Lilian Isperdon

Tishreen University

My Classroom Observations of the Factors Influencing My Own Classroom at the Macro, Host Institution, and Teacher's group level

Outline

1. Introduction

2. The influence of the host educational environment

1. Foreign Methodologies

2. Foreign culture and traditions

3. The influence of the local culture and the local teacher's groups on the classroom environment

1. The influence of the local culture:

2. The local teacher's groups on the classroom environment:

4. Reaching Conformity among all the overlapping cultures:

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction:

Throughout this paper I will talk about my own 5^th grade classroom when I was a teacher at Al-Sham Oasis Private School. The influence of our Syrian national culture largely affected the culture of the host educational environment intended to teach students English using foreign methodologies and foreign course books. The struggle between the two cultures ended by adhering to both of them and reaching a kind of conformity inside the classroom.

2. The influence of the host educational environment:

The influences of the host educational environment on the classroom culture can be classified under two types:

1. Foreign Methodologies:

Al-Sham Oasis private school uses the Houghton Mifflin course for learning English through reading stories, science, and Math. Houghton Mifflin courses follow the Cooperative Learning approach that tend to teach the American learners in their L1 to work in teams, provide each other with feedback, challenge reasoning and conclusions, and most importantly, teach and encourage one another, and make the classroom environment student-centered rather than teacher centered. Teachers, in this method, should be integrationist as they should follow "skill based, discovery-oriented, collaborative pedagogy" allowing "classroom practice" and "team-oriented" discussions (Holliday, Appropriate Methodology and Social Context 1994). Teachers of English in this school try to follow this method which is foreign to our country. They teach their students English knowing that it is only a foreign language here and use foreign methodologies which seem difficult and strange to most students.

Adhering to the host educational environment, I used to divide the class in groups and read some stories in English and students should participate in discussions based on the events happening within the story or predicting what it's going to happen next. They should be able to make associations on their own between words or phrases and their meaning, induce certain structures and study in groups to answer the written exercises on their workbooks. However, learning wasn't just as easy as it was supposed to be especially for new students coming to school every year. The new students had difficulty in integrating within the classroom discussions or reading and comprehending large amount of vocabulary used within the course which they thought they had to memorize based on their prior knowledge of the collectionist "didactic, content based" methodologies commonly used in Syria. They felt anxious about the exams and considered working in groups and discovery oriented tasks as trivial games and kept on asking me about the examination questions and the things they had to focus on inside the course books. They had difficulty in inducing grammar rules out of texts and understanding unfamiliar words through their contexts.

Mahrous and Ahmed in their article "A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Students’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Pedagogical Tools: The Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United States" talk about the pedagogy implemented in the Middle East within public institutions in particular. They suggest that it depends "solely on lectures, rote learning, and dictation" since "Teaching consists simply of illustrating concepts and reading from textbooks" Furthermore, "the assessment of students relies almost entirely on examinations" that reward the "passive absorption of knowledge" depending on memorizations and rarely do they have any " questions requiring students to employ what they have learned to situations outside the classroom." (2010).This is really a sharp contrast with the pedagogic and assessment systems in the United States which usually focus on interactive education and exams based on assignments that bring up the students understanding and ability to negotiate meaning alongside with the syntactical structure. Houghton Mifflin course books employ foreign strategies that our students in Syria should be trained previously for before they are able to function efficiently inside classrooms but still it was the host educational environment's rule to adhere to them.