A Case study on how an experienced fulbright teacher of English helped her students to development communicative competence meanin making and cultural awareness in a tefl literature classroom while studying a novel at METU

Abstract

ABSTRACT Title: A case study on how an experienced Fulbright teacher of English helped her students to develop communicative corrpetence, making meaning and cultural awareness in a TEFL literature classroom at METU High School in Ankara, Turkey. Author: Azize Boşnak Thesis Chairperson: Ms. Bena Gul Peker Bilkent University MA TEFL program Thesis Committee: Dr. Teri S. Haas, Dr. Phyllis Lim Bilkent University MA TEFL Program The present study investigated how literature classes were conducted in a teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) classroom by a native-speaker teacher of English. This study was conducted at Middle East Technical University (METU) High School in Ankara, Turkey. The participants of the study were an American Fulbright teacher and her eighteen 9th grade students. It is a descriptive case study conducted in a naturalistic classroom setting. This study has four different data sources; classroom observations, students' art and written work, teacher's interviews and students' interviews. These different data sources provided methodological triangulation. Four different research questions were asked in this study. ' The first question investigated how the teacher' s classroom practices contributed the communicating ability of students. For the answer of this question, only the data from two class sessions were used. In these class sessions oral classroom interaction among the teacher and the students prevailed rather than the small group work, and therefore, these class sessions have verbatim transcriptions. First, the classroom behaviors were defined, and then, the frequency of the utterances in different classroom behaviors were counted. The results showed that the teacher did most of the class talk in the first analyzed class session. It was the class session in which the teacher taughtsone technical terras related to literature. In the other class session analyzed, the teacher encouraged the students to do the class talk mostly. The second question sought for how the teacher stimulated the students to do interpretation, and how she reacted to the students' different interpretations. The study revealed that in the analyzed class session, the teacher made some statements which referred to several parts of the novel. She led the students to interpret and evaluate the novel through revealing their ideas on the given statements. She gave positive feedback to students who offered interpretations, as long as they referred to textual evidence. The third research question concerned the activities conducted by the teacher to make the literature classes more conmuriicative. Therefore, a number of communicative activities held by the teacher were described. The fourth question investigated how the cultural issues encountered in the novel were negotiated in the classroom. The data showed that the teacher clarified some cultural issues in the story which the students had difficulty in understanding. She also gave cultural background knowledge. The findings of this study showed that the teacher's acceptance of the students' idiosyncratic views reflected in their interpretations and evaluations increased the students' responsiveness in the classroom to provide communication.