools due to sufficient human and material resources were able to organise more English Day competitions than the low-performing schools. Such competitions were

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considered an additional help for students at high-performing schools to improve their knowledge of English. The socio-economic status of parents also was

assumed to influence their children’s performance in language learning (Bourdieu 1984; Butler, 2013) as economically affluent parents are able to afford private tuition on the English subject for their children. Hence, questions from two to eleven and from twenty-two to twenty-four in the questionnaire were formed on the issues related to the assumptions explained above. Questions from two to eleven consisted of questions with Yes or No options and multiple choices, and questions which required written answers. The questions from twenty-two to twenty-four were designed in five points Likert scale with the options Always, Often, Sometimes, Rarely and Not at all.

The second area focused on in the questionnaire (from questions twelve to twenty- one) was the learning experience of students in the classroom. Questions twelve and thirteen were multiple choices and the rest were designed in five points Likert scales with the same options mentioned in the previous paragraph. The researcher wanted to see whether students at high-performing schools experienced more effective language learning than their counterparts or teachers at low-performing schools provided their students with less effective teaching than teachers at high- performing schools. Hence the questionnaire included appropriate questions for students to express what took place during their daily English language lesson. The researcher also achieved this purpose through lesson observations which are detailed later in this chapter.

The student questionnaire also partly served the purpose of determining one of the operational definitions of the current research. As said in section 5.2.2 one of the operational definitions the researcher had to define was the aspects of effective teaching of English. At the end of the questionnaire he included an open-ended question (Q25) which asked the students what they expected from their teachers of English in relation to their learning.

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Piloting and revising students’ questionnaire

Piloting of the research instruments is an important stage of a research in which the researcher tests out and makes changes (where necessary) in those research instruments based on feedback from a small number of participants who complete and evaluate the instruments (Creswell, 2005). Forty students (twenty designated by their schools as high-performing and twenty low-performing students)

participated in the pilot questionnaire. Both the Tamil and the English versions of the questionnaire were made available to students. All the low-performing school students and most of the high-performing school students chose to complete the questionnaire written in Tamil while a few high-performing school students opted to do the English version. After they had completed the questionnaire, the

researcher had a discussion with each group of students to identify questions which the students found difficult to answer and those where further clarification was needed. The questionnaire was revised on the basis of the students’

suggestions (section 2.18/table 2.4/appendix-2) and the revised version of the questionnaire (section 2.4/appendix-2) was used in the preliminary study. Table 4 shows questions in the revised student questionnaire designed to achieve the objectives of the preliminary study.

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Table 4. Revised questions of student questionnaire

Objectives of the questions Questions on the student questionnaire

1) Opportunities for learning English:

Do students get into HPSs* or LPSs** either because of their pass or failure in G5SE?

3. Did you pass the Grade 5 Scholarship examination?

Do students get better foundation in English because of their primary education?

2. I am learning English from: 4. Where did you get your primary education (from Grade 1 – 5)? Do students get more opportunities to

learn English when their parents’ socio-economic status is better?

5. What is your father’s occupation? 6. Does your mother go out to work? If so, what is she?

10. Do you go to tuition for English? Do students get more opportunities to

learn English because of the

educational background of their family members?

7. What is your father’s educational qualification?

8. What is your mother’s educational qualification?

9. Does any member in your family help you with the English lesson? Do students get more opportunities to

learn English at their schools?

11. Do you take part in any

events/competitions of your school English day?***

Do students get more opportunities to learn English at home and in their social contexts?

22. I read English books, magazines or newspapers at home.

23. I watch English news or some English programme in the TV. 24. I have opportunities to listen to elders speak English in my social contexts.

2) Experience of learning English

What difference do the students at High-Performing Schools and Low- Performing Schools have in their experience of learning English?

From Question 12 to 21****

3) Effective teaching of English from the students’ point of view

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What are students’ expectation from their English teachers?

25. What do you expect from your English teacher regarding learning English in the classroom?

*High-performing schools **Low-performing schools

***See appendix-2 (section 2.4) for a comprehensive set of answers given to the students to choose from.

****See appendix-2 (section 2.4) for questions from twelve to twenty-one.

b) Teachers’ questionnaire

Purpose, construction and content of teachers’ questionnaire

The main purpose of the questionnaire was to establish one of the operational criteria i.e., to identify the problems which teachers frequently encountered in their classrooms and also other problems such as socio-economic and political problems which affected their overall teaching. The teachers’ questionnaire was categorised under four sections. Section one consisted of questions about

teachers’ personal background and issues related to their teaching of English. The options to respond to the questions were decided according to the nature of the answers elicited by the questions. Some of the questions elicited straightforward answers such as Yes or No, some questions required the inclusion of multiple- choice answers in order to meet all respondents’ needs (Colosi, 2006; Wyse, 2013) and still some other questions required written answers as they related to circumstances of the individual respondents. The other three sections (section two, three and four) included three different lists of several classroom problems and a smaller number of related socio-economic and political problems. These

problems were informed by relevant literature and also from the teaching experience of the researcher. The participants were asked to underline in those three lists the problems they frequently encountered in their classrooms. They also were given a chance to write down the problems which were specific to their teaching context but not included in the questionnaire.

