A Reconsideration of the Instructional Affordances of Classroom Monitoring in English Language Learning

Abstract

This article explores teachers’ classroom monitoring in English language learning and asks if it has a role to play beyond what we know and recognize as mainstream classroom management. As part of a larger study of pedagogical practices in classrooms in Singapore, researchers collected and analyzed videographic data on the types and subject-specific content of teachers’ monitoring activities. The findings showed that teachers mostly monitored for supervisory purposes to individuals within a limited set of language learning activities. Overall, there were few occurrences of classroom monitoring for formative purposes and in the subject-specific areas of creative and descriptive writing, expression, conveying information and persuasion. In conclusion, the article suggests that one way to broaden monitoring activities in classrooms would be through setting short- and long-term questioning as an instructional strategy.

Keywords

Classroom management monitoring instructional affordances instructional practices English language learning questioning

Introduction

In the midst of the complex, fast-moving and complicated context of classroom life, how might teachers know what their students are doing and possibly learning at any given time? One approach would be for teachers to monitor instructional and learning events through regular observations, checking and record keeping.

In broad strokes, we can define or characterize classroom monitoring in several ways depending on its manifestations (forms) and functions (both actual and intended). Most commonly, monitoring, also known as ‘circulating’ (Rogers, 2006), is associated with teachers operating in their capacity as managers in their classrooms (Towndrow, 2007). When they do so, teachers often monitor by scanning their classrooms from a fixed point of view and/or walking around to fulfil various purposes simultaneously (Cotton, 1988). For example, teachers can monitor to establish their presence and build rapport (Hattie, 2009; Knoster, 2008; Marzano and Marzano, 2003; Rogers, 2006), regulate student behavior (Cowley, 2006; Evertson and Emmer, 2013; Garrett, 2014), and check on work-in-progress (Darling-Hammond et al., 2008; Hattie, 2009; Towndrow, 2007; Weinstein and Romano, 2015).

In general, the classroom management literature shows that monitoring is both a strategy to be learnt and a necessity if learners are to benefit fully from learning tasks and activities. In terms of developing plans of action to achieve instructional objectives, Cowley (2006) notes how classroom management strategies, including monitoring, help teachers ‘read’ their classrooms. Additionally, Knoster (2008) alludes to teachers learning by observing their students as they work.

Monitoring can also play a role in informing or ‘feeding back’ to teachers on their instructional and learning practices thus providing a platform for teachers to make adjustments to their lesson plans using real-time data (Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Hattie, 2009). Importantly, based on the understandings that teachers’ actions have a direct impact on students’ achievement and that students cannot learn in chaotic, poorly managed classrooms (Marzano and Marzano, 2003), monitoring can also contribute to the creation of a safe and responsive learning environment (Garrett, 2014).

Within the subject-specific field of English language learning, monitoring is rarely mentioned or discussed (see for example, Richards and Renandya, 2002) as a current practice or approach where teaching principles and classroom practices can be derived and developed. And so, given the long-standing recognition of how language-teaching methods change over time in response to the kinds of proficiency learners need (Richards and Rogers, 1991), and contemporary foci in education on the social construction of knowledge (Bransford et al., 2000), classrooms as communities (Rogers, 2007) and visible learning (Hattie, 2009), we believe it is now timely and appropriate to look again at monitoring in English language learning and to ask if it has a role to play in the achievement of instructional and learning objectives beyond what we already know and usually practice.

Background Considerations

The Local Policy Context

In the city-state of Singapore, where the government’s approach to education is characteristically pragmatic, centralized and driven by economic, social and nationalistic purposes (Ashton and Sung, 1997), the study of English in schools is framed specifically as the medium of instruction and a subject for study in its own right (Ministry of Education, 2010). As Singapore sets out to transform into a knowledge-based economy, it envisions that a proficient command of English ‘will enable pupils to access, process and keep abreast of information and to engage with the wider and more diverse communities outside of Singapore’ ( Ministry of Education, 2010: 10). While detailing language focus areas and learning objectives extensively, the current English language syllabus also specifies six teaching processes that English teachers will employ when planning and enacting their lessons: Raising Awareness, Structuring Consolidation, Facilitating Assessment for Learning, Enabling Application, Guiding Discovery and Instructing Explicitly (Ministry of Education, 2010: 12). Notably, classroom monitoring is listed under facilitating assessment for learning and is one of the ways teachers can implement the requirements of the curriculum.

