Page 306 - Beyond Methods
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Monitoring teaching acts
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gies and the mismatches as a general guide, interpret the class- room events.
Step 10: Finally, the teacher makes use of all the interpretive data in order to self-evaluate her teaching acts. Such an evaluation can help her refine her teaching beliefs and classroom practices and eventually lead her to construct her own personal theory of practice.
Reflective task 13.2
Before reading further, consider the feasibility of the ten-step procedure. What difficulties do you anticipate in following this procedure? What modi- fications would you suggest and why?
Using the M & M Scheme
By way of illustration, I present one aspect of a project I conducted to assess the extent to which the M & M scheme can help teachers reflect on their practice and begin to theorize from their practice (see Kumaravadivelu, 1999a, for details). Two female ESL teachers based in a California community college participated in this part of the project—one as teacher (T) and the other as observer (O). They both have a master’s degree in TESOL. The observer has been teach- ing for nearly eight years. The teacher has been teaching for two and a half years. There were thirty students in the class that was observed, and approximately one-half spoke Spanish as their first language. Others spoke Vietnamese, Korean, or Chinese. Most were recently arrived immigrants. On the day of observation, the teacher was fo- cusing on reading comprehension.
Before the actual observation, the observer gathered the follow- ing background information about the teacher and the class: the teacher was going to use a lesson titled “Looking for an apartment” for teaching reading comprehension; she did not subscribe to any particular method, “not even the communicative method.” She be- lieved in doing “whatever works.” She also said, “I don’t teach them grammar; I teach them what they need to know.” She felt that even though hers was a low intermediate class, at least half the students were very active in class participation, and that most of the students
