Abstract
ABSTRACT Classroom management has been generally recognized to be one solution to the issue of students’ differentiated English proficiency level that teachers encounter in their classroom. To find out to what extent this issue affected present English teachers in elementary schools, as well as the solutions they came up with, a two-phased study was carried out. The first step (Phase 1) involved conducting phone interviews with eight new English teachers from different elementary schools in Taipei city, to check whether their practical solutions in reality conformed to the methods and techniques suggested in related review of literature on the topic of solving children’s individual English proficiency difference in an effective way. The second step (Phase 2) involved conducting the field study at Jen-Ai Primary School and Xin-Sheng Elementary School in Taipei, with the observer sitting in the back of the classroom videotaping three English teachers in class from each school with the principal and the teachers’ permission. A questionnaire was designed before the field observation to supplement what was missed during the observation by getting teachers’ perspectives, as well as to allow for other strategies that teachers wanted to add in addition to what could be observed in the limited observation periods. This study aimed to examine two main research questions: 1. How do children’s individual proficiency difference issues weigh among the problems that English teachers of elementary schools confront, and how do the teachers deal with them (their classroom management strategies)? 2. Since classroom management is one way to address this problem, what are the groupings and activities that fit into an elementary English classroom setting, and how do they interact with each other, both in teachers’ consciousness and in the real classroom? The results showed that almost all the teachers in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 admitted that the issue of students’ differentiated English proficiency level was quite perplexing to the teaching and learning process in their classroom settings only to different extents. Teachers handled the problem in different ways, e.g., leveled teaching materials, student tutor strategy, heterogeneous grouping, and interactive activities. Generally speaking, analysis and comparison of the interview data and the observation field notes showed no apparent discrepancy between teachers’ concept and reality in Phase 2. This case study demonstrates the confounding existence of the issue of individual proficiency differences in many primary school English classes at present, while teachers provided quite a few useful classroom management strategies, effective groupings, and various activities for other instructors’ reference. Thus, the study set up a preliminary foundation for future research on English classroom management of multi-leveled classes.