Affordances

The notion of an affordance originates from the study of ecology – the branch of biology dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and their physical surroundings. In James Gibson’s (1979: 127) ecological approach to visual perception, ‘The affordances of [an] environment are what it offers [an] animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’. This definition embraces more than the simple identification of abstract physical properties. Instead, it refers directly to a complementarity that is both unique and particular to the parties involved. While it is convenient to think of the affordances of an object or tool in terms of its properties (thus suggesting how they might, in fact, be used beneficially), Norman (1999) points out that real affordances are less important than those that we perceive because these determine what we think we can do with an object and how we might go about doing it. Therefore, it is quite possible for one person to perceive a positive affordance in a tool or object where another sees no benefit to him or her either personally or socially.

This article proposes to characterize and understand classroom monitoring in terms of what we might call, ‘instructional’ affordances – those aspects of monitoring that teachers recruit for their planned and perceived purposes (compare Snow, 1998 in Tochon and Okten, 2010). By their very nature, we also take it that these affordances are observable through teachers’ actions and are subject to variation according to one or more practical or theoretical perspective.

Subject-specific Instructional Activities

One way of understanding what happens in instruction is to view classroom events and the purposes behind them through the conceptual lens of tasks and the activities they are composed of. In long-standing work, Doyle (1983: 162) claimed that academic tasks and curricula, more generally, ‘form the basic treatment unit in classrooms’ and were, therefore ‘the primary determinant of how the curriculum is experienced by students’, and the principal feature of classroom life that mediates between teacher instructional behavior and student learning. Although Doyle (1983: 161) also recognized that other events and classroom contexts and processes influenced student learning, he nevertheless argued that academic tasks were the principal link between teaching and learning because they influenced ‘learners by directing their attention to particular aspects of content and by specifying ways of processing information’.

Moving ahead pedagogically, Alexander (2001) makes a useful distinction between the conceptual and practical features of tasks. While both aspects of learning are equally important and necessary, activities – the practical elements of tasks – are the means by which teachers lead learners in taking the steps between what was previously taught and what is on the agenda to learn now. Crucially, instructional activities (and tasks, more broadly), centre around what we might call an ‘underlying idea’ where there is minimally a topic or theme, instructional objective(s) and skill(s) (Stein et al., 1996). Further, while tasks may span more than one lesson or instructional period, instructional activities are likely to be completed in less time and change as learners’ engagement switches from one item to the next, and corresponding classroom participatory structures alter (e.g. whole class – pair-work – group-work – whole class, and so on).

While it is likely that the type of instructional activities organized by teachers will have commonalities across subject areas in terms of thinking and knowledge work (see, for example, Anderson and Krathwohl’s [2000] revised Bloomian taxonomy of educational objectives) there will also be subject-based distinctives to consider according to task and content-specific purposes.

In the present study, teachers could potentially draw on an extensive list of instructional activities in accordance with the English language syllabus in particular communicative and meaning-making contexts (see also Ellis, 2003). As an illustration, Table 1 lists and describes nine English language-specific instructional activities (Coding/Decoding, Comprehension, Interpretation and Meaning Making, Creative Writing, Descriptive Writing, Explanation, Conveying Information, Expression and Persuasion) with an example for each item). As we will suggest later, these activities could also present opportunities and reasons for teachers to monitor students’ work in their classrooms.

Table 1.

Subject-specific (English) Instructional Activities.

