The Language Teacher
December 1999
Action research: Semi-scripted monologues in team-teaching
John Wiltshier & Makiko Honma
Tago Junior High School, Sendai, Miyagi
As a Japanese teacher of English (JTE) and an assistant language teacher (ALT) at a public junior high school, we conducted a year-long action research study with four classes of second-year coed students of mixed proficiency. We integrated semi-scripted listening monologues into three "Read and Think" sections of our class textbook, New Horizons Book 2 (Asano, Shimomura, & Makino,1993), in order to (a) give the students practice in listening to spoken English, as opposed to written English being read aloud, and (b) make the reading section of the textbook easier to understand.
Semi-scripted monologues (Geddes & White, 1978) are speeches delivered from notes in order to simulate real-life spoken English. Somewhere between free speech and reading aloud, they include features of natural speech such as incomplete sentences and hesitations. The notes the ALT used to make the monologues were based on the target language in the class textbook.
Research Approach
We developed a three-lesson approach to utilize the monologues. In the first lesson the students listened to the monologues; in the second lesson they read the text; and in the third the students were required to write a text on a similar but distinct theme. The first lesson was always team taught, but the ALT was not always present in the second and third lessons.
While listening to the monologues the students completed a variety of tasks designed to challenge all levels of students: listening for and identifying key nouns, verbs, and adjectives; then making simple sentences about the monologues using these keywords. After completing these tasks, the students would then have a list of keywords and a summary for each monologue.
Since our main interest was in the monologue listening lessons, we administered questionnaires to the students, videotaped the lessons, and held teacher discussions after the lessons. The questionnaires asked the students about their feelings during the lesson and whether or not they could succeed in the class. Then we studied the videotape to observe the responses of the students and to assess our own performance (for the JTE this meant explanation of tasks and for the ALT it was delivery of the semi-scripted speech). We discussed how we felt the students had performed and how difficult the semi-scripted speeches were.
Findings
Results from the questionnaire showed that 73% of the students'responses expressed positive feelings (enjoyment, interest, useful, good listening practice). A smaller percentage, 27%, expressed negative feelings (not interesting, uneasy atmosphere, frustrating, desire to give up). Nearly 60% of all the students stated that having a listening class first did make reading and understanding the "Read and Think" sections easier. Perhaps they found it easier because they had been introduced to key vocabulary words and had a summary of the text-based monologue before they started reading the text. This finding was very encouraging and showed that semi-scripted speeches by the ALT can be linked to the textbook. Initially this linkage was not achieved: We felt the listening section was too long, and the JTE's explanations were not clear or the tasks were too difficult. However, gradually through discussion we developed textbook-based listening lessons with clearly explained appropriate tasks.
Finding time to sit down together and discuss a lesson was difficult. Eventually we set aside a specific time each week for our discussions, which worked much better than our first attempts to find five minutes here or ten minutes there. We felt that with more time and fewer distractions we could have done the research better. When a new idea did not work it left us feeling disappointed and sometimes frustrated. However, this disppointment led to one of our biggest realizations: simply that it was essential to compromise on what we wanted to do and how fast we wanted to do it. We realized that not aiming to be perfect was important for us in order to make the research a practical possibility. We felt that our research raised our critical awareness of our teaching, and we realized that action research as we did it was really just an extension of our teaching schedules, especially the evaluation and planning stages.
Any change to a current teaching style requires desire and effort from both teachers, but we found our new style beneficial to both students and ourselves: In our case we were teaching a newly introduced textbook. Through action research the JTE welcomed the chance to try something a little different and the ALT felt he contributed more positively in the classroom. The JTE notes, however, that the success or otherwise of this kind of research will depend very much on the two teachers involved.
References
Asano, H. , Shimomura, Y., & Makino, T. (1993). New horizons english course. Tokyo: Shoseki.
Geddes, M. & White, R. (1978). The use of semi-scripted simulated authentic speech and listening comprehension. Audio Visual Language Journal, 16 (3), 137-145.
For further details please email jm-wiltshier@scn.ac.jp or BXU01356@nifty.ne.jp.
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