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Piloting and revising teachers’ questionnaire

Five teachers from high-performing schools and five from low-performing

schools teaching students from Grade Six to Eleven were given the questionnaires in English and their feedback (section 2.20/table 2.6/appendix-2) was obtained to make necessary changes. The revised questionnaire (section 2.7/appendix-2) was used to obtain data from the teachers. Table 5 shows questions in the revised teacher questionnaire designed to achieve the objectives of the preliminary study. Table 5. Revised questions of teacher questionnaire

Objectives of the questions Questions on the teacher questionnaire

Background information Section 1: 1. Gender: 2. Age:

3. Marital status:

4. Your highest academic qualification:

5. Your professional qualifications:

6. How many years have you been teaching English? Issues related to current teaching of

English

7. The type of school you are teaching in:

8. The average number of students in your classroom: 9. How many periods (altogether)

are you teaching English per week?

10.Are you the only teacher who teaches English (from Gr. 6 - 11) in your school?

Pedagogical problems in English Language Teaching (ELT)

Section 2: List of pedagogical problems*

Socio-economic problems in ELT Section 3: List of socio-economic problems*

Political problems in ELT Section 4: List of political problems* * See Appendix-2 (section 2.7) for the complete lists of problems

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c) Lesson observation

Overall purpose of lesson observation

Lesson observations are a useful way of seeing what is happening ‘in situ … as it requires us to see what is happening rather than what we want to happen, or think is happening’ (Basil 2010: 118). The overall purpose of the lesson observations, was based on the sub-research question which, was to see if there was any difference between the classroom lessons conducted at low-performing and high- performing schools. Through the lesson observations the researcher tried to get answers to the following questions.

 Did high-performing school students have more effective English (see Introduction of Chapter One) lessons than their counterparts?

 Did low-performing school teachers appear to be less effective in their English teaching than their counterparts?

 Did low-performing school teachers have more problems in the English classroom than teachers at high-performing schools?

 Was the overall English learning environment more advantageous for high-performing school students than their counterparts?

In addition, since many students and teachers who participated in the

questionnaire also participated in the lesson observations, this research instrument was used as a means to see whether there was conformity between the data given by students and teachers in the questionnaire and what was observed in the classroom. It was also used to identify possible gaps or omissions with the questionnaire data and what was observed.

Construction of observation

The lesson observation followed a primarily semi-structured approach: the researcher took down notes of what was taking place in the classroom and had checklists in order to facilitate his taking down of notes.

Two different checklists (sections 2.8 and 2.9/appendix-2) were prepared for the observation. One covered the physical setting and the human setting of the classroom (Morrison, 1993: 80 in Cohen et al., ibid.): its teaching style, that is whether it was traditional with a teacher teaching from the front or a modern classroom with students sitting in groups; its location, whether it was located in a

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fully separated and quiet environment or adjoined with other classrooms in a noisy environment; its facilities whether they were spacious enough to accommodate all students to have group activities and contained the necessary materials and

equipment for learning; its human settings that is to say whether students were male or female or the classrooms were mixed gender and illustrative of student socio-economic background. This checklist was prepared by the researcher based on his previous classroom and contextual knowledge and experience of teaching in Sri Lanka.

The other checklist was prepared to observe the following five aspects which were simplified from two settings provided by Morrison (ibid.) i.e., the interactional settings and the programme setting. The five aspects were:

Teacher how he/she helped students engage with lessons, Students how they participated in learning activities, Teaching approach whether the teacher and students cooperated with

each other to have more student-centred learning, Activities the kind of activities students were mostly engaged

with and

Materials whether the teacher utilised various kinds of materials to motivate students or just used the English textbook as stipulated by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Education alone.

d) Interviews

A semi-structured interview (section 2.10/appendix-2) guided by the main research questions and issues outlined above was conducted with principals, retired teachers of English and resource personnel of English language teaching (Table 14) in Jaffna from October 2012 to December 2012. The interviews lasted about thirty minutes. The interview questions were not piloted.

Purpose of the interview

The purpose of the interview with the principals, resource personnel and retired teachers of English in the preliminary study was to determine the operational criteria for the main study, i.e., the aspects of effective teaching of English which the current teachers of English needed to consider in their classrooms. The

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interviews sought to understand what the participants meant by effective teaching of English or how they considered one lesson was more effective than another.