Department of English

National Pingtung University of Education

Masters Thesis



Academic Adjustment of Junior High School EFL Students in Taiwan





Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-hsiu Yang

Graduate: Sheng-shiang Tseng




July, 2008
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This master thesis would not be completed without the assistance and support of
many individuals. I want to express my sincerest gratitude to those individuals who
assisted and encouraged me to work toward the completion of the thesis.
First of all, my deepest appreciation goes to my advisor Dr. Hsiu-Hsiu Yang for
her encouragement, patience, and suggestion. She always believed in me and offered
incredible support throughout the completion of my thesis. It was an honor to have
her as a model and mentor. I am also indebted to Dr. Hsin-Hsin Yang and Dr.
Ming-Tzu Liao, my committee members, who share their professional knowledge and
experiences with me and offer me their valuable and insightful suggestions to make
my thesis better and more complete.
In addition, I would like to thank Bob, David, J oe, Ken, and Peter for their
willing participation in this study. I owe a special debt to Miss Huang for her interest,
openness, and time to grant me permission to enter his classroom and interview her
students. This thesis would have been impossible without their participation.
I am also grateful for my classmates and friends, Alice, Anita, Chris, Cindy,
Eureka, Ivy, J ack, J oanna, Kelly, Tank, and Winnie for their unfailing academic and
emotional life support.
Last and most important, I must express my profound gratitude to my parents,
Hsiu-Chu Huang and Ming-Chih Tseng, for their persistent love and faithful support
in all of my academic endeavors over the years. Their constant encouragement has
contributed greatly to the completion of this thesis. I would also like to thank
Mei-Hsiang Yin, my soul mate, for her unconditional support and love. I am so happy
to have you all the way in my life.


ii

iii

iv
ABSTRACT
This study aims to investigate the first-year secondary school students English
academic adjustment problems in terms of Learning Strategies, Learning Attitude, and
Learning Habits. While previous studies had used a quantitative method to examine
the relationship between students academic adjustment and other social, personal,
and family factors, few focused on how these variables influence students
academic adjustment. Hence, this study also explores how students adjust their
English Learning adjustment and what external variables influence their academic
adjustment.
Five secondary school students were invited to participate in this study to explore
their English academic adjustment. The instrument included the interviews with
students and their English teacher, classroom observations, and students reflective
Learning journals. The data of the interviews, the classroom observations, and the
Learning journals were transcribed and analyzed in terms of Learning Strategies,
Learning Attitude, and Learning Habits.
The findings revealed that the major problems on students academic adjustment
were their lack of effective Learning Strategies and Learning Habits. In terms of
Learning Strategies, students could not employ effective Strategies to help memorize
vocabulary, learn grammar, and form a grammatical sentence. In terms of Learning
Habits, students confronted the problems in changing their physical Habits and mental
Habits to get adjusted to the new Learning context in secondary school. In addition,
the results showed that family and social support were the two crucial factors for
students academic adjustment to change their Learning strategy uses and Learning
Habits. However, the family support from parents in students academic adjustment
was often restricted to the Learning Habits only. In social factors, teacher and peer
v
support were also not very effective to facilitate students to adjust their Learning.
Hence, what matters most to help students succeed in academic adjustment for
teachers and parents was to closely examine what Learning problems students really
encounter and to offer the Strategies that could match students needs.
Finally, this study suggests that future researchers could employ a questionnaire
about academic adjustment before interviews to inspect students academic
adjustment. Future researcher could also examine whether genders and location of the
schools might influence students academic adjustment.

Keywords: academic adjustment, Learning Strategies, Learning Attitude, Learning
Habits, 9-year integrated curriculum





















vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.. i
Chinese Abstract..... ii
English Abstract.. iv
Table of Contents .... vi
List of Tables........ x
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION.. 1
Background and Motivation 1
Statement of the Problem. 3
Purposes of the Study........... 5
Research Question.... 5
Significance of the Study.. 6
Limitation of the Study. 6
Definitions of Terms.. 7
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW.......... 9
Academic Adjustment........... 9
Elements of Academic Adjustment.......... 10
Learning Strategies....... 11
Learning Habits..... 13
Learning Attitude... 14
Factors Influencing Learning Adjustment... 15
Family Factors 16
Personal Factors. 16
vii
Social Factors.. 17
Academic Adjustment Studies in Taiwan.......... 19
CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY.......... 22
Rationale 22
Participants........... 23
The Secondary School English Class and the Teacher..
23
Students..
24
Data collection......, 25
Semi-structured Interview...
26
Reflective Learning Journals...........
29
Classroom Observations and Filednotes..... 30
Data analysis.. 30
Trustworthiness. 32
CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.......... 34
Subject one: David........ 35
Davids Learning Strategies...........
36
Davids Learning Attitudes..............
38
Davids Learning Habits...... 39
Davids Academic Adjustment..... 39
Subject two: Ken......... 41
Kens Learning Strategies......
41
Kens Learning Attitudes................
44
Kens Learning Habits..... 45
viii
Kens Academic Adjustment........ 46
Subject three: Peter..... 49
Peters Learning Strategies......
50
Peters Learning Attitudes..........
52
Peters Learning Habits....... 52
Peters Academic Adjustment.......... 53
Subject four: Joe... 55
Joes Learning Strategies.....
56
Joes Learning Attitudes...........
57
Joes Learning Habits... 57
Joes Academic Adjustment..... 58
Subject five: Bob...... 59
Bobs Learning Strategies....
60
Bobs Learning Attitudes........
61
Bobs Learning Habits.......... 61
Bobs Academic Adjustment.... 61
Summary and Discussion..... 63
Learning Strategies..........
64
Learning Habits........
67
Learning Strategies..........
64
Factors for Successful and Unsuccessful Academic Adjustment.....
68
Learning Attitudes............
73
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION.......... 75
ix
Summary of the Study.............
75
Implications for Teaching Practice.........
77
Suggestion for Future Research.............
78
REFERENCES......... 79
Appendix A..............
85
Appendix B.......... ...........
87
Appendix C .................
89
Appendix D...............................
91
Appendix E........
93
Appendix F............
95
Appendix G............
97
Appendix H............
100



















x
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1 Data Collection Schedule of the First Semester............................ 28
Table 2 Data Collection Schedule of the Second Semester........................ 28
Table 3 Example of the Interview and Observation Data........................ 31
Figure 1 The Procedure of the Interview..................................................... 27




1
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

Background and Motivation
When English emerges as a powerful communicative tool in the field of business,
science, and technology worldwide, EFL countries initiate a series of educational
policies to promote English education in primary schools, secondary schools, and
universities. To help foster national development, the Taiwanese government
legitimized English as a mandatory subject in 1968 (Dai, 1999). In 2001, the
Taiwanese government further made English one of the crucial subjects in the
nine-year integrated curriculum, starting to promote English teaching in the primary
schools (Dai, 1999; Zhou, 2002). The central principles of English teaching in the
nine-year integrated curriculum are to equip students with fundamental English
communicative skills and self-learning approaches, to enhance students English
learning motivation, and to provide students with basic knowledge relevant to foreign
cultures (MOE, 2006). Following the principles, Taiwanese English teachers in both
the primary schools and secondary schools have to design various English teaching
activities or teaching materials to establish a natural English learning context (Huang,
Cheng, & Lin, 2004; MOE, 2006).
However, the teaching objectives in the nine-year integrated curriculum are not
easy to be fulfilled in both the primary schools and secondary schools due to the
following reasons (Zhang, 2003; Wu, 2004). While the primary school teachers use
many games to motivate students to engage in their learning process, one of the
problems of language teaching is that the overuse of games to teach English might not
be easy for teachers to evaluate students language proficiency (Wu, 2004). The
second problem is the mixed English proficient levels of students in the class which
2
makes it difficult for teachers to use useful teaching methods to benefit students
English learning. Such a problem also takes place in the secondary school where
teachers have no ideas of what teaching activities and learning materials can be
employed to meet the needs of each student in the class (Zhang, 2003).
In the secondary school, a huge number of students in the English class become
another problem that teachers are concerned in teaching activity design. That is, due
to the time constraint and the number of students, not many communicative activities
are allowable for teachers to conduct in class to provide enough opportunities for
students to practice their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Similarly,
Dan and Zhang (2001) show that even though most of the secondary school teachers
hold positive opinions toward the communicative language teaching approach (here
after, CLT) in the nine-year integrated curriculum to build up a meaningful and
contextualized learning environment to help students apply what have learned into
real life, teachers usually cannot adhere to using the CLT approach in their classes to
facilitate students language proficiency due to the time constraints and pressure from
the basic competence test for junior high school students. As English tests in the
senior high school entrance exam rely so much on reading and writing skills, teachers
in their third-year English class are inclined to use more one-way teaching approaches
focusing on reciting vocabulary, grammar rules, and dialogues, rather than interactive
activities. Moreover, Huang, Cheng, and Lin (2004) express that 60.6% of the
secondary school teachers in their study believe that the teaching of foreign culture
should be excluded from the nine-year integrated curriculum, and that English
teaching has to focus on the training of reading and writing skills, instead of four
language skills. In other words, English teaching in the secondary school today is still
inclined to the use of grammatical teaching methods or audio lingual methods to
emphasize reading and writing skills through mechanical drillings. The major
3
teaching goal of the secondary school English classes is to help students deal with the
high school entrance exam. However, such a teaching principle and the notion of
teaching activity design are very different from those of the primary school English
classes. In the primary school English classes, the teaching goal is to enhance
students learning motivation, to enhance their listening and speaking skills, and to
develop their self-learning ability. The teaching approach is the CLT to allow students
to practice their language skills with peers through interactive activities.

Statement of the Problem
Such a gap as mentioned above in the teaching goal and the teaching approach
between primary school and secondary school has ushered in a devastating impact
upon the transition of English learning for the secondary school students (Su, 2001;
Lin, 2004, J ia & J ia, 2003; Huang, Cheng, & Lin, 2004; Zhou, 2002; Wu, 2004). For
example, learning language structures becomes relatively difficult for the secondary
school students in Taiwan, as such a language skill is fully overlooked and not trained
in the primary school class (Zhou, 2002). Secondary school teachers also complain
that the materials on language structure in the textbooks are too complicated for
students to learn. In addition, different for the primary school which focuses on the
use of communicative language teaching approach, the secondary school English
teachers are inclined to the use of traditional teaching approach which lied heavily in
mechanical drillings and had little opportunities for students to have interactions with
peers and teachers (Huang, Cheng, & Lin, 2004).
Consequently, English learning becomes stressful for the secondary school
students, and English is further perceived merely as a tool to help pass the school
exam, rather than a communicative instrument (Zhou, 2002). Wu (2004) also
pinpoints that due to the discrepancy in language teaching approaches between the
4
primary school and the secondary school, students cannot adapt themselves very well
to the English learning context in the secondary school. Moreover, the adjustment
problem for the secondary school students is much more terrible in the remote schools
than students in the non-remote school (Huang 1975; Chen, Wang, Li, 1993; Li, 1994;
Wu, 1996). That is, secondary students from the remote schools seem to suffer more
academic adjustment problems in learning strategy use and lack confidence in their
learning process than students from the metropolitan districts (Huang, 1975; Li, 1994).
In other words, the school district location appears to be one of social factors that
might influence students academic adjustment.
As Kaspar (1997) states that the change of English curriculum influences
students English skills, academic performance, and retention. All the reviewed
literature indicates that under the nine-year integrated curriculum (Su, 2001; Zhou,
2002; J ia & J ia, 2003; Lin, 2004; Huang, Cheng, & Lin, 2004; Wu, 2004), the
secondary school students have faced numerous English learning difficulties in the
transition from the primary schools to the secondary schools. While many studies in
Taiwan discuss the academic adjustment problems from the primary schools to the
secondary schools (Chen, Wang, & Li, 1993), little research in English teaching and
learning has been conducted to look deeply into the way by which students adjust
their English learning from the primary schools to the secondary schools. Furthermore,
the studies about academic adjustment are usually conducted by quantitative research,
employing a huge amount of questionnaires to understand students academic
adjustment. However, the so-called academic adjustment is complicated and reflected
in different aspects of growth at different times and context (Wentzel, 1999). That is,
to study students academic adjustment requires a longitudinal observation and
examination upon students learning.

5
Purpose of the Study
Recognizing the discrepancies between the primary school and the secondary
school in English curriculum design, this study aims to explore academic adjustment
problems students encounter in their first-year English learning experience in the
secondary school. As academic adjustment was often divided into learning strategy
uses, learning attitudes, and learning habits (Zhang, 1982; Chen, Li, & Lin, 1989; Lin,
1992), I would examine students academic adjustment problem in terms of the three
elements. Moreover, by a qualitative method, I attempted to examine how students
make changes in their English learning process to adjust themselves to the English
learning context in the secondary school.
Research about academic adjustment shows that some factors like family and
schools have strong influences upon students academic adjustment (Huang, 1975; Li,
1992, 1994; Wu, 1996; Chen, Wang, & Li, 1998). Therefore, this study also intends to
investigate what are essential factors that might help students enhance their academic
adjustment in the secondary school.

Research Questions
Based on the purpose of the study, the research questions are:
1. What are the problems that students encounter on their second English learning
in learning strategies, learning attitudes, and learning habits?
2. How do the secondary school students adjust their English learning in learning
strategies, learning attitudes, and learning habits in their learning process?
3. What external factors might influence students English academic adjustment in
learning strategies, learning attitudes, and learning habits?


6
Significance of the study
This study has its significance on the theoretical and practical implications of
English teaching and learning in Taiwan. Theoretically, different from previous
quantitative research on students adjustment problems, this study aims to uncover
students changes in their adjustment to provide a more comprehensive insight
about academic adjustment. Pedagogically, by recognizing students academic
adjustment difficulties and factors that influence students adjustment, this study
attempts to empower English teachers in secondary schools to comprehend what
supports they could provide to help students bridge the gap in the nine-year integrated
English curriculum. In addition, students can have better understanding of their
English academic adjustment problems to help adjust themselves into the secondary
school English class.

Limitations of the Study
The present study had its limitations. First, I found it difficult for secondary
school students to express their beliefs and feelings toward their English learning
during interviews. It could be a loss that I did not employ questionnaires to elicit more
information from students. Second, writing reflective learning journals was also
unable to get sufficient information for students felt reluctant to spend their time on
the journal writing. Finally, the previous studies indicated that gender might cause
different results of academic adjustment, but I was unable to recruit the female
students who had academic adjustment problems and who still was imbued with
motivations to learn English.



