FIRST RESEARCH PROJECT - ERROR GRADING AND INVESTIGATION OF PERCEIVED DIFFICULTY

Reasons for carrying out the study

My experience of teaching in Hong Kong had given me the impression of a highly complicated language learning situation where the failure of a large number of students, some at ter­tiary level working solely in English, could not be explained from the point of view of the prevailing theories of second language acquisition. These theories neglected, I believed, to give sufficient weight to the special psychological, cultural and sociological conditions of the language learner in Hong Kong.  Much of the literature of second language acquisition appeared to be written from a ‘Western’ viewpoint where certain assumptions, not applicable to Hong Kong learners and their teachers, are constantly made.  For example, the work of Krash­en, perhaps the most influential TEFL theorist of recent times, seems to be written with the following a priori“ assumptions:

1) An equitable education system.

2) Education in all societies is accepted as having intrinsic value.

3) Students are naturally inquisitive and responsive.

Such assumptions may not be made in Hong Kong. The education system is essentially elitist and, in a number of ways, unfair (e.g. the stress on English ability and the over-importance of Form Five exam results). The Hong Kong population is generally illiberal, in Western terms (which is not to say that many Westerners share the same beliefs) in its attitude towards education, regarding it as a passport to money rather than a means of personal development (see Lau.S.K. and Kwan, S.C.

(1988), Morris (1983), Winter (1989)). Students are not encouraged or expected to be inquisitive or spontaneous as adaption rather than individuation is normally stressed both in Chinese culture generally and in its education processes in particular (Bond 1986). Anecdotal evidence of teacher failure supports the view that ‘Western’ teaching methods in their purest forms are known failures in Hong Kong without a long period of student habituation. The recent difficulties with the Expatriate Teachers Scheme in Hong Kong secondary schools was at least partly due to the inflexibility of teachers sent from the UK to teach in an ‘alien’ environment.

These assumptions are also shared, to some extent, by other ‘methods’ which still figure prominently in teachers’ minds: e.g. Communicative Language Teaching and Community Language Learning. The abandonment of specific ‘methods’ and  ‘approach­es’ in favour of eclecticism or focus on ‘context’ (e.g. Rich­ards 1991) does not undo the psychological/sociological/cultur­al nexus so pervasive in the Hong Kong language learning     situa­tion although an understanding of the ‘context’ is valuable for pointing the way forward.  The Richards approach seems to have an inbuilt academic passivity in it which stresses analysis rather than solutions. 

Even Gardner (1985), whose socio-educational model is more useful than many models for understanding the Hong Kong context, states:

“It is argued that any other subject, such as mathematics, science, or history, involves the development of knowledge or skills which are a part of the heritage of the student’s cultural community; a second language, on the other hand, is a salient characteristic of another culture.” (Gardner 1985:146)

In the English-medium schools of colonial Hong Kong, subjects are rarely viewed from a traditional Chinese viewpoint.  All subjects are alien to the language and culture of many students.

My approach

The general theoretical framework underlying this study has already been outlined in the preceding sections. In addition, my own personality is strongly influenced by the approach of Transactional Analysis which defines a problem, naively, as something which has a solution.  There are clearly  English language learning problems in Hong Kong but there has been very little investigation into:

1. What students identify as problems.

2. What teachers identify as problems.

and perhaps, most importantly,

3.Whether student and teacher perceptions are similar or dissimilar.

As I am strongly interested into what psychologists term ‘interaction’ in the classroom, I posed a fourth question:

4. How do students and teachers perceive each others’ difficulties?

Of course, such data are often naive, from an ill-informed and unqualified source (esp. students) who know nothing of the complexities of applied linguistics or psychology but their data has the advantage of being direct and relevant and suitable to a large extent for useful analysis leading to possible solutions.

I had the impression that too much research was non-dynamic, regarding students or teachers in isolation (a recently published Hong Kong research paper of Richards (1991) for example devotes itself to teacher characteristics alone).  It is a further conviction of mine that teaching and learning should be viewed as cooperative processes and whereas investigations of student and teacher perceptions, motivation, attitude, cognitive style etc. are undoubtedly valuable, a more dynamic assessment of student/teacher interaction is, I think, more valuable.

The idea of ‘difficulty in language learning’ is related to some earlier thinking of mine regarding ‘barriers’ and ‘optimi­zation’.  The hypothesis is very simple: that if ‘barriers’ to language learning, be they psychological, sociological, cultural or whatever, are removed or alleviated, the learning and teaching process can be optimized, that is made the best possible.   This approach is related to Tran’s  (1975) concept of language learning difficulty and to B.Spolsky’s (1989) idea of ‘conditions for language learning’ (see previous section).

