Abstract

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is a relatively new teaching strategy that was developed outside the FL education field, but it is compatible with the good practices in education in general and in FL education in particular, such as learner engagement in the learning process, student-centeredness, learning by doing and interaction. In light of the difficulties faced in applying these good practices in the actual practice of FL teaching, JiTT might be helpful in this regard since these practices are inherent in its structure. Findings of the limited studies on JiTT in FL education (Abreu & Knouse, 2014; Chantoem & Saowalak, 2016; Cupita & Andrea, 2016; Edwards, Mehring & Murphey, 2006) showed that JiTT is useful for FL education, but since FL education is not all the same, the present study has been undertaken to investigate the effect of JiTT on students’ achievement in an English language course, and to find out students’ attitudes towards the strategy. This is a preliminary small-scale study with a sample of two groups, one experimental and one control group, each consisting of 30 students. Data were collected with the help of an achievement test and a questionnaire. Even though the results showed that the achievement scores of the experimental group taught with the JiTT strategy were significantly higher than the scores of students taught with the regular method, and that the experimental group generally had positive attitudes towards the JiTT strategy, it was not practical for the researchers to adhere fully to the specifications of the JiTT strategy because of the nature of the course, which is in the form of an anthology of English prose. Thus, the study concludes that even though we can still benefit from the ‘flipped learning’ part of the JiTT strategy in teaching similar FL courses, we may not be able to fully realize the potential of the JiTT strategy when teaching FL courses of this type.

Key Words: Foreign Language Teaching, Flipped Learning, Just-in-Time Teaching strategy

Introduction

Investigating the utility of Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) for Foreign Language (FL) education has been inspired not only by the great success of JiTT reported in teaching several other disciplines (Simkins & Maier, 2010), but also by the potential that it may hold for FL teaching and learning (Abreu & Knouse, 2014; Chantoem & Saowalak, 2016; Cupita & Andrea, 2016; Edwards, Mehring & Murphey, 2006; Sarvamangala & Al-Sharafi, 2017). To begin with, JiTT is a blended learning strategy that results in flipping learning (even though JiTT is not formally associated with flipped learning; it is rather introduced as a unique teaching strategy). As all flipped learning goes, JiTT moves knowledge transfer outside the classroom through assigning reading, listening or other material to be studied before the class. However, JiTT is unique in that it assigns questions of specific qualities related to the assigned pre-class material and mandates that they are answered and turned in by students before the class (usually on a learning management system, such as Moodle or Edmodo … etc). The pre-class questions are very important since “[t]he key to achieving success with JiTT lies in the development of effective JiTT questions” (Novak & Peterson, 2010: 7). Novak & Peterson (ibid) listed the following characteristics of good JiTT questions: they “yield a rich set of student responses for classroom discussion, encourage students to examine prior knowledge and experience, require an answer that cannot easily be looked up, require that students formulate a response, including the underlying, concepts, in their own words [and] contain enough ambiguity to require the student to supply some additional information not explicitly given in the question”. Then, in light of students’ responses to the pre-class questions, teachers adjust their lesson plans for the in-class activities to address areas of confusion and misunderstandings revealed in students’ responses, on the one hand, and they plan for making the most out of the class time to engage students in interactive activities to help them achieve deeper levels of learning, on the other. Pre-class assignments and students’ responses to them help create what is called a ‘feedback loop’ between the pre-class assignments and the in-class activities, and it is this ‘feedback loop’ which is the crux of the JiTT strategy (Abrue & Knouse, 2014). Pre-class assignments are due only a time short enough before class to make students come with knowledge fresh in their minds and at the same time long enough for teachers to go through students’ responses to the pre-class questions to adjust their lesson plans accordingly (and hence its name). Pre-class questions are formative in nature and the in-class session in the JiTT strategy starts by displaying excerpts of students’ responses to these questions, which makes them feel they are the owners of what is presented to them in the class, and helps facilitate their engagement in the learning process. Yet, JiTT does not specify how the rest of the in-class session should be spent; it only stresses that it should be interactive.

It is obvious that lessons in JiTT do not start from the scratch since JiTT is based on a constructivist theory of learning (Abreu & Knouse, 2014): “all students enter the classroom with background knowledge and all students use this knowledge to construct more knowledge” (ibid, p 53). JiTT is firmly grounded in research findings about good practice in education (Gavrin, Watt, Marrs & Blake, 2003). Therefore, JiTT emphasizes interactivity, student-centeredness, regular frequent studying and learning-by-doing, on the part of students, and, on the part of teachers, it is “grounded in the notion that education works best when faculty are aware of students’ needs and abilities, and react accordingly” (ibid: 3). With JiTT, students are put “at the middle of the teaching and learning process” (Novak & Peterson, 2010: 21); they are actively engaged in the learning process, and are more responsible for their own learning.

