Browsing by Author "G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)"

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    Assessing the Practice of Turn-Taking in Group Discussions in ELT Classrooms: Grade 9 Students of Miskaye Hizunan Medahine Alem Monastery Church School in Focus
    (Addis Ababa University, 2019-06) Mengistu, Kefale; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    ii Abstract In this study, an attempt was made to assess the practice of turn-taking in classroom group discussions with reference to grade 9 students in Miskaye Hizunan Medahine Alem Monastery church school. The subjects of the study were grade 9 students and English language teachers at Miskaye Hizunan Medahine Alem Monastery church school. 50 students from one randomly selected section among four sections and 15 English teachers have taken part in filling the questionnaire. Three randomly selected groups from a section were observed for a total of six periods and a one-day observation was audio-taped and transcribed. SPSS software and Allwright's (1980) model of turn-taking practice were employed to analyze the data that were gathered through questionnaire and observation, respectively. The analysis of the data shows that from the total of 125 turns, the majority of turns were taken by the teacher and the group leaders which is 16(12.8%) and 56(44%), respectively. Based on the findings, it was concluded that the nature of the group, the presence of a constant leader and reporter in the group, do not give appropriate time for each group work... affect the practice of turn-taking in classroom group discussions. Therefore, English language teachers should consider these problems and exert their maximum effort to have relatively an equal turn distribution in the classroom group discussions.
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    Exploring Challenges Linguistic Minority Learners Experience in Multilingual Classrooms
    (Addis Ababa University, 2016-03) Admassu, Abera; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    This study aims to investigate how primary schools in Arba Minch address children with diverse linguistic background, in this study referred as linguistic minority students. It is founded on the premises of sociology of education which is considered essential to address the education of linguistic minority learners. More specifically, this study analyzed, through the application of Bourdieu’s notions of ‘linguistic capital’ and Cummins’ ‘interdependence hypothesis’ theory. The study used a mixed method concurrent design, and data were collected using questionnaires, tests, interviews, observation checklists, fieldnotes and document examination. The study revealed that linguistic minority learners have encountered challenges owing to their limited L2 proficiency. The finding also showed that the children used non-linguistic signals, time gaining, codeswitching, appeal for help, use of all-purpose words, and this shows the children were not competent enough in Amharic oral expressions. Besides, it revealed that minority language students experienced difficulties and challenges in negotiating competence and identities, which influence their opportunities for learning. Moreover, teachers indicated negative perceptions towards the inclusion of linguistic minority children, and expressed that linguistic minority children needed to attain a minimum level of Amharic proficiency prior to entering the mainstream classrooms. Recommendations for future research and implications for practice and policy include establishing pre-school programs, providing appropriate training for general education teachers, developing parent engagement programs to facilitate parent-teacher communication and to establish a collaborative working relationship between home and school.
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    he Effects of School-based Professional Development Workshops on English Language Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Classroom Practices: An Inductive Grammar Teaching Approach in Focus
    (AAU, 2020-05) Guade Chekol, Adugna; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    The Effects of School-based Professional Development Workshops on English Language Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Classroom Practices: An Inductive Grammar Teaching Approach in Focus Augna Guade Addis Ababa University, 2020 i This study mainly aimed at investigating the effects of school-based professional development workshops on secondary and preparatory school EFL teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their grammar teaching approaches. It set out to investigate the extent to which the school-based professional development workshop that dealt with an inductive grammar teaching approach shaped or changed the teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their grammar teaching approaches. It further targeted at exploring the teachers’ pedagogical beliefs about the effects of professional development workshops on their classroom practices. In order to achieve the intended objectives, this study employed a mixed methods design involving both the quantitative and qualitative methods in two phases to study the issues under investigation in detail. The quantitative data in phase I were presented prior to the qualitative part based on the data collection procedure. Two types of questionnaires (survey and workshop evaluation questionnaires), classroom observations, interviews and research journal were used to collect sufficient data for this study. To obtain reliable outcomes, the validity and reliability of the tools were checked through reviewers and data analyses during the pilot study. Based on the lessons obtained from the pilot study, the tools were revised again and improved for the main study. In the first phase of this study, the quantitative data were collected through a belief inventory survey questionnaire from eighty-six sample teachers in twelve randomly selected government schools in Addis Ababa. The data collected through this instrument were organized and analyzed quantitatively with the help of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.The statistical analyses carried out on the data focused on computing descriptive statistics, particularly the mean and grand mean values of the questionnaire items. The survey questionnaire data in the first phase of the study indicated that the EFL teachers participating in the study believed in the effectiveness of professional development workshops to improve their classroom practices. In the second phase, which was a case study part, the qualitative data were collected from four EFL teachers selected from Bole Preparatory School based on convenience sampling - four out of eighty-six participant teachers. In this phase, the case study teachers were observed two-three times (a total of eleven videotaped classroom observations) and interviewed once before the workshop was provided. The classroom observation data obtained from this phase were analyzed descriptively case by case based on Pearson’s approach and the PPP (presentation-practiceproduction) procedure suggested by Hedge and Thornbury. And the data gathered through the initial interview were transcribed and thematically analysed. The baseline data, i.e. the data mainly collected through the initial classroom observations and interviews before the workshop indicated that the case study teachers tended to employ a