EFL Student Teachers as Task Designers: A Participatory Action Research Self-Study Abstract Dr. Mohamed El-Okda mohokda@gmail.

com Self Study in Teaching and Teacher Education is a fairly recent wave of research. In this paper a case is made for the use of self study by EFL student teachers educators. The paper reports the present writers attempts over the past few years to empower student teachers of English at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) to become task designers as a prerequisite to involving them in on-going curriculum development. These attempts culminated last year in engaging a group of EFL student teachers in a participatory action research project constituting the main task of a unit in a blended learnercentered course in ELT Curriculum. Student teachers analyzed learning experiences in a whole textbook and attempted collaboratively to transform drills and exercises into tasks. The study reports the limitations and pitfalls of earlier attempts and the advantages of the last attempt in bringing about a breakthrough in their theory-in-action. Implications of this study, conducted in a Gulf country, in EFL teacher education in Saudi Arabia are briefly discussed. Introduction My own familiarity with self study in teaching and teacher education as a wave of research dates back to the year 2005, one year after the publication of Loughran, J. et al. (2004). It took the special interest group of Self Study in Teaching and Teacher Education approximately a whole decade to get this genre of research in teacher education recognized as an academic type of research that can transform teacher education practices. What made me specially interested in this type of research is that I had read earlier a paper in the Handbook of Educational Research on Teaching (1986) in which the writer pointed out that the hidden message of teacher education programs is simply Do as I say, not as I do. As teacher educators, we always advise our student teachers to conduct action research, but we rarely conduct such type of research. This discrepancy between our practices and what we preach seems to underlie my involvement in task-based action research (See El-Okda, 1991) in the late eighties of the last century. At that time, I acted as a supervisor of a number of teachers who had been teaching the first task based course in the prep stage Welcome to English who were transferred unwillingly to a secondary school in a small village in Egypt and had to teach a purely audio-lingual course Excel in English in the secondary stage. It took me a relatively short time to get them form a sort of community of practice who collaboratively managed to modify learning experiences included in that textbook into well-designed tasks. This was my first attempt to engage a group of EFL

teachers in on-going curriculum development (El-Okda, 2005). Unfortunately, this early attempt was aborted prematurely when I was transferred to Cairo University. The desire to practice what I preach triggered by reading about the hidden message of teacher education programs in the late eighties of the last century increased my interest in the study of teacher learning, teacher cognition and teaching expertise as a process. Most of my post doctorate research focused on topics related to these areas and some of those studies were consistent with the Self-Study paradigm (see for example El-Okda, 2008). Gradually, I got more and more eager to be engaged in collaborative self-study research. Unfortunately, however, a collaborative diary-based self study that I managed to design for a number of colleagues involved in the CCCM Methods Course, a capacity building project, was aborted and I was simply excluded. Despairing of reviving this study, I thought of experimenting with collaboration with undergraduate students in a participatory action research project as a major authentic task in a blended learner-centered course that I managed to design individually. Earlier attempts to engage EFL student teachers in task design I have had a strong belief that student teachers and teachers can become task designers so that they might become active agents of on-going curriculum development since I completed my PhD study on working out a model for the evaluation of oral communication tasks both as work-plans and in-process. At that time, the original seeds of the Interaction Hypothesis seemed to have grown into a full-fledged theory. The first five years of the last decade of the last century witnessed the development of the recent version of the Interaction Hypothesis. There seems to be a general agreement in the mainstream of second acquisition theory that exposure to comprehensible input through performing communicative tasks is the necessary condition for language acquisition in the second language classroom. This constituted a major component of the undergraduate ELT curriculum course. Although other models like that of Ellis consciousness raising assert that there is a role for grammar instruction and special types of tasks for triggering the two cognitive processes of noticing and comparing that are thought to explain how input becomes intake, the original claim that exposure to communicative tasks is necessary for classroom foreign language acquisition continues to be one of the main bases of decision making in ELT curriculum design. One expects that textbook writers must become more and more aware of the need to strike a balance between unfocused and focused tasks in ELT materials. However, a quick look at more recently introduced textbooks reveals that most learning experiences included are either drills or exercises. A number of attempts have been made earlier to enable student teachers of English at Sultan Qaboos University to become task modifiers and task designers: 1. In Wiki-based e-portfolios on Moodle, EFL student teachers of English have always been required to plan their lesson plans in terms of learning experience analysis. To facilitate this process a simple componential definition of task was adopted. A task is defined as a language learning experience that consists of three components: the givens, learner procedure and the outcome. It has always been emphasized that the three types of