JiTT strategy has been successfully used in the teaching of a wide range of disciplines starting from natural sciences to humanities (Simkins & Maier, 2010), but as far as FL education is concerned, not much research has been carried out. Yet, the limited research on the utility of JiTT for FL education seems promising (Abrue and Knouse, 2014; Chantoem and Saowalak, 2016; Cupita and Andrea, 2016; Edwards et al., 2006). JiTT also seems to be suitable for FL education since it is not incompatible with accumulated established good practice in FL education. For instance, interaction, which JiTT stresses, is a cornerstone in FL acquisition. Interaction is viewed in a number of second (or foreign) language acquisition theories as the matrix of second (or foreign) language acquisition including Swain's 'comprehensible Output Hypothesis', Long's 'interaction Hypothesis' and Lantolf's 'Socio-cultural Theory' of language learning (Ellis, 2003), despite the fact that these theories hold different stances of how interaction enhances FL learning. Learning-by-doing, which is also stressed in JiTT, has been highly valued in FL education with the great shift towards communication that FL education has witnessed since the 1970s. Since then, two major changes, among others, took place. First, the goal of FL teaching became ‘to develop learners’ communicative competence’, and second, the way to develop learners’ ‘communicative competence’ was through engaging them in communication. That is, for a learner to be able to communicate in a FL, he/she must communicate in that FL, and this is even more obvious in task-based language instruction which emerged from the Communicative Approach to language teaching. More importantly, ‘student-centeredness’ is valued both in JiTT and in FL education, the latter of which emphasizes that Student Talk Time (STT) in class should be more than Teacher Talk Time (TTT), and that the teacher should adopt roles like a facilitator, prompter, guide, resource, participant … etc, and minimize their role as a controller or knowledge transmitter. Besides, the importance of learner engagement in the learning process which is stressed in JiTT is also recognized by FL teachers who recognize that without engagement, learners are much less likely to remember the new language they are exposed to (Harmer, 2007), and thus less likely to learn it. However, despite the fact that FL education stresses these good pedagogical practices, it is acknowledged by FL teachers that there are difficulties in applying these established good practices in the actual practice of FL teaching; thus, JiTT may help in this regard since these practices are inherent in its structure.

JiTT is basically a blended learning strategy, and JiTT developers used technology as a communication tool. That is, the teacher posts the pre-class assignments for students and then receives students’ responses on a learning management system, which helps the teacher to assess students’ understanding before coming to class and thus plan in-class activities accordingly. Yet, JiTT has been also reported (Edward et al, 2006) to be utilized without the use of technology, where students wrote their assignments in notebooks; the teacher then selected some of students’ comments and distributed them in a newsletter on paper or as e-mail attachment. This was seen worth doing in case technology is not available to all students (ibid). It was also recommended by Abreu and Knoubse (2014) that adjustments can be made so as to accommodate for students who do not have access to the web out of campus. In this article, we are reporting an experiment of utilizing JiTT strategy without technology since the majority of the students in our sample did not have regular access to the internet. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of the JiTT strategy on students’ achievement and to find out students’ attitudes towards the strategy. Thus, the questions the study sought to answer were:

• Is there a significant difference in achievement scores between students taught with JiTT strategy and students taught with the regular method?
• What is the attitude of the students taught with JiTT towards the strategy?

Method

In the present study, JiTT has been tried in teaching a unit in an English language course taught to first year students in an Art college in Mysore City, India. The course was in the form of an anthology of English prose, and the unit we experimented on was a written oration with sophisticated literary language. There were one experimental group and one control group. The strategy, its challenges and benefits were explained to the experimental group before starting the experiment since previous research shows that JiTT "must be accompanied by effective communication with students about its purpose, process, and impact to ensure that its learning potential is fully realized" (Camp, Middendorf & Sullivan, 2010: 37)". The sample consisted of 30 students in the experimental group and 30 students in the control group. The students were met once a week in a one hour class for five weeks. The control group was taught with the regular method where the teacher read the lesson aloud word by word and explained it to the students who were listeners most of the time. For the experimental group which was taught with the JiTT strategy, although internet could not be used since the majority of students did not have regular access to it, the teacher distributed pre-class readings with assignment questions to students on paper a few days before the class, and assignments were due just three hours before the class. The classes began by presenting excerpts of students’ responses to the questions assigned before the class and discussing them with the class. Students were also asked more questions to check if they had thoroughly comprehended the material assigned to them in the pre-class session, and were referred to the reading material to clarify ideas not clear to them, when needed. Then students were engaged in discussion type activity related to the topic of the lesson in which a question was put to every class for discussion in small groups. After that, a whole class discussion was held to let groups present and discuss their views with the other groups in the class. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of the strategy on students’ achievement and to find out students’ attitudes towards the strategy. Data were collected with the help of an achievement test for the experimental and control groups to assess students’ understanding of the unit they studied and a questionnaire only for the experimental group to find out their attitudes towards the strategy.