7
Definition of Key Terms
1. Academic adjustment:
Academic adjustment is an interactive process between students and the learning
environment and involves the elements like learning strategy uses, learning habits,
learning attitudes, academic objectives, learning context, and psychophysical
accumulation (Chen, Wang, & Li, 1993; Raimsay, Baker, & J ones, 1999). In this study,
only the learning strategy uses, learning habits, and learning attitudes are perceived as
essence of academic adjustment, while other elements such as learning context are
adopted to examine how they influence students adjustment.
2. Learning strategy:
Learning strategies are the thoughts or behaviors that learners adopt to make their
learning more efficiently and effectively in different situations (Oxford, 1990). In this
study, learning strategies are examined in terms the behaviors or thoughts that
students acquired from their learning experiences to face their learning problems (Wu,
1996).
3. Learning habits:
Learning habits are automatic responses that frequently take place when learners are
placed in the similar situations (Bernard, 1965). The development of learning habits is
a result of motives. For example, a reading habit can be developed at first because
reading is expected by learners to keep up with other fellow students to please their
teachers or parents. Afterwards, learners might perceive themselves as a capable
reader to understand the meaning of texts and feel excited; by the time reading
becomes a motivated and rewarding act.
4. Learning attitudes:
Learning attitudes are learners reactions toward an object, a person, an institution or
an event, including cognitive component, affective component, and readiness for
8
action (Ajzen, 1988). Cognition is attitudes of learners toward their learning ability
and intelligence. Affection is positive or negative impressions of learners upon
particular language like English. Readiness of action is behavioral response of
learners toward language learning (Su, 2002).






















9
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews the studies on academic adjustment. The first section
defines academic adjustment. The second section describes the elements of academic
adjustment, including learning strategies, learning attitudes, and learning habits. The
third section identifies factors which influence academic adjustment. Finally, the
empirical study about academic adjustment is discussed.

Academic Adjustment
Raimsay, Baker and J ones (1999) term academic adjustment as the fit which
students achieve with the academic context (p. 129). Andrade (2006) refers
learning adjustment as evidence of learning, which may be measured by successful
completion of course requirements, grade point average, satisfactory academic
standing or retention (p. 134). In other words, academic adjustment is the continuous
interactive process between students and the new learning context when students
struggle to employ particular strategies to cope with the new learning context (Li,
1992, 1994; Chen, Wang, & Li,1993; Raimsay, Baker, & J ones, 1999). Academic
adjustment can be further divided into four stages when the students would have
various affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses toward the different situations
in the new learning context (Anderson, 1994, cited in Raimsay, Baker, & J ones, 1999).
Anderson claims that adjustment begins with a general cultural encounter. Then, in
the second stage, students encounter different obstacles derived from the environment
or self, and the obstacles in turn provoke a variety of response generation in the third
stage. Finally, students get used to the new learning context in the fourth stage, the
overcoming phases. Of these four stages, the second and third stages are regarded as
10
relatively pivotal in helping students succeed in their academic adjustment during
which students encounter obstacles from the environment or the self, and adopt
possible approaches to help overcome the obstacles (Anderson, 1994). In other words,
students may fail in their academic adjustment because they cannot employ adequate
approaches to resolve their problems appropriately. Studies also indicate that
academic adjustment has a close relationship with students academic performance
( Wu, 1981; Li, 1992, 1994; Gerdes & Mallinckrodt, 1994).
Students with good learning adjustment are proved to have better performance in
their learning achievement and social interaction among peers than those who have
academic adjustment problems (Wu, 1981; Gerdes & Mallinckrodt, 1994). Li (1992,
1994) further indicates that students who have academic adjustment problems appear
to lack learning motivation, confidence, and concrete learning objectives, and easily
fail in their learning process.

Elements of Academic Adjustment
Elements of academic adjustment have been widely identified according to
different researchers. Baker and Siryk (1984a, 1984b) explain academic adjustment
involves such components as learning motivation, academic objectives, actions to
match the need of academic objectives, and the general satisfaction with the academic
environment. Chen, Li, and Lin (1989) identify learning strategies, learning habits,
learning attitudes, learning contexts, and psychophysical accumulation as five
essential elements to describe the academic adjustments. Zhang (1982) claims that
academic adjustment comprises students learning strategies, learning habits, and
learning attitudes. Li (1992) perceives academic achievement, learning strategies,
learning attitudes, curriculum design, and school regulation as the components of
academic adjustment. Wang (2003) states that to justify students academic
11
adjustment, teachers or researchers must take into account students learning strategy
use, learning habits, learning attitudes, and learning context.
Of all the components discussed by the previous studies, only three ones,
learning strategies, learning habits, and learning attitudes, are the elements that
students could make adjustments in the learning process, while the external elements
like learning context, academic objectives, and curriculum design are not allowable
for students to make any changes in their learning. These external elements can only
been perceived as influential factors in students adjustment process. Consequently,
the three components, learning strategies, learning habits, and learning attitudes
would be used to examine students English academic adjustment. Other external
components like school, academic objectives, and English curriculum will be used to
examine how they influence students adjustment. In the following paragraphs, I
describe the three elements of academic adjustment, learning strategies, learning
habits, and learning attitudes, respectively.
Learning Strategies
The learning strategies are defined as the special thoughts or behaviors that
individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information
(OMalley & Chamot, 1990, p.1). In other words, effectively using learning strategies
are beneficial for learners to acquire, store, and retrieve new information. Oxford
(1990) categorized the learning strategies into memory strategies, cognitive strategies,
compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social
strategies. Memory strategies refer to the techniques that learners use to help retain
information, including creating linkages between information and mind, reviewing,
and employing actions to memorize information. The cognitive strategies are the most
popular strategies employed by learners to help manipulate or transform the target
language, including practicing, receiving and sending messages, analyzing and
12
reasoning, and creating structure for input and output. Learners employ the
compensation strategies to make up their incompetence of grammar and vocabulary,
such as guessing intelligently and overcoming limitations in speaking and writing.
The metacognitive strategies are characterized as the knowledge to identify their
learning strategy use and problems during the learning process, including centering,
planning, and evaluating your own learning. The affective strategies empower
learners to control their emotional temperature, foster their learning motivation, and
promote self-confidence. The social strategies are about how learners attempt to call
for assistance from others to resolve their learning problems, such as asking questions,
cooperating with others, and empathizing with others.
In second language acquisition, among those strategies, cognitive strategies are
found to be the most popular ones with language learners, particularly the practicing
strategy, and the metacognitive strategies are regarded as essential for successful
learning (Oxford, 1990). In other words, an efficient language learner could be
categorized as a person who relies much on the cognitive and metacognitive strategies
in their learning process, while such a characteristic cannot be found in less proficient
learners. OMalley and Michael (1990) further pinpoint that the learning strategy use
differences do exist between the beginning level students and the intermediate level
students, and show the intermediate level students use more strategies in their learning
process. In other words, proficient language learners tend to be more effective in
employing more strategies to facilitate their learning than less proficient learners. For
example, in listening comprehension, proficient listeners employ more inferring,
elaboration, monitoring, and metacognitive strategies to help them comprehend the
listening text than the less proficient listeners (Vandergrift, 1997; Berne, 2004).
In academic adjustment, learning strategies are further related with the behaviors
or thoughts that students adopt when facing their learning problems (Wu, 1996):
13
achievement strategies and failing strategies. The achievement strategies have positive
influence upon students school adjustment and the strategies are acquired through
successful experiences in learning when students attribute their success to the correct
use of learning strategy. That is, students will acquire new learning strategies and turn
them into a kind of learning habits only when successful learning experiences are
provided or constructed by teachers or parents to the students. By contrast, failing
strategies are a kind of evading behaviors and are related with low self-confidence,
low self-expectation, and low learning motivation. Thus, in this study to know the
students academic adjustment in learning strategy, I examined their learning strategy
based on Oxfords model and then explored how the learning strategies were acquired
or disregarded through their successful or failing learning experiences.
Learning Habits
Bernard (1965) indicates that learning habits are acts or patterns of behavior
that have become so easy, through practice, that they occur spontaneously in given
situations, without conscious thoughts or concentration (p.96). In other words,
learning habits refer to the automatic learning behaviors that learners repeatedly and
subconsciously employ to acquire knowledge or retain information in defined learning
contexts. Simply put, learning habits are how much time students might spend on
their learning, how they plan their learning, and the place where they used to study.
Bernard (1965) divides the learning habits into physical, mental, and emotional
categories. Physical habits refer to skills that are consolidated and acquired through
practices. Good physical habits are constructed through 1) early detection of errors, 2)
interaction in proper techniques, 3) reinforcement of improved responses by
commendation or calling to attention, and 4) giving attention to the matter of the
pupils need reduction. For example, when teaching writing, teachers might ask
students to write first and then tell the students mistakes they made in writing for
14
them to practice. Mental habits are the ways of thinking and doing, and would
determine ones successful adjustment. Thinking positively, in other words, can be
beneficial for students to succeed in their academic adjustment. Among various
mental habits are the habits of attention and inattention playing a preliminary role in
learning. That is, when students only pay attention to certain subjects or things that
match their interest, they lose the opportunities to enrich personal knowledge and
interests from other fields. The last one emotional habits are referred as attitudes,
indicating that learners have specific tendency toward particular events or situations.
The learning attitudes are further affected by students self-esteem and self-concept.
Students with higher self-esteem toward English might have greater achievement in
that subject. As a consequence, teachers are suggested to provide students with
satisfying experiences in the events or situations toward which students had negative
impressions or attitudes. In the next section, the definition of attitude will be further
described in detail.
Learning Attitudes
Ajzen (1988) perceives attitudes as a disposition to respond favorably or
unfavorably to an object, person, institution or event (p.4). That is, attitudes refer to
ones' positive or negative feeling or reactions toward particular events, persons, and
objectives. There are three fundamental components of learning attitudes: cognition,
affection, and readiness for action (Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960). The cognitive
component is about personal thoughts and beliefs toward different learning situations
or events. For example, a favorable attitude toward foreign teachers in English
teaching in Taiwan might entail the belief that foreigners are more competent than
Taiwanese teachers in language proficiency. The affective component concerns
feelings about the events, objectives, and contexts, such as anxiety and motivation.
The action component of attitude is associated with the behavioral intentions under
15
particular contexts and circumstances. Parents in Taiwan with a favorable attitude
toward the foreign English teachers might send their children to the language program
directed by native speakers. Students with a favorable attitude toward foreign English
teachers might indicate their readiness to attend an English only learning environment.
In other words, the three components of attitudes explain how attitudes might affect
behaviors (Ajzen, 1988). The presence or absence of particular objects might elicit a
favorable or unfavorable reaction toward the objects, and these reactions will in turn
affect individuals learning behaviors and academic achievement.
In second language learning, learning attitudes are associated with how learners
feel about their learning contexts, learning curriculums, learning materials, and the
styles that teachers teach in the classroom (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Chen, Lin, &
Li, 1989). Gardner (1985) proposed that learning attitudes, language proficiency,
motivation, and aptitude can predicate learners L2 success. That is, students with
positive learning attitudes are found to easily succeed in L2 (Gardner & Lambert,
1972). Influenced by their parents, peers, instructors, and the learning environment,
students might also adjust learning attitudes in the learning process (Freeman & Long,
1990). Some other external factors which might influence students learning
adjustment in learning strategies, learning habits, and learning attitudes will be
discussed in the next section.

Factors that Influence Learning Adjustment
This study takes learning strategies, learning habits, and learning attitudes as the
three components of the academic adjustment to investigate students English learning.
The three elements of the academic adjustment will be adjusted by students in their
learning process when external forces or some internal forces start to intervene in
their learning. These external and internal forces are divided into family, personal, and
16
social factors which in turn I will describe in detail.
Family Factors
To help students adapt themselves to the school learning, parents are regarded as
the most frequently cited sources of support to motivate students learning to success
in their education, and parental involvement further has been proved as significant
positive impact on children across race and across academic outcome (J eynes, 2003;
Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005). Grolnick, Kurowski, and Gurland (1990) also
support that children who have good relationships with their parents tend to have
better development of self-regulatory competences. Parents always do whatever it
takes to help their children, such as tutoring to get involved in their children learning
process (Wentzel,1999; Gerdes & Mallinckroat, 2001; Ryu, 2004). For example, some
parents will discuss homework with their children, read books, and play educational
activities with them. That is, parents teach their children some learning strategies,
such as memory strategies and compensation strategies to help their children be
prepared for new academic context. In addition, when parents find themselves as
incapable of providing help to solve their childrens problems, parents might support
their children by sharing their childhood experiences with their children to serve as a
learning model for their children to know what to do (Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005).
Parents who have high socioeconomic status can also provide their children with
better educational resources and opportunities (Wentzel, 1999). For instance, parents
employ tutors or school counselors equipped with knowledge that their children need
to help their children get through school successfully (Snchez, Reyes, & Singh,
2005). Once children realize their parents sacrifices and expectations on them, they
would work harder on their schooling.
Personal Factors
Personal factors concern personal expectation, genders, and grades in the school.
17
Li (1992) defines personal expectation as the concepts of how people evaluate
themselves as a successful one physically and mentally from the interaction between
themselves and the environment. Gerdes and Mallinckroat (2001) show that the
discrepancy between personal expectation and the learning environment serve as a
primary predictor for academic adjustment. That is, students who have unrealistically
high expectations and who overestimate their adjustment skills tend to become
vulnerable and then drop out of school easily. The self-efficacy theory similarly
proposes that learners become motivated to learn when they see the learning objective
to be set in line with their cognitive level (Weiner, 1985).
In terms of genders, females are proved to have better learning adjustment than
males in both the primary and secondary school (Li, 1992, 1994). Wu (1981) also
supports that females have better learning habits, learning strategies, and learning
attitudes in academic adjustment than males. The problem of adjustment also
increases, as students are upgraded into higher level in their learning. That is, higher
grade students appear to face more academic adjustment problems than lower grade
students due to the overwhelming learning projects or assignments (Huang 1975;
Chen, Lin, & Li, 1989; Chen, Wang, Li, 1993, 1994; Li, 1992, 1994;).
Social Factors
The social factors mainly entail the learners relationships with peers, teacher
teaching styles, and the school location. Gerdes and Mallinckroat (2001) signify that
in the academic adjustment process, students tend to encounter the difficulty like
loneliness during their first freshman year. Therefore, warm, stable, and nurturing
support network from peers becomes desperately needed to help students adjust
themselves to the new learning context (Berndt, 1999). Students who are not well
accepted by peers might feel less motivated in school learning and easily drop out
(Wentzel, 1999). Peers are also helpful in providing students academic adjustment
18
support that cannot be obtained from their parents, such as tutoring,
scholarships/financial aid and the college application process (Snchez, Reyes, &
Singh, 2005).
Moreover, teachers also have roles to play in students academic adjustment
process. They are suggested to realize how students react to the way that they teach in
the classroom to provide assistance for students who have adjustment problems (Ryu,
2004, Li, 1992, 1994). However, in the study done by Snchez, Reyes, and Singh
(2005), institutional agents cannot provide much support in students academic
achievement due to a huge number of students in the class. Only the college
application process and scholarships/financial aid are identified as useful support
provided by institutional agents, including teachers, an academic counselor, a pastor
and educator, and a mentor from a mentoring program.
Finally, the location and size of school are also co-related with students
academic adjustment (Huang 1975; Chen, Wang, Li, 1993; Li, 1994). Students
studying in the remote district tend to face more academic adjustment problems, and
fail to find out effective learning strategies to help resolve their problems. Chen,
Wang, and Li (1993) further point out that students studying in the urban district are
equipped with much better learning adjustment skills. Liu, Wu, and Chen (1995)
investigate the academic adjustment of indigenous students studying in the primary
school located in the urban district in Taiwan. They reveal that because of the social
cultural and social economic differences between the urban district and the indigenous
district, the indigenous students encounter sociocultural impacts upon their learning in
the urban school, failing to find right learning habits, learning attitudes, and
particularly in learning strategies to help them get used to the learning context in the
urban school. Furthermore, Liu, Wu, and Chen (1995) indicate that teachers, without
understanding of indigenous culture, are unable to find the obstacles that the
19
indigenous students encounter, and cannot provide suggestions to facilitate students
learning.

