In this qualitative study, the phenomenon of large class teaching in South African secondary schools is investigated. It was concluded that since large classes will be a feature of the South African teaching context for many years to come due to financial constraints, educators and educational planners should explore and implement coping strategies instead of becoming demoralised by the situation. The study provides several instructional guidelines for implementation in large classes in the South African context. The focus of these guidelines is on large class management and effective teaching in large classes. The possibilities of strategies such as whole group instruction, cooperative learning, peer teaching, groupwork and the proper organisation of classroom space are investigated. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Didactics)

Text in Afrikaans / In hierdie verhandeling is bepaal dat kommunikasie 'n beduidende rol in klaskamerbestuur binne technikonverband vervul. Aan die hand van 'n driepoot-klaskamerbestuursmodel is aangetoon dat 'n aangename klasatmosfeer 'n voorvereiste vir effektiewe beroeps- of loopbaangerigte onderwys is. In die model is daar hoofsaaklik op die rol van kommunikasie in die fisiese, psigologiese en sosiale bestuursareas gekonsentreer. Ten opsigte van die fisiese bestuursarea is die fisiese klasruimte, sowel as die benutting en bestuur daarvan ter bevordering van 'n gunstige leerklimaat, belig. In die psigologiese bestuursarea is veral gefokus op die bevrediging van die student se behoeftes, selfbeeld en 'n dosent se andragogiese kommunikatiewe handelinge. Met betrekking tot die sosiale bestuursarea is bevind dat kommunikatiewe handelinge wat verhoudingstigting bevorder, ook bevorderlik is vir 'n aangename klasatmosfeer. In die hele proses is kommunikasie die bindende kontinue bestuursfunksie, as't ware die vuur wat die hele driepoot-klaskamerbestuursmodel aan die gang sit en in stand hou. / In this dissertation it has been determined that communication fulfils a significant role in classroom management at technikons. A tripod classroom management model has been employed to indicate that a pleasant classroom atmosphere is a prerequisite for effective vocational or career orientated teaching. Particular emphasis has been placed on the role of communication in the physical, psychological and social management areas. The physical management area refers to the physical classroom space, its utilization and management in creating a favourable climate for learning. In the psychological management area attention is focused on meeting the student's needs, his self-image and the teacher's andragogical communicative actions. The communicative actions found in the social management area promote relationships which are also conducive to a favourable classroom climate. In this whole process communication is the binding management activity which ignites the flame and maintains the impetus in the management function of the tripod classroom management model. / Educational Leadership and Management / M. Ed. (Onderwysbestuur)

In this essay I have examined the inclusion in the school, specifically in the classroom and leisure time center. Inclusion means briefly that all students, regardless of their capability for school work, should be part of the planned teaching, and also be able to assimilate the knowledge that is intended to be conveyed. During my years as an educator in classroom and after-school center I've seen how this inclusion is very complicated to implement and sometimes impracticable. I have investigated how inclusion works and how it does not work in both the classroom and in the leisure time center. I have done this by examining the inclusion from three different perspectives: student´s, educator´s and school´s. I show and discuss how different inclusion can be perceived depending on which perspective you look from. I also describe how inclusion is shaped, both positively and negatively, by external factors, so-called framework factors. I discuss how these framework factors provide or do not provide educational opportunities and how they condition the educator´s practice. Opportunities that sometimes are taken advantage of and sometimes overlooked.

his thesis consists of an analysis of a classroom simulation using a Second Life (SL) experiment that aims to investigate the teaching impact on smartbots (virtual students) from trainee teacher avatars with respect to interaction, simulated behaviour, and observed teaching roles. The classroom-based SL experiments' motivation is to enable the trainee teacher to acquire the necessary skills and experience to manage a real classroom environment through simulations of a real classroom. This type of training, which is almost a replica of the real-world experience, gives the trainee teacher enough confidence to become an expert teacher. In this classroom simulation, six trainee teachers evaluated the SL teaching experience by survey using qualitative and quantitative methods that measured interaction, simulated behaviour, and safety. Additionally, six observers evaluated trainee teachers' performance according to a set of teaching roles and roleplay approaches. The experiment scenario was set up between smartbots, trainee teacher avatars, and observer avatars in the virtual classroom, where smartbots are intelligent agents managing SL bots, and where groups are similar to one another but are under programming control.