Instructional Activity	Description	Classroom Examples
Coding/Decoding	Necessary precursors to making sense of, and making meanings with, language. Conceptually, coding involves learning the rules and conventions of grammar, word formation, punctuation, pronunciation, syntax and semantics.	Students are required to learn a new grammar item in terms of its form and functions. For example, ‘The simple present perfect tense is made up of: auxiliary verb ‘to have’ + present participle of the verb’.
Comprehension	Deriving meanings from a text or representation.	Students identify the facts in a text and then answer true/false or multiple-choice questions.
Interpretation and Meaning Making	Builds on comprehension practices. The knowledge work done requires close analysis and text production for a particular person, audience and/or cultural context.	Students are tasked to state whether (or how) a text/representation helps them understand other situations, themselves or other people better.
Creative Writing	Involves the preparation and production of original compositions. Self-expression lies at the heart of creativity and usually involves the unique and unexpected combination of ideas, events, people and places.	Students are required to write a story using a series of pictures, diagrams or photographs.
Descriptive Writing	Descriptions might be viewed as ‘painting pictures with words’ or simply showing. Effective descriptions make the reader feel she is part of the writer’s experience and leaves a lasting impression.	Students describe persons, places and events in a variety of ways.
Explanation	Making something clear. Explanations also say how or why something happened and possible consequences.	The teacher asks students to explain facts or points of view.
Conveying	When an idea is ‘conveyed’, meanings (statements, suggestions, requests etc.) are communicated (and interpreted) as largely intended by the author or originator.	Teachers task students to tell or write a story about their real-life experiences.
Expression	Making known one’s thoughts or feelings.	Teacher asks students to express their feelings and thoughts in writing (e.g. a poem).
Persuasion	The act of getting someone to do or believe something. Persuasion requires demonstrating influence, reason and justification. The act of being persuaded requires logical and linguistic analysis.	Teacher asks students to show how and why something is persuasive. Teacher asks students how they would persuade different people of their/a point of view.

Research Questions

There are two research questions guiding the focus of this article:

What types of monitoring do English teachers use, and when, during lessons?

What are the purposes and substantive content of English teachers’ monitoring practices in their lessons?

Using study data, the answers to these questions form the basis for a discussion of the potential consequences of adopting one approach to monitoring over others in the design and enactment of English language instruction.

Methods

The Study and Data Collection

In 2003, the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore, under the umbrella of its then newly established Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP), began a large-scale baseline research programme – Core 1 – that asked broad pedagogical questions about local government schools, such as, ‘What and how do teachers teach?’ and ‘Why do they teach in these ways?’ (Luke et al., 2005).

In a follow-up suite of related projects, the Core 2 programme involved (among other things) measuring, mapping and modelling the patterns and logic of pedagogical practices, and analyzing the intellectual quality of knowledge work from a representative stratified random sample of Primary 5 (age 10–11) and Secondary 3 (age 14–15) classrooms (Mathematics and English) spread geographically across the island (Hogan et al., 2009).

The data used in this article originates from the Core 2 English classrooms at the Secondary 3 level.¹ In this subset of the data, there are 16 schools and 32 teachers/classes (two teachers from each school). The total number of data collected and analyzed was 162.4 hours from 179 lessons. The average class size is 40.

There is a varied profile of teachers in the sample. The median age of colleagues was 33 years. The median number of years of teaching experience is eight and there were more female teachers than male (76.8% female). The majority of teachers have a Bachelor’s degree in Education (75.5%) and 14.4% held a Master’s degree.

For each teacher in the present study, researchers observed a complete unit of work, defined as a series of thematically or topically-related lessons over a specific period of time (e.g. two weeks). The team video-recorded the teachers’ and students’ work using an in-house protocol informed by Clarke (2006). Specifically, this encompassed classroom interactions from multiple angles: (i) the teacher, (ii) whole-class and (iii) small group. The researchers also collected samples of students’ written work, worksheets and instructional materials, along with audio recordings of student pair or group work as it happened. Later, a trained group of three videographers combined each set of lesson digital media into stand-alone movie files to enable the detailed coding of the lessons.