Academic Adjustment Studies in Taiwan
Most of the academic adjustment studies in Taiwan examined the relationship
between academic achievement and academic adjustment, the differences in academic
adjustment of students according to various variables like gender, school grades, and
educational backgrounds of parents, and socioeconomic status (Li, 1992, 1994 ; Chen,
Wang, & Li, 1993; Wu, 1994; Liu, Wu, & Chen, 1995; Wang, 2003; Lin, 2004; Wang,
2004; Huang, 2004).
Li (1992, 1994) and Chen, Wang, and Li (1993) employed questionnaires to
investigate academic adjustment of secondary school and primary school students.
Their findings showed that compared to other elements of adjustment like learning
habits, learning attitude, and the acculturation of learning environments, the fail to
apply learning strategies to the learning environment was the major obstacle that
students encounter in both the primary school and the secondary school. Li (1994)
further claimed that the problem of learning strategies in adjustment seemed to be
derived from the students learning stage of primary school. Huang (2004) examined
the English adjustment of the proficient learners in the secondary school. He pointed
out that most of the proficient learners were found to have good learning strategies,
and the learning strategies are acquired from the students cram school teachers. In
learning attitude, most of the gifted secondary school students acted as aggressive and
motivated learners in English. In learning habits, the students often concentrated on
their English classes and raised questions. At home, only 40% of the students
volunteered to listen to English radio programs or doing some practices. Qualitatively,
Wang (2003) conducted her study to know the academic adjustment of three students
20
with mental retardation in a regular class. She found that the students lacked correct
self-learning strategies and had to call for others to help them complete their
homework. In learning habits, the students could not concentrate on class and liked to
chat with their classmates and could not turn in their homework on time. In learning
attitudes, students disliked the mainstream subjects, such as Chinese and
Mathematics.
The academic adjustment studies in Taiwan also examined the differences in
academic adjustment of students according to various variables. Several studies
discovered the gender differences in adjustment; females have less adjustment
problems than males in the secondary school and the primary school (Huang, 1975; Li,
1992, 1994; Chen, Wang, & Li, 1993; Lin, 2004). School graders served as another
influential factor for adjustment (Huang, 1975; Li, 1992, 1994; Chen, Wang, & Li,
1993; Wu, 1994; Lin, 2004; Wang, 2004). For example, the secondary school students
also had much more difficulties in dealing with their problems in their learning
process than primary school students (Li, 1994). In addition, parents educational
backgrounds, socioeconomic statues, and involvements in their childrens learning
were also considered as influential variables in students adjustment (Li, 1992, 1994;
Liu, Wu, & Chen, 1995).
Huang (2000) examined the related factors of secondary school students English
academic adjustment in terms of learning strategies and learning attitudes. She
claimed that learning strategies and learning attitudes were related with students
personal English learning experiences and their English teachers teaching styles and
teaching attitudes. That is, students who received extra instructions from English cram
schools or English tutors could be more successful to employ learning strategies to
learn English and have higher learning motivation in the secondary school. In addition,
English teachers could help students develop effective learning strategies and higher
21
learning motivations if teachers could be aggressive to employ multiple teaching
approaches and be positive to use lots of encouragements in their class.
As discussed, the previous academic adjustment studies only presented how the
three main elements of adjustment obstacle students learning and what difficulties
exist in the three elements of academic adjustment. In other words, the previous
studies, in understanding the adjustment in Taiwan did not reveal the so-called
adjustment, defined as the continuous interactive process between students and the
new learning context when students struggle to employ particular strategies to cope
with the new learning context (Wu, 1981; Li, 1992; Cheng, Wang, & Li,1993; Li,
1994; Raimsay, Baker, & J ones, 1999). That is to, in addition to finding out the
problems in students academic adjustment, the researcher further had to continually
examine students academic adjustment to explore how they make changes in their
learning in learning habits, learning strategy, and learning attitude from their
interactions with the learning context.
Moreover, even though the previous studies have revealed the relationship
between students adjustment and other social, personal, and family variables, few
researchers focused on how these variables influence adjustment, that is, how the
external variables make students change in their learning strategies, learning attitudes,
and learning habits. Few of the previous academic adjustment studies investigated
students academic adjustment in a particular subject, particularly in English. Thus,
this study aims to explore how students make changes in their English learning
adjustment and how external variables influence their adjustment.




22
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY

This chapter describes the design and research methods of the current study. The
rationale of the study and participants for this study are first illustrated. The procedure
of data collection and data analysis are then displayed.

Rationale
Academic adjustment is characterized as a complex and interactive development
reflecting each students growth in different aspects at different times and contexts
(Wentzel, 1999). In other words, cases of each students academic adjustment are
unique based on his/her own diverse learning contexts, and a case-study approach
might be workable to examine each students academic adjustment experiences. Case
study approaches usually require a qualitative, naturalistic, descriptive, and
longitudinal ways to collect data and describe findings. Qualitatively, case studies
concern with the interaction between human beings and social worlds, and with
individuals own accounts of their attitudes, motivations, and behavior (Hakin, 1987;
Merriam, 1998). To conduct a case-study research, researchers usually adopt
observations, interviews, interactive journal writing, and think-aloud techniques to
collect their data in line with their research questions (J ohnson, 1992). Consequently,
a qualitative methodology, the case-study approach, was employed to examine
students academic adjustment in terms of learning strategy uses, learning attitudes,
and learning habits, and to know how the three elements were adjusted as students
interact with the learning environment by means of classroom observations,
interviews, and students reflective journal writing.

23
Participants
The Secondary School English Class and the Teacher
The participants in this study were selected from a secondary school English
class in the remote district which is far away from the Pingtung city around 15
kilometers. The school had nearly 900 students and only had 33,758 square meters in
space.
To invite teachers and students in this school to participate in this study, I
contacted the academic affairs supervisor in the school first to see if he could
introduce one of the first-grade English teachers to collaborate with me to conduct
this research. A Chinese invitation letter was delivered to the academic affairs
supervisor and the first grade English teachers to explain my motivte and purpose of
the study (See Appendices A and B for the Chinese and the English versions of the
invitation letter). After my explanation about the study to English teachers, a female
first-grade English teacher, Miss Huang, showed her willingness to work with me to
provide supports I need during my research period. Thus, my participants were mainly
selected from her class.
Miss Huang was a novice English teacher, just graduating from an English
department in a university of education, and had started her teaching career for two
years in this school. In her class, the language used for instruction was Mandarin
Chinese, and language skill trainings focused on reading and writing. Supplementary
teaching materials like flashcards or posters/wall maps were not usually used in her
class, and she sometimes might ask students to listen to the dialogues in the textbook
by CD-player and conducted interactive activities and games which were covered in
the textbook. With respect to her teaching beliefs, she perceived that learning English
should not be stressful. Therefore, in her class, she liked to share jokes that actually
took place in her life with students, and allowed students to call for help from
24
classmates when they could answer her questions.
In this study, I observed Miss Huangs English class to know her teaching styles,
teaching beliefs, and interactions with the students, participants in this study, and to
examine how teachers might influence students academic adjustment. In addition, I
interviewed Miss Huang about English learning problems, which she found from the
students, to help me comprehend the students adjustment difficulty in English. As a
homeroom teacher, Miss Huang also provided the information about the students
parents for me to analyze how parents influenced students academic adjustment, such
as their parenting styles and socio- economic status.
Student subjects
I invited the students to participate in this study after the first monthly exam.
Since after the exam, English teachers and homeroom teachers in the first exam would
know the first-year students learning conditions, and students who have adjustment
problems in the secondary school might be possibly shown at their grades.
To begin with, a Chinese questionnaire of academic adjustment (See Appendices
C and D for the Chinese and English versions of the questionnaire) was given to the
students to help me identify the possible participants for this study. The questionnaire
adapted from Chen, Lin, and Li (1989) was composed of the personal data section and
the survey section. The personal data section was designed to elicit the background
information of the students, including names, gender, student numbers, previous
primary schools, and English learning experiences in the primary school. The survey
section entailed three major elements of English adjustment, including personal
learning strategies (Item 1-4), learning habits (Item 5-9), and learning attitudes (Item
10-18). The 18 items were designed to be rated on a 5-point scale from strong
disagreement to strong agreement. That is, the respondents were given 5 points for
strong agreement, 4 points for agreement, 3 points for neutral, 2 points for
25
disagreement, and 1 point for strong disagreement. In addition, the items 9, 13, 14,
and 17 in the questionnaire were negative statements, and therefore reversely scored,
ranging from 5 points for strong disagreement to 1 point for strong agreement. The
mean scores of the overall 18 items for each student were calculated and compared
among the students to identify possible participants in this study. However, since the
questionnaire was not examined for its reliability and validity, the result of the
questionnaire was only seen as supplementary recourses for me to find out the
students who might have adjustment problems. Therefore, students performances in
their English examination were also used to examine whether students identified in
the questionnaire really had adjustment problems. Students who had high grades in
the English exam were not invited to participate in this study.
Moreover, I asked Miss Huang that, according to her observations, which
students in her class she thought came up with English learning problems. I then
interviewed the students nominated by Miss Huang and those selected from the result
of the questionnaire and from English grades to ask whether they wanted to
collaborate with me to conduct this research from the first to the second semester in
their first year in the secondary school. The other purpose of the interview was to
examine students English learning experiences from the primary school to the
secondary school to find students who had problems in academic adjustment.
While more students were found to have English learning adjustment problems,
they were not qualified to participate in this study for their lack of motivation to
promote their English proficiency. As a result, only five male students were recruited
to take part in this study.

Data collection
This study intended to illustrate students adjustment problems in learning
26
strategy uses, learning habits, and learning attitudes, their changes in the three
elements, and factors affecting students changes in the three elements. The data
included audio tapes and transcriptions of the individual interviews with students and
teachers, reflective learning journals of the students, and fieldnotes of the classroom
observations. The transcription of the interviews and reflective learning journals were
analyzed qualitatively as the major sources to answer the three research questions in
this study. The fieldnotes of the classroom observations were used to reflect students
learning habits in English class and their interactions with English teachers. All of the
data were collected for two semesters. The following sections describe the collection
procedure of each instrument.
Semi-structured Interviews
Merriam (1999) categorized interviews into highly structured, semistructured,
and unstructured interviews. I adopted the semistructured interview to examine
students adjustment because the semistructured interview has its advantages to allow
me to get more access to elicit participants responses and to help me focus my
interview on specific topics with predetermined questions. However, Marshall and
Rossman (1999) claims that the use of interviews has its strengths and weaknesses on
research. For the advantage, interview empowers researchers to get large amounts of
data quickly, and to understand the meaning that people hold for their everyday
activities. For the disadvantage, the interviewees might feel reluctant to faithfully
share their experiences with the interviewers due to social distances, and researchers
lack of sophisticated interviewing skills may lead to the failure of research. Therefore,
researchers must have excellent listening skills to ask right questions to elicit more
information from interviewees and skillful interaction skills to construct a friendly
relationship with the interviewees. Based on these concerns, I followed Rapleys
(2004) and Merriams (1999) principles of doing interviews to investigate students
27
academic adjustment. That is, to ensure that I could ask good questions to elicit
sufficient information I wanted, I had to in-depth understanding about my own
research topic and avoided asking Yes-or-no questions and leading questions. To build
up good relationship with interviewees, I chose the right place for doing interviews.
Sometimes I tried to disclose my personal experiences or information to bring in
mutual understanding so that my subjects could feel more at ease. A graphic
representation of the interview procedure is presented in Figure 1.

Before the
interview
Reviewing related academic adjustment studies to generate interview
questions

Before the
interview
Inquiring the participants about the time and place of the interview

During the
interview
Introducing the purpose of the study and explaining the use of audio
recorder to the participants

During the
interview
Producing follow-up questions and bring in mutual understanding
Figure 1: The Procedure of the Interview

As a result, I started designing my interview guides (See Appendices E and F for
the Chinese and English version of the Interview Guides) by reviewing related
academic adjustment studies to see how other researchers formulate their
questionnaires or interview guides about academic adjustment. The interview
questions were categorized into students learning attitudes, their learning strategy
uses, their learning habits, and their learning difficulties. Next, I inquired the
28
participants, including English teachers and students, about the place and time of the
interviews. Each interview might take 30 to 40 minutes, and the MP3s were used to
record the whole conversations. Each student was interviewed after their first, second,
and third monthly examinations in each semester, and their English teacher and
homeroom teacher was interviewed after the third monthly exam, as shown in Table 1
and Table 2.

