A Case Study of Student Perceptions toward Between-class Ability Grouping in Freshman Practical English Class

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate students' learning experiences and their perceptions towards teaching methods and evaluations, teaching materials and ability grouping policy in the course of Freshmen Practical English. The subjects were freshmen from three different colleges (i.e., College of Management; College of Engineering; College of Humanities and Social Sciences) at National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences in the 2005 academic year. Students were distributed into 3 levels based on the placement test provided by the publisher of the textbook for the Freshmen Practical English course. Data were collected through a questionnaire (α= 0.8477) on four categories of students' learning experiences, perceptions toward teaching methods, teaching materials and grouping policies. The questionnaire survey was conducted during the final two weeks of the first semester. Collected data were analyzed and decoded in the SPSS for Winodws 10.0 including the analyses of mean scores, standard deviation, one-way ANOVA and Duncan post hoc comparisons to examine gender difference, level difference and college difference. The results showed that 1) there was a higher percentage of approval than disapproval in all of the four categories, especially in the category of perceptions toward teaching methods and evaluations; 2) 52.5% of the respondents answered so-so to the question of whether they were satisfied with the grouping policy, while 33.1 % responded ”agree,” in contrast to 14.4 % who responded ”disagree.” Moreover, 44.7% of the respondents expressed that grouping was helpful to their English learning, and only 8.6% disagreed; 3) 49.6% preferred to be ability grouped in the Sophomore Listening and Speaking Class, and only 12.6% disagreed; 4) 47% of the respondents agreed that different teaching materials should be used for different level students, while 17.3 of the respondents disagreed; 5) in gender differences, male students demonstrated a significant higher level of stress in learning English, and this phenomenon was especially significant among students from College of Engineering. Besides, more female students felt the classroom atmosphere was nice; 6) 14.5% of the respondent revealed that they were misplaced, and a significant higher percentage of beginning-level respondents wanted to be regrouped per semester than intermediate and intermediate advanced level students.