deductive grammar teaching approach in their respective classes. After confirming that the teachers employed this approach, the researcher introduced an inductive grammar teaching approach through a schoolbased professional development workshop. The main purpose of this workshop was to shape or change the case study teachers’ pedagogical beliefs about the teaching of grammar, and enable them to implement an inductive grammar teaching approach in their respective classrooms as an alternative approach. After the workshop, the case study teachers were observed two-five times (a total of fifteen videotaped final classroom observations) for the second time, and they were also interviewed once each to gain an insight into the effects of the current workshop. The final classroom observation data were transcribed and analyzed descriptively case by case based on an inductive grammar teaching approach suggested by Harmer. And the transcribed final interview data were organized into six major categories and thematically analyzed. As the data in the second phase after the workshop pointed out, the workshop resulted in some positive changes on the teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their grammar teaching approaches. Out of the fifteen final grammar lessons observed, seven of them (47%) were presented inductively. In addition, however insignificant the improvements were, the teachers made some sort of changes with the rest observed lessons, especially the beginning part of a grammar lesson which deals with a rule discovery task. So as to weigh up the effects of the school-based professional development workshop, the researcher also employed Guskey’s four-point workshop evaluation standard, and the result indicated that the workshop was fairly effective to bring about the intended change. It was also revealed that the participant teachers did not implement the workshop in the same efficiency. One of the reasons identified for the accomplishment variation among the teachers was the difference in the levels of professional motivation, and it was indicated that a low level of professional motivation resulted in a low degree of implementation of the workshop. Following the major findings and the conclusions drawn from the study, a few feasible recommendations were suggested
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    The Morphology of Gawwada
    (Addis Ababa University, 2003-06) Tulu, Geberew; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    This study is an attempt made to describe and analyze Gawwada morphology. The objective of the thesis is to identify different inflectional and derivational morphemes on selected word classes such as noun, pronoun, adjective and verb, and account for different morphemes and their variants. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is on the background of the study, which involves information on the language and the people, objective, significance, review of previous work, methodology and limitation of the study. Chapter Two presents some aspects of the phonology of the language, which is believed to be useful in analyzing the morphology of the language. Chapter Three deals with inflections of various grammatical categories such as number, gender, definiteness, case, person, etc, on selected word classes. Chapter Four treats different derivational affixes of nouns, adjectives, verbs and negative verb formation. Finally, the last chapter gives the summary and conclusion of the thesis.
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    N-Gram-Based Automatic Indexing for Amharic Text
    (Addis Ababa University, 2002-07) Mengistu, Bethlehem; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    This research explored the applicability of the n-gram method for indexing text written in the Amharic language. 100 documents (Amharic news articles written in the Visual Ge'ez font obtained from Walta Information Center) and 24 queries (collected from people who frequent ly read newspapers) were selected and used for the test. The values of n used were n=2 (bi-grams) and n=3 (tri-grams). For comparison purposes, unstemmed words were also used as index terms.The Vector Space Model (VSM) was used for document representation and retrieval. Thus, the individual words, bi-grams and tri -grams were identified for the collection. These unique tel111S were then weighted using the TFIIDF weighting technique used in the VSM. The term vectors were generated from these calculated weights for each type of term, i.e. unstemmed word, bi-gram, and tri-gram. The query terms (words, bi-grams, and tri-grams) were also identified and weighted. A different weighting fOl111Ula was used for the query terms. The vectors of terms were then formed.In order to retrieve relevant documents, similarity calculations were performed between each document-query vector pair. The ranked results from this calculation were then used to calculate precision and recall measures that are used in the VSM to test or compare retrieval effectiveness. The relevance information th at was used to detel111ine recall and precision was stored in a tabl e. Recall and precision values for the queries for each type of index (word, bigram, and tri-gram) were calculated and compared.The results showed that although word indexes are better in overall indexing performance, bigrams and tri-grams also have va lues for indexing comparable to words.
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    A Study of Design and Implementation of Grammar Tasks/Activities: the Case of English Grammar in Use i at Hossana College of Teacher Education
    (Addis Ababa University, 2013-05) Lolamo, Abebe; G/Tsadik, Abebe (PhD)
    The purpose of this study was to examine the design and implementation of grammar tasks and activities in Ethiopian context, specifically at Hossana College of Teacher Education with regard to communicative grammar teaching. It was attempted to analyze the activities for various purposes; such as (a) whether they are designed and practiced at discourse level, (b) if they are form focused or communicative, (c)whether they are suitable for pair and group work, and (d) to identify them whether they are appealing to learners’ interest and needs. The subjects of the study were one hundred trainees selected by using stratified sampling technique. Two trainers who were offering English Grammar in use I course at HCTE were also taken as participants of the study. The data was collec ted through content analysis, observation, and trainees’ questionnaire. Ninety eight quest ionnaires were returned and analyzed. The finding from each tool indicated that tasks and activities were designed and implemented at isolated sentence level rather than at discourse. The result also revealed that instruction of grammar lesson has a few transactions (recognizable start and finish, but there was no recycling of the exchanges. Furthermore, it depicted that the tasks and activities are not related to trainees’ personal information, experience and do not provide occasions for them to interact with each other, and lessons were not supported by visual aids. Therefore, they are not appealing to trainees’ interest and desires. Moreover, activities are not suitable for either pair or group works. Consequently, teachers should make implementing grammar tasks or activities more communicative, discourse based and more contextualized. The course teaching material should be modified based on Communicative Language Teaching.