Findings and Discussion

Data gathered to answer the two questions of the study were analysed and the results are as follows. First, question number one was:

Is there a significant difference in achievement scores between students taught with JiTT strategy and students taught with the regular method?

To answer this question data were gathered using an achievement test, and the results are presented in the following table.

Table (1) Group Statistics & Table (2) Independent Samples Test

See at the end of the article

The t-test shows that there is a significant difference in achievement between the group taught with the JiTT strategy (M= 9.37 and SD = 5.346) and the group taught with the regular method (M= 6.70 and SD = 4.625), where t = (2.066) for df (58), with P = (0.043). This shows that the group taught with the JiTT strategy scored significantly higher than the group taught with the regular method. The results of the present study are in accordance with the findings in Chantoem and Saowalak’s study (2016) that showed significant differences between the experimental and control groups in their reading ability in favour of the experimental group.

The second question of the study was:

What is the attitude of the students taught with JiTT towards the strategy?

To answer this question, a questionnaire was administered to the experimental group who were taught with the JiTT strategy. Table (2) below presents the percentages of students’ responses to the Likert scale used in the questionnaire to assess their attitudes towards the strategy.

Table (3) Students’ Responses to the Questionnaire:

see at the end of article

As shown in the table above, students’ responses showed that they generally had positive attitudes towards the strategy. The total percentages of students who “strongly agreed” and “agreed” with all the statements except the last one were more than those who “disagreed” or “strongly disagreed” with the statements or those who were “undecided”. The last statement was interesting since even if students showed positive attitudes towards the strategy, only 50% (33.3% for ‘Strongly Agree’ and 16.7% for ‘Agree’) of them saw that the strategy was better than the regular method. 16.7 % were undecided, and 33.4 % (26.7% for ‘Disagree’ and 6.7% for ‘Strongly Disagree’) saw that the regular method was better.

Students were also asked to write the things they disliked in the strategy. Their answers revealed a number of points, among which the following were the most recurrent:

• The strategy required students to spend much time studying.
• Some students preferred that lessons were explained by the teacher first and then questions were assigned to them.
• Some pre-class questions were difficult.
• Some students were not interested in the lesson itself.

This shows that even though students had positive attitudes towards the JiTT strategy, they found that it required much time for preparing lessons before coming to class, which they were not used to. Thus, some of them wrote that they preferred that lessons had been introduced first and then questions were assigned to them, which implies that they preferred the regular method of teaching. Students also found some pre-class questions challenging and some of them were not interested in the lesson itself.

The findings of the present study are in accordance with those of previous research conducted by Chantoem and Saowalak (2016), Cupita and Andrea (2016) and Edwards et al.’s (2006), where results in Chantoem and Saowalak’s study showed significant difference in learners' attitudes toward learning English in favor of JiTT strategy, Cupita and Andrea’s study showed that learners perceived JiTT strategy as a means to engage them in the designed activities, and Edwards et al.’s study showed that JiTT increased students' motivation and lowered students’ affective filter (Krashen, 1981).

A note to be mentioned here is that the researcher could not adhere fully to the specifications of the JiTT strategy due to the nature of the course the researcher experimented on. Even though the course is being taught as one of only two ‘language courses’ in the English language departments in Art colleges in the state (and not as a literary course as most of the other courses taught in these departments), this course is in the form of an anthology of English prose (and poetry). This limited the range of pre-class assignments and in-class activities that the researchers could give to the students. It should be noted also that the pre-class questions in the JiTT strategy are of the thinking questions type, but since the unit the researcher taught was mainly for reading, the researcher gave both thinking questions as well as comprehension questions. Assigning only thinking questions was not enough to help the researcher assess students understanding of the pre-class readings due to the nature of the material. Thus, the positive effect on the achievement of the group taught with JiTT as well as students’ positive attitudes towards the strategy resulted most probably from the ‘flipping learning’ part of the JiTT strategy.

Conclusion

The present study has been undertaken to investigate the effect of JiTT on students’ achievement in an English language course taught for college level students in an English language department in an Art college in Mysore City, India, and to find out students’ attitudes towards this strategy. The study revealed that the achievement of the group taught with JiTT was significantly higher than that of the group taught with the regular method, and students had positive attitudes towards the strategy, but at the same time students found the strategy demanding; thus, the responses of almost one third of them indirectly implied that they preferred the regular method. In addition, the strategy also helped the researchers save part of the class time which we could devote for engaging students in discussions, which was not done by teachers using the regular method since class time was not enough. Through the strategy we could also assign additional readings related to the lesson, which we believe helped students understand the lesson better. However, the findings should be taken with caution due to the nature of the course the researcher experimented on, which made them unable to adhere fully to the specifications of the JiTT strategy. Despite this, the JiTT strategy did bring a positive effect on students’ achievement and attitudes towards the strategy, which the researcher believe resulted most probably from the ‘flipping learning’ part of the JiTT strategy.

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