Data Analysis

While it is fully and unconditionally accepted that classroom interactions are multiple, simultaneous and continuous, we needed a mechanism that would serve to reduce the cognitive load on coders when (re)viewing recorded footage. Therefore, for solely operational purposes, a team of 16 trained² coders divided each lesson into three-minute intervals or ‘phases’ and noted occurrences of instructional practices as they occurred within and across these time periods. This device allowed for a proportional and event-based examination of classroom practices from the start to the end of a lesson irrespective of lesson length. Accordingly, a 30-minute lesson would have 10 phases, a 45-minute lesson 15 phases, and an hour-long lesson 20 phases. As we did not have a standard measure of lesson duration in the data set, we averaged the total amount of instructional time per individual lesson before consolidation to derive an average measure of monitoring actions or events for the entire sample of recorded data.

The scales, subscales and indicators were, in nearly all cases, not mutually exclusive: coders could code 1 for multiple categories within a scale or subscale, thereby permitting multiple responses per scale or subscale. The binary coding scheme (present or absent) had the advantage of reducing measurement error and increasing inter-rater reliability,³ and the potential disadvantage of underreporting the frequency of instructional events.

The coders used a largely theoretically-driven coding scheme that drew attention to teachers’ pedagogical practices, the nature of intellectual development and knowledge work in the classroom, lesson objectives, standards of understanding and performance, social organization of lessons, patterns of instructional activity, classroom learning environment, and classroom talk.

For the purposes of the Core 2 study, there were two main types of classroom monitoring activity identified in the data: monitoring type (supervisory or formative), and monitoring focus (individual or group). The specification of these actions – through both spoken and non-verbal – are as follows:

Monitoring Type

Supervisory: Teacher focuses mainly on the set learning activities such as whether students are complying with given instructions. For example, the teacher stands at the front of the classroom and says, ‘Okay, let’s keep the noise level down, please’. Or s/he moves around the room and checks if the students are on-task by looking over their shoulders.

Formative: Teacher seeks to establish or determine the present level of student understanding or skill in a learning task by listening to talk, observing behavior asking questions (e.g. ‘Can you say some more about that?’ ‘What is the next step?’) or checking written work. The teacher can also use record-keeping, for example, carrying notebooks in which s/he writes comments and grades as s/he moves around the classroom.

Monitoring Focus

Individual: Teacher moves to an individual student to establish or determine the level of his or her understanding or skill in a set learning activity or task.

Group: Teacher moves to a group to establish or determine the level of students’ understanding or skill in a set learning activity or task.

Findings

Monitoring Type and Foci

In terms of monitoring type at the lesson level, 26% of phases included supervisory monitoring and 20% included formative monitoring. At the unit of work level, 28% of phases included supervisory monitoring and the figure for formative monitoring was lower at 20%.

In terms of focus at the lesson level, 22% of phases included the monitoring of individuals and 12% with groups of students. The percentages at the unit level were almost identical: 22% for individuals and 13% for groups.

The Core 2 data indicates that teachers conducted monitoring for both supervisory and formative purposes (not necessarily in the same event), and these actions were positively correlated (r = .546, p = .0001). There were also medium to strong significant relationships between individual and supervisory monitoring (r = .535, p = .0001), and group and formative monitoring (r = .534, p = .0001). There were medium and significant relationships between individual and formative monitoring (r = .380, p = .0001), and group and supervisory monitoring (r = .480, p = .0001). Finally, and logically, an increase in the occurrence of group focus was associated with a decrease in individual focus and vice versa (r = –.303, p = .0001).

The graph in Figure 1, shows the occurrences of, and changes in, monitoring types at the lesson level. Over an average one-hour (double-period) time frame, there was a fairly close association between supervisory and formative monitoring set against a relatively modest frequency scale. For the first two-thirds of lessons, teachers undertook slightly more supervisory monitoring but this decreased in favor of formative monitoring as lessons and activities drew to a close.

Figure 1.

Monitoring Types in Secondary 3 English.

The graph in Figure 2 illustrates changes in, and the progression of, monitoring foci at the lesson level. It is clear that there was more individual than group monitoring throughout lessons but this did not occur very often.

Figure 2.

Monitoring Foci in Secondary 3 English.

