Comprehension strategies of above average English as a foreign language (EFL) readers

The study reported in this thesis is a single-shot case study, which aims to provide a detailed description ofthe reading comprehension strategies used by fifteen student teachers ofEnglish from Indonesian- and Javanese-speaking backgrounds in the last year of their four-year Strata-One study at a university In Yogyakarta, Indonesia. These readers were above average among their peers in that their average indexes of grades in Reading and Speaking classes were 3.22 and 3,34 respectively, while the average indexes ofthe peer group were 271 and 2.63, respectively, out ofa scale of 0 to 400. In addition, while students in this university may complete their study by course work or by research, these readers were all enrolled as research students. As studying comprehension strategies involves complex issues, a multi-method approach is required, not only for breadth of coverage, but also to allow for a check on the validity of individual methods. To achieve the goal of the study, thinka1oud tasks, retellings, a reading comprehensIon test, indepth interviews and observations were employed to explore the strategies used. An analysis of the recorded data indicates that these readers used thirty strategies classified under five clusters: infomiation gathering, information processing, text interpretation, comprehension monitoring, and comprehension utilisation. In general, readers started gathering information by silent reading, interpreted the text by an inference or a paraphrase, and ended the task by making selfreflections relevant to the text. Most readers managed to identify problems when they occurred, and monitored their comprehension when they doubted their interpretation, as could be seen from their rereading the text or vocalising its pail(s). When direct interpretation was difficult, readers associated the text with prior knowledge or interrelated parts of the text, The readers in this study share characteristics of both poor and good native readers, in the sense that there was evidence ofgood strategy use butthe readers did not manage to maintain it consistently. As a result, even the successful readers were not able to maximise their potential. The implication is that in order to develop students into independent readers, strategy instruction should be part of and appropriately embedded in, the reading instruction. There is a need not merely to teach strategies as such, but rather to teach flexibility in strategy use. While there was sufficient evidence that thinkaloud tasks and their complementary methods worked to achieve the goals ofthe present study, similar studies with different cohorts are suggested for crosschecks.

Displaced self : the impact of language-migration on self-identity

In this dissertation I explore the impact that language-migration has on Self-Identity. The thesis consists of two parts: a memoir The Strangeness of Freedom, and an exegesis. Each is intended to stand alone, but also to complement the other. In the memoir I draw on my personal recollections of my family's migrations across five countries (Czechoslovakia, West Germany, USA and Australia) and into three languages (Czech, German and English) in order to convey my particular experience of language migration. In the exegesis I analyse several memoirs written by other language migrants and examine what impact they believe migrating into a new language and culture had on their own Self-identity. I draw on postmodern and psychoanalytic theory to explore the nature of Self-Identity formation and why migrants, as well as non-migrants might experience a change in their Self-identity during the course of their lives. I attempt to tease out to what extent the change in Self-identity is a universal experience that results from living across time and moving from a known past into an unknown future, regardless of whether one physically migrates or not. I found that while language-migrants tend to describe a more intense disruption of their Self-Identity, non-migrants also experience such a disruption in their sense of Self, simply by living in a rapidly changing world. I propose that while changing locations and languages clearly disrupts the continuity we presume life entails, it is in fact the passage of time that distances us from our known past, including our familiar Self, even if we never physically or linguistically migrate.

Women, words, and work : a study of change and reconstruction in adult TESOL

My dissertation asserts that the discourses which at the present time construct the world of work for teachers in adult TESOL, are no longer adequate to represent the field in these new and rapidly changing times. For the last forty years the discourses that have constructed the field present a totalising, gender free, liberal humanist view of TESOL, rendering women's experience invisible, no longer speaking to or for women teachers who make up more than ninety percent of the teachers in Victorian adult TESOL programs (Cope & Kalantzis 1993, Brodkey 1991, Fine 1992, Peirce 1995). I begin by exploring the work of women teachers in adult TESOL, focusing on women teaching in the fast growing de-institutionalised settings of adult TESOL programs, which remain marginalised from the central programs in terms of administrative policy and practice. I report the findings of a series of projects undertaken by the teachers and the researcher by which new insights and understandings of teachers beliefs about their work and the changes which are currently reconstructing the field of adult language and literacy education in Australia, have been gained. I questions the discourses of applied linguistics which have for the past forty years constructed the field of adult TESOL in Australia and suggests that these lack a social theory (Candlin 1989). From the research findings I questions the possibility of continuing to work in the ways of the past, in the current climate of reconstruction of the field, rapid policy change and continued erosion of resources. I suggest that the previously loose system which held this field of work together, the ways of working, the understandings of practice, have in the light of these new times, been stretched to the limit and are in real danger of collapse. For the women working in TESOL this continued incursion of the systems into their work and the changes that have taken place, the denial of their ways of working, their local knowledge and gendered experiences, can be read against Habermas' concept of the colonisation of the lifeworld of language teaching (Habermas 1987).

