Browsing by Author "Teshome, Getachew"
Item Exploring the Nature and Role of Classroom Interaction in Developing Early Grade Reading skills: The case of Afan Oromo mother tongue(AAU, 2019-12) Teshome, Getachew; Mohammed, Nuru (PhD)he objective of the study was to explore the nature and role of classroom interaction in the development of early grade reading skills. Specifically, it tried to address mediational strategies teachers and students used in creating meaning and understanding, theoretical assumptions that inform teachers’ classroom practices and the nature of classroom activities in early grade reading classes. The study focused on teacher-student and student-student interactions as mediators and mediatee in co-constructing meaning and skills. To this end, ethnohraphic research design was employed on Grades 1, 2, and 3 students at Abdi Bori Primary School at Mendi, West Wollega. The school was selected purposively as it was a private school catering for better quality education than other schools in the district. To achieve its objectives, qualitative data were collected using different instruments, such as non-participant observation with field notes, interview and document analysis and analyzed qualitatively. The result uncovered that the three classrooms observed were mostly teacher-controlled and textbook-directed that limited students’ active participation. It revealed a mixed mode of teaching: traditional transmissive, constructivist(joint discovery) and dialogic methods with more focus on the former. Teachers controlled content and direction of the lesson through frequent use of display questions that limited extended classroom interaction. However, when constructivist approach was employed, classroom interaction created better learning opportunities and co-construction of knowledge and skills, through the proper mediation of more knowledgeable others, who used both verbal and non-verbal modes of interaction. Mediation strategies used by participant teachers and students, like repetition, summarization, prosodic chopping, elicitation and uptake questions, significantly contributed to the meaning making and skill development processes. The study also disclosed and acknowledged the multimodal nature of early grade reading lessons, like physical objects, verbal cues, images, audio, etc that assisted literacy skill acquisition and development. Since the environment that surrounds children—inside and outside of school—is not only print-rich but also rich with multiple modes of expression, children combined different sign systems to represent, interpret and share meaning with others. Moreover, the participants demonstrated numerous strategies such as graphophonic, semantic and syntactic cueing systems in constructing meanings of what they read. The study also showed disparity between the teachers' perceptions on the role of classroom interaction in developing early grade reading skills and their actual classroom practices. Based on the finding, it was concluded that classroom interaction, and students and teacher mediations immensely contribute to the development of early grade reading skills.Item Teacher-initiated Learner Self-correction Strategy of Academic Writing: Wollega University in Focus(Addis Ababa University, 2009-05) Teshome, Getachew; Kebede, Seime (PhD)The major objective of this study was to investigate teacher -initiated learner selfcorrecting ability in written composition of third year EFL students at Wollega University taking the course Advanced Composition. Specifically, the study aimed at finding out the extent to which the students can self-correct their written errors, the strategies they use to process and handle the teacher's written feedback and revise their texts, areas of ease and difficulty for them to self-correct, and their general attitude to the technique. To achieve these objectives, the necessary data were collected through compos ition writing tasks, student questionnaire and teacher interview. The students (No. 25) i.e. 100% were made to write four compositions (two original ve rsions and two self-corrections or revisions). Finally they filled in a questionnaire and their instructor was interviewed. The result of the essay writing revealed that the students successfully selfcorrected their composition errors. That is from a total of 1155 errors recorded prefeedback on both sessions writing tasks, they managed to significantly reduce these to 475 errors self-correcting 680 errors or 58.9% of the errors. This implies that self-correction and rewriting are worthwhile approaches to written error correction. Moreover, it was revealed that the students attended to most (93%) of the teacher's comments and suggestions in self-correcting and rewriting. The result of student questionnaire similarly disclosed that they mostly used internal resources like reading the feedback over and over and contextual clues to process and understand the teacher's comments. They also reported having good initiation and motivation for self-correction and revision. The teacher also noted that he used teacher correction sometimes, peer correction most frequently and self correction rarely. Finally, it was concluded that self-correction is an indispensable means of dealing with written errors and promoting writing autonomy in EFL classes. However, in order to deal with or overcome the limitations of the technique, proper training and conscious-raising on its benefits and procedures are essential for the students and teachers alike. Teachers are also advised to draw on different cO/Tection techniques (peer-con·ection, etc), depending on the nature of the activities and other s ituations, giving self-con·ection the first place in their minds.