Critique of the “Teachers’ and Learners’ Reactions to a Task-based EFL in Thailand Course”
1 Introduction
This article deals with an investigation into reactions between teachers and students of task-based class at Chang Mai University in Thailand. During the period of twelve months, the authors did succeed in reaching some conclusions in the process of collecting participants, analyzing data. Although some reservations did exist at the very beginning of the class,both teachers and learners hoped that they could get used to it through some more activities and instructions.
2 researching perspectives in detail
In my critique, I am going to comment on it from several different perspectives, such as, the purpose of the study, the characteristics of participants, the research techniques of data collection, the methods of data analysis, and various summaries of findings. All the above ev
oked the authors a great interest in launching a study on reactions to the online manage‘‘teachers’ and learners’ reactions of task-based class’’.
2.1 background of English learning and teaching in primary or secondary schools
According to the investigation, all the subjects including thirteen teachers and thirty five students were from English department of CMU. The participants whom picked up had something in common, but still showed a slight difference in their English levels, ages, and backgrounds of English learning. The majority of the students were native in Thailand for learning English from primary or secondary schools, but among them, two students had their high school education in the USA for one year, and three students had the experience of staying in the English-dominant countries around two to three months. The criteria of the students were that they must pass the national examination before entering in English department and also need to reach the intermediate English level. For the teacher-participants, the similarity was that they all won master’s degrees or bachelor’s degrees of TESOL or some other fields related to it, meanwhile, the difference is that their teaching experience varied from nearly two years to fifteen years or so.
2.2 data collections and analysis for the investigation
After selecting the participants, the next step is to collect the data. According to Wellington (2000a:17), ‘most approaches in educational investigation include both qualitative and quantitative data’. Authors of this article did exploit both these two methods which were considered the effective way for data collection. As Gibbs (2002a:2) illustrated that ‘Qualitative data analysis is usually interactive, recursive, and active’, which is a method of organizing or administrating the data(p.4). ‘Qualitative data are characterized by meaningfulness and the major perspective is translation and the reliability and validity of such translation is a magnificent concern of analysis’ (p.14). 3 classroom observations and commentsIn this research, teacher-participants were expected to give comments on the materials related to the observation distributed by their pilots before the beginning of class. The major purpose of the observation was to let the teacher-participants get a whole idea of what the other pilots were going to teach, and then they could prepare sufficiently based on the materials. After the observation, the teacher-participants could really gain the experience from their pilots’ teaching. Secondly, they exploited two evaluation methods, sa
y, the ‘course evaluation’ and the ‘task evaluation’, which are also the most two significant approaches for collecting data. Genesee, F(1996) stated that evaluation of the class was completely necessary for education because information won from evaluation would assist teachers in making decisions to teach effectively.
3.1 evaluate the classroom observation
As we can see from the article, twelve open-ended questions about different aspects of the class were required to evaluate the class observation, which consisted of teaching methods, references, and activities. The other two ‘scalar questions’ were demanded to answer in order to see whether the class for learning skills and strategy was practical. Students accomplished the evaluation in class at the final day of the term, which meant that they used the whole semester time to evaluate the task-based class. When it comes to the task evaluation, students were still asked to complete their evaluation form at the final task. The questions were composed of two parts, namely,‘open- ended questions, and multiple questions’.As Genesee, F(1996) suggested that evaluation completed by students
would provide the teachers’ with the valuable feedback.‘Interviewers can give help if there is a problem’ (author and year unknown). In the study, the teachers who observed Wanpen’ classes should present comments about syllabus and materials in writing, and later on they would have a further discussion based on both task evaluation and class evaluation, as well as the observation.
3.2 analyze the classroom observation
After data collection, we should pay much attention to analysis, as Wellington (2000b:134) claims that ‘data analysis is an integral section of the whole investigation process.’ We can see obviously that the authors utilized the two major analysis methods, which were qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. However, to a large extent, the length of writing about qualitative analysis overweighed that of quantitative one. For example, observation, course evaluation, and task evaluation belong to qualitative analysis approach. In this research, they ‘adopted cyclic, recursive method’ for analyzing the data, which was a preferable way to refine the reflection. As Gibbs (2002 b: 2) demonstrated that quantitative analysis were usually interactive, recursive and active. T

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