Although there have been a large number of studies on the use of L1 and L2, there seem to be few on L1 use in Chinese university EFL classrooms, especially investigating the language use of those who teach English to students at different proficiency levels or teach different types of English courses. This thesis aims to analyze four Chinese EFL teachers’ actual use of L1 and L2, to understand their attitudes and beliefs regarding this issue, and their own perceptions of and reasons for their language use, and to explore possible influencing factors. The reading-and-writing lessons and the listening-and-speaking lessons of these four teachers, who were teaching non-English major students at four different levels, were observed and recorded. All the observed lessons were subjected to quantitative analysis with the aim of providing a clear picture of the distribution of their L1 and L2 use. Some episodes selected from these lessons were subjected to further detailed analysis, in order to provide an account of the circumstances, functions, and grammatical patterns of their language use, as well as their language use across different frames of classroom discourse. The teachers were interviewed subsequently about their general beliefs on the use of L1 in L2 teaching and learning. Separately, in a stimulated recall interview, they were invited to provide comments specifically on their language use in the selected episodes that were replayed to them. The quantitative findings show that the amount of the teachers’ L1 use was not necessarily closely related to their students’ English proficiency levels, although the teacher of the students at the lowest level used the highest amount of Chinese in her lessons. However, a noteworthy finding was that all four teachers used more Chinese in the reading-and-writing lessons than in the listening-and-speaking lessons, although with substantial individual variation. The qualitative analysis of classroom data indicates that these teachers switched often at unit boundaries, but rarely at clause boundaries. They also switched frequently within units, especially within noun phrases, and the ‘Chinese determiner + English noun’ pattern is the main one they had in common. Furthermore, the teachers used Chinese as the matrix language in their mixed utterances in most cases, and these mixed utterances nearly always fitted Myers-Scotton’s Morpheme Order principle and System Morpheme principle. The teachers were also found to use Chinese in a variety of circumstances, such as talking about lesson plans or examinations, dealing with exercises, analyzing text, teaching vocabulary, checking the students’ comprehension or retention, giving the students advice on learning, telling anecdotes and assigning homework. The functions for which they used Chinese could be divided into four main categories: facilitating developing lesson content; supporting students and carrying out classroom management; delivering information related to teaching agenda or examinations; and facilitating communication beyond language learning and teaching. The most frequent function common to all four teachers was translation. Furthermore, the study used four different ‘frames’ to analyze classroom discourse, and found that the teachers used the L1 with varying frequency across these frames. Moreover, although all four teachers believed that using the L1 was beneficial to L2 learning, their attitudes towards the medium of instruction were different. While two advocated using the L1, the other two expressed a preference for speaking English-only and perceived their L1 use as a compromise or an expedient. The teachers reported many reasons for their L1 use. The factors that affected their language use consisted of both immediate classroom factors, such as functions of utterances, students’ language use, students’ perceived mood, students’ background knowledge, the difficulty of lesson content, time limitations, teachers’ awareness of their own L1 use, and teachers’ state of mind at a particular moment in a lesson, and relatively static factors, such as the university policy, students’ L2 abilities, teaching objectives, teachers’ beliefs regarding L1 use, and teachers’ L2 abilities. Through its detailed analysis of the teachers’ language use, as well as their relevant beliefs and decision-making, this thesis hopes to make a contribution to L2 teachers’ professional development and L2 teaching, especially in helping to establish a pedagogically principled approach to L1 and L2 use.

Traditionally, language policy (LP) has been conceptualised as a notion separate from that of practice. That is, language practices have usually been studied with a view to evaluate the extent to which a LP is (or is not) implemented (e.g. Martin, 2005; Johnson, 2009). Recently, however, Spolsky (2004, 2007, 2008a) has argued that policy and practice need not be seen as distinct and that, in fact, there is policy in language practices themselves (I use the term ‘practiced language policy’). Therefore, Spolsky’s claim represents a decisive development in the field of LP research. However, this proposal remains essentially programmatic since Spolsky does not indicate how practiced language policies can be investigated. The aim of this thesis is to address this methodological gap. The main claim of the thesis is that Conversation Analysis (CA) – a method specifically developed to describe conversational practices – can be used to investigate practiced language policies. In order to support this claim, a case study has been conducted on the language practices of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France. In the thesis, a broad view of CA is adopted, incorporating both sequential and categorisation analysis (Membership Categorisation Analysis). More specifically, I have used the conversation analytic approach to code-switching (as developed over the last few years by researchers such as Auer, 1984; Li Wei, 2002; Gafaranga, 2009; Bonacina and Gafaranga, 2010) and investigated a corpus of audio-recorded classroom interactions I collected in the above mentioned setting. Observation of these interactions revealed a number of “norms of interaction” (Hymes, 1972) the classroom participants orient to in order to go about the routine business of talking in an orderly fashion. For example, it was observed that each of the languages available can potentially be adopted as the “medium of classroom interaction” (Bonacina and Gafaranga, 2010) depending on who is doing being the language teacher. When no one is doing being the language teacher, it was observed, a key determinant of language choice is participants’ language preference. Finally, in the absence of any shared preferred language, French was adopted. The practiced language policy of this induction classroom consists of the set of such interactional norms. It is because CA can be used to discover and describe such interactional norms that this thesis claims it can be used to investigate practiced language policies in this induction classroom and in other settings as well. In summary, this thesis is primarily a contribution to the field of LP research. It starts from recent proposals in the field, especially by Spolsky (2004, 2007, 2008a), that there is policy in practices and shows how this programmatically formulated proposal can be implemented. More specifically the thesis shows that and how CA can be used to discover a practiced language policy. The research reported here has adopted a case study methodology, investigating language choice practices in a multilingual educational setting. It therefore contributes to the study of bilingual classroom talk, albeit indirectly. This is particularly the case as there has been very few, if any, studies of bilingual classroom talk which combine both sequential and categorisation analysis.

