TAI #12 Inquiry to my Teaching

Plan and conduct detailed inquiry into specific aspects of your current teaching that are relevant to the hypotheses you identified in the literature.

I decided to start off this inquiry into my current teaching by doing a self-observation on whether what I do in my current teaching relate to the writing difficulties my learners perceived and identified. To do that I need to use the qualitative information - a form of student voice - which I have collected from the 'Perception Toward English Writing Survey'. In this survey, my inquiry learners identified the difficulties they have when learning to write in English. Hopefully, I would be able to identify some formative information about strengths in my current teaching or areas for development. The areas I need to develop should be used as baseline information at the end of the year to provide evidence of shifts in my teaching.

With this self-observation, I am hopeful as well that I would be able to identify aspects of my teaching which are relevant to hypotheses that I identified in literature. These hypotheses are:

• If I know my learners’ difficulties in writing from their own perspectives and address them in my teaching, they will learn more about writing and increase their proficiency. 

• If I know my learners’ cognitive/linguistic, psychological/emotional, or social/cultural difficulties in writing and address them in my teaching, they will learn more about writing and increase their proficiency.

Another tool I would use in this inquiry is to do another self-observation on whether some aspects of my current teaching are relevant to the other hypotheses which I identified in the literature. Again these formative information should be able to identify strengths or areas to develop in my teaching. These hypotheses are:

• If I target my teaching of writing on particular genre-types required and desired by the academic department and use explicit genre-based pedagogy, my learners will acquire the related skills and increase their proficiency.

• If I use explicit scaffolding approach in teaching writing to my learners, they will acquire writing skills better when learning related specific skills through scaffolded steps.

• If I use the the Toulmin Model in teaching argumentative essay, learners will be able to increase their proficiency in this writing genre.

• If I use corrective feedback to help learners identify how to improve their writing, then learners will know areas for improvement thus increasing their proficiency.

With this plan to inquire into my current teaching, I am hoping that I would identify strengths to be reinforced for effective learning of my learners. More importantly, I look forward to identify areas for development which should help me shift my teaching in directions that would improve in my learners' learning of writing.