Inquiry-based teaching has started to find its way into Swedish classrooms and its quest for answers is believed to engage the students by activating them to discover new facts and discourses through the exploration of specific sources. It has foremost become a model to structure history and civics teaching, but international research shows that inquiry-based teaching, or FDU as it is called in Sweden, can also reinforce learning English as a foreign language, EFL. The purpose of my research is to investigate the possibility of implementing the FDU model as a teaching tool in a Swedish EFL classroom as well as student perception of the model. The research questions aim at investigating student perception of the model and whether there are any particular advantages and disadvantages with FDU. Through and action-based study, the FDU was implemented in an advanced EFL class consisting of 17 senior upper-secondary school students, and their perception was evaluated through a graded scale survey of 1-5, which also included three open-ended questions. Even though the survey revealed quite undistinguished results regarding the positive claims attached to FDU such as motivation, increase of attentiveness, alertness and learning reinforcement, most of the students found the model very helpful at providing them with a clear and comprehensible structure and description of the learning objectives. It was also a good opportunity to cooperate with peers in a varied manner. As an English teacher, I found the FDU very helpful for planning and constructing, as well as executing, my ideas. Even though some students reported disadvantages such as confusion due to the vast amount of information included in the FDU and the connection between the different parts of the final assignment, a clear majority said they would like to work with the model again. In conclusion, according to this study FDU shows potential as a structural and clarifying tool, both for the students as well as the teacher.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-100018 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Nordahl, Marie |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap (from 2013) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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