The English language instruction on the secondary school level through the lens of the video camera

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Authors

NAJVAR Petr NAJVAROVÁ Veronika

Year of publication 2010
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Education

Citation
Description In the paper the results of selected partial analysis that were carried out as the part of the CPV Video Study of English will be presented. The main aim of the project was to document and describe the process of everyday teaching of English language as taught on the secondary level in the Czech Republic. The authors of the project analysed almost 80 English lessons taught on randomly selected schools in three regions in the Czech Republic. Different analyses were aimed at domain general aspects of the instruction, such as classroom organisation, phases of instruction and didactic tools and media usage. Other analyses were aimed at domain specific aspects of the instruction, for example the role of the mother tongue, the nature of pupils’ utterances, etc. The systematic analysis of partial aspects of the instruction enables us to gain a complex view of the instruction and the processes of teaching and learning. In the relation with the video studies of TIMSS 1995 and 1999 and the IPN video study, that were realised in science teaching, in our analyses the processes of teaching and learning were understood as creating opportunities to learn and opportunities to talk. Also the concepts of teaching scripts and teaching discourse were taken into account. The results are presented by the so called lesson signatures. The method of video study was used as the methodological framework of the research, as it enables to combine quantitative analyses of the video and qualitative analyses of lesson transcripts. For the unit of the analysis a ten second interval was chosen and the videos were divided into them. Observations were done by instructed coders when an acceptable rate of inter-coder reliability was reached (according to international methodological standards). The results indicate that the instruction of English language at the Czech secondary schools is up to considerable scale controlled by the teacher, and less than 30% of the teaching time is devoted to individual or group work, the emphasis of the instruction is on securing previously presented subject matter. The results also indicate that teachers rely on textbooks very often. Analysis of the transcripts reveals the importance of the mother tongue in English instruction and on the importance of teacher driven practice of the communication. All the analyses show considerable differences between teachers. At the end of the paper a comparative perspective on English instruction will be offered in comparison with instruction on Physics, Geography and Physical Education that were analysed by comparable methodological procedures.
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