All but three of the 15 teachers used a whiteboard in the teaching that we observed. In most cases, it was the mainstay of their teaching. The second most frequently used teaching aid was either ‘butcher’s paper’ for groups and classes, or notepaper with 1:1 teaching. Eight of the teachers used some form of worksheet – some were copied out of commercially-produced workbooks and some were constructed by the teacher using local resource material such as newspaper articles. Other teaching resource material included dictionaries (3), TV/video (2), calculators, a grammar book and a car magazine (all 1). Interestingly, in contrast to comparable research in the US (Beder & Medina, 2001), only one teacher used a reading textbook.
Worksheets played a central role in some of the sessions we observed – especially with the less experienced teachers. They were used for a number of purposes: mainly for consolidation of skills already taught, but also for assessment. They also played a useful role in coping with larger groups by creating ‘space’ for the teacher to work with individual learners. Many of the worksheets were used in relation to unit standards. One teacher commented that she felt that they guaranteed a minimal standard of quality, but another teacher was critical of them because she felt that they did not lend themselves to providing content related to her students’ interests. As she said,
The three students I am working with this morning are interested in phlebotomy, horse massage and the Bible – imagine trying to get worksheets that covered those!14
Of the 15 teachers, only three were observed actually using computers in the teaching sessions. The first of these teachers was teaching a learner on a 1:1 basis to use the Internet – primarily how to locate information within web-pages. The teacher had a pre-designed worksheet (Internet Quiz) with a series of questions that the learner had to answer by accessing web-sites listed on the sheet. For example:
Following are a few questions. Type in the URL provided and the information will be somewhere in the site that opens.
What name was the New Zealand far north town of Russell originally known?
http://www.tapeka.com/russell.htmWhich is the longest bridge in the world?
http://www.geocities.com/Axiom43/bridges.html
Most of the teaching in this session involved the teacher guiding the learner around the technical aspects of using the computer (locating function buttons, how to type in the URLs, which in most cases came up with the first few keystrokes because previous learners had carried out the same exercise on that computer) and discussing personal links to the content (such as trips they had taken around New Zealand to sites mentioned in the quiz). On two occasions, the teacher suggested that the learner read some of the text, but these instructions were rather vague and quickly subsumed by discussion about more technical instructions or personal stories related to the web page contents.
14 Quotes from participants are reported verbatim, although um’s, err’s and repetitions have been deleted to improve fluency; T denotes the teacher and L denotes a learner. Additional learners and teachers are identified by numerals – e.g. T2 or L3. ‘I’ identifies the researchers as ‘Interviewer’