History of contact and change in the Goroka Valley, Central Highlands of New Guinea, 1934-1949

The thesis traces the interaction of the Goroka Valley people with European and coastal New Guinean intruders during the pacification stage of contact and change. In this 15 year period the people moved from a traditional subsistence culture to the threshold of a modern, European-influenced technological society. The contact experiences of the inhabitants of the Valley and the outsiders who influenced them are examined, using both oral and documentary sources. A central theme of this study is the attempts by Europeans and their coastal New Guinean collaborators to achieve the pacification of a people for whom warfare has been described as 'the dominant orientation'. The newcomers saw pacification as being inextricably linked with social, economic and religious transformation, and consequently it was pursued by patrol officers, missionaries and soldiers alike. Following an introductory chapter outlining the pre-contact and early-contact history of the Goroka Valley people, there is a discussion of the causes of tribal fighting in Highlands communities and two case studies of violent events which, although occurring beyond the Goroka Valley, had important consequences for those who lived within its bounds. The focus then shifts to the first permanent settlement of the agents of change -initially these were coastal New Guinean evangelists and policemen - and their impact on the local people. A period of consolidation is then described, as both government and missions established a permanent 'European presence in the Valley'. This period was characterised by vigorous pacification coupled with the introduction of innovations in health and education, agriculture, technology, law and religion. The gradual transformation of Goroka Valley society as a result of the people's interaction with the newcomers was abruptly accelerated in 1943, when many hundreds of Allied soldiers occupied the Valley in anticipation of a threatened Japanese invasion. Village life was disrupted as men were conscripted as carriers and labourers and whole communities were obliged to grow food to assist the Allied war effort. Those living close to military airfields-and camps were subject to Japanese aerial attacks and the entire population was exposed to an epidemic of bacillary dysentery introduced by the combatants. However the War also brought some positive effects, including paradoxically, the almost total cessation of tribal fighting, the construction of an ail-weather airstrip at Goroka which ensured its future as a town and administrative and commercial centre, and the compulsory growing of vegetables, coffee, etc, which laid the foundations for a cash economy and material prosperity. The final chapter examines the aftermath of military occupation, the return of civil administration and the implementation of social and economic policies which brought the Goroka Valley people into the rapid-development phase of contact. By 1949 Gorokans were ready to channel their aggressive energies into commercial competitiveness and adopt a cash-crop economy, to accept the European rule of law, to take advantage of Western innovations in medicine, education, transport and communications, to seek employment opportunities at home and in other parts of the country and to modify their primal world view with European religious and secular values. A Stone Age people was in process of being transformed into a modern society.

