Page 313 - Beyond Methods

Monitoring teaching acts 301
Analyses of extended data (not included here) showed that the teacher consistently followed a pattern: she recognized those learner- initiated opportunities that were in support of her lesson plan, and ignored those that were not part of her planned agenda. When the observer, being a more experienced teacher, argued that teachers in an L2 class should make use of all the learning opportunities created by learners even if they go against their planned agenda, the novice teacher seemed skeptical. They agreed, however, that the teacher should have facilitated more meaningful interaction in class. Con- sidering that only the previous day she had spent a lot of time ex- plaining what a paragraph is, she could have asked other students to explain instead of providing a readymade answer. This would have given other students an opportunity to interact.
The same segment provides an example of a series of disruptive mismatches. Twice the teacher interrupts her own explanation of what a paragraph is in order to admonish students who were try- ing to take notes. She thought that students shouldn’t write any- thing during a part of the lesson that she considered “reading com- prehension time.” Later on, during her conversation with students, she found out from the offending students that they were trying to write down the definition of paragraph and were perplexed why the teacher was preventing them from taking notes. The teacher had wrongly thought that the students were actually writing a paragraph about renting an apartment, which was the next exercise in the text- book, and therefore wanted them to stop writing and concentrate on reading.
The teacher and the observer discussed this misunderstanding at length and thought that this illustrates a combination of mis- matches: instructional, procedural, and attitudinal—instructional mismatch because the teacher’s directions were not clear to the stu- dents; procedural mismatch because the teacher was not aware of the path chosen by the learner to achieve an immediate goal; and attitudinal mismatch because of the teacher’s attitude toward the nature of L2 learning and teaching, i.e., a strong belief on the sepa- ration of skills and a strict adherence to a predetermined lesson plan. They hypothesized that teachers who firmly keep students fo- cused on the lesson can easily lead them to overlook many learning opportunities created by students, and also make them fail to pro- mote negotiated interaction.
There is yet another segment (turns 52–62) that is as interesting as it is intriguing. In turn 52, S13 expresses the opinion that the