The purpose of this study was to identify team development activities which occurred in public elementary schools during the implementation year of the Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) and determine if there were any significant differences between highly effective and less effective teams. The sample under study consisted of 42 elementary schools which were implementing the Teacher Assistance Team model during the 1983-84 school year. A questionnaire survey instrument was used to obtain information from the schools regarding team development activities. School staff were asked to respond to eight general areas thought to impact upon the adoption of the Teacher Assistance Team model in the school. These areas were level of service delivered, effectiveness of service delivered, personnel training, team membership, scheduling of meetings, principals' support strategies, technical assistance needs, and teacher reactions to the team process. Statistical analysis revealed the high and low service teams did not differ significantly in school enrollment, personnel trained, scheduling of team meetings, or 26 of the 27 support strategies employed by building principals. However, the analysis indicated significant differences between the high and low service levels. The high service teams operated for a larger proportion of the months possible; served a larger proportion of the student enrollment; and considered more cases per month and per team than did the low service teams. Additionally, the high service teams attempted to resolve a larger proportion of team development problems and actually resolved more problems than the low service teams. Building principals among the high service teams demonstrated more of a commitment to the team process by personally selecting team members and requiring that teachers experiencing learning or behavior problems in the classroom refer to the team for assistance. The results of this study hold implications for teachers and school administrators. Recommendations were developed enabling state and local educational agency personnel and building principals to increase the effectiveness of Teacher Assistance teams during the first year of the team's operation in the school. Future research is directed to address three outcomes of the team process. These are: referral and cost effectiveness; classroom intervention; and teacher satisfaction.

This paper seeks to evaluate the effects of peer misbehavior in the classroom on student learning outcomes--namely, if there is any truth behind the old saying that “one bad apple ruins the bunch”. Using experimental data, I show that there is a strong initial relationship between the level of misbehavior in a given classroom and performance on a mathematics evaluation; however, the inclusion of lagged peer achievement in the model causes most of that relationship to be absorbed away, suggesting that the bulk of peer effects stem more from the academic performance of other students than from their behavior.

Historically, disciplines other than education have studied the culture of the classroom. Yet, the group phenomena of education has been ignored. The ways teachers manage groups and lesson activities appear to have important implications for the study of teaching and learning. However, there are no rules to follow. A decision-making base does not exist. Yet, the study of teacher and student behavior is dependent upon the setting within which that behavior occurs. An appropriate choice must be made for an objective method to provide an adequate level of description of the teaching/learning context of the classroom. That is the focus of this study. The subjects were nine classroom teachers, grades 1 or 2, from two separate school districts within a 50-mile radius of Tucson, Arizona. Six teachers served as the control group and three teachers served as the treatment group. Treatment consisted of orientation in the concept of activity structures, videotaping of language arts instruction, coding of such instruction by the researcher and stimulated recall of such instruction by the teacher in a feedback session with the researcher. Instrumentation consisted of a beliefs questionnaire, a teacher information form, a journal, and an interview all developed by the researcher. Instrumentation occurred with both groups, both pre- and posttreatment. Ethnographic techniques were used for both instrumentation and treatment.

Current research in expert/novice differences in problem solving suggests the need to investigate the domain specific knowledge of people with experience in problem solving in a particular field against the domain specific knowledge of those with less experience. Furthermore, research in teacher thinking makes important assumptions concerning the knowledge teachers of different experience levels have about students, but lacks complete support for those assumptions. This qualitative study addressed both of these issues. It investigated the differences in the knowledge of students and classrooms of twelve high school science teachers with three different levels of experience. Through analysis of the protocols of interviews with experienced, first year, and student teachers at key times during a semester, this study examined patterns of knowledge acquisition among the three groups. Analyses of the protocols revealed four major findings: Patterns and themes in the development of teachers' knowledge of students and classrooms, the role of observation and work in teachers' understanding of students, the role of teacher comprehension in teachers' knowledge of students and the teacher/student relationship. The discontinuity in development between more and less experienced teachers in this study had important implications for teacher education and research.