Professional Reading
Wrestling with Research: helping ESOL students with the research demands of NCEA level 1
The outline of a CLESOL workshop presented by Jenni Bedford, Juliet Fry,
Margaret Kitchen and Jung Hee Lee.
Why look at research?
Research, and the research process, has a high profile
in achievement and unit standards for NCEA Level 1.
Nineteen different subjects have standards that assess research skills at
this level and students could be working on five pieces of
research for NCEA. Our focus being on helping ESOL students cope
in the mainstream, we decided to look more closely at whether these
19 subjects had shared understandings of the research process and of
terminology that would enable our students to cope. The standards can be
accessed on the
NZQA site.
The activities are located in the subject communities on
Te Kete Ipurangi.
In NCEA, every subject has some standards that are internally assessed. Research
is one type of student work that should be internally assessed because of the
nature of the activity. In the past, students were asked to describe research
in an external exam, (for example, in the School Certificate English exam).
Some other externally assessed subjects did not cover research at all. Now that
all subjects have internal assessment components, the following questions arise:
- What is research?
- How skilled are our students at carrying out research?
- Are the research processes the same in different subjects?
- What are the implications for ESOL students?
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What is research?
Research in the school context is generally described as a process
of gathering information in order to find the answer to a question. This
process has been structured into a series of steps.
Gwen Gawith's six stage Action Learning model is widely used in New Zealand
schools.
There are other models such as the
Bright Bird
allegory,
which illustrates Michael Eisenberg's
"Big Six"
steps.
For the purposes of the workshop, we used a model based on the work of these people and that of Liz Probert at Pakuranga College.
What does the research say about our students' research skills?
Research by Crooks and Flockton (1997) with year 8 students shows that New Zealand
students are not good at generating questions likely to produce a substantial
amount of really useful information. When students were asked to locate specific
information, they had less success with tasks that involved some ingenuity,
flexibility, or persistence on their part in finding appropriate search key
words or routes. The students did not perform well when they were asked to interpret
or summarise information. Many students scored poorly in selecting main points,
identifying and setting aside irrelevant information, and sequencing steps in
a process.
What are the differences in the research activities in different
subjects?
The differences are very real. In the standards there might be no mention of
research but some stages of the process are implied. For example, the title
of the home economics achievement standard 1.3 (Explore cultural influences
on food choices and eating patterns), implies some research, but the assessment
does not evaluate the activities of defining and locating information. In the
standards, students are assessed only on their ability to "describe" and "demonstrate".
Another example is music 1.6 (Demonstrate knowledge of musical works),
where "applying resources and research" is mentioned only in the Explanatory
Notes, not in the Achievement Criteria themselves. Other assessment activities,
such as visual arts 1.1, ask students to research but do not break down the
process in the standards.
Another difference is that some types of research activities require the use
of primary sources and some use secondary sources, while others supply the resource
material itself. Agriculture and horticulture 1.1 (Carry out a practical
investigation with direction) requires students to gather data from their
own work, (for example, the germination of sweet pea seeds), and then to interpret
it. However, in the science subjects with the 1.2 achievement standard, students
use secondary sources, (with some reference to sources) to achieve with merit
or excellence. In maths, students are supplied with data.
There is a
significant variation in the terminology used at different
levels of achievement. The similar, but slightly different, terminology
will cause difficulty for ESOL students.
To confuse the students further, in some subjects (such as science), students
are required to use their own words in their report. In other subjects, this
is not the case.
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What are the implications for ESOL students?
New Zealand educated students will have used elements of the
research process throughout primary school. In comparison, many ESOL
students who have been educated outside New Zealand will not
have studied using the research process. For example, according to
Jung Hee Lee, Korean students associate research with university-level
education only.
Many ESOL students come from cultures where the authority of text is unquestionable.
In Hong Kong Chinese culture, for example, students are required to "submit"
to text as it is only the right of the master of a field to exercise critical
judgment. Many students from this cultural background will find it difficult
to follow the instruction given in the research standards to put information
gathered from texts into their own words. They will find it even more difficult
to evaluate or to take a critical view of texts. In her article Learning
Language and Critical Literacy: Adolescent ESL Students (2001) Jennifer
Alford, describes an education system that requires and rewards memorisation
and reproduction of culturally and historically valued texts and thought. To
effectively sift content, form links and challenge assumptions from a variety
of texts requires advanced language skills and acculturation.
