Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - Literature review Example

Education TESOL review Name: Institution: INTRODUCTION Education (TESOL), where the initials stand for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, is a field of specialization in education. Of course, the mention of the word education creates an image of two parties in a classroom setting i.e. teacher and learner. The teacher passes worthwhile knowledge and values to willing learners. Therefore, under education (TESOL) teaching of as a foreign language to speakers of other languages is involved. (Goodwin 2001) Education (TESOL), as a field of study, meets all the requirements or qualifications as an area of specialization. One of the qualifications is the ability to allow for limitless research work to be conducted in order to question existing knowledge and generate new ideas, testable theories and logical concepts. A number of researches have so far been conducted on this field to critique and come up with new knowledge relating to methods of teaching, learner evaluation, knowledge validity, usability and reliability and many more. I am going to focus my attention on two articles: The first article is written by Abdulhak Halim discussing how creative drama impacts the development of communication skills in a primary school located in Erzurum city in Turkey in the year 2008. The second article written by Cremin, Kathy, Louise, Emma and Roger discusses the relationship between drama and writting by taking certain moments for writting in 2006. The former, as from the title, explains a research process carried out in Turkey using 10 year-old-fourth-grade primary school pupils as experimental and control groups to determine whether teaching applying drama activities was more efficient than using the conventional class-based techniques. The latter was carried out by five researchers; Three primary school teachers doing their Masters and two lecturers.They purposed to understand the effect of process drama to children’s writing and characteristics of the children’s writing that is related to drama. From the past research work done on this field, several researchers have found that drama has a positive impact on learning language.For example, Dervishaj, in his article ‘Using Drama as a Creative Method for Foreign Language Acquisition’, says, ‘Through the activities done with my students, I have come to see that drama provides an interesting way for students to learn and appreciate language in meaningful, communicative contexts’. Liane Brouillette, 2012 also says that texts alone do not convey enough essentil elements of communication like facial expressions, intonations and postures as expressed in theater art classes. So far, even before moving to read the next part, one may have questions in mind like; Is it all dramatical activities that have a positive impact?what type of drama activities have positive effects on other skills like listening and reading?what other conditions are combined with use of drama to produce positive effects? How about improving the teachers’ creativity?And so many others. One researcher will use different methods of research, different sources of data collection or different cultural background from another researcher. Probably, there might be a simpler technique to follow in teaching to other speakers.This shows then that some more knowledge expounding on this research topic should be sought, of course, through further research. REVIEW OF ARTICLE 1 Adulhak Halim’s article on the effects of drama activities on comunication skills in elementary school children, is an exemplary education research article written legibly, in correct spelling and grammar, correct sentence structure and uses a reader-friendly vocabulary. It entails a research carried out using fourth-grade students from Erzurum city in Turkey in their 2006-2007 academic year as study group. Halim has presented her work following standard research article format including standard academic writing style (Havard) and at the same time avoiding much citations implying she entirely relied on her own data findings. The article is also introduced in a way that displays the author’s expertise as a researcher by sufficiently reviewing the works carried out by other researchers or their previous studies that are related to her research topic.She has cited the relevant statements by different authors that are in support of her point.An elaborate example of her review is; “Goodwin[7] states, Drama is a particularly effective tool for pronunciation teaching because various components of communicative competence (discourse intonation, pragmatic awareness, nonverbal communication) can be practiced in an integrated way”. Teaching a native language to a speaker of another language is one of the difficult tasks in education. Success of this task is determined by a number of factors including the age of the learners, method of instruction and internal factors like psychological state of the learner, learners mental retention, learners attitude towards the teacher and learning content and so many others. Although Halim has made assumptions on teachers creative abilities she has made it clear that the teacher should apply methodologies considering the students’ needs, interests and their learning levels.Using relevant citations, she has purposefully written with an aim of solving the problem of the native language learning difficulty. In the abstract, the research aims at determining whether English language instructional methods applying creative drama skills improve in speaking skills more effectively as compared to the old-fashioned applied instructional syllabus in elementary school students.I would encourage young article writers aiming to improve their writing skills to look at the way this article has stated the research purpose - in form of a research question. Since the research is based on measuring a learned behavior, there is need to apply a design which allows for comparison of initial and final behavior that is acquired after a certain treatment. Halima’s experimental design is the most appropriate choice for her work. This design involves: Measurement of two groups (the control and the experimental groups) is done before any treatment (pre-test), treatment is applied to one group(the experimental group) then measurement is again carried out on the two groups (post-test). The treatment being the application of drama activities to the conventional teacher-based courses in learning, the experimental group is treated while the control group follows the untreated usual method. Pre-testing was significant in that it is confirming that the two groups did not have a significant academic performance difference initially and to provide results for comparisons with the post-test results. Adequate time of fourteen weeks is allowed to produce the desired changes. Post-testing is finally done and comparisons made. Halim’s article has clearly and profoundly described her methodological decisions. She argues that many of the basic language speaking skills are improved at primary level with regard to ease of acquiring those skills and permanent retention, a reason why she deliberately chooses to use primary school students as her study group. However, following the demands of the experimental design used, there was no need for population or sampling selection. She adopts a random sampling technique to identify a working group and professionally dividing the group equally into two; the experimental group and the control group.The study group which consisted of sixty-five primary school students aged 10 years and in their fourth grade was divided into; control group which comprised of 20 girls and 13 boys, and experimental group which comprised of 20 girls and 12 boys. All these students were ethnic Turks. Halim adopts observation as a method of collecting data and observational tests as her primary source of data collection. I presume, that the level of the students allows them to give the utmost knowledge they have acquired for fourteen weeks in an observation test given by their teacher.The observation form is used by the researcher as an assessment test and a source of data.Halim moves ahead to show that the observation form that she used was valid and reliable by referring it to educational experts. Presenting it the form to the right group and at the right time, in my view, proofs its usability. I have the feeling that Halim has made the best choice of methodology for her research work. An integral part of a research work is the part of results interpretation and data analysis. The results obtained should rhyme with the stated purpose of study and the research methodology used so that appropriate conclusions are made at the end of the whole process. Halim’s article has well analyzed the data and explained her findings using tables and graphs. The findings from this experiment include: Results obtained from pre-testing and post-testing of control and experimental groups together with their subsequent Means and Standard Deviations; t-test results obtained from a t-test that was conducted before the experiment to determine whether there were differences in class performance between the two groups initially; t-test results calculating the range or the difference between the post-test performances for the control group and experimental group; t-test performance of the range between the two test results of the experimental group, all these are recorded on different tables. The development progression in oral communication abilities for the control group and the experimental group is recorded on a graph. The means and standard deviations (24.81 and 25.09) and (5.9290 and 5.6189) for pre-test results of the control group and experimental group respectively have an insignificant difference. This shows that there an insignificant difference in academic performance of the students from the two groups initially. A t-test result (p Read More