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learning experiences have the first two components: givens and procedure. But only tasks have outcomes. Care has also been taken to distinguish between a learning outcome and a task outcome. Student teachers are usually required to produce a one sentence description of each learning experience that starts with its type and briefly identifies its components. They are usually required to analyze just one learning experience in detail. Student teachers are also required to write a reflective comment focusing only on how an exercise or a drill can be modified into a task. Despite repeated feedback to these task-based lesson plans, student teachers often make three main mistakes: They sometimes fail to identify the type of the learning experience They confuse learning outcomes (objectives) and task outcomes The proposed modifications of learning experiences rarely represent welldesigned tasks

2. Enabling tasks in Teaching Practice courses and task analysis in Methods courses Student teachers are given different types of learning experiences to analyze and classify both in Teaching Practice Courses and Methods of Teaching Courses. The aim is to enable them to distinguish between tasks and non-tasks and continue to complete the full cycle of a task-based action research by implementing the modified task and reporting the difference they felt in teaching the two learning experiences. Again, few student teachers opt for a task based action research and most of them prefer to do a kind of Exploratory Practice research proposed by Dick Allwright. The above mentioned attempts seem to have been less effective than expected in sensitizing student teachers to the paucity of language learning tasks in newly introduced textbooks and preparing them for becoming task modifiers and task designers. Some variables that might have been beyond my control is the fact that most of the student teachers who took teaching practice with me might have been taught the methods courses by another colleague who might not have been concerned too much with this issue. However, I have enough evidence supporting my impression that those attempts were not very much useful. Furthermore, the attempt to lead a small community of practice in Egypt to collaborate in making their audioligual textbook more communicative highlights the importance of collaboration in such attempts. One of the three teachers published a task based action research article in Teaching English in Egypt. Despite the reasonable amount of tasks they were able to design, the change of the supervisor, as I was told, aborted this attempt prematurely. Research question Thus, the research question for the present study continues to be, How can EFL teacher education courses be used to enable student teachers of English as a foreign language to become task designers to be involved in on-going curriculum development?
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Reflecting upon those attempts, I have been able to identify a number of preconditions that might make a further attempt to be more successful: 1. Changing student teachers beliefs is a pre-requisite to making them more enthusiastic about being involved in task design. 2. To get involved in meaningful task design, student teachers need more face-to-face as well as online scaffolding and an intensive learning environment focusing on this issue. 3. It should involve collaboration among student teachers as well as between student teachers and their facilitator. 4. Such attempt needs to be integrated with the course content. 5. The tasks in which they are engaged should be authentic in the sense that they should be derived from the professional world of teachers in which this content is to be used. Being entrusted with teaching an undergraduate ELT Curriculum course each Spring Semester and having experienced the limitations of an attempt to use a top-down strategy to design an undergraduate learner-centered Methods course and the advantages of using a fully bottom-up strategy for designing the other blended learner-centered Methods course, a decision was made to design the ELT Curriculum course using the same principles. To my surprise, no colleague expressed his/ her willingness to collaborate in this endeavor. Despite the great obstacles faced in implementing the wholly top-down Methods course, other colleagues opted for waiting until the ELT Curriculum course would be designed by the same team. Time constraints and too much overload combined with the possibility to get it done by that team made some people discourage me to make any reference to my personal intention to shoulder this responsibility. But the nature of the content of the ELT curriculum course as I designed it since I first arrived in Oman and my repeated attempts over the past years to update it as well as transfer its e-learning component from being a store of resources to a learner-centered e-learning environment made me feel that it would be the best choice for this attempt. At that time, I noticed that many of the course activities were content based exercises, not authentic tasks. The course had a unit on L2 Acquisition Theory as a Basis for Decision Making in ELT Curriculum Design and another unit on Task-Based Syllabi. It became clear to me that this is the optimal content for including belief change activities followed by a more authentic collaborative action research task. The decision was based on a number of other reasons: 1. Having failed to ensure collegial collaboration, it would be a good idea to seek student teachers participation; which is a basic feature of self study as well as participatory action research. 2. Both student teachers enrolled in that course and myself had similar and interrelated goals and needed to collaborate to achieve them. My goal was to enable those student teachers to become task designers and to convince them of their role in on-going curriculum development. Theirs was to resolve a highly controversial issue they kept arguing about in forums as well as belief elicitation tasks, i.e. whether the number of meaning focused tasks in the new English textbooks introduced in Basic Education is