Improving English language teaching in Thailand

The teaching of English in Thailand is a matter of national concern. The national government believes that the ability of Thai people to use English for effective communication is very important for the continuing economic development of Thailand. However many students who have had primary, secondary and university exposure to English find it difficult to conduct a conversation with a native speaker of English. The reasons for this include lack of student motivation and contextual support, large classes, the dominating effects of assessment on what is taught, and the English language competency of the teachers. The research in this thesis focuses on the teaching of English as a foreign language in secondary schools in Khon Kaen. The research reported here consists of one major and three minor studies. In the major study some of the principles of action research were used to explore strategies that would improve the teaching of English in a number of secondary schools in Khon Kaen in Thailand. In the first phase of the major study I worked with two teachers to design and implement a series of classroom activities that encouraged lower secondary students to use English. In the second phase I worked with a group of teachers to design and deliver a professional development program for twenty school teachers interested in improving their English language teaching. In the third phase I used data from the first two phases to design five new activities that were used in classrooms by two teachers. Findings from the three phases indicated that working collaboratively with school teachers can be a mutually beneficial professional experience and can improve student interest and learning. In the first minor study I used interview-conversations to investigate the perceptions that subject co-ordinators and teachers have towards English language teaching. The conversations covered the merits of detailed curricula and curricula frameworks, professional development, assessment, resources, and integration of English language with other subjects. It was clear that the teachers were aware of the national government s policies for the improving English language teaching and accepted the need for change. It was equally clear that the preparation of teachers and the resources available were major limiting factors in schools to teacher effectiveness. In the second minor study I examined the teaching of Mandarin in an Australian school that suffered from some of the same resource problems as Thai schools. Although there was only one teacher available for all of the Mandarin classes in the school she was extremely effective. Her teaching was an example of best practice. It included thorough preparation, the ability to manage lessons at the pace of the learners, active classes and individual attention, detailed assessment records, and the integration of language and culture. Some or all of these could be used in Thai schools. The third minor study was an investigation of the professional development experiences of English language teachers in Thai schools. In most schools there are consultative and administrative mechanisms, acceptable to principals and teachers, in place to support professional development. Access to native speakers was seen as very important. However, the schools in Khon Kaen province have little or no access to native speakers of English. Even if they were available, the schools do not have the funds to employ them. Findings from the four studies indicate that it is quite possible to use interactive, participatory or student-centred pedagogies to teach English as a foreign language in Thai classrooms. However, one cannot expect teachers to adopt such pedagogies unless they are convinced of their value. This can be achieved most effectively through a systematic and sustained program of professional development.

Gender and genre : a case study of a girl and a boy learning to write

This study addresses questions of gender and genre in early writing by drawing on systemic linguistic theory, It is a longitudinal case study that compares the writing development of two children, a boy and a girl/ who learned to write in classrooms that adopted an approach to writing known in Australia as 'process writing1, The children's written texts were analysed using the systemic functional grammar as developed by MAK, Hallidey and the models of genre and register as proposed by J,R, Martin. The children were followed for the first two and a half years of their schooling, from the first day of kindergarten to the middle of grade two. They were observed weekly during the daily ‘writing time’ and all texts were collected. Although the children were ostensibly 'free’ to determine both the writing topics and text types they produced, systemic analysis revealed that: 1) the majority of texts written were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the children reconstructed their personal experience with family and friends and offered an evaluation of it. 2) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre, such that the boy reconstructed experience in terms of the male cultural stereotype of being an active participant in the world, while the girl reconstructed experience in terms of the female stereotype of being a more passive observer of experience. It is the strength of systemic linguistic analysis that it revealed how the choices the children made in language were constrained by a number of social and cultural contexts, including: a) the teacher's theoretical orientation to literacy; b) the models of spoken and written language available to the children; and c) the ideology of gender in the culture. In particular, the analysis made visible how children appropriate the meanings of their culture and socialise themselves into gender roles by constructing the ideology of gender in their writing. The study contributes to an understanding of genres by offering a revised description of the Observation genre, which derives from the Observation Comment genre originally identified by Martin and Rothery (1981). It also raises a number of implications for teacher training and classroom practice, including the need for: 1) increased teacher consciousness about gender and genre, especially an understanding that choices in language are socially constructed 2) a critical reassessment of the notion of 'free topic choice’ promoted by 'process writing' pedagogy, a practice which may limit choice and tacitly support the gender status quo.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, ‘Language and Literacy in Secondary School’, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy (this is dictated by state government specifications of graduate outcomes for teacher education programs). To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. They thereby create a heteroglossic text (Bakhtin, 1981) that stretches their repertoires as language users and enables them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences, and (in a separate piece of writing) endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit.

The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. Their writing also raises questions as to extent to which tertiary students are actually able to formulate a critical language awareness that will subsequently inform their professional practice as secondary teachers.

