Will doing HUP link ups improve confidence and enjoyment to learn English?
In the last post we looked at the results of our research into ‘Interculturalising the coursebook ‘ in terms of test results. Now we’re going to look at the results in terms of confidence and enjoyment of English in school.
So first of all here’s a recap on what we did….
With four large classes in Gaza (50 students in each), working with English for Palestine, we did weekly online links ups as part of their regular English classes. The aim was to provide a motivating context for the students to practise the language from the coursebook, and to develop their intercultural awareness and understanding.
Working together with the classroom teachers in Gaza, Wafaa Khudeir (for the girls groups) and Hussam Soliman (for the boys groups) we activated the language of three units of the Grade 8 Coursebook - 4) How to get Healthy, 5) People and Games and 6) Friends.
At the beginning and end of the three-month period we asked the students to grade the following questions to assess their confidence to use English, and their enjoyment of their English classes.
Questions for Confidence:
I feel confident during my English classes.
I feel scared of making mistakes when I speak English in front of other people.
I feel relaxed when I speak English.
I am excellent at English.
Questions for Enjoyment:
I really look forward to my English classes.
Studying English is interesting and enjoyable.
I prefer English classes to other classes.
I feel happy when I miss my English class for a special event.
We also gave the same questionnaire at the same times to students from other classes who hadn’t taken part in online link ups (but same teacher, same school, same materials, same number of classes etc). These students acted as a control group.
The results for Confidence
As you can see from the table above, there was a substantial increase in confidence for those who’d done online link ups, especially for girls. The boys and girls control groups actually lost confidence over the same period.
Results for Enjoyment
There was a huge increase in enjoyment for those who’d done online link ups, especially for girls. The control groups actually felt they enjoyed their classes less over the same period.
Interestingly, the increase in enjoyment happened for both the top students and bottom students (according to the test results). And the level of enjoyment went down for both top and bottom students in the control groups.
Of course in a class of 50 students it’s impossible for everyone to have equal opportunities to come up and interact with the remote volunteer The graph above shows that the increase in enjoyment wasn’t dependent on having interacted a lot with me - it happened for nearly everyone. In fact the students who interacted more than 10 times with me over the whole period were the only ones who actually went down in enjoyment! Maybe you can have too much of a good thing? 😉
We think that these results are really exciting and have implications for other contexts around the world too. We’d really like to know what you think of course as well so please leave a comment below. And if you think you’d like to do something similar in a large class that you teach too then please get in touch and we’ll try to arrange it as soon as we can.
We’d like to add that we are extremely grateful to Andre Castro Bilbrough for the design of the research model and analysis of the results.