In order to further see some elements of language learning difficulty expressed as real data, it was decided to investigate actual errors (as explained in the Introduction).

Design of the research project

General guidelines for conducting research in psychology and applied linguistics were obtained from Harris, P. (1986) and Hatch, E.M. and Farhady, H. (1982).

A number of secondary schools were contacted using a list of schools appearing in the local telephone directory.   Three schools eventually cooperated in every stage of the research: in all, 320 students of forms 3 to 5 (aged approx. 14-16) and 15 teachers participated at secondary level.  In addition, some staff from the English Dept. of H.K.U., many Baptist College classes, a class from a teacher training college and a small group of students from an ESF (English Schools Foundation) were used in a pilot/complementary study.

Sample sizewas therefore 320 students and 15 teachers.

An important point to be made here is the problem of access to schools.  Schools were not necessarily hostile to researchers nor to foreign researchers. Researchers simply put teachers under more stress. The burden of secondary school teachers is already immense  (long teaching hours, large classes, noisy environment, endless examinations and tests). Any increase of this burden was clearly unwelcome as school after school re­jected the invitation to participate in the research project.  Only when we contacted the ILE was it possible to find schools willing to participate in classroom observation  (Research Project II). “Cold” approaches were nearly always unsuccessful.

The English teaching staff of the schools were asked to draw up a list of eighteen typical errors made by students contained in sentences as context-free as possible. Two error-free sentences were added by me.  The list was then presented to students and teachers to correct, where appropriate, and then they were asked to grade according to three distinct response modes.  The response modes were based on the ego states of TA: a critical/ideal response corresponding to the Parent, the spontaneous response to the Child and the considered response to the Adult.  The sense of the multiple responses was to give students the opportunity to express any mixed feelings regarding the grading of any particular errors and to test a minor hypothesis: that there was a conflict in attitude towards errors (severe Parent grading and more lenient Child grading).  This hypothesis was based on my belief that English could be considered a ‘Parental’ language/subject in Hong Kong, associated with achievement, power, duty etc. (see Adams 1991, pp. 75-87).

This understanding of language ‘association’ approaches the reality of English in the minds of Hong Kong people more closely, I believe, than sociolinguistic analyses which emphasise ‘functions’, ‘diglossia’, ‘status’, ‘social identity’, ‘domains’ and so on.  The analyses of social psychologists which see language use in a multilingual community in terms of ‘salience’, ‘accommodation’ and so on lie closer to my approach but reveal only a part of what really happens in Hong Kong people’s heads when they use English. I view these analyses of English as patterns generated by the fundamental psychological association of English.  Such an association is not purely mental: posture, voice, emotional state, expression can all be seen to be affected by the use of English in most Hong Kong English speakers.  This is obviously a subject for further research. A useful concept does however arise from sociolinguistics to describe the Hong Kong situation of language use at one extreme“ in a description of Fasold (1984: 193): ‘diglossia without bilingualism ...In such a society, the governed group would acquiesce to the rule of the elite, but they would not consider themselves part of the same speech community.  They would not feel any particular need to learn the dominant group’s language, except the minimum required for interacting with them.’ Of course, the functions ascribed to English are constantly ‘leaking’ into Cantonese, in particular as representative democracy and localisation concomitant with 1997 take effect. In the Hong Kong case too, we might add: ‘...and for gaining an acceptable education.’ Again, such an analysis, derived from anthropology, is too group-oriented to fully see the reality of individual language use.  Gumperz’s idea of code-switching related to High and Low usage presents an idea which approaches my own but his discus­sion does not make use of an underlying psychological network of associations (incorporating domain, feeling, power association, prestige, compulsion, control, formality in the case of the term  ‘Parental’) as in my understanding of the use of English in Hong Kong. (See also Fasold 1984: 204-7 for various categories of language use which could all be understood under the one heading: Parental language use).

Respondents, teachers and students, were asked to grade the errors contained in the erroneous sentences on a scale ranging through very serious, serious, neutral, trivial, very trivial to no error (a type of semantic differential scale). This is a mentalist rather than a behaviourist approach, consistent with the prevailing trend of investigations of attitude. 

The ego state model provides a very useful model for investigating attitude and this is the first time, to my knowledge, that it has been employed in this way.

Explanation of the rationale behind the multiple responses was given by teachers after some instruction in the concept of ego states from me.

The final part of the research instrument was a set of  ‘open’ questions regarding language learning difficulty in general, language learning difficulty of the individual respondent  (for students and teachers and one group’s perceptions of the other group  ‘s difficulties) and a final question asking ‘ What are the difficulties of learning English in Hong Kong?’ (see appendix).