Table 2, reports combinations of monitoring type and focus. Notably, 2154 phases (that is, over 60% of all coded phases) did not involve any kind of monitoring activity by teachers. The most frequent combination of monitoring type and focus was supervisory and formative to individual students (14.5%). The next highest combination was formative monitoring to individuals (8.2%) followed closely by supervisory monitoring to individuals (6.7%). All the other possible combinations between and across monitoring types and foci were less than 1%.

Table 2.

Descriptive Statistics: Combinations of Monitoring Type and Focus in Secondary 3 English.

Type		Focus		No. Phases	% Phases
Supervisory	Formative	Individual	Group	No. Phases	% Phases
None				2154	66.3
Yes	Yes	Yes		230	7.1
Yes		Yes		313	9.6
	Yes	Yes		129	4.0
Yes	Yes		Yes	200	6.2
Yes			Yes	107	3.3
	Yes		Yes	73	2.2
Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	31	1.0
Yes		Yes	Yes	4	0.1
	Yes	Yes	Yes	1	0.03
		Yes		2	0.1
Yes				2	0.1
	Yes			1	0.03
Total				3,247	100.0

Monitoring Purposes and Content

Our attention now turns to the purposes and substantive content of teachers’ monitoring practices. The specific point of interest here is what teachers monitored for when they observed and acted on students’ work, interactions and behavior in their classrooms.

Contemporary educational psychology is particularly interested in how knowledge is both cognitively and socially constructed (Bransford et al., 2000). Concomitantly, recent and current models of learning emphasize the active construction and organization of knowledge, meaning and understanding based on prior knowledge and experience. Specifically, research findings suggest that in order to engage students and help them make progress, teachers must understand what they are thinking and how they might connect this with what they already know, do, and importantly, what they have achieved previously.

Table 3, shows the correspondences at the phasal level between teachers’ monitoring and checking for students’ background knowledge through questions, statements and recapitulations. There were three key knowledge-building indicators: (i) Checking for prior activities/topics (e.g. ‘Do you remember we discussed how the internet differs from printed books?’), (ii) Checking for prior specific content knowledge (e.g. ‘Who can recall the differences between books and the Internet?’), and (iii) Checking for prior relevant knowledge (e.g. ‘How many books are in the Harry Potter series?’).

Table 3.

Correspondence Analysis: Monitoring and Knowledge Building Indicators at the Phasal Level in Secondary 3 English.

	Individual	Group
	Phases	Phases
Checking for prior activities/topics	22	6
Checking for prior specific content knowledge	17	16
Checking for prior relevant knowledge	9	6
Total (Col)	48	28

The results indicate that teachers rarely, if ever, checked background knowledge through monitoring individuals or groups. In terms of individuals, we coded only 27 minutes from over 160 hours of recorded class time where checking for prior relevant knowledge occurred. The instances for checking for prior specific content knowledge and checking for prior activities/topics were 17 and 22 lesson 3-minute phases, respectively. The figures for checking background knowledge in groups were even lower.

It is also worth noting that there were no obvious and meaningful relationships between checking for prior activities/topics, specific content knowledge and relevant knowledge at the p = .05 level. In other words, there were few explicit connections made between what the students knew and the present content of lessons.

Finally, Table 4 considers monitoring type and focus by subject-specific instructional practices (see Table 1) at the phasal level. There were a total of nine areas under consideration (Coding/Decoding, Comprehension, Interpretation and Meaning Making, Creative Writing, Description, Explanation, Conveying Information, Expression and Persuasion). These items were adapted from Ellis (2003), and Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2000) revised Bloomian taxonomy of educational objectives.

Table 4.

Correspondence Analysis: Monitoring Type and Focus by Subject-specific Instructional Activities at the Phasal Level in Secondary 3 English.

