"Transparency" of Textbook Activities as Perceived by Chinese Middle School English Teachers With Different Professional Experience.

Hao Xu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661014

Abstract

Transparency of textbook activities, i.e., the degree of easiness for teachers to process and comprehend them, needs to be researched in terms of both materials design and materials use. This article reports on a study that investigates the impact of teachers’ professional experience and transparency of textbook activities (due to materials design) on teachers’ actual perception of the transparency of materials. The study adopted a mixed-methods design and collected quantitative data via a five-point scale survey from 115 secondary school teachers as well as interview data from 15 informants. Data analysis reveals that both teachers’ professional experience and transparency of textbook activities affect the degree of easiness teachers perceived as they understand and interpret the activities for pedagogical purposes. However, discrepancy exists between transparency in materials design and transparency in teachers’ perception. Lack of pedagogical knowledge about the relationship between teaching objectives, steps, and assessment and strong existing cognitive schemata developed from the stereotype of processing a familar set of teaching materials might hamper teachers’ perception of transparency.

Highlights

How English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers use textbooks is of sustained interest to both teacher education and materials development researchers (Tomlinson, 2012)
The research question this study aims to answer is: How is EFL teachers’ understanding of textbook activities influenced by teachers’ experience and transparency of the activities?
Three of the experts were university professors specialized in research on EFL teaching in schools, three were expert junior high school teachers, and three were senior editors from publishers that compiled EFL textbooks for schools

Summary

Introduction

How English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers use textbooks is of sustained interest to both teacher education and materials development researchers (Tomlinson, 2012). Teachers’ understanding of textbook activities, for instance, that of the designed learning objectives and suggested learning process, informs their instructional design and classroom teaching (Ren and Han, 2016). As part of teaching practice, understanding textbook activities involves a series of cognitive processes that are supported by teachers’ knowledge, skills, and beliefs, among many other “Transparency” of Textbook Activities psychological traits (Gao and Zhang, 2020). These traits are comprehensively represented in teachers’ experience, which, by and large, resides in their seniority in the teaching profession. Experience should be investigated as a potential variable that impacts on how teachers understand textbook activities

Objectives

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Results