Encounters with 'strangers' : towards dialogical ethics in English language education

This article takes the inquiry into 'nativeness' and 'non-nativeness' to the level of developing an ethical framework for professional practice in English language education. In so doing, our aim is firstly to use the 'sociology of the stranger' as a framework to problematize discourses on the Other and Othering. We shall argue that these discourses are sedimented in the modernist project of perpetual purification in which "order making ... becomes indistinguishable from announcing ever new abnormalities, drawing ever new dividing lines, identifying and setting apart ever new strangers" (Bauman, 1997, p. 11). Our next step is to open up the possibility of transcending these discourses in education through a dialogical ethics of respecting the otherness in the Other. Pedagogy based on the ethics of dialogical recognition emphasizes the value of difference in learning through the 'surplus of vision' that the Other provides for constructing new meanings and new ways to mean (Bakhtin, 1981; Levinas, 1969). The recognition of 'the foreigner in the self' has significant pedagogical implications for language educators and marks the movement from ethics to politics.

Repeated-viewing and co-viewing of an animated video : an examination of factors that impact on young children's comprehension of video content

The experiment reported here was concerned with the effect of repeat- viewing and adult co-viewing on the comprehension of an animated feature length movie. Four- to six-year-old children watched a movie on video either once or five times, and either with their mother present or on their own. The findings revealed that, after controlling for language skills and interest in the type of video watched, children who watched five times had higher comprehension scores than children who watched only once. Furthermore, children who watched the video repeatedly were also better at character identification and at identifying the good and bad qualities of one of the main characters in the movie. The presence of a mother, who was explicitly asked to co- view the movie with her child, did not facilitate comprehension. The findings are discussed in terms of the educational benefits of repeat viewing. Theoretical implications are also noted.

Policy, practice and purpose in the field of education : a critical review

This paper provides a critical review of papers in this special issue on Bourdieu and practice. What is different about this collection is that, in analysing policy and practice through a Bourdieusian lens, the thinking tools of field, disposition (collective and individual), logics of practice and doxa have been mobilised with regard to the social practices of educational policy - its production, circulation and reception. First, these papers illustrate how, as a field, education has its own language, boundaries and power relations informed by particular modes of distinction and legitimation around different forms of capital formation, thus providing explanations for both social mobility and social stratification. Second, this collection foregrounds 'policy as practice' in terms of the social practices involved in the production of policy, the practices involved with the articulation and vernacularisation of policy through the processes of its reception, as well as the intent and effects of policy changing practice. Third, in focusing on specific policy problematics in higher education and schools, teacher professional development, leadership and educational reform, these contributions illustrate multiple methodological approaches as to how Bourdieu's thinking tools can be used to theorise educational policy, change, practice and effects. The value of Bourdieu's work lies on getting past the impasses between divisions between material and cultural analyses, between the materialist and linguistic focus, by talking about social practices, what people are doing, how they are thinking and how they are acting.

Performing Pedagogy and the re(construction) of global/local selves

The eighth chapter, written by Gayle Morris, is entitled “Performing pedagogy and the re (construction) of global/local selves.” Morris tackles a unique perspective with regard to globalization and education. A major characteristic of today’s globalized world is the diversity of people living within societies and communities. Classrooms in public schools and universities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain are comprised of students from all parts of the world, a reality which is increasing the challenges faced by teachers and policy makers. Morris particularly discusses second language teaching and learning and the inadequacy of second language educators who are mostly approaching from “White/mainstream” positivist models and approaches to language teaching (p. 137). Morris highlights the “fixing” of immigrants and ethnic minority identity, and how the inefficient training of ESL teachers is affecting the global/ local selves of students. This chapter is invaluable contribution in this volume given the number of immigrants to western countries is on the rise.

Language learning strategies of adult ESL learners using virtual independent learning environments

This case study explored the influence of the Virtual Independent Learning Centre on the preferred language learning strategies of adult immigrant English as a second language learners. Findings expand the understanding of English as a second language learners' use of language learning strategies within online independent learning environments.

Emagining change : English teachers and technology

This textually playful study focuses on gaining a deeper understanding of teacher beliefs about English and the influence of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Because English is in transformation, these insights into teachers' perpectives of their subject, technology and change will contribute to the productive rethinking of the profession. It employs narrative research, diaglogics and Actor Network Theory techniques.

Semantic and pedagogical aspects of affixation in Bahasa Indonesia

This thesis analyses eleven affixes sampled from a range of contemporary writings in Bahasa Indonesia. Though assumed to be basic, these affixes cause difficulties for tertiary-level non-native learners, thus suggesting the need for alternative materials and methods of instruction.