This chapter pulls together the three phases of this project, and summarizes my reflections on teacher/student perceptions of writing and the challenges that both groups articulated during my fieldwork at ELI. I also consider the contribution of the study to research in the field of teaching and learning writing in English and implications for Saudi higher education system specifically to the preparatory program in KAU. This chapter also includes a discussion of limitations and challenges of the study, and finally some suggestions for further research.
7.2 Reflections on conducting action research
In this section, I discuss my role as a teacher researcher during the intervention phase. Though I had planned to try out different teaching approaches …show more content…
The second is that there was already much stress on form in their writing classes and students were conscious of making grammatical mistakes that I wanted to shift their attention to simply write with no fear or anxiety on producing correct sentences. However, the students asked me several times to provide them with a grammar lesson on sentence structure, because they did not know how to compose sentences, and so to meet their needs, I did. Even though they overly produced the same simple sentence structure in class, it nevertheless broke down the barrier that kept them from writing. I often had to use Arabic in class when they struggled to understand what I was saying. Even though using Arabic in ELI classes is frowned upon, but since I was on leave for study, I did use Arabic when I needed. In hindsight, I probably could have used Arabic more to save time, but this was my habit as a teacher in terms of only talking in English in class that it was hard for me to break from. The differences between my role and the role of the other teachers observed is that where I had the freedom to teach what I wanted (cf. Chapter 5, Sections 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.3 and 5.4.4), the teachers in ELI, on the other hand, had a set curriculum to finish. My priority lay in that the students were learning. This was my priority and often came before my aims for my research. Learning revolved around the student and therefore the student was the focus, whereas in other classes, it was teacher-centered and the decisions and the students were not involved in any decision
7.2 Reflections on conducting action research
In this section, I discuss my role as a teacher researcher during the intervention phase. Though I had planned to try out different teaching approaches …show more content…
The second is that there was already much stress on form in their writing classes and students were conscious of making grammatical mistakes that I wanted to shift their attention to simply write with no fear or anxiety on producing correct sentences. However, the students asked me several times to provide them with a grammar lesson on sentence structure, because they did not know how to compose sentences, and so to meet their needs, I did. Even though they overly produced the same simple sentence structure in class, it nevertheless broke down the barrier that kept them from writing. I often had to use Arabic in class when they struggled to understand what I was saying. Even though using Arabic in ELI classes is frowned upon, but since I was on leave for study, I did use Arabic when I needed. In hindsight, I probably could have used Arabic more to save time, but this was my habit as a teacher in terms of only talking in English in class that it was hard for me to break from. The differences between my role and the role of the other teachers observed is that where I had the freedom to teach what I wanted (cf. Chapter 5, Sections 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.3 and 5.4.4), the teachers in ELI, on the other hand, had a set curriculum to finish. My priority lay in that the students were learning. This was my priority and often came before my aims for my research. Learning revolved around the student and therefore the student was the focus, whereas in other classes, it was teacher-centered and the decisions and the students were not involved in any decision