All research tasks assume prior knowledge of the research process. Some of
the research tasks, or the activities that the teachers might choose, have a
cultural bias. For science 1.2, students may be asked to investigate the wine-making
process; or in biology 1.2, the cheese-making process. Wine and cheese are outside
the experience of many ESOL students.
Another difficulty is the language of the assessment activities and standards.
Often quite important instruction words have multiple meanings – a typical
example is "present a report". Another stumbling block for ESOL students is
that different words are used to describe similar processes across different
subject areas. For example, students are asked to:
- analyse/synthesise/interpret/process data
- give/offer/make/form solutions
- locate/collect/gather/access information
- draw/make/form conclusions
It would be frustrating and time consuming for ESOL students to figure out
all such expressions using a dictionary. If students do not understand that
"draw conclusions" might be similar to "analyse", and that both tasks require
the students' own thinking, they have little chance of achieving with excellence.
If they did not understand the process of collecting and processing information
in science, they would probably have similar problems in economics, and similarly
under-achieve in several assessment activities across their range of subjects.
There is a very high vocabulary load in all the research achievement
standards (greater at level 1 than level 2). Words such
as "succinct", "enhance", "enable" and "integrate" are used.
Students are asked to "undertake" a task and to "inform" an analysis. If
ESOL students do not get a catch-up on the language and processes of
research, they may find
themselves missing several similar opportunities for gaining credits towards
NCEA.
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What can be done?
- Use the different world-views of your students to a positive
advantage. For example, ESOL students can help to challenge the dominant
assumptions made by western text that New Zealand students often readily
accept.
- Use texts and topics that represent a range of cultural and
language backgrounds.
- Develop standardisation and simplification of instructional
language used across subject areas, for example, questions could
be asked instead of posed or formulated.
- Foster strong relationships between the ESOL
department and other departments within the school in order to develop a
planned approach to dealing with research.
- Teach the metalanguage of critical investigation. Scaffold the
processes.
- Write a glossary of terms used in the standard. Some achievement
standards are more user-friendly than others.
- Ensure that students understand instructions and terminology used in the
standards. Strategies such as structured overviews, clines,
word map and matching
word/meaning cards are useful tools for introducing and reinforcing terms
used.
- Develop shared understandings about the research process across departments,
such as in the following case study from Pakuranga College.
Case Study: Pakuranga College's Shared
Understandings about Research
The Context/Needs Analysis
Liz Probert, the teacher librarian, saw the need to provide shared understandings
amongst staff and students about information literacy and the research process.
She wanted to develop a framework for students to use when carrying out research
– a scaffold or a guide that students could use so that they wouldn't get
lost.
The Initiative
In 2001 she floated the idea of a "Common Methods Folder" at a Curriculum Committee
meeting. The idea was endorsed, so she then took the idea to the HOD meeting.
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Planning/Implementation
Liz made up a draft folder using her own ideas developed over time working
with teachers and students doing research. Included in the folder were:
- an outline of the six stages of research;
- detail about each stage, including, fat and skinny questions, dot-jot note-taking,
appropriate genre, referencing, and presentation methods such as reports,
essays, PowerPoint presentations and seminars;
- templates; and
- common terminology to use.
The folder was circulated around all HODs who wrote their comments on the
front. Liz re-worked the folder in the light of feedback, and showed the revised
templates at another HOD meeting.
Implementation
The HODs used the templates at their own departmental meetings. Liz helped
the departments implement the shared understandings.
Future Directions
Liz encourages all staff to do the InfoLink
course, (B15.32). This is a cross-curricular information literacy course
from Auckland College of Education that teaches work through one of their classes.
It is 8 – 10 weeks long, and is available online or as a multi-delivery
course. A version for teachers at secondary level is currently being developed.
Teachers work through the information process with a year 9 or 10 class and
the course takes 7 weeks to complete. Ideally a group of staff (including representatives
from most subject areas in a school) would take the course, delivered online
and with face-to-face sessions at the school. These teachers would then be in
a good position to plan the integration and practice of information literacy
across the curriculum. They would be in a particularly strong position to deal
with issues concerning research and NCEA achievement standards.
Reference List
Alford, J. (2001, November). Learning Language and Critical Literacy: Adolescent
ESL Students.
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 45 (3), pp 238
– 242.
Crooks, T. & Flockton, L. (1998). Information Skills : Assessment Results
NEMP National Education Monitoring Report 7. New Zealand: Ministry of
Education.
Gawith, G. (1988). Action learning: Student guide to research and information
skills. Auckland, N.Z. : Longman Paul.
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