It was thus hoped to arrive at a personally perceived, a perceived comparative and a perceived general view of English language learning difficulty of a reasonably large and varied sample of the English language learning and teaching population in Hong Kong.

Results of the research project
 

The results of error grading from one Kowloon secondary school were so inaccurate as to be meaningless.  Moreover, the answers to the questionnaires were very sketchy. It was decided to discard this data. We were then left with two schools: one a famous school for boys in Kowloon (English medium) with an excellent academic record and a school for girls on Hong Kong island (Chinese medium) of below-average academic standing.

Although the error grading was incidental to the main point of the project, it did  - within its severe limitations of sample size and methodology - reveal one interesting, if tenuous, conclusion.  Teachers graded errors more severely than their students.  This might indicate an important difficulty in lan­guage learning for Hong Kong students. As our study wished to embrace a much wider area of student and teacher concerns, we did not pursue this initial finding. The second part of our questionnaire which we labelled “Supplementary Questions” constituted the main data of the research project. Our findings are summarised in what follows. 

SCHOOL A

The main   factors mentioned in the answers to supplementary questions by students and teachers together were:

Lack of opportunity to practice - 79

Grammar - 65

Vocabulary - 55

Mother Tongue - 48

Oral proficiency/difficulty - 42

Mother tongue/interference combined gave a score of 76.

The factors could be grouped together in three main areas:

Linguistic (factors Acc./Comm./Comp./E./Fl./G./I./Int./List.

MT./O./Orth./PP./Pr./Rd./V./W.) 386

Sociological/logistical (factors Env./Ex./Exm./MA/OW/Pts./Px./

Res./STR/System/Tincmp./TM.)  170

Psychological (B./F./H./Ht./Motiv./NI./R./S./STREL.) 79

Discussion of results

Although a single ‘sociological’ factor is identified most often, the factors called here ‘linguistic’ predominate over­ all.

‘Psychological’ and ‘sociological’ factors taken together do not exceed ‘linguistic’ factors but it can be seen that they are a considerable factor in the minds of the students.  (‘Psychological’ factors may have been higher in number if we had included MT, mother tongue as it is cited in such naïve statements as ‘We are Chinese’.)

Comparison of student and teacher perceptions

It is interesting to note that teachers do not identify ‘Grammar’ or ‘ Vocabulary’ as readily as students (even if we convert their small number of responses to a class size by multiplying by five or six).  Students and teachers identify ‘Lack of opportunity to practice’ to roughly the same degree.  ‘Shyness’, ‘Exposure to English’ and ‘Interference’ are emphasised as important areas of difficulty by teachers but not by students.

If teachers do not correlate in their conception of language learning difficulty with their students, students do not readily see the difficulties of teaching.  Many students did not answer question four or provided responses indicative of an inability to empathize.

Conclusion

Within the limits of this sample it may be concluded that:

·        Sociological/psychological factors figure prominently, but not predominantly, in students and teacher conception of language learning difficulty.

·        Teachers and students do not always have the same conception of what constitutes language learning difficulty. Students seem more concerned with basic language knowledge than their teachers.

The first conclusion supports our hypothesis that non-linguistic factors are important in the conception of LLD.

The second conclusion may explain the growing lack of accuracy from third to fifth form seen in the first parts of the questionnaire and support the conclusion of studies such as...which speak of a growing tolerance to error as the student advances in the Hong Kong education system.

The prominence of ‘Lack of Opportunities To Practice’ may be interpreted as ‘Not Taking Up Opportunities To Practice’ bearing in mind the actual opportunities available in Hong Kong (as outlined in the previous section) and may be evidence of Subgroup A behaviour in Giles and Byrne’s Intergroup Model (1982).

The main characteristic of such a group’s behaviour in language learning is the avoidance of informal language learning.  The psychological reality contained in ‘Lack of Opportunities to Practice’ may be culturally and sociologically conditioned so that the individual language learner cannot perceive any opportunities to practice the language. Such opportunities may interfere not only with laws such as intergroup boundaries but other rules such as how strangers can be approached for conversational practice, the status of English speakers (foreigners) in the society, the approach to learning (classroom based/open and holistic) and so on.

Gardner (1985) suggests that: ‘Students either opt in or out of informal contexts, and the extent to which they do would be expected to be influenced primarily by their degree of motivation and/or anxiety.’  The preponderance of ‘Lack of Opportunities to Practice’ may thus indicate low motivation in students combined with anxiety.  These factors may have a number of causes.

SCHOOL B

The main factors mentioned in the answers to the supplementary questions were:

Lack of opportunity to practice - 78

Expressing oneself - 68

Comprehension - 62

Grammar - 58

Vocabulary - 58

Mother tongue/interference combined gave a score of 85.

