Roger Barnard

Submerged in the mainstream? A case study of an immigrant learner in a New Zealand primary classroom

Immigrant children from diverse language backgrounds face not only linguistic challenges when enrolled in mainstream English-medium classrooms, but also difficulties adjusting to an unfamiliar learning community. The culture of primary school classrooms in New Zealand typically reflects conventions across three dimensions: interactional, instructional task performance and cognitive-academic development. All three dimensions are underpinned by the culturally specific discourse conventions involved in language socialisation. New learners may be helped by classmates or their teacher to understand and successfully use these conventions, but left on their own they may sink rather than swim. This is a case study of one Taiwanese 11-year old boy, ‘John’, who entered a New Zealand primary classroom midway through the school year. Johns basic conversational ability was sound, but he did not possess the interactive classroom skills needed to operate in the new culture of learning. Selected from a wider study of the classroom, transcript data from audio-recorded excerpts of Johns interactions over several months with his teacher and classmates are interpreted from perspectives derived from sociocultural and language socialisation theories. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the extent to which John constructed, or was constrained from constructing meaningful learning experiences, and suggestions for further research and reflection.

First-Year Undergraduate Students' Perceptions of Lecturer and Peer Feedback: A New Zealand Action Research Project.

Providing feedback on students’ written work is a key professional activity in tertiary education. Although there has been research into the effectiveness of lecturers’ feedback, there is a need for more studies comparing students’ perceptions with those of their teachers. This article discusses the design and implementation of an innovatory approach to both peer review and associated collaborative action research in an undergraduate writing course in a New Zealand university. Data were collected from extracts of students’ written reflective journals and a focus group of the teaching team. These data were subjected to grounded analysis to identify the extent to which the respective perceptions converged. The findings from both sources indicated that the students’ initial apprehensions about giving and receiving peer feedback changed, and their skills improved during the course. The article concludes by explaining how this project was framed as mutual scaffolding in a zone of proximal development.

Trainee Teachers’ Teaching Metaphors and Their Pedagogical Association

There has been increasing interest in exploring what language teachers believe about teaching (Borg 2006). Often these beliefs are expressed in terms of metaphors (Richards 1998; Woodward 1991). Richards (1996) asserts that teachers’ personal principles would reflect their teaching approach in which these principles guide the teachers’ instructional decisions. Teaching principles are commonly built upon teachers’ beliefs, educational input, training, and experience, which reflect the teachers’ roles and influence the instructional decisions and pedagogical practice. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in research about teaching and its association with teachers’ beliefs or vice versa. Nevertheless, there has been little recent research connecting the choice of metaphors and the teachers’ beliefs in relation to classroom practice. Hence, this chapter presents the findings of a study on teachers’ teaching metaphors and their pedagogical representations. The central focus of this chapter is on the teachers’ peripheral beliefs about teaching and the extent to which educational trends of teaching English language in the ESL classroom are established through such beliefs.