Instructional Activities	Supervisory	Formative	Total	Individual	Group	Total
Instructional Activities	Phases	Phases	Phases	Phases	Phases	Phases
Coding/Decoding	313	287	600	255	176	431
Comprehension	126	132	258	77	98	175
Interpretation and Meaning Making	170	157	327	106	116	222
Creative Writing	59	45	104	30	34	64
Descriptive Writing	81	66	147	53	32	85
Explanation	95	65	160	72	38	110
Conveying Information	228	161	389	193	96	289
Expression	32	34	66	10	27	37
Persuasion	45	24	69	28	20	48
Total (Col)	1149	971	2120	824	637	1461

In terms of monitoring type (supervisory and formative), the highest level of occurrence was between coding/decoding activities (600 phases) followed some way behind by conveying (389 phases) and interpretation and meaning making (327 phases). Where subject-specific activities took place, the levels of occurrence for comprehension, creative writing, description, explanation, expression and persuasion were all highly infrequent. Furthermore, English teachers used more supervisory than formative monitoring when subject-specific activities were in play or enacted.

The associations between monitoring focus and subject-specific activities were slightly more varied. Clearly, the most frequent of correspondence was between individual monitoring and coding/decoding activities (255 phases), followed by individual monitoring and conveying (193 phases), and group monitoring with coding/decoding (176 phases).

Discussion and Conclusion

Summary of Findings

The present study explored the uses and purposes of monitoring by Secondary 3 English teachers in government schools in Singapore. In terms of the types of monitoring and their occurrences (Research Question 1), the results indicated that teachers engaged in low levels of supervisory and formative monitoring with individuals and groups in both individual lessons and across entire units of work. In addition, although there was not a perfect correlation, there was evidence to support the claim that teachers conducted monitoring for both supervisory and formative purposes at various time points in lessons. This was not the case for monitoring focus where an increase in the occurrence of group focus was associated, logically, with a decrease in individual focus and vice versa. Broadly speaking, these results indicate that monitoring occurred throughout lessons but at relatively low-to-medium thresholds of occurrence across coded phases; less than 40% of the total number of phases in the lesson sample.

As for broad purposes and content in monitoring (Research Question 2), teachers rarely checked students’ background knowledge via monitoring. This finding suggests that the content of monitoring was restricted as a direct function of the nature and objectives of planned and enacted learning tasks and activities. Therefore, English teachers seemed most concerned with checking students’ basic coding/decoding work over any other form of subject-specific skills work. While accuracy in decoding and coding is clearly important and essential in language study and communication, the lack of focus on other language learning activities is not incidental nor is it inconsequential. There could be other under-explored fields of subject-specific skills work where monitoring activity could be involved.

On the basis of the present data, we now move on to consider the potential consequences of adopting a small observed range of monitoring activities set against a syllabus context with wider language learning intentions and aspirations (see Table 1). The remainder of the discussion examines the implications of the study findings in terms of potential lost or missed opportunities (through classroom monitoring) in the design and enactment of English language instruction in Singapore and beyond.

A Reconsideration of the Instructional Roles of Monitoring in English Language Learning

Two of the possible consequences of choosing to use monitoring as a primary means of control and for checking on students’ progress in set learning tasks and activities are that less time and attention will be available for other planned and enacted monitoring purposes. For example, from the theoretical perspective of visible teaching and learning (Hattie, 2009) where learning is the explicit goal and where teachers actively seek to ascertain whether and to what extent challenging goals are attained by students, monitoring could provide a starting point for a range of subject-based activities (incorporating comprehension, interpretation and meaning-making, creativity, description, explanation, conveying information, expression and persuasion), reflective practice (Farrell, 2015) and even the social construction of knowledge (Bransford et al., 2000). But, for these instructional practices to gain traction and priority in English classrooms, teachers would have to be open to the possibility of recruiting monitoring for formative purposes as well.

As specified earlier, formative monitoring involves teachers seeking to establish or determine levels of student understanding or skill in a set learning activity or task. And so, if an English teacher were interested in reconsidering the instructional affordances of monitoring, how might this be approached?

One avenue would be to envision and enact monitoring as an instructional strategy (Robertson, 1996) with formative learning purposes by establishing questioning as a classroom-based professional development challenge with personal and professional growth in mind.

