A study on an english teaching method: —Based on a Comparative Study on the Effect of Recitation and ‘Questions and Answers’—

Abstract

The aim of this experiment was to investigate conditions to heighten students' ability of speaking, writing and summarizing in English, and the following experiment was made. We compared the control group (C-group), where students were taught English in ordinary 50 minute periods with the first experimental group (EI-group) where thy were taught through questions and answers in English in the last ten minutes after ordinary 40-minute periods; and with the second experimental group (EII-group) where thy were made to recite and write correctly during the last ten minutes. In order to know the learning effect of the above-mentioned three groups, the following measures were used. In putting English into Japanese and vice versa, an ordinary subjective marking method was used. In the summarization of the material, Komachiya's (1974) following measures were adopted: i) useful communication unit score, ii)useless communication unit score, both based on the evalution of the test material by ten teachers of English, iii) summarization judgement, a measure based on the interaction between useful and useless communication units, and iv) the number of communication units. Three matched groups of 33 first-year senior high school students were trained and tested as follows. In the pre-test, all subjects were given the first half of O. Henry's short story, and in the post-test its second half, and were asked to read and answer the following three questions within 50 minutes: 1) Putting English into Japanese, 2) Putting Japanese into English and 3) summarizing in English. The pretest was carried out before the training period, and the post-test after the period. In the training period, the subjects of the three groups were given the following instructions for understanding the teaching material 1) by listening to the tape recorded by a native speaker, 2) by reading the material and 3) by learning new words, important sentences and the way to put English into Japanese. With these procedures, C-group had done with their tasks. For EI-group the instructor told them to answer and ask some questions in English concerning some important sentences necessary to better understand the teaching material; they used the last ten minutes: for EII-group they were told to recite and write correctly the same sentences as the students of EI-group during the last ten minutes. These training procedures were repeated four times. The differences of the results of the posttest from those of the pre-test were little in putting English into Japanese and vice versa for all three groups. But in summarizing, EI-group was the best in general, and then Ell-group and C-group. As a whole these results coincided with those of Komachiya's (1974). It could be said that the subjects would understand and summarize the material better by questions and answers in English. The author expected that EII-group would be best and then EI-group and C-group in understanding the material, but the results of this experiment showed the contrary. It is supposed that the expectation was not supported mainly because of the shortage of time for learning. The greatest merit of this experiment is that it was made in the form of ordinary lessons. © 1981, The Japanese Association of Educational Psychology. All rights reserved.