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adequate for acquiring English or not. Having completed the Unit about the Interaction Hypothesis and Consciousness raising and performed a number of belief elicitation tasks and forums on controversial issues, their was a general agreement that a reasonable blend of focused and unfocused/ meaning focused tasks should be the optimal decision in designing learning experiences of the course. What was still unresolved then was whether meaning focused tasks in English for Me were adequate or inadequate. Most student teachers considered this series to be ideal and based on the most up-to-date theory. Hence, the need to be engaged in participatory action research as transformative reflection enhancing task. 3. The project would act as a pre-requisite for a final unit on Top-down, bottom-up models of curriculum renewal (El-Okda, 2005). It was believed that being engaged in participatory action research project would enable them to appreciate the call for involving teachers in on-going curriculum development. 4. A fourth reason was the gradual emergence of task based teacher research. My very early attempt to get EFL teachers involved in modifying exercises and drills into tasks in1989 described above is no longer unique. This was a major recommendation of my PhD thesis (El-Okda, 1990). Ellis (1997) calls for engaging teachers in what he calls empirical evaluation of language learning tasks as a type of teacher research. El-Okda (2004) considers task based action research a viable option of teacher research. El-Okda (2005) provides a top-down, bottom-up model for involving teachers in on-going curriculum development through task based action research. Edwards and Willis (2005) constitutes a representative collection of teachers attempts to explore language learning tasks It is argued that the first introduction of action research in education was in bottom-up curriculum development (El-Okda, 2005). Driessen et al (2008) report the design of an analytic system that can be used by teachers for the investigation of language learning tasks. Implementation of participatory action research (PAR) Many calls have been made for engaging teachers in action research (Burns, 2010, Collins, 2004, El-Okda, 2004). The use of participatory action research (PAR) in self-study has been recommended by pioneers of this paradigm of research (Aubusson and Gregson, 2008, Collins 2004, Feldman, Paugh and Mills, 2004, LaBoskey, 2004, Loughran, 2010) 1. Introducing the unit under the title Learning Experiences in ELT Materials in which student teachers were mainly concerned with defining and characterizing tasks; and distinguishing tasks from drills and exercises. Both face-to-face and online tasks consisted of analyzing and characterizing different types of learning experiences that were scanned from currently used textbooks in Basic Education. Elsewhere (El-Okda, 2008) introduces a teacher friendly componential definition of task and justifies its use. Students were also engaged in a forum about the types of learning experiences to which they were exposed in pre-university textbooks; and their posts revealed their full
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understanding of the implications of Interaction Hypothesis and the Consciousness Raising Model. It was clear from their contributions that although grammar instruction should not be completely excluded in the foreign language classroom, the greater number of the learning experiences should be communicative tasks during which they can be exposed to comprehensible input and notice the form they had been taught and whose awareness of it had been raised. As one student puts it, We now know that comprehensible input is essential for language acquisition. Even the consciousness raising model accepts this point of view. I was not lucky to use the new textbooks that the Ministry of Education has introduced in Basic Education. There were very few communicative tasks in Our World Through English. But I think the new books include more communicative tasks. I have not looked closely at any of them. This student posting was followed by many others whose replies revealed a great deal of agreement rephrasing the same ideas. Here, I had to interfere with a short comment suggesting that they can if they liked to systematize this desire to look closely at the learning experiences included in one of those textbooks in a sort of participatory action research and I did agree to act as their research consultant. I showed great interest in their replies to my posting in a subsequent comment and pointed out that collaboration would save time and energy and provide an opportunity for learning from each other. I also sought their suggestions for formulating the research question. I also pointed out that they can depend on the resources used in the Wiki task for this unit. This was because some of them pointed out that they ..have too many other assignments for other courses. Suggestions for a research question included: How many tasks are included in Basic Education textbooks? What is the ratio of communicative tasks to other types of learning experiences? Are Basic Education EFL textbooks acquisition rich? Are Basic Education textbooks consistent with L2 acquisition theory? . 2. Briefing and organizing The next face-to-face session was entirely devoted to briefing student teachers about participatory action research: its principles and procedures with special emphasis on taskbased action research; and to organizing students into teams. Five copies of Grade 5 B English for Me package, one for each team, were distributed. First, it was left entirely for teams to select the unit each was going to analyze and then each group had to distribute the learning experiences of the unit amongst themselves. Having agreed on who was going to do what, I proposed that they should select one of them to lead a brainstorming activity to develop the analytic tool to be used for the analysis of each learning experience. The selected student was skillfully able to elicit a very simple analytic tool for each learning experience. Apart from items related to the number and page and unit in which the learning experience occurs, a simple table consisting of five rows was produced. For each learning experience the analyst was supposed to specify the givens, the learner procedure and the expected outcome if it is a task. The fourth column was
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devoted to the pedagogical focus of the learning experience (the skill/skills involved, the form or function focused on etc. The last column was left for specifying the type of the learning experience. It was agreed that individual work of each member of the group should be checked by the group as a whole and that s/he could seek advice from me or from other members of the same group or other groups if they reached no agreement on any learning experience. It was also agreed that individual students each should think of modifying one learning experience that is a drill or an exercise into a task. The best two tasks developed would be selected for inclusion in the team action research report with the rewarding measure to acknowledge the designers contribution in the team research report. Furthermore, a table summing up the statistical analysis performed by all members of the group. This involved the number and percentage of each type of experience and the frequency of each pedagogical focus. 3. Collaborative performance of team data analysis The next face-to-face session was entirely devoted to peer review of each individual work and then grouping all individual work into data analysis statistical table. It also involved writing down the final action research report of the group in a template that was prepared for this purpose. This stage involved a lot of group discussions and many disputes that needed to be resolved without imposing my own point of view right from the beginning. Instead, all questions raised were bounced to other members of the group or all other groups. Finally, it was agreed that each group would upload their report and a PowerPoint presentation to a database in Moodle created for this purpose. 4. Summary of groups findings The following table displays the percentage of each type of learning experiences. Student teachers reported findings then follow. Types of learning experiences reported in groups action research reports Types of learning experience Tasks Drills Exercises Total Number G1 3 2 29 34 G2 1 9 13 23 G3 4 11 27 42 G4 3 1 11 15 G5 3 7 12 22 14 30 92 136 10.3% 22.0% 67.6% 100% Total %

It became clear to all the members of the different groups that the ratio of tasks to other types of learning experiences (drills and exercises) is 1:9, a matter which proves that a classroom using such a textbook is bound to be very acquisition poor. Other findings related to pedagogical foci were also illuminating and required teachers to take action to
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redress the balance. Each group was able to modify two learning experiences into tasks. It was also clear that students working in groups to modify exercises and/ or drills into tasks were deeply influenced by the tasks they were required to analyze at earlier stages of the project. All those tasks were selected from textbooks and scanned for task analysis. They included tasks that required learners to follow a set of instructions to make a kite/ a robot/ paper frog/ a mask or a rocket, information gap tasks (picture comparison tasks), information processing tasks and information transfer tasks. Almost all the tasks they were able to produce imitated those task types. This highlights the notion of modeling in teacher learning and the need to expand the task analysis stage of such projects. Unfortunately, however, no student was enrolled in teaching practice to try out the interventions they have planned represented in the modified learning experiences. But, they were very enthusiastic to do this when they get access to real classrooms. Each student teacher was required to write an end-of-course diary using a number of guiding questions; one of which aimed at eliciting their reaction to the participatory action research experience. Generally speaking, their diaries reflect favorable attitudes to this experience. Now, I understand that the textbooks I will be asked to teach may not be perfect as I believed and that I can play a role in developing the curriculum, wrote one of them. Many other student teachers added comments to that effect. Another described the exciting experience of having to collaborate with other colleagues in a nonthreatening environment. She wrote, I like the way we worked in groups throughout this course specially in action research. The only thing that we had to do as individuals was the quizzes. I was worried about my grade. The wikis were all done in groups. But the doctor insisted that we should answer the quizzes individually before coming to the lecture and the first thing he did was to check that all members of each group have done it. In putting us in groups for the action research, we had some rules that allowed no member to take a free ride as he used to say. All research we have been asked to do before were questionnaires. This is the first time for me to do something different; something that I feel will make me a better teacher. I am no longer afraid to co-operate with my friends. The student who was selected to lead the whole group in designing the instruments added, I do not know how the teacher of this course was able to make each group come to similar results in the action research. Each presentation supported others. I wish he had allowed me to put all the group reports in one. Many of us have downloaded both the PowerPoint presentations and reports of other groups.

5. Conclusions and recommendations This experience has been a thrilling one to me. First, student teachers can be empowered to become task modifiers during undergraduate program. However, attempts to do this should be in terms of a large scale collaborative project like this that is fully integrated with the content of the ELT curriculum course. I have come to realize that this type of collaborative action research should be one of the major authentic tasks for a course like this. It is something that those prospective teachers will hopefully be able to replicate when they become regular teachers and form communities of practice. Second, my belief that EFL student teachers need to be prepared to become active agents of on-going curriculum development has been field tested; but needs to be fully exploited in the field. Third, self study, as repeatedly dwelt upon in the literature, should be done collaboratively to ensure the transformation of teacher education. This might be impossible to do in some contexts where non-native speaker EFL teacher educators tend to marginalize themselves. Under such circumstances, individual initiatives for collaboration or innovation proposed by one of them can be suppressed for obvious reasons. One such reason is self-marginalization through the desire to have it done by a native speaker teacher educator. Under such circumstances, individual self-study should be allowed and collaboration with student teachers can compensate for collaboration with other teacher educators. Finally, we can hardly find any published self-study that does not dwell upon self-study methodology of research (Laboskey, 2004). Recently, whole publications have been devoted to methodology of self-study as a genre of qualitative research, (Pinnegar and Hamilton, 2009); and some researchers have started to investigate the effectiveness of teaching self-study methodology to teachers (Lunenberg & Samaras, 2011). We might conclude this paper with a recommendation to that effect. Student teachers need to be able to investigate their practices. Self-study should not be confined to teacher educators. The acronym (S-STEP) stands for Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices. The third word of the acronym seems to have been over -shadowed by teacher education. Finally, although this study was conducted in another Gulf country, the situation in Saudi Arabia is not different from that of Oman. All the recommendations mentioned above can be adopted in the Saudi Arabian context. The Methods of Teaching English courses need to be redesigned collaboratively as blended learner-centered courses, More specifically, student teachers need to be engaged in task-based participatory action research described in this paper. References Aubusson, P. and Gregson, R. (2008). Self-study, teacher-researcher, and action research: Three sides of a coin? Aubusson, P. & Schuck, S. (eds). (2008). Teacher learning and development, Springer, (195208).

Burns, A. (2010). Action research: Contributions and future directions in ELT. Language Teaching Collins, S. (2004). Ecology and ethics in participatory collaborative action research: An argument for the authentic participation of students in educational research. Educational Action Research, 12(3), 347-362. Driessen, C. , Westhoff, G. , Haenen, J. and Brekelmans, M. (2008). A qualitative analysis of language learning tasks: The design of a tool. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 40(6), 803 - 820 Edwars, C. and Willis, J. (2005). Teachers exploring tasks in English language teaching. England: Palgrave Macmillan Ellis, R. (1997). The empirical evaluation of language teaching materials.ELT Journal, 51(1)26-42. El-Okda, M. (2008) Manipulating task components for skill integration. Proceedings of the 8th annual ELT conference held at SQU, 23-24 April, 2008. El-Okda (2005) A proposed top-down, bottom-up model for on-going curriculum development. Asian EFL Journal, 7(4). El-Okda (2004). Action research: Options and constraints. El-Okda, M. (1991). Task-based action research. Teaching English in Egypt, Issue 12. El-Okda, M. (1990). A proposed model for evaluating oral communication tasks. PhD dissertation, Ain Shams University. Feldman, A. , Paugh, P and Mills, G. (2004). Self-Study through action research. Loughran, J. et al. (Eds.) (2004). International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices Springer International Handbooks of Education, Volume 12, Section 3, 943-977 LaBoskey V. K. (2004). The methodology of self-study and its theoretical underpinnings. Loughran, J. et al. (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 814817). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Loughran. J. (2010). Reflection through collaborative action research and inquiry. N. Lyons (ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry, Springer, 2010, 399-413. Lunenberg, M., & Samaras, A. (2011). Developing a pedagogy for teaching self-study research: Lessons learned across the Atlantic, Teaching and Teacher Education (2011), doi:10.1016/j.tate.2011.01.008 Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Critical language pedagogy: A postmethod perspective on English language teaching. World Englishes, 22(4), 539-550. Pinnngar, S. and Hamilton, M. (2009). Self-study of practice as a genre of qualitative research: Theory, methodology and practice. Springer. Westhoff, Gerald (2009). A priori assessment of language learning tasks by practitioners. Language Teaching, 42(4), 504-518.
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