The Use of Reflection-for-Action in Planning English Language Lesson at Primary School

Abstract

Teaching English language is a challenging task for p rimary school teachers. Teachers need to plan their lesson to match all levels of students in one class as there is no streaming classes allowed. This study exp lored how reflection-for-action to be used by the English language teachers at primary schools in Northern state of Peninsular Malaysia in planning their teaching starting fro m choosing lesson objectives, planning the activities and preparing the materials. Hence, this study also gathered another relevance data on principles, benefits, changes and stages of reflection which led the teachers to use reflection-before-action in teaching English language. There were six part icipants involved in this study, three of them were male. The part icipants were experienced teachers who teach English language at primary schools with more than eighteen years teaching experience. This study used semi-structured interviews to co llect the data. The researchers used thematic analysis to analyze the data. The findings revealed that reflection-fo r-action was very helpful to help the teachers to plan a meaningful lesson, to improve their teaching and to maximize their students' learning and knowledge of the target language. After applying reflection-for-action, the English language teachers managed to plan specific teaching activit ies to deliver specific skills in English language classroom to suit their teaching and learn ing contexts. Therefore, the four main themes found in this study contribute a recommendation for the teachers to learn and to use reflection-for-action dynamically to plan a meaningful lesson for mult iple intelligence students in the classroom. Hence, the findings also found that teachers need to apply theory in practice to plan and reason their lesson plan arrangements to fulfil the nature of teaching and learning process which needs them to attain the skills, objectives, knowledge, experiences, subject to be taught and the materials to be learned in the current teaching and learning context.

The use of reflective practice towards achieving effective English language teaching at primary schools

“…In relation to the first aspect of the research, the results portrayed that the teachers applied reflective practice to adjust and make changes to plan the lesson, during teaching and after teaching to reframe their teaching for future lesson [9,36,45]. Similar to Sua, et al [17] as well as Lee [36], the teachers in this study claimed that reflective activities support them to be more progressive and enable them to increase their teaching quality [2][3][4][5] but, the findings showed that, rather than practicing reflective practice on their own, the teachers need ample support from the school administration to improve their practices in schools [17].…”

“…The support and collaborative reflective activities [23] will motivate the teachers in implementing reflective activities in their teaching and learning process which could ease the teachers' stress in providing effective teaching [5,43] to increase students' learning performance and to fulfil the pedagogical, content and context demands [5,14] based on their own pace and significant to the context as suggested by Jejo and Haji [24]. It is because well motivated teachers play their role meaningfully to convey their enthusiasm to their students [4,31,45].…”

“…Moving on to the second part of the research, the participants focused on five elements to make changes in their teaching. The quality of instruction, appropriateness level of instructions, incentive and time as suggested by Slavin [17,18] were highlighted as the needed elements to help them to achieve effective teaching, but the teachers claimed that teachers need to focus on their teaching performance and students' performance [10], teachers' motivation [31] and classroom management [19,25,29,35] to guide them to be more reflective, creative and to think critically to find relevancy in planning and choosing the materials [33,45] as well as effective approaches [30,34] to deliver their instructions successfully [10,[46][47][48].…”

“…The data analysis on the second research question revealed that the English language teachers reflected based on their students' feedbacks, students' achievement, self-reflection and their own observation. Five themes were derived from this study based on Model of Effective Instruction by Slavin [45,46]. They are teaching performance, students' performance, motivation, time management, and classroom management.…”

Proceedings of the VII International Workshop on Professional Retraining and Life-Long Learning using ICT: Person-oriented Approach (3L-Person 2022). Virtual Event, Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, October 25, 2022

“…Improving the effectiveness of English lessons in primary school, by strengthening the informational, communicative and emotional saturation of the educational process, is an urgent need of leading modern methodists (Flynn [82], Goh and Fang [83], Hashim and Yusoff [84], Järvinen and Twyford [85], Niyazova and Muratova [86], Pokorna [87], Reid [88], Xu et al [89]).…”