For example, teacher educator and instructional designer, Sánchez Terrell (2015), in her compendium of ideas, The 30 Goals Challenge to Teachers: Small Steps to Transform Your Teaching, advocates that teachers who want to reinvigorate their teaching do so purposefully and consciously in pursuit of an ideal. Sánchez Terrell outlines a professional learning process that is essentially task-oriented and revolves around the achievement of both short- and long-term goals, and reflections designed to motivate action and promote self-discovery.

Following this line, a short-term goal for questioning with the intent of recruiting students’ prior knowledge in the classroom might be:

Prior to the commencement of a task (i.e. at task set-up) ask students simply worded and straightforward questions (e.g. What do you think? Why do you think that? How do you know this? Can you tell me more? What questions do you still have?) (Alber, 2013) about the topic or theme to engage and prepare them for the work ahead.

A more ambitious and challenging long-term questioning goal would be to create opportunities for students to ask teachers and each other the type of questions they would normally have to answer. Potentially, this reversal of roles could instill ownership, promote shared practices and lead to positive learning relationships in the classroom. Essentially, the key desired outcomes would be to encourage debate and transform language classrooms into communities of enquirers. Beyond that, student-initiated questioning could even be scaled to the level of a school-wide approach that is part of day-to-day life (Rogers, 2007). These are areas where language teachers and researchers need further research-driven data to inform the development of instructional practices and learning materials.

The present discussion indicates that the monitoring of language students’ work in classrooms in Singapore could have a wider set of instructional affordances. For example, it could be extended in scope to provide opportunities for both teachers and students to begin the process of identifying, measuring and evaluating their progress and success in planning and enacting a wider array of classroom interactions, and learning activities and tasks. This expansion of the monitoring repertoire in classrooms could potentially widen the bases upon which teachers decide what their students are learning and how. To do this would require making teaching and learning more ‘visible’, and using strategies or techniques that draw extensively on students’ prior knowledge and venture into a wide(r) range of subject-based knowledge work. More specifically, there might also be a place created, via monitoring, for teachers and students to interact and learn from each other in ongoing ways through questioning techniques. Overall, if all of this were to hold true, monitoring could become a powerful pivot for transformed classroom interactions and one of a number of measures for differentiating effective schools and teachers from those who are not yet so (Cotton, 1988; Hattie, 2009).

Limitations

We duly acknowledge that the cross-sectional classroom observation data reported here has limited scope and depth. For example, the study coders only had access to a single unit of classroom work taken from a semester in a single year of school study. Further, there is a distinct lack of background information concerning previous classroom behavior or the content of previous instruction. Yet, when viewed indicatively in answer to the questions, ‘How and why do teachers teach in the ways that they do?’ the data speak to and inform a generalizable classroom disposition and pedagogy where monitoring plays a vital, yet purposefully restricted, role in English language instruction (i.e. successful task setting and task completion).

Second, we fully accept that classroom monitoring activities are highly dynamic and dependent on the contingent unfolding of both verbal and non-verbal (e.g. gesture and motion) events in the classroom. These events may also be bounded by the amount of available time, and students’ familiarity with subject matter, lesson content and established classroom management procedures. While it is possible that coders missed some potential monitoring occurrences due to the limitations of the study’s categorizations, we were still able to identify certain instructional patterns across many hours of data collected in different schools.

Third, it is well-known that expanding teachers’ instructional practices is particularly difficult especially in situations where the coverage of curriculum content, accountability and the preparation of learners for high-stakes public examinations take precedence in lesson planning and institutional policymaking (Black and Wiliam, 1997; Cohen and Ball, 2007; Cuban, 1988; Fullan, 1991; Lefstein, 2008). Thus, there may be several compelling reasons why English language teachers in Singapore and beyond may not want to learn new techniques in monitoring or even be interested in perceiving the affordances of monitoring differently.

Yet, it is worth bearing in mind that the type and content of monitoring are not fixed entities and that what teachers plan and focus on in class is a direct reflection of what is valued, rewarded and enacted instructionally. Overall, the article’s central venture is to invite a reconsideration of the perceived affordances of monitoring as a way of critiquing observed practices in the interests of scrutiny and potential improvement.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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