The factors could be grouped together in three main areas:

Linguistic (factors Acc./Comm./Comp./E./Fl./G./I./Int./List.

MT./O./Orth./PP./Pr./Rd./V./W.) 481

Sociological/logistical (factors Env./Ex./Exm./MA/OW/Pts./Px./
Res./STR/System/Tincmp./TM.) 179

Psychological (B./F./H./Ht./Motiv./NI./R./S./STREL.) 97

Discussion

As in the first case above, linguistic factors predominate but a ‘sociological’ factor is the most cited single factor.

The greater overall number of answers (122 more than the first case) is distributed to ‘linguistic’ factors.

Comparison of student and teacher perceptions

Teachers make entirely different assessments of language learning difficulty in the answers to the supplementary questions which are not simply ascribable to their greater maturity or learning.

The ‘learning environment’, ‘motivation’ and ‘exposure to English’ categories receive more mentions in proportion to the (small) sample of teacher responses than in student responses.  ‘Lack of opportunities to practice’ is not similarly identified or emphasised by teachers whereas ‘reluctance, unwillingness’ is given fair representation.

Limitations of the project

Fasold (1984) points out that ‘demonstrating validity in the case of cognitive and affective attitudes is nearly impossible (Fasold 1984: 153).  Some attempt was made in the design of the experiment to overcome this difficulty by allowing the respondents to deviate from their ‘cognitively-oriented’ (Adult) response but no validity of this response can be guaranteed in particular as what is considered ‘spontaneous’ (emanating from the Child in TA) by one person may be in fact an exercise of their criticising or judgmental faculty (Parent).  Only people who have undergone some degree of training in TA whereby ego states are clearly ‘decontaminated’, and thus delineated, could make valid cognitive/affective attitudes within a TA framework.

The objection could then be made that the respondents trained in TA made the responses expected of them due to TA training.

Studies have shown (see Fu and Pierson in Lord (ed.)(1987)) that when Hong Kong students are asked anything in English, they tend to give an ideal response (this is of course in accordance with the Parental hypothesis). The project would have been strengthened by being conducted in Cantonese.

Again, as students in Hong Kong often display strong over-adaptive behaviour, the truth of the answers is called into question: did the students merely adapt to the situation of the test and give what appeared to be plausible answers to fulfill the demands of the test, or perhaps more importantly, their teachers. The breadth of factors covered in the supplementary questions and the variety of examples give would suggest otherwise.

Nevertheless, with these strong reservations in mind, an attempt was made to get close to the psychological reality of attitude towards errors in English and thus, perhaps, attitude towards English in general.  Many respondents did take the opportunity to distinguish considered from critical or spontaneous responses.

The use of the multi-response grading with three replies was not generally accepted although the principle of one deviation from an initial response clearly was accepted.

Finally, in keeping with the skepticism we have expressed elsewhere in the thesis towards claims of general validity based on cross-sectional studies, care must be taken in extrap­olating longitudinal trends from the study we carried out.

CONCLUSION

The research project - although limited in scope - confirmed our hypotheses that attitude to error is complex and contradictory and that difficulty in English language learning is perceived as being strongly, but not mainly, rooted in the sociological and didactic situation of students. Psychological factors were also strongly perceived as constituents of difficulty.

We decided to pursue the three identified areas of perceived difficulty  - linguistic, sociological and psychological - more closely in the part two of the thesis. We decided that the areas of student and teacher perceptions of psychological difficulty might be profitably combined in a section devoted to educational psychology (and in particular to ‘Approaches to Study’ because so much work had been done recently in that area.)

The question of attitude to error was abandoned at this point as we believed the project had partly demonstrated that attitude to error was one of the manifestations of difficulty rather than one of its essential underlying areas. A fundamental distinction between the error as a symptom of Difficulty rather than Difficulty in itself was made earlier in the thesis. To pursue attitude to error would have continued an outdated approach to the problem of difficulty (a sort of error analysis) and would have worked against our holistic approach.

Part Two of the thesis (sections 6-10) examines and elucidates the three areas of difficulty and prepares for the second research project which asked the question: ‘What attempts, if any, are made by teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools to counter the complex difficulties in the learning of English?’ Underlying this question was the idea of the ‘intervention’, a common term in psychotherapies such as Transactional Analysis and also an increasingly common term in education, particularly in curriculum development. In the final section, some attempt is made to construct a theoretical model of classroom intervention for removing English language learning difficulty in Hong Kong.

The Conclusion (section 11) assesses our overall findings and makes recommendations for future research.