Teaching English in the Priy Classroom | Page 66

The questions I ask students aim at checking their understanding and, therefore, their answer is known to me in advance 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% respondents with no special training postgraduate students respondents with seminars only s ay lw a ly al su u m so e tim es re ra ly v ne er respondents with seminars, training courses and university courses Figure 30. Relationship between the special training of respondents and their use of display questions 3.1.1.3 A grading of the respondents’ practices using the Likert scale As a final method of analyzing evidence, the Likert scale was used in order to grade the communicativeness of the respondents’ practices, overall (see section 2.2.1). The results are shown in figure 31, on the next page. The first column of the table refers to the serial number of questionnaires, while the four middle columns show the kind of training respondents have received. The last column shows the score respondents have ach ieved, in an ascending order. As it is shown in the last column, there are 14 respondents (38%),who scored below 60 points, which was established as an average score, while four of them (11%) just reached that average. The rest 19 respondents (51%), scored from 61-73 points. This indicates a large percentage of respondents who follow traditional teaching practices, overall. What is equally interesting, however, which is not shown in the table, is that, even respondents who achieved scores higher than average, did that by behaving inconsistently, i.e. by responding in the same manner to both favourable and unfavourable statements, and this is the reason why none of them managed to score more than 73 points. Such an inconsistent behaviour was also apparent in the respondents’ answers to some theoretical questions of the questionnaire, already discussed. Karavas-Doukas (1996), investigating the secondary English teachers’ attitudes to the communicative approach, found a similar discrepancy between the teachers’ classroom practices and their expressed attitudes towards the communicative approach. According to Karavas-Doukas (ibid), such a discrepancy shows a lack of understanding of many principles of the communicative approach, and reveals that teachers are unable to see the practical implications of many of its 66