After the
first exam
After the
second exam
After the
third exam
Date



Interviewees
Oct., 2006 to
Nov, 2006
Nov., 2006 to
Dec., 2006
Dec., 2007 to
Feb., 2007
Total times of
the interviews
Each student 1 time 1 time 1 time 3 times
English
teacher
1 time 1 time
Homeroom
teacher
1 time 1 time
Table 1: Data Collection Schedule of the First Semester
After the
first exam
After the
second exam
After the
third exam
Date


Interviewees
Mar., 2007 to
May., 2007
May., 2007 to
J un., 2007
J un., 2007 to
J ul., 2007
Total times of
the interviews
Each Student 1 time 1 time 1 time 3 times
English
teacher
1 time 1 time
Homeroom
teacher
1 time 1 time
Table 2: Data Collection Schedule of the Second Semester
29
Specifically, this study interviewed each student for 6 times to realize his/her
own academic adjustment experiences in learning strategies, learning habits, and
learning attitudes from the first to the second semester. To acquire further information
about students academic adjustment in the three categories, the interviews with the
students English teachers were conducted as supplementary sources. The current
study also interviewed the students homeroom teachers to explore the students
family background information, including socioeconomic status and parenting styles.
Before the interview, I introduced the purpose of this study briefly and explained the
use of the audio recorder to the interviewees first to lower their anxiety and to gain
their trust. I also produced follow-up questions to ask participants to probe in-depth
information from participants. For example, after asking students the question, Do
you like your English teachers teaching style?, I might ask the follow-up question,
like If yes, please tell me which part of the teachers teaching style you like .
During the interview, I also shared my English learning experiences as well to build
up positive relationship with the interviewees.
Reflective Learning Journals
Reflective learning journal can empower researchers to get a comprehensive
scope of how students react to the learning context and how they adjust themselves to
the learning context (Schumann & Schumann, 1977). To understand their academic
adjustment, I gave each participant a notebook to write down their reflective learning
journals to report their personal academic adjustment history once a week. On the first
page of each notebook, I wrote down the following questions to guide students to
write their learning journals, including 1) what learning strategies they employ to help
learn English, 2) what learning difficulty they encounter in the learning process, 3)
how they feel about their English learning process, 4) what learning habits they have.
I also encouraged students to write their learning journals each week but not to
30
impose on them, because in writing learning journals writers need to be voluntary and
open-minded to self-disclose personal information to readers (Moon, 2006). Although
students had no incentive and would often forget to write the learning journals, I still
tried to acquire as much as information I wanted from students learning journals to
help me analyze their English academic adjustment.
Classroom Observations and Filednotes
Classroom observation is the best approach to realize how teachers teach and what
the teacher-student interactions are in the classroom (Good & Brophy, 2004). As a
consequence, classroom observation was employed in this study to know the students
learning habits in class. To this end, I observed the class once a week for one semester
until the data of observation were enough for me to realize teachers teaching styles
and students learning habits in school. While observing the class, I sat in the back of
the classroom to take field notes and used a digital camera to note down detailed
events that happened in the classroom and students moves in the classroom. Then, I
watched the video-tapes and the field notes to interpret the students behaviors.
During interviews, I also questioned the students to know the reasons why they
performed the behaviors to avoid my misinterpretation of the results.

Data analysis
To know the difficulty that students encountered in their adjustment process, the
interview transcriptions and the reflective learning logs were examined to investigate
students academic adjustment process. Marshall and Rossman (1999) claims that
qualitative analytical process could fall into 1) organizing the data, 2) generating
categories, 3) coding the data, 4) testing the emergent understandings, 5) searching for
alternative explanations, and 6) writing the report. As a consequence, I started my
analysis by using pseudo names for the teacher and students to transcribe the
31
interview data. In the transcription, R refers to the researcher of this study, T refers to
the teacher, and other letters to represent refers to students initials in this study: D
(David), K (Ken), P (Peter), J (J oe), and B (Bob) (See Appendix G for the sample
transcript of the interview of the students and Appendix H for the same transcript of
the interview of the teacher). I wrote down the date of the interview, and the
interviewees name on the title of each transcript. Adapted from Hsieh (2001), I used
the capital letter I to name the interview data and the capital letters CO to name the
fieldnotes data of the classroom observation to distinguish the interview data from the
observation data as ways to organize my interview transcriptions. In my data
organization, Peter.I.10/26/06 refers to Peters interview data recorded on Oct. 26
th
in
2006, and Peter.CO.10/27/06 refers to Peters fieldnotes of observation data on Oct.
27
th
in 2006, as shown in Table 3.

Data sources
Name
Transcriptions of the
Interview
Fieldnotes of the
Classroom observation
Peter Peter.I.10/26/06 Peter.CO.10/27/06
David David.I.11/07/06 David.CO.10/27/06
Table 3: Organization of the interview and observation data.

After transcribing the interview data, I started reading the interview
transcriptions, the field notes of classroom observations, and the students reflective
learning journals to find the three fundamental elements, learning strategies, learning
habits, and learning attitudes. In learning strategies, Oxfords (1999) categorizations
of learning strategies were adopted to scrutinize the strategies students used to help
them adjust to secondary school English class, including memory strategies, cognitive
strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and
32
social strategies. In learning habits, following Benard (1965), I coded the data of the
interviews and classroom observations into physical and mental categories to analyze
how students perform well to develop their English abilities. In learning attitudes,
Rosenberg and Hovlands (1960) classifications of learning attitudes into cognition,
affection, and readiness for action provided me a coding system to inspect how
students reacted to their English learning.
To examine how students made changes in their adjustment and what motivated
them to change their adjustment, I compared students learning strategy, learning
habits, and learning attitudes from the beginning to the end of the semester to see if
students used different learning strategies or developed different learning habits, and
learning attitudes. Once I found students start adjusting themselves in the three
elements, I retraced back to the previous transcriptions to see what factors resulted in
their changes in adjustment. Finally, I employed the triangulation, prolonged
engagement, and audit trail to make sure the reliability and validity of the research
findings further clarified in the next section, trustworthiness.

Trustworthiness
The two issues that concern most of qualitative researchers are the validity and
the reliability of research findings. The validity refers to the question of how
research findings match reality and how you know the researcher is not biased and
just finding out what he or she expects to find (Merriam, 1999, p. 201-202). By
contrast, the reliability concerns whether researching findings can be duplicated. In
validity, I adopted the triangulation and prolonged engagement strategies to confirm
the findings would reveal the truth of observations (Merriam, 1999; Lincoln & Guba,
1985). In reliability, as academic adjustment was a unique learning process for
individual student, I attempted to ensure the research results are in accordance with
33
the data collected by means of triangulation and audit trail (Lincoln & Guba, 1985;
Merriam, 1999).
In triangulation, I adopted different data sources to examine students academic
adjustment by interviewing students and their English teachers and homeroom
teachers as outsiders viewpoints to offer me more detailed information about
students' learning and background information. In addition, the students reflective
learning journal was employed to ensure the trustworthiness of research findings
about students adjustment. In prolonged engagement, I spent two semesters
interviewing the secondary school students about their adjustment process in order to
obtain the truthful data from the students. In the audit trail, I described my data
collection procedure to tell how I selected the participants and what techniques I used
to collect the data. Next, I explained how I followed previous researchers coding
systems to analyze my data.
In this study, I did not calculate the intercoder reliability for the coding systems
were only used to help me organize the qualitative data of interviews, classroom
observations, and reflective learning journals to examine students' changes, problems,
and related influential factors in academic adjustment.









34
CHAPTER FOUR
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

To help students overcome the gap between primary school and secondary
school in English curriculum, this study aims to discover the problems on students
English performance in secondary school, to see how they made changes in learning
strategies use, learning attitudes, and learning habits, and to explore the factors for
their academic adjustment in English.
Following Oxfords (1999) model, memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and
compensation strategies were used to examine students learning strategy uses in
terms of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence formation for the three language
components were the major problems subjects met in their English learning in
secondary school. Rosenberg and Hovlands (1960) model was adopted to inspect
students English learning attitudes in terms of cognition and affection. Oxfords
models of affective learning were further employed to examine how students adjust
their attitudes in English learning. Finally, Bernards (1999) model was used to
investigate students learning habits in terms of physical habits, mental habits, and
emotional habits. Oxfords models of metacognitive strategies were also applied to
inspect the way students might use to develop good physical and mental learning
habits.
This chapter uses a case-by-case approach to evaluate the individual subjects
academic adjustment in English in secondary school and end this chapter with
discussions about the factor for students academic adjustment by comparing the
similarities and differences in academic adjustment among the five participants. In
each case, I first provided the basic information about the each subjects English
learning experience in primary school. Next, I inspect the problems that the individual
35
subject met in learning strategy uses, their English learning attitudes, and their
English learning habits in secondary school. Finally, I attempt to reveal the changes
that each participant made in learning strategy uses, learning attitudes, and learning
habits.

Subject one: David
David was an efficient English learner in primary school. He was able to
apprehend the sentence structures in his textbook and could use the Chinese phonetic
symbol, Pin yin, to help retain the new vocabulary. He did not have to spend much
time studying English and was able to maintain his English scores around 80s and 90s
in every monthly examination, including the tests of listening, vocabulary, grammar,
and sentence translation from Chinese into English. However, learning English was
tedious learning experience in his primary school learning process not only because
the primary school English teacher had been using the same teaching activities for
students to practice grammar and vocabulary but because the vocabulary and
grammar was too easy for him to provoke his motivation to learn English.
David was from a single parent family and stayed with his father when he was in
primary school. However, his father passed away and then he moved to live with his
mother and two elder sisters. His mother worked in the evening market and was the
only one financial support in the family. Huang, his English teachers and homeroom
teacher as well, stated that Davids mother did not have time to stay with her children
and had some problems in alcohol and gambling. One of his elder sisters, furthermore,
was notorious for stealing and fighting in this school. Huang was so worried that
Davids family would usher in negative impacts on his learning. However, David was
a diligent and humorous student. In class, he would raise questions to clarify his
misunderstanding and liked to make fun with teachers or classmates.
36
Davids Learning Strategies
To scrutinize Davids English learning in secondary school, I inquired him about
the way he used to learn vocabulary and grammar and the problems that he confronted
in secondary school English class. The results displayed that David could use the
effective memory strategies, including reviewing and applying sounds, and asking
strategies to help memorize vocabulary. For example, David claimed he spent one to
two hours per day previewing and reviewing the subjects he had learned in school. In
terms of English, he would preview the new vocabulary for every lesson and try to
memorize them in advance. Due to his unfamiliarity with K.K. phonetic symbols, he
had to count on his elder sister to help him read the vocabulary and he would use the
Chinese phonetic symbols to memorize the pronunciations of the new vocabulary.
Furthermore, David also applied the numerous cognitive to help determine the
meaning of the text in English textbooks and to produce messages in English. For
instance, he would break the sentences of the texts into parts to use the vocabulary he
knew to analyze the meaning of the texts in textbook. He would also translate the
English texts into Chinese to help him get the idea of the texts quickly. To form a
grammatical sentence, he would attempt to translate the Chinese sentences into
English by applying the English rules and patterns he learned in primary school,
rather than memorizing the sentences.
However, the first problem on Davids English learning in secondary school was
his disability to comprehend his English teachers instruction in new grammar so that
his English scores were decreased into 77 in the first secondary school English
examination. As shown in Extract 1, David considered his declination of English
performances in secondary school as a result of his unfamiliar with the new
grammatical rules, such as the singular and plural nouns. He had no ideas how to
transform the singular into the plural by adding es or s. Therefore, David
37
determined to highlight the grammar rules that he could not explain to call for
assistance from his elder sister to construe the rules again. To help David realize new
grammatical rules, his elder sister would design grammar exercises for David to
practice and try to explain the rule again when David failed to complete the exercises
correctly.
Extract 1.
R: How did you do on your monthly exam?
D: So-so, I guess. I was somewhere between seventy and eighty.
R: Are you happy with it?
D: No, it sucks.
R: Then what do you think was the reason for your poor performance?
D: I couldnt understand some new grammar rules in class.
R: Why not?
D: Because sometimes I cant remember all those singular and plural forms, and
which words should add s.
R: Then have you thought of a way to solve that problem?
D: Yes, I'll ask my sister
R: Was it much helpful for you to ask you sister to teach you grammar?
S: Yeah.
R: Really? What is the difference between your elder sister and English teacher
in grammar teaching?
D: As for my English teacher, I cant remember the grammar rules she taught in
class very well. But, it is easier for me to remember the grammar rules that
taught by my sister.
R: Why?
D: Because, my sister would give me exercises afterwards. Shell teach me again
38
if I didnt pick up.
(David.I.11/07/06)
Davids Learning Attitudes
Following Rosenberg and Hovlands model (1960), the results revealed that in
terms of cognition, David believed that learning English was to empower him to
communicate with foreigners to know the lifestyles of the foreigners. He asserted that,
however, most of his classmates believed that the purpose of learning English was to
obtain a good occupation. In terms of affection, David was more satisfied with the
learning context in secondary school for the secondary school English teacher was
much more benevolent and enthusiastic in teaching than the primary school English
teacher. The challenge of grammar learning in the secondary school further served as
a momentum to increase Davids English learning motivation to get more involved in
studying English than he did in the primary school, as displayed in Extract 2. He was
willing to face his grammar learning problems and desired to figure out every
grammatical rule so as to compete with his peers and to maintain his English
performance above average standards.
Extract 2.
R: Are you more interested in learning English in the secondary school or the
primary school?
D: In the secondary school. It was because in the primary school I could hardly
follow my teacher. And it was also boring to play games in the primary school
English class.
D: Then why are you more interested in learning English in the secondary
school?
D: Well, it was because I wanted to figure out those complicated grammar rules
in the secondary school. Since the top guys in my class could understand those
39
grammar rules, itd be weird if I cant. .
R: So your intension is to keep up with those proficient learners?
D: Yeah, besides, I want to keep my grades above average standards.
(David.I.11/07/06)
Davids Learning Habits
According to Benard (1999) and Oxford (1999), the findings pointed out that in
physical habits, David often studied in the living room with his elder sister and
applied the metacognitive strategy to plan time for study and entertainment. For
example, he would reduce his time on playing when the school examination was
approaching. Guarded by his elder sister, David tended to finish his homework first
and then he could go to play computer games or watch television. He addressed that
his sister would be mad if he fooled around while studying. In mental habits, David
often paid much attention on grammar learning; therefore, as shown in classroom
observation, David would respond teachers questions about grammar in class. He
would also take notes when his English teacher was explaining the new grammar
rules in class.
Davids English Academic Adjustment
David adjusted the way by which he used to learn vocabulary and grammar. In
terms of vocabulary learning, he employed the cognitive strategies to use resources
for receiving and sending messages. For instance, assisted by his elder sister, he
started learning K.K. phonetic symbols through a K.K. handbook. The K.K. handbook
was employed by his elder sister to help David realize the relationship between the
K.K. phonetics symbols and the 26 aphetic letters. As shown in Extract 3, the use of
Chinese phonetic symbols further empowered him to memorize the sounds of the
respect K.K. phonetic symbols. With the reorganization of the K.K. phonetic symbols,
he could learn the pronunciations of the new vocabulary on his own by employing a
40
Chinese English dictionary. However, some particular phonetic symbols like [] still
remained unknown for David to identify their corresponding letters to infer the
pronunciations of the new words.
Extract 3.
R: Dont you use a dictionary when you study English?
D: Sometimes I do, if the words are hard.
R: By hard you mean
D: As for long words composed of several syllables, Id look them up in the
dictionary to find their pronunciations.
R: But you mentioned you didnt learn the K.K. Phonetic Symbols. How do you
understand the pronunciation in the dictionary?
D: Well, my sister has a handbook of K.K. Phonetic Symbols.
R: So, can you read the book on your own?
D: Yes.
R: Why?
D: Because in the book, K.K. Phonetic Symbols are marked with Mandarin
Phonetic Symbols, such as a for , etc. But some are strange, theyre not
English alphabets.
R: Like [].
D: Exactly, and [j] is strange too, I dont know where to use it.
R: You meanyou know [b] is for b, but you dont know what [j] is for.
D: Yes, its so confusing.
(David.I.01/02/07)
In terms of grammar learning, by asking his elder sister, David was able to enrich
his grammatical knowledge which made it possible for him to use the cognitive
strategy to compare the syntactic differences and similarities between English and
41
Chinese, such as verb and tense. He also found an efficient way to help him retain the
new grammatical rules by taking risks wisely to analyze the new grammatical rules
based on what had learned, instead of asking his elder sister.
With adjustments in vocabulary and grammar learning strategy uses, David
indeed enhanced his English scores from 77 to 94 in his final English examination.
Davids achievements further changed his attitudes toward English in learning
interests and learning behaviors. He was imbued with learning motivation to seek for
possible opportunities to improve his English proficiency by discussing English with
his classmates to acquire new learning strategies. In learning habits, he also scheduled
his time to study different subjects and English was the core subject he needed to go
over per day.

Subject two: Ken
Ken was a good English learner in primary school; at that time, he kept his
English performances around 80s and 90s in monthly examinations. He was able to
spell the vocabulary correctly and use the known vocabulary and rules in English to
form a grammatical sentence and analyze the meaning of the texts in textbook. The
only problem in his English learning in primary school was that he could not
remember the sound of the vocabulary particularly for those composed of multiple
syllables. Even though he was equipped with the ability to associate letters with
particular sounds like t with [t] and d with [d], he could not blend these sounds to
infer the pronunciations of the words. In order to memorize the pronunciations of the
new vocabulary, he had to rely on his primary school English teacher to repeat the
same vocabulary several times in class.
Kens Learning Strategies
In secondary school, Kens English scores were declined to 64 in the first
42
monthly examination. English was also the worst subject in the academic
performances, while other subjects were around 70s and 80s. The results manifested
that the problem that Ken first met in the secondary school English class was
vocabulary learning. He was still unable to use the right memorize strategy to help
remember the pronunciations of the new vocabulary. He found it more difficult
learning to read the vocabulary in secondary school not only because the vocabulary
comprised more syllables to learn but for he was not able to receive sound inputs of
the vocabulary as many times as in his primary school English teacher, as shown in
Extract 4. As a consequence, Ken had difficulty catching up with his secondary school
English teacher when she was reading the vocabulary or texts in the textbook. He had
to ask his classmates to say the vocabulary again, but soon or later he would forget the
articulations of the words easily. The results also showed that Ken had attempted to
use a memory strategy to apply Pin yin as an auditory link to help memorize the new
vocabulary pronunciation, but this learning strategy did not last for a long time. The
reason was he could not segment sounds of what he heard from English teachers to
find out the appropriate Chinese phonetic symbols to replace the pronunciations of the
vocabulary.
Extract 4.
R: Do you think your English is good enough?
K: No, because sometimes I dont understand what the teacher said.
R: Can you give me examples?
K: Well, its difficult for me to remember the vocabulary pronunciations for the
teacher only teaches us how to pronounce new words once, but sometimes its
easy to forget.
R: So how do you memorize the new words? Take the word book as an
example.
43
K: If I know the pronunciation, Ill say book; otherwise Ill just remember it as
b-o-o-k.
R: Do you write it down again and again while youre memorizing words?
K: I do.
R: Can you pronounce most of the words in your textbook?
K: Mostly I cant for the words are much longer and longer than before.
R: Then, did you find any ways to solve your problems?
K: I could go to my classmates for help, I still forget the pronunciation easily.
(Ken.I.11/04/06)
Therefore, Ken could only use the repetitive strategy to memorize the new
vocabulary by writing the same vocabulary many times, while other memory
strategies like grouping, associating, apply sounds and images were not found in the
interview. However, memorizing vocabulary through repetitive mechanical practices
led to the problem that Ken could not retain the vocabulary in the long term memory,
particularly for the words that spells alike, such as car and cat. Extract 5 exemplified
that Ken could only retrieve the vocabulary he had retained few hours before the test
and that he had difficulty to recall the spellings of the words, such as car and cat
during tests.
Extract 5.
R: Are there many words in each lesson?
K: Somewhere between ten and twenty.
R: Did you always spend lots of time memorizing them?
K: Id memorize all of the vocabulary, but I always forgot them the next
morning.
R: Really.
K: Bad memory.
44
R: But, your teacher said that youd get good grades as long as youre really
preparing?
K: Thats because I tried to memorize vocabulary right before the exam.
R: Would you just leave hard questions unanswered?
K: I can recognize the first half of a word if I know the pronunciation, but if I
cant pronounce the other half, Id get confused with words that spell alike.
R: Such as?
K: Car and cat.
R: I see.
K: Yeah.
R: Is it because they spell so similar?
K: They both start with the letter C. so I often get confused with them.
(Ken.I.11/15/06)
Ken also pinpointed that his inability to retain vocabulary in his long term
memory further interrupted his comprehension in reading the questions in examination
papers, especially for cloze tests and grammar tests. Ken believed that he might
enhance his English performances provided that he could read the questions in test
sheets.
In grammar and sentence formation, Ken was inclined to use the cognitive
strategy to express his ideas by translating a sentence from Chinese into English based
on his limited grammatical knowledge. However, his limited grammatical knowledge
led to numerous grammatical errors, particularly in forming interrogative sentences.
Kens Learning Attitudes
The results emerged that in terms of learning affection, Ken was content to learn
English in secondary school for he viewed his English teacher as a very considerate
teacher who would talk to his mother to check on his learning and would have more
45
interaction with him than the primary school English teacher. However, Kens fiasco
to maintain his English performances around 80s and 90s in the first monthly
examination decreased his learning interest in English in secondary school. He was
not satisfied with his English performances with a score of 64 and filled with anxiety
that his parents would punish him due to his regression in English. Nevertheless, the
results did not uncover any affective learning strategies were used by Ken to lower his
learning anxiety. He only expected to increase his English scores to become one of the
top 10 students in his class. In other words, in terms of learning cognition, Kens
intention of learning English was to do well in the school examination to avoid being
punished by his parents.
Kens Learning Habits
The results manifested that in physical habits, Ken was used to studying in his
bedroom at home and would close the door to prevent his families from entering his
room to check on his study. He did not use the metacognitive strategy to schedule his
learning and would only study English one day before the exams. However, in mental
habits, Ken was unable to concentrate on study both at school and at home. Extract 6
exemplified that while studying English in his bedroom, Ken could not concentrate on
the English textbooks and was often distracted by video games. My classroom
observation also exhibited that would talk to his classmates in class and could not
keep up with his English teacher instruction when she was teaching the vocabulary
and texts in English textbooks. The learning habits had been developed since he was
in the primary school. However, Ken could not understand the reason why the same
learning habits could not be applied successfully to the secondary school English
learning context.
Extract 6.
R: As for now, what do you study English for?
46
K: For my grades, I guess.
R: Sure, as students we have to study hard to take lots of exams in school.
K: Yeah, Of course I care about my grades and what I actually learned; however,
when I studied at home I just would be distracted from external affairs, such as
computer or television.
R: Did this happen when youre in the primary school?
K: Wellyes, but I still could got high scores in the primary school monthly
exams
R: So could you tell what would be the reason?
K: I have no idea.
Such a distraction problem also took place when Ken studied English in class.
(Ken.I.11/04/06)
Kens English Academic Adjustment
Ken did not adjust his uses of learning strategy to overcome his inability to retain
the sound and spelling of the new vocabulary in his long term memory. His failure to
adopt the strategy to solve his vocabulary learning problem further changed his
learning attitudes. He was so disappointed that he could not obtain the strategies to
help remember the sounds of the new vocabulary to promote his English
achievements as he did in the primary school. As a result, Ken made changes in terms
of learning attitudes and learning habits. For example, he did not perceive himself as a
proficient English learner anymore and downgraded his standard in English
performances from 80s to 60s. As revealed in Extract 7, he did not mind whether he
could pronounce the new vocabulary in the textbook and gave up distinguishing the
words with similar spellings since he was able to maintain his English performances
over 60.

47
Extract 7.
K: How do you memorize words now?
S: Same as before
K: Do you mean you are still used to simply memorizing words without knowing
the pronunciation?
S: Yeah, you just have to spell the vocabulary correctly at the exams,
pronunciation doesnt matter.
K: Soall that matters is spelling the words right.
S: Yeah, as long as I could pass the exam.
K: But you just said youd get confused with words that start with the same
alphabet, like car and cat. What do you do?
S: I would try my best to remember them. But I dont care.
(Ken.I.03/14/07)
Even though Ken had been compelled by his parents to go to an English cram
school, the cram school teachers still could not provide him with strategies to solve
his vocabulary learning problem. His cram school English teacher would only punish
him for his inability to retain the vocabulary in textbooks. Therefore, Ken persisted to
drop out of the cram school, regardless of his mother opposition. He stated that what
he benefited from the cram school English teachers was to know the way to adjust his
learning in grammar. With the aid of his cram school English teacher, Ken was able to
enrich his grammar knowledge in English. For example, his cram school English
teacher taught him the rules to transform a positive sentence into an interrogative one
by inserting auxiliaries, such as do or does. He also learned to foster his grammatical
knowledge through the practice strategy to repetitively doing exercises and examining
the mistakes he made in the previous test sheets on grammar. He addressed that he
liked the way in which the cram school teacher taught grammar for she would explain
48
the same grammatical rules in various ways and then provide different types of
grammar exercises for students to practice, while the secondary school teachers would
not allow them to do numerous grammar exercises in class. However, as in Extract 8,
he mentioned that though he was able to recognize the patterns in English and applied
them to form a grammatical sentence, he just could not understand the meaning of the
sentences due to his limited vocabulary size.
Extract 8.
R: So how did the cram school help you in English learning?
K: In cram school, we learned and practiced grammar rules.
R: What about now?
K: Well, I still do that sometimes, but I had no idea what the sentence means
when I was doing the grammatical exercises.
R: Do you mean you dont understand every word in the sentence?
K: Mostly I dont, I only know some of them.
R: Did this also happen when youre in cram school?
K: Yes.
R: It must be hard for you to answer the questions in your examination papers.
K: Exactly, its all in English.
(Ken.I.03/14/07)
Pressures from his parents forced Ken to struggle for other alternatives to
improve his English if he did not want to go to the cram school. As a consequence,
Ken started to adjust his learning habits in terms of physical and mental habits.
Required by his mother, Ken prolonged his time in studying English and started to
schedule his English learning from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday. He also
reduced his time playing computer games and watching TV to prepare for his school
exams. The event that his father was dismissed from the job further served as an
49
impetus for Ken to realize parents strain in finance to study harder to forbid himself
from playing computer games while studying in his bedroom.
In sum, the adjustments that Ken made were mainly in learning habits and
learning attitudes to enhance his English achievements in the secondary school.
Parents were found to be one of the factors that influenced Kens changes in learning
habits. However, Ken was still unable to solve his problems to remember the sounds
and the spelling of the new vocabulary by adjusting his learning strategy uses. The
English cram school seemed not to be an effective avenue which could facilitate
Kens academic adjustments.

Subject three: Peter
Peter was not adept in learning English in primary school for he was unable to
understand what his English teacher taught about vocabulary, grammar, and the texts
in textbooks. Therefore, he was not interested in learning English in primary school
and often talked to his peers in the English class. Peter further believed that the
English lesson was the best time to chat and entertain because the English classroom
was often filled with noise and his English teacher could not in effect manage student
conducts in the classroom. However, Peter did not give up learning English and
looked for assistance from proficient students to keep every vocabulary and sentence
structure in mind so that his English scores could be maintained around 70s and 80s in
primary school.
Nevertheless, Peters English performances were declined to 53 in the first
monthly secondary school exams. Peter was concerned about his regression in the
English and asked his English teacher how to improve his English proficiency.
However, his English teacher was not able to figure out the problems that Peter faced
in his English learning. She asserted that Peter was one of the most intelligent
50
students in his class and he also performed very well in other subjects like Math and
Chinese. She believed Peter could improve his English ability once he could discover
some approaches to overcome his English learning difficulty.
Peters parents were divorced and he was the only one child, living with his
father. According to his English teacher, Peters father usually had to work until the
midnight and therefore he did not have much time to stay with Peter. He did not have
high expectations upon Peters academic performances in school. However, he was
very concerned about Peters health and behaviors. His father would ever immediately
leave his position during work to take care of his son when he knew Peter was sick.
Peters Learning Strategies
To diagnose Peters English learning problems, I asked him the way in which he
used to study English. The results found that only the repeating strategy was
employed by Peter to memorize vocabulary. Peter had the problem as Ken did in
vocabulary learning that they were unable to read the vocabulary with the K.K.
phonetic symbols or phonics. As in Extract 9, to memorize the new word, Peter would
have to repeatedly write the same vocabulary many times and it would take him more
than one hour to prepare for daily vocabulary tests. But, he often could not retain the
vocabulary in his long term memory and would forget what he had remembered
during tests. He addressed that his inability to read the vocabulary further impeded his
comprehension of his English teacher instruction for he could not know the
vocabulary or sentence his English teacher was reading in class.
Extract 9.
R: Is that hard for you to learn English in the secondary school?
P: Well, I dont know K.K. phonetic symbols.
R: Can you memorize the words?
P: Not if theyre long ones.
51
R: How long does it take to memorize the words?
P: Sometimes an hour, or several hoursit takes longer if the words are hard to
remember. However, even though Ive already memorized the words, I forget
them on the exam.
R: How did it happen?
P: No, I just couldnt remember them.
R: Say, the word book. How do you memorize it?
P: If the words are hard to memorize, I write them down again and again.
R: Have you learned any easier ways to memorize words?
P: I think itll be much easier if I can know the sounds of the K.K. phonetic
symbols.
(Peter.I.10/26/06)
In grammar learning and sentence formation, Peter seldom used any types of
direct strategies to help learn to analyze grammar rules and construct sentences. He
would only note down the grammar rules taught by his English teacher; however, the
taking note strategy was not very effective for Peter could not explain the rule on his
own. To prepare for the daily sentence translation quizzes, he had to retain the texts in
the textbook by repeatedly writing the same sentences.
Peter also claimed that the vocabulary learning problems and the sentence
translation problem did not occur when he was in primary school. Two of the crucial
reasons was that the number of the vocabulary in the primary school textbooks was
much less and that the primary school English teacher also seldom asked students to
write a sentence in English to examine their writing ability in the monthly exams.
However, in secondary school, crammed with a huge amount of the sentence
structures and vocabulary to learn, he was unable to get adjusted to the secondary
school English learning context and needed help to solve his problems in vocabulary
52
learning and sentence formation.
Peters Learning Attitudes
The results showed that in cognition, learning English for Peter was to obtain
good scores in academic performance to avoid receiving punishments from his father.
In affection, Peter was also content with the learning context in secondary school in
terms of facilities, classmates, and in particular English teachers. He uttered that he
was gratified with his secondary school English teacher because she would often
highlight the major points for students to remember, and for she was also very
concerned about students health. However, his problems in vocabulary learning and
sentence formation decreased his learning interest in English because he was unable
to maintain scores in the secondary school English exams over 60. Like Ken, he also
did not employ the affective learning strategy to foster his confidence and motivation
in English learning.
Peters Learning Habits
In terms of physical habits, Peter was used to studying English in his bedroom,
and would spend one or more hours studying English for the daily English tests. Like
Ken, he also did not use the metacognitive strategy to plan his study and only study
English few days before the exams. In mental habits, as shown in Extract 10, Peter
demanded himself to pay a strong power of concentration on his English teacher;
otherwise, he could not uphold his English scores over 60 and would receive
punishments from his father. Ken thus started to take notes and did not gossip with his
peers in class, as shown in classroom observation and Extract 10. Nevertheless, at
home, Peter was not able to focus on the textbook and might fall asleep when he
confronted difficulty in studying English on his own, such as memorizing vocabulary
or reading the texts in textbooks.

53
Extract 10.
R: I see. Do you think you study harder in the secondary school than you did in
the primary school?
P: Sure, much harder.
R: Why do you say so?
P: Well, I take notes and dont chat with my classmates in class.
R: In your opinion, what caused this difference?
P: Grades.
R: How come?
P: Im not allowed to use the computer unless my grades are good enough. And,
You know, in secondary school if you dont get prepared, you will get zero for
your exams.
(Peter.I.10/26/06)
Peters English Academic Adjustment
Peter adjusted his learning strategy to overcome his problem in vocabulary
learning. Strategies he adopted to help retain new vocabulary was to apply a
memorization strategy to create an auditory link for the vocabulary with words in
Chinese that sound alike (Oxford, 1999). That is, learning from his classmates, Peter
applied Chinese phonetic symbols to help retain the sounds of the new vocabulary.
Therefore, he was able to recognize the texts and vocabulary that his English teacher
was reading to increase his comprehension in class. But, as Peter still could not realize
the relationship between sounds and letters in spelling, he still had difficulty retaining
vocabulary in his long term memory.
Being able to know the pronunciations of the vocabulary by creating an auditory
link further in turn influenced Peters learning attitudes to become more interested in
learning English. Peter declared that for example, he would use simple English
54
phrases he learned from the textbook to the daily life when talking to his friends.
Moreover, he was inspired to look for other learning strategies to foster his English
learning. As shown in Extract 11, Peter attempted to use a cognitive strategy to
analyze the meaning of the texts by using the known vocabulary. Moreover, he also
learned to employ resources like electronic dictionaries or web dictionaries to help
understand the meaning of the texts.
Extract 11.
R: Now lets talk about how you figure out the meaning of the text.
P: My teacher taught me to read the first part first, and then the other part, then I
could pretty much get the meaning.
R: By first half you mean
P: Well, my teacher gives some explanations, so Ill just have to look at the
vocabulary below, then I could infer the meaning of the text.
R: Okdid you use the same strategy before?
P: No, I didnt.
R: Why?
P: I wasnt interested in English, so I never tried to guess.
(Peter.I.03/15/07)
However, what disappointed Peter was he still could not find out the strategy to
help recognize rules and patterns in English to use the known vocabulary to form a
grammatical sentence. As a result, he was still forced to memorize the texts in
textbooks by repeating writing the text several times to help produce his expression in
English when doing Chinese-English translation exercises. However, according to
Peter, in the exam papers when the sentences he wanted to translate into Chinese were
a little different from what he had learned in the English textbook, he would not be
able to translate the sentence into English correctly. Therefore, regardless of his
55
success in daily tests, Peter could only got around 40s in the monthly English exam.
Peters English learning interest was also decreased when he could not explore
the strategy to help solve his problem in vocabulary memorization and sentence
formation to obtain good scores in exams. He further believed that English
examinations could not help discover his problems in learning English and would
decrease his learning motivation. Although he successfully enhaced English scores
from 33 into 69 in the final English examination of the first semester, he did not
perceive this massive progression as a result of his own efforts. Instead, he considered
his progression was because the complexity of the third monthly examination was the
lowest among the three monthly examinations in the first semester.
To sum up, this study discovered that Peter adjusted his learning strategy uses to
empower him to memorize the productions of the vocabulary to increase his
comprehension of teachers instruction in class. With this successful learning
experiences in strategy uses, Peter was motivated to apply new strategy to facilitate
his English learning. However, as Peter was unable to solve his problems in sentence
formation and vocabulary memorization, his English performances in the monthly
exams were still around 50s and 60s.

Subject four: Joe
J oe was a proficient English leaner in primary school as he could read the
vocabulary and recognize the basic sentence structures in textbooks, his English
scores in the primary were maintained at around 80s. According to J oe, one of the
crucial elements that facilitated his English learning was the English cram school,
empowering him to better understand and memorize the vocabulary and grammar
rules. Required by his parents, he also had to review what he had learned in the cram
school to maintain his academic performances. However, in secondary school, J oe
56
determined not to go the English cram school for he needed more time to finish the
homework in different subjects. His parents also allowed J oe to take charge of his
own study.
Joes Learning Strategies
The results found that J oe would use the cognitive strategies, such as analyzing
expression strategies and translation strategies, to help him understand he meaning of
the texts in textbook and produce messages in English. While reading the texts in
textbooks, J oe would break a sentence into several components to use the known
vocabulary knowledge to infer the meaning of the sentence. Furthermore, he was able
to produce messages in English by translating the messages from Chinese into
English based on what he learned about the rules or patterns in English. The problem
that J oe encountered in the secondary school English class was that he could not
employ the right memorization strategy to retain the pronunciations of the new
vocabulary that he did not learn in the primary school, as shown in Extract 13. Being
unable to know the pronunciations of the new vocabulary gave rise to the fact that J oe
had difficulty apprehending his English teacher instruction when she was analyzing
the sentence structures and the meaning of the texts in textbook.
Extract 13.
R: Do you review your lessons every day?
J : I would only study English only before the exams.
R: What do you do when you review your lessons?
J : I go over the texts and words.
R: How do you memorize words? Take the word book as an example.
J : Id write it down a few times and read it out.
R: Are there words you dont know how to read?
J : Of course.
57
R: Then what do you do about them?
J : Well, simply recite them, forget about the pronunciation.
R: How do you know some of the words?
J : Those are the words I learned before.
R: By before you mean in primary school?
J : I think so.
(J oe.I.11/08/06)
Joes Learning Attitudes
The findings revealed that in terms of cognition, J oe had no ideas why he had to
learn English. He was further unable to tell whether he was interested in learning
English in the secondary school, even though he was pleased to learn English in the
secondary school. He only suggested that his English teacher could give more detailed
explanations when she was analyzing the sentence structures and the meaning of the
texts in textbooks. J oe was satisfied with his performances in the first monthly
English exam and believed that he could enhance his English scores from 68 into 80s
in the next monthly examinations provided that he could avoid making careless
mistakes.
Joes Learning Habits
In terms of physical habits, J oe was used to study in his bedroom and spent
around 20 minutes preparing for the school daily tests. Like the previous participants,
J oe also did not schedule his study. In mental habits, J oe addressed that he was very
concentrated while he was studying English, but my classroom observation showed
that J oe usually did not listen to his English teacher in class. For example, when his
English teacher was teaching vocabulary and the texts, J oe seldom repeated the
vocabulary after his English teacher. When doing exercises, J oe would often do other
things like playing pens to wait for the answers from his English teacher.
58
Joes English Academic Adjustment
J oes academic performances in English were decreased to 40s in the monthly
exams. His secondary school English teacher in the interview said that J oe became
less motivated to learn English, as illustrated in Extract 14. For example, he did not
concentrate on English class and had no incentive to study harder to retain the
vocabulary in the textbook. However, J oe was not an inefficient English leaner like
Peter; J oe was able to know how to form a grammatical sentence on his grammatical
knowledge. In other words, his English teacher believed that J oe was able to enhance
his performances in English tests once he could make more efforts in studying
English.
Extract 14.
T: J oe looks very absent-minded to me. He doesnt really want to memorize the
words, but he actually knows how to make sentences correct, like be+V-ing
for present continuous tense; as for Peter, he cant translate a Chinese sentence
into English. J oe just can not pay his attention on the class.
R: Did he also act like this in other classes?
T: Yes. Hes pretty quiet and always sat alone in class.
(Teacher,I.1/21/07)
However, J oe indicated that he did not make any changes in his learning
strategies and learning habits. He would still spend 20 minutes preparing for the daily
tests and applied the same strategies to memorize vocabulary and grammar rules in
the textbook. But, he could not figure out the reason why he flunked in every
vocabulary test no matter how hard he had tried. He pointed out that he gradually felt
overwhelmed to remember a huge amount of vocabulary in every lesson. He was
getting confused with more and more vocabulary and could not understand the
meaning and pronunciations of the new vocabulary. He stated that though he would
59
use an electronic dictionary to help understand the pronunciations of the new words,
he would forget the word pronunciations sooner or later. The problem continued to
exist in the second school examination and he only got 38 points in English. He
asserted that he was not satisfied with his performances in English, lowered to 38, as
he believed he should have got 60s to 70s in his English.
As J oe was unable to use the right strategies to solve his problems on retaining
and reading vocabulary, he gave up pushing himself to memorize those new words.
He indicated that in class he did not listen to his English teacher anymore and he was
unable to explain the factors resulting in his changes. He did not want to waste his
time studying English for the daily school tests. He declared that he was not interested
in English anymore; whatever he did he was unable to recall the vocabulary he
learned from his memory. He was not sure whether he could learn English as well as
he did in the primary school. He said that when he was free, he would like to watch
television, help his mother do the housework, make furniture with his father.
In the beginning, it seemed that J oe was an effective English learner and could
adjust himself to the secondary school English learning context. However, at the end
of this research, J oe failed in his academic adjustment and his English scores were
declined to 30s in the final exam of the second semester. He was also the only one
subject in this study who did not make any improvements in English. His fiasco to
adjust his learning strategy uses further changed his learning attitudes and learning
habits, resulting in his failure to learn English in the secondary school.

Subject five: Bob
Bob was not competent in learning English in primary school because like Peter,
he could not understand his English teachers explanations of the vocabulary,
grammar rules, and texts in the textbook. More specifically, he had no ideas about the
60
pronunciations of the vocabulary and the Chinese meaning of the texts in the textbook.
As a result, learning English was a tedious experience in primary school. His English
performances in the primary school monthly exams had been maintained around 60s
and 70s. He did not perceive himself as a proficient English learner and believed that
he could never enhance his English ability. However, in secondary school, Bobs
English performances were worsened to 51. It seemed that Bob did come upon more
problems in English learning in the secondary school.
Bobs Learning Strategies
In secondary school, Bob was haunted by the same vocabulary learning problems
as Ken, Peter, and J oe did that he could not apply the strategy to memorize the
pronunciations of vocabulary in the textbook. Therefore, Bob was restricted to use the
repeating strategy to mechanically writing down the new vocabulary several times to
help recite the new word. In grammar learning and sentence formation, like Peter, he
was unable to employ the cognitive strategies to recognize and apply all of the
grammatical rules in English. Therefore, as shown in Extract 15, to prepare for the
sentence translation test, he had to use the same repeating strategy to constantly write
the same sentences to memorize the sentences in the textbook.
Extract 15.
R: Can you tell me how you memorized the vocabulary?
B: J ust trying to memorize the spelling of the vocabulary by writing it several
times
R: Can you pronounce the whole vocabulary?
B: No, I cant.
R: Do you know the pronunciations of the word when you were memorizing
vocabulary?
B: No, I cant.
61
R: Then, how did you prepare for your daily sentence translation tests?
B: Like the way I used to learn vocabulary. I tried to write the sentences 10
times.
R: But, is it really useful for you to prepare the translation tests?
B: No, I usually flunk the translation tests and I got only 60s in vocabulary tests.
(Bob.I.11/10/06)
Bobs Learning Attitudes
Like previous participants Bob was satisfied with the English learning context in
the secondary school, including teachers, classmates, and facilities. He perceived the
purpose of learning English was to help him pass an entrance exam to study in a good
senior high school. Therefore, Bob was so concerned that his English performances
would be deteriorated sharply in the secondary school after he had got only 51 in the
first monthly exams. He uttered that he would not give up learning English for
English was a core subject in every exam, and he was still eager to maintain his
English achievement over 60.
Bobs Learning Habits
The results emerged that in terms of physical habits, Bob often studied in his
bedroom and would spend one or two hours reviewing the new vocabulary, grammar
rules, and texts in the textbook to prepare for the secondary school exams. In mental
habits, the complicated grammar rules and inability to understand the Chinese
meaning of the texts in the textbook often made it difficult for him to concentrate on
studying while studying at home.
Bobs English Academic Adjustment
Bob adjusted his learning strategy uses to solve his vocabulary and grammar
learning problems. Taught by me, he first learned to use a memorization strategy to
associate the pronunciations of the vocabulary with the Chinese phonetic symbols to
62
remember the word pronunciations which in turn help him understand his English
teachers explanations of the new vocabulary and texts in textbooks. In terms of
learning attitudes, Bob also appreciated that learning grammar was of great
importance to maintain his English scores over 60 in the monthly English exams.
Therefore, as in Extract 16, Bob took initiations to memorize the grammar rules in
textbooks. In learning strategy uses, he also employed the cognitive strategy to foster
his grammatical knowledge by doing numerous questions and reviewing the
grammatical mistakes he made in the previous tests.
Extract 16.
R: In your opinion, what is the factor that enhanced your grammar ability?
B: Because I had done lots of grammar exercises in my English class?
R: Did you review what you had learned about grammar after school?
B: MM.. Yes.
R: How did you do that?
B: I would review the grammar rules in each lesson and try to memorize the
R: MM.. Then?
B: I would review the grammar errors that I made in the previous test sheets and
workbook.
R: Have you done this before?
B: No.
R: Why not.
B: Because I think grammar is much more important now. My English would
become worse if I could not understand any grammar rules.
(Bob.I.01/21/07)
Nevertheless, Bob was still unable to acquire the strategy to help recognize and
apply the sentence structures in English to use the known vocabulary to form a
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grammatical sentence. Therefore, Bob was confined to learn to translate English
sentences into Chinese by memorizing the texts words by words or use the general
sentence structure rules in Chinese to translate the Chinese sentence into English. His
performances in the daily sentence translation tests were remained between 40 and 80.
With his adjustment in learning strategies in vocabulary and grammar, Bob did
improve his English achievements, having 71 in the final monthly exam of the first
semester. In terms of learning attitudes, Bobs progression in English achievements
further imbued him with senses of achievement and motivations to learn English and
became more concentrated on studying English. However, Bob was still not confident
in English learning because he had never got 70 points in monthly exams ever after
and for he seldom could get over 60 in the daily sentence translation tests. With the
concerns, he was anxious about his English to become the worst in the second year
and he had no ideas what he could do to remedy his problems.
Bob made some changes in learning strategy uses to help him get familiar with
the pronunciations and spellings of the new vocabulary. He also learned to foster his
grammar ability through repetitive practices of the grammatical exercises. These two
learning strategies to some extent did help Bob raise his English performances in the
monthly exams. However, he was not filled with confidence in English learning due
to his limited progression in English learning because he could not solve his problem
in vocabulary memorization and sentence formation.

Summary and Discussion
The results revealed that the problems that students encountered in their
academic adjustment was the lack of effective learning strategies and learning habits
to get adjusted to the secondary school English learning context. The learning
attitudes seemed not to be the major component in students academic adjustment, as
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all the participants in this study held the same positive learning attitudes in terms of
cognition and affection (Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960) toward the secondary school
learning context with respect to the English teachers teaching styles, classmates, and
facilities. The finding was in accordance with the results of the previous studies (Li,
1992, 1994; Cheng, Wang, & Li, 1993) that the failed to apply learning strategies to
get adjusted to the new learning context is the preliminary problems in students
academic adjustment.
Therefore, this section describes a summary of the participants problems in
learning strategies and learning habits. Next, I analyze the factors for students
English adjustment to help students solve their problems in learning strategy uses and
learning habits between successful and unsuccessful learners.
Learning Strategies
The learning strategy use problems in English academic adjustment are divided
into vocabulary learning, grammar learning, and sentence formation that students
often met in the secondary school English class.
Vocabulary learning
The findings revealed that in terms of vocabulary learning, participants did not
use many types of memorization strategies to help remember the pronunciations and
spellings of the new vocabulary. Instead, four of the participants are restricted to use
the repeating strategy imbedded in the cognitive strategy to memorize vocabulary.
However, the lack of the effective memorization strategies to memorize vocabulary
often led to the problem that students could not retain the vocabulary in their long
term memory. Students in this study also declared that English teachers in primary
school and secondary school would only request students to keep vocabulary in mind,
but none had taught them the way to memorize vocabulary. Therefore, they were
inclined to employ a cognitive strategy to repeatedly write the same vocabulary
65
several times to memorize new words. The repetitive learning strategies had indeed
assisted the subjects to learn English in primary school to maintain their English
performances above average standards in their own class. In secondary school,
however, using the repetitive strategy to memorize the vocabulary became infeasible
and made it difficult for students to retain vocabulary in their long term memory,
particularly for the vocabulary that spells alike, such as car and cat. One of the
reasons was the complexity of the learning materials between primary school and
secondary school. Students mentioned that in primary school, they had to memorize
only five vocabulary for each lesson and the sentences of the texts were also very
short and simple to remember. In contrast, in secondary school, they were
overwhelmed to memorize around twenty vocabulary and complicated sentences for
each lesson and could not retrieve the vocabulary through memory.
Nevertheless, Peter, Ken, and Bob realized the desperate need to adjust their
English learning strategies to apply a memorization strategy to use the pronunciations
of the vocabulary to help memorize new words in English textbooks. But, as they
were in absence of the knowledge about phonics and K.K. phonetic symbols, they
failed to apply the pronunciations of the vocabulary to help memorize the new
vocabulary. The inability to use phonics or K.K. phonetic symbols to read the
vocabulary had further impeded their comprehension of the English teacher
instruction in class, particularly when the English teacher was reading and analyzing
the vocabulary and the texts in English textbooks. More specifically, students, having
vocabulary learning problems, often could not keep the pace with their English
teacher as they were unable to identify the vocabulary or sentences that their English
teacher was reading in class.
Grammar learning & sentence formation
In grammar learning, none of the participants would know the strategies they
66
could adopt to help learn grammar. The only strategy they employed was a social
strategy to ask for clarification or correction from a capable and knowledgeable one in
English, such as English teachers or proficient English learners. However, none of the
participants would call for assistance from English teachers to solve their grammar
problems because the students in this study were passive or timid to ask their English
teacher questions during the breaks and partially for their peers could not
comprehensively resolve their doubts. As a consequence, participants were inclined to
look for abetment from their relatives who are adept in English learning to solve their
grammar learning problems, such as elder sisters or elder brothers. However, Ken,
Peter, J oe, and Bob who had no one to turn to in their families would feel helpless to
learn grammar in their English learning.
Moreover, students could not apply learning strategies to help form a
grammatical sentence. Three of the participants would use cognitive strategies to
understand the meaning of the texts and produce messages in English by translating a
Chinese expression into English based on their limited grammatical knowledge. For
instance, David, Ken, and J oe who were equipped with fundamental grammar rules in
English would use the translation strategy to help understand the meaning of the texts
and produce sentences in English. However, word-by-word translation often brought
some grammatical errors due to the syntactic differences between Chinese and
English. Of the five participants, Peter and Bob encountered the severest learning
problem in sentence formation for they were unable to employ the translation strategy
due to their unfamiliarity with any rules and patterns in English to help promote their
production and comprehension. Most of the secondary school students had the same
problem as Peter and Bob did that they did not acquire sufficient grammatical
knowledge which they had to learn before graduating from the primary school,
according to their English teacher, Huang. For example, students should be able to
67
identify the agreement between subjects and be-verbs, the differences between
pronouns and possessive pronouns, and the rules to transform an affirmative sentence
into a negative or an interrogative one. Otherwise, students would be incapable of
applying the known vocabulary to produce their expressions. To translate the
sentences into English in tests, Peter and Bob had to memorize the sentences of the
texts in the textbook word by word by repeatedly writing the same sentence several
times without meaningful understanding. They might further meet difficulty
translating a Chinese sentence into English during exams once the meaning of the
Chinese sentence was not exactly the same as the one they memorized in the
textbook.
Learning Habits
Following Benard (1965), the learning habit problem that the students faced
could be categorized into problems of the physical habits and mental habits. In terms
of physical habits, participants would follow the same learning habits they developed
in the primary school to learn English in the secondary school. For example, all of the
participants except for David did not schedule their English learning and often did not
start to prepare for their school exams until the last day. Ken, J oe, and Bob also did
not make an adjustment in their time to study English and only spent around 20
minutes to prepare for the school exams or daily tests. In terms of mental habits, Ken,
Peter, J oe, and Bob, having learning strategy uses problem, often could not
concentrate on study both at school and at home because they at school could not
understand English teachers instruction and for they were unable to use the effective
learning strategies to study English on their own after school to memorize vocabulary
or form a grammatical sentence.
Factors for Successful and Unsuccessful English Academic Adjustment
In line with the previous studies (Gerdes & Mallinckroat, 2001; J eynes, 2003;
68
Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005), the present study uncovered that family support and
social support were the core factors leading to successful English academic
adjustment to solve students problems in learning strategy uses and learning habits.
Without these two factors, students in this study were also found to fail to adjust their
English learning in the new learning context and could not obtain good scores in
academic performance (Wu, 1981; Li, 1992, 1994; Gerdes & Mallinckrodt, 1994). For
example, J oe was the one who did not adjust his English learning in the secondary
school and his English performances were also the most terrible one of the five
participants at the end of this study. The reason was that he could not receive support
either from his family or peers when he confronted learning problems in learning
strategy use and learning habits. Compared to the other participants parents, J oes
parents seemed to adopt a free parenting style to empower J oe to take charge of his
own academic performances. They were not aggressive to understand and monitor
J oes academic performances in the secondary school to provide support that J oe
might need in his academic adjustment. Therefore, J oe started to give up learning
when he was unable to keep up with what teachers had taught. In fact, apart from
English, J oes academic performances in other subjects were also deteriorated at the
end of this research.
In the light of the importance of family and social factors in academic adjustment,
this section further addresses in detail how the two factors influence students English
academic adjustment.
Family factors
Family is the most frequently cited sources of support to assist students learning
in academic adjustment and family members might get involved in students learning
(J eynes, 2003; Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005). For instance, David, who
successfully adjusted his learning in this study, received lots of assistance from his
69
elder sister to help change his learning strategy uses and learning habits to solve his
academic adjustment problems. That is, Davids elder sister worked with David to
examine his English learning strategy use problems and learning habits to offer him
appropriate help that David really needed to succeed in English academic adjustment.
More specifically, his elder sister held the responsibility of his mother to look after
Davids academic performances and behaviors in school. To help David adjust his
learning to the secondary school, his sister examined Davids problems in learning
strategy uses and learning habits. In terms of learning strategies, his sister taught
David to consult a Chinese-English dictionary to know the meaning and
pronunciation of the new vocabulary. His elder sister also used a K.K. handbook to
assist David to recognize the pronunciations of the K.K. phonetic symbols and the
relationship between K.K. phonetic symbols and letters. As a result, David was able to
read vocabulary on his own and memorize the vocabulary in an efficient way by
associating the relationship between sounds and letters. To help David better
understand the grammar rules, his elder sister would design numerous grammar
exercises for David to practice and would construe the rule again when David could
not finish the exercise correctly. With his improvement in grammar learning, David
then took risks wisely to analyze the new grammatical rules to learn the new
grammatical concept on his own, rather than to ask his elder sister. He further
attempted to analyze the syntactic differences between Chinese and English to help
translate a Chinese sentence into English grammatically. In learning habits, David was
requested by his elder sister to develop the learning habits that he had to finish his
homework and study first so that he could go to play computer or watch television. He
also had to schedule his time to study every subject from Monday to Friday and
English and Math were the core subjects he needed to go over everyday.
Previous research all had positive comments on family factors for the academic
70
adjustment (J eynes, 2003; Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005); however, this study found
that not every support from family could in effect help students in academic
adjustment. In the present study, the support from parents to facilitate students
academic adjustment was often restricted to the learning habits. Parents (e.g. Kens
and Peters parents) often helped their children to adjust their learning by using
punishment to correct their childrens learning habits. They often did not notice the
change of learning habits was not enough to facilitate students academic adjustment.
To help their children acquire English learning strategies, parents (e.g. Peters parents)
would send their children to a cram school to provide their children with a learning
model. This finding was in accordance with the previous studies which pinpointed
when parents found themselves as incapable of providing help to solve their childrens
problems, parents might support their children by sharing their childhood experiences
or employing tutors to serve as a learning model for their children to know what to do
(Wenztel, 1999; Snchez, Reyes, & Singh, 2005). Nevertheless, this study uncovered
that the tutors might not offer students the useful learning strategies to facilitate
students academic adjustment as the teachers usually neglect to the students need in
their learning strategy uses. Ken, for example, was requested by his mother to plan his
study to prolong his time in studying English from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday.
To force Ken to study hard in school, his parents would deprive him of his favorite
computer games and video players once he could not keep his academic performances
over 60 in the monthly exams. Kens parents also requested him to go to an English
cram school to enhance his English performances in the monthly exams. To a certain
extent, Ken indeed enriched his grammatical knowledge and recognized new rules
and patterns in English from his cram school English teacher. For instance, he learned
the rules to form an interrogative sentence by inserting an auxiliary to avoid directly
translating a Chinese sentence into English. He also learned to examine his
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grammatical knowledge by doing numerous grammar exercises and employ a
grammar handbook as well as the previous test sheets to clarify his misuse of certain
grammar rules. But, his cram school English teacher still did not uncover the primary
vocabulary learning problem that Peter had in English learning. The cram school
English teacher further punished Ken for he was unable to keep every vocabulary in
mind. Therefore, regardless of his mother opposition, Ken dropped out of the cram
school. Due to his inability to solve his vocabulary learning problem, Ken still could
not successfully adjust his English learning due to the vocabulary learning problem
even though he changed his learning habits and acquired learning strategies to
facilitate his grammar learning and sentence formation.
The similarities and differences of the academic adjustment between David and
Ken indicate that the change of learning habits were not enough to help students get
adjusted to the new learning context in secondary school. What matters most was to
offer the appropriate support in learning strategy uses that could match students
needs to solve their primary concerns in English. The reason why Ken could not well
adjust his learning as David did was that no one could act like Davids elder sister to
closely examine his learning problems, such as vocabulary learning, and work with
him to fix up the problem together. In other words, parents seemed to make a mistake
in the process of students academic adjustment that they did not really discuss and
inspect the problems with their children about their academic adjustment to offer the
appropriate assistance. Parents might only blame children for their inability to obtain
high scores in English exams. Parents might further get mad with their children for
their children resisting going to the cram school and could not figure out the reason
why their children felt reluctant to go to the cram school. Parents might also blame
their children for they could not concentrate on study, and did not realize the fact that
their children had difficulty employing the appropriate learning strategies to study
72
English on their own.
Social factors
In social factors, previous research claimed that teachers had roles to play in
students academic adjustment to realize how students react to the way that they teach
to provide assistance for students who have adjustment problems (Li, 1992, 1994;
Huang, 2000; Ryu, 2004). However, teachers in this study were not perceived as a
helpful character to facilitate students academic adjustment. The study discovered
that in interviews, English teachers were unable to identify students academic
adjustment problems in learning strategy uses, learning attitudes, and learning habits,
and to examine whether their teaching styles might further deteriorate students
learning problems. For example, the English teachers in this study were not aware that
students had problems in memorizing the pronunciations of the vocabulary making it
difficult for students to keep up with their English teacher teaching in vocabulary.
Consequently, teachers never realized the need to change their teaching styles to use
teaching aids when teaching vocabulary or the texts in English textbooks to increase
students comprehension and focus students attention in class.
Moreover, the findings displayed that English teachers often aimed to enrich
students knowledge about vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns, but few
would teach students strategies to acquire such a huge amount of knowledge in
secondary school English class. However, according to Miss Huang, to follow the
curriculum of the English syllabus, she was not allowed to spend time teaching
students some learning strategies to solve their academic adjustment problems.
Therefore, she had to assume that students could solve their learning problems on
their own once they did not initiate any questions in class. The results accord with the
study done by Snchez, Reyes, and Singh (2005) which addressed institutional agents
cannot provide much support in students academic achievement due to a huge
73
number of students in the class.
Therefore, participants, having no much support from family, had to rely on
themselves to look for the learning strategies mainly from peers. Nevertheless, this
study uncovered that due to their limited knowledge about English, peers could not in
effect help students in academic adjustment. Peter, Bob, and J oe, for example,
acquired the learning strategy from peer to link the vocabulary with words or
phonetics symbols in Chinese that sound alike to memorize the sounds of the
vocabulary to overcome their disability to recognize the pronunciations of the new
words. Being able to pronounce the vocabulary indeed empowered them to
understand their English teacher instruction in terms of the vocabulary and the texts in
textbook. However, although Peter and Bob learned to use Pin yin to memorize the
pronunciations of the new vocabulary, from peers, they still could not realize how the
sounds of vocabulary could benefit their vocabulary memorization skills by
connecting sounds and letters. Thus, they were inclined to use a mechanical way to
write the same vocabulary several times to memorize vocabulary and still suffered
from the same vocabulary learning problem, being unable to retain the vocabulary in
their long term memory. The finding also advocated the researchers (Berndt, 1999;
Gerdes & Mallinckroat, 2001) who declared the peer support in academic adjustment
was restricted to emotional elements only and could not provide much assistance in
tutoring.
Learning Attitudes
Moreover, the results revealed that learning strategies would in turn influence
students changes in learning attitudes with respect to their motivation in English
learning, because the effective learning strategies were the essential elements to pave
the way for students to obtain good scores in academic performances to imbue
students with senses of achievement and confidence. The findings were in accordance
74
with Li (1992, 1994) who indicated that students who could resolve their academic
adjustment problems appear to have more learning motivation, confidence, and
concrete learning objectives in their learning. For example, David who successfully
used the learning strategies to help pronounce the vocabulary and analyze the
grammar rules on his own became more motivated to learn English. He were inspired
to adopt other types of learning strategies after he realized his adjustment in learning
strategy uses could efficiently promote his English ability to obtain good
performances in English tests. In contrast, learning interest decreased when
participants failed to employ the right learning strategies to overcome their difficulties
in English learning to maintain their academic performances. For instance, Ken
became less interested in learning English and perceived himself as an inefficient
English learner to lower his standard in English performances, as he was unable to
apply any strategies to help him memorize the pronunciations of the vocabulary.
Finally, he gave up learning English
In sum, to help students facilitate their academic adjustment, teachers or parents
should realize that apart from changing students learning habits, they should also
examine what learning problems students really encounter to offer the strategies that
could match students needs to increase their confidence and motivation in English
learning to get adjusted to the new learning context.







75
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION

This chapter provides a summary of the findings in this study. Then, the
implication for teaching practice and suggestions for future research are addressed.
Summary of the Study
This study intends to inspect the problems on students English performance in
secondary school, to see how they made changes in learning strategies use, learning
attitudes, and learning habits, and to explore the factors for their academic adjustment
in English.
The findings displayed that the major problems on students academic
adjustment was their lack of effective learning strategies and learning habits. In terms
of learning strategies, students could not use many memorization strategies to help
retain the pronunciation and spelling of the new vocabulary. Students were inclined to
use the cognitive strategy to write the same vocabulary several times to memorize the
new words. However, without effective memorization strategies, students often could
not retain the spelling and pronunciation of the new vocabulary in their long term
memory, leading to the fact that they had difficulty in understanding their teachers
instruction in class. Moreover, students also could not employ many strategies to help
learn grammar to form a grammatical sentence. Students would only attempt to
produce their messages in English by directly translating a Chinese sentence into
English based on their limited grammatical knowledge. Two of the participants, Peter
and Bob, further could not use the translation strategy to help form a grammatical
sentence due to their unfamiliarity with grammatical rules and sentence patterns in
English. Therefore, they had to memorize the whole texts by writing the same
sentences several times so as to translate Chinese sentences into English in tests.
76
In addition, students problems in learning habits could be divided into physical
habits and mental habits. In physical habits, students did not realize they had to
change the learning habits to schedule their study time to cope with a huge a mount of
new information in the secondary school English class. In mental habits, students
were unable to concentrate on study both at school and at home mainly because they
could not use the effective learning strategies to memorize vocabulary and grammar
rules to understand their English teachers instruction and study English on their own.
The results also showed that family and social support were the two crucial
factors for students academic adjustment to change their learning strategy uses and
learning habits. However, the family support from parents in students academic
adjustment was often restricted to the learning habits only by using punishment to
correct their childrens learning habits. Parents did not often help their children
examine their academic adjustment problems to offer the appropriate assistance.
Parents might only blame their children for they could not concentrate on study and
for their inability to obtain high scores in English exams. However, students, who
changed their learning habits, were still unable to well adjust their learning in the new
learning context because they could not employ the right learning strategies to solve
their problems in vocabulary learning, grammar learning, and sentence formation.
In social factors, teacher and peer support was also not very effective to facilitate
students to adjust their learning. Due to time constraint and the number of students in
class, English teachers could not found students academic adjustment problems in
learning strategy uses, learning attitudes, and learning habits, to adjust their teaching
styles to facilitate students academic adjustment. Therefore, students always had to
call for helps from their classmates. Nevertheless, their classmates often failed to
solve their problems for their peers lacked sufficient knowledge about English. In
other words, to help students succeed in academic adjustment, teachers and parents
77
are strongly encouraged to closely examine students learning problems in strategy
uses so that they can offer appropriate support which can actually solve students
primary concerns to empower students to obtain good scores in exams so as to further
increase their learning motivation.

Implications for Teaching Practice
In current study, learning strategy uses and learning habits were the problems
that secondary school students confronted in academic adjustment. Therefore, in
vocabulary learning, English teachers may encourage students, in absence of
knowledge about K.K. phonetic symbols or phonics rules, to employ their mother
tongue to create an auditory link (Oxford, 1990) to link the vocabulary with a familiar
word that sounds alike in Chinese to memorize the pronunciations of the vocabulary.
To help students remember vocabulary, teachers can tell students the relationship
between sounds and letters and teach students to apply word pronunciations to infer
the spellings of the vocabulary. The teaching activities can also be designed to foster
students spelling ability. Maybe it is difficult for the secondary school teachers to
teach students the relationship between sounds and letter in class due to time
constraint; however, it is worthy to equip students with such a spelling ability to help
students to learn English on their own. In terms of teaching styles, it is suggested that
secondary school teachers may use teaching aids to help students identify the words
or sentences that teachers are reading so as to increase their comprehension in class.
Last but not least, at the beginning of the semester, teachers may employ diagnosis
tests to know the reason why students have low test scores in exams and what
problems they confront in learning vocabulary, learning grammar, and sentence
formation. Teachers then can offer remedial programs after school for students to
solve their academic adjustment problems. In terms of learning attitudes, to help
78
students adjust their learning, teachers can teach students the way to allocate their
time to study. The learning strategies also can be provided for students to know the
way to study English on their own so that students can concentrate on study both at
school and at home.

Suggestions for Future Research
This study examines the academic adjustment of the students in their secondary
school English learning through interviews with participants. However, I found that
secondary school students often had difficulty clearly expressing their feeling or
beliefs toward their own English learning. Therefore, a questionnaire about academic
adjustment can be employed before interviews. In interviews, researchers can elicit
more related questions by using the information found in the questionnaire results
about their academic adjustment. In addition, as the participants in this study were all
male students, future research can analyze the differences and similarities of English
academic adjustment between male students and female students. Moreover, as the
present study was conducted in a remote secondary school in Pingtung county, future
research can inspect the students studying in the metropolitan district to examine
whether different learning contexts influence academic adjustment. It is also
suggested that future research can focus on the linguistic analysis of students
language performances to understand students academic adjustment problems in
English learning. Not many data about students linguistic performances were found
in this study. Linguistic analyses can help researchers pinpoint the problems students
have in their English learning.



79
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85
Appendix A
Chinese Version of the Invitation Letter

86

E-mail:u9241346@yuntech.edu.tw
0919-356197


























87
Appendix B
English Version of the Invitation Letter

Dear Teachers
First, I have to thanks for your willingness to receive my interviews. Now, let me
introduce myself first. Then, I will explain the procedure of classroom observation
and interview, and the supports I might need during my research process.
I am a gradated student studying in the Department of English in the National
Pintung University of Education (NPUE). And, I have been a substituted English
teacher in the Kaolang primary school for one year.
As an English teacher in the primary school, I find that the essence of English
teaching in the primary school is to employ interactive activities or games to enhance
students listening and speaking skills. However, in the secondary school, English
teaching turns to focus on the reading and writing skills training through mechanical
drillings to help students cope with the high school entrance exam. Such a gap
between the primary school and the secondary school become one of the major
problems that teachers and students encounter in their secondary school English
classes. With this in mind, I desire to investigate what impacts or problem students or
teachers might have in their learning and teaching process.
In order to better understand teachers teaching styles and students learning
conditions, I might go into the teaching spot to do classroom observations. I will also
interview students and their English teachers. About classroom observations, I need
to observe one class at least once a week. The purpose of classroom observation is
mainly to know students learning condition in the class. During the observation, I
will take notes. With your permission, I wish to video-record the students learning
during the whole process of class, so that I will not miss crucial information about
students learning. The video-tapes are only used for research and will be deleted
88
after I complete my research. I have to interview with students at least 3 times and
with teachers at least one time. Each interview might last an hour. During the
interview, I wish to audio-record my conversations with interviewees so that I can be
more concentrated. After research, these audio-tapes will be also deleted. Finally,
your name and background information will be protected secretly. All the data will
be only used for research, and will be only known by my advisor and me. All the
participants will be described anonymously in the paper. After research, I can give
you the audio-tapes and video-tapes if you want. If you would like to take part in this
research, we can make an appointment for the next time meeting. I will also feel
regretted if you cannot help me to accomplish this study. However, I am still very
appreciated for your reading this invitation letter. I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely Yours,
Sheng-shiang Tseng
National Pingtung Educational University


















89
Appendix C
Chinese Version of the Questionnaire

1. _________ ________
2. ___________
3.
4.

5.

6.

1. 20%
2. 40%
3. 60%
4. 80%
5. 100%
18




90





1. 1 2 3 4 5
2. 1 2 3 4 5
3. 1 2 3 4 5
4. 1 2 3 4 5
5. 1 2 3 4 5
6. 1 2 3 4 5
7. 1 2 3 4 5
8. 1 2 3 4 5
9. 1 2 3 4 5
10. 1 2 3 4 5
11. 1 2 3 4 5
12. 1 2 3 4 5
13. 1 2 3 4 5
14. 1 2 3 4 5
15. 1 2 3 4 5
16. 1 2 3 4 5
17. 1 2 3 4 5
18. 1 2 3 4 5











91
Appendix D
English Version of the Questionnaire

Dear Students,
The purpose of this questionnaire is to better understand your English academic
adjustment in the secondary school to provide you assistance in your English
learning. The content consists two sections. The first is personal data section. The
second is the survey section on your English adjustment in the secondary school.
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. All the information will
be protected secretly, and it will not affect your course grades. Therefore, please do
not worry about it, and answer the questions according to your own situations. Your
opinions will be helpful for me to understand your English adjustment.
National Pingtung Educational University
Advisor: Hsiu-hsiu Yang
Student: Sheng-shiang Tseng
First section: Personal data
1. Gender: Male Female Name_________ Student number________
2. Primary school: ___________
3. Have you learned English before the primary school?
Yes No
4. