Friday, April 10, 2009

Still here

I'm still alive and in Edmonton. All I can think about is my schoolwork that has to be finished over the next few weeks and my trips to Toronto and Halifax for the summer. Especially now that spring has come to Alberta, it just makes me want to jump on a plane. But first I have to finish this beast of a research report. It was quite discouraging Wednesday when I realized I had written 20 pages and had only done the appendixes, references list and title page. If you're wondering why I start with the stuff people usually do last, it's because I like to get the "easy" stuff out of the way and have the satisfaction of crossing four things off my to-write list. For example, writing the "meat" today took the whole day for six pages. Yikes- it feels like wading through mud. I'm hoping that if I work non-stop tomorrow I can finish most of it so I can relax a bit on Easter Sunday. And then I have Monday for final proof-reading. I'm learning a lot- did I mention that? It's slow going because it actually requires thought (instead of just typing whatever comes into my head and relying on my writing ability to make it sound intelligent even if it isn't). I don't know if anyone would be interested, but here are the research hypotheses (which condensed, means I'm looking at ways that teaching and classroom management affect classes like Carole's where all the kids just talk in Turkish instead of listening or participating in English :)
Among Turkish Preparatory Year students in English language classes, the higher the quality of teaching that the teacher provides and the more collaborative the teacher’s approach to classroom management, the less the unsolicited use of the first language in the classroom. This effect will occur because the higher the quality of teaching the teacher provides and the more collaborative the teacher’s approach to classroom management, the greater the students’ perception of class robustness will be, and the greater the perception of robustness, the less the unsolicited use of the first language in the classroom. However this relationship between perception of class robustness and unsolicited use of the first language will be larger for students with high self-efficacy in the class than for students with low self-efficacy.

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