LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

between a pre-existing structure and an agential self. She positions this as also developing through three distinct (although unpredictable and changeable) phases from structural conditioning to sociocultural interaction finally to structural elaboration. In this way a society or institution, although pre-existing, is formed and re-formed as a result of the individuals, roles, collectives who make up the human nature of that society. In this way it is important to study both the agential actors and the culture and society of which they are a part, building a picture and understanding from the interplay that takes place. This perspective also lends itself to an ethnographic case study approach (Porpora, 2015) as well as an Exploratory Practice paradigm where researchers work to understand rather than definitively answer.

      I wanted to develop a detailed picture of education practices and linguistic understandings within different sites, with a different disciplinary focus and a different student population/cohort mix. I hoped to consider the significant differences in experience across sites as well as the similarities (Silverman, 2000). As ‘using a case study provided a systematic way of examining language, identity and power’ (Feagin et al., 1991 in Sterzuk, 2015: 57), my ethnographical investigation developed into a multiple Case Study approach. Aimed at retaining ‘the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events’ (Yin, 1994: 3) and allowing for a number of different sources and methods of collection to create a ‘thickness’ (Geertz, 1973) to the data, three sites within the larger institution being researched formed part of the project investigation. Within each of these Case Studies, the collection of data took on slightly different forms depending on circumstances (Yin, 1994). As with most ethnographic case studies, although the data collected can be categorised as qualitative rather than quantitative, there was not one specific form of data collected. Rather, I acted as curator of a collection of documents and conversations which could be seen to relate in some way to the focus of the project, noting comments and thoughts in a journal as the project progressed.

      What ultimately developed from this rather messy, emergent research design was data that provides both individual narratives of a moment in time and around a specific experience and then a layered, deep, often contradictory and complex picture of an institution in flux as it interacts with different agents.

Project Design and Data Collection

      As the methodological approach to the project being reported in this book was emergent and reflexive, crossing boundaries as my understanding of the issues and questions being investigated developed, the project design needed to reflect this exploratory approach. SoTL also requires that I acknowledge my disciplinary epistemologies. As an EAP and language teacher, my overall perspective of the University is subjective (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). The perspective taken is of the entire University as a language classroom; a site of linguistic struggle, in both its literal and theoretical senses. This struggle is enacted within and through content knowledge, educational cultures and individual and collective identities, all of which directly impact on teaching and learning. All forms of communication involve language (if viewed in multimodal terms) in some form; understanding how language creates and develops knowledge and thought within a discipline is essential to the work of a University, and therefore the work of all those teaching in it. The main focus of this project is to consider how this language is used to express and connect ideas and how those working in the University engage with and understand its power.

      Given this perspective, it was important to collect data that included all involved in the teaching and learning process – both EAP teachers, other teaching staff and students. It was also important to look at the influence of interactions and experiences that took place both inside and outside the traditional learning spaces, so across the entire TPG curriculum. The curriculum in this project being conceived as in its widest sense as ‘the interplay of all those involved’ in Higher Education and as a ‘cultural imperative’ (Barnett & Coate, 2005: 159).

      The collection of data, then, took place across the three separate Case Study sites within my own institution. One of these was the EAP teaching unit, the other was an Arts, Humanities and Cultures (AHC) School and the other a Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) School. This allowed for comparison across disciplines and for consideration of any (dis)connections between those whose primary role is to focus on language (the EAP unit); those who are concerned with content knowledge; and those (the students) who find themselves grappling with both simultaneously. The experiences and thoughts of both student and teacher were included, the aim being to create a sense of where and if overlap occurred.

      The collection of data ran over a period of 10 months, from May 2016 through to March 2017.

      Interviews and focus groups

      The interviews and focus groups with teachers were all semi-structured and were built around a similar set of questions. The questions were designed to develop an understanding of how the teachers approached teaching at TPG level specifically, and how they viewed it as different to teaching at undergraduate level, before moving on to consider how they felt language had an impact on their disciplinary content teaching and assessment practices. I also asked them to consider any differences they perceived in their approach to international and home students and asked them what, if any, training they felt was necessary to support teachers when working with increasingly diverse groups of students.

      EAP teachers were asked similar questions. The focus on content and language was reversed, asking how teaching EAP with a focus on disciplinary content impacted their language teaching.

      Similar questions were used for individual interview and focus groups for the students, asking why they had chosen to study their TPG programme, what the differences were between their undergraduate programme and their post-graduate programme, and if they felt that language had any impact on their ability to understand and study on their programme. Questions also covered understandings around assessment practices, and what support they received and would like to receive from the University.

      The student Focus Groups were re-interviewed on three occasions over the 10-month period. The structure of these interviews became looser throughout. The opening request ‘Tell me how things are going’, with guidance to think about their language use was usually enough. Having this more longitudinal element to the data collection, with multiple points of data generation, allowed comparison across the different data sets (Cohen et al., 2007). Importantly, it provided insight into the development and change in the students’ understanding of and approach to language, learning and content communication over time and across two sites, as these students initially began their time at university as EAP students before moving into their academic School.

      Observations

      By allowing direct access to events and interactions (Simpson & Tuson, 2003), observations allowed me to look directly at the interaction between language and content as it played out in the different learning environments of each of the three Case Study sites, rather than relying only on second-hand recounts (Cohen et al., 2007). As the intended focus of the observations was the language/content interplay, I chose to use the usual observation form used for peer and evaluative observations of EAP teaching within the EAP unit. I chose this form because of my own familiarity with it, but also because it guides the observer to direct their focus on academic language and discourse. However, whilst fit for purpose in an EAP classroom, and useable in more discursive seminars, I found this format unusable in a practical or lecture session. Here the pedagogy and approach were different, rendering many of the observation questions irrelevant. In these sessions, other than noting down the arrangement of the room, I wrote my own field notes as a train of events, with some verbatim interactions. Much of the final product tended to be lists of vocabulary that were either totally unfamiliar to me as a non-disciplinary expert, or that I felt would not be taught with that particular orientation of meaning in a general EAP or language classroom. This in itself provided useful insight into the disconnect between a students’ likely previous English language learning experiences and their real disciplinary experience of language in use.

      Field notes and informal discussion

      Here I distinguish between the notes taken in the more unnatural, and therefore more formal, situation of classroom observations where, however familiar the context, I was always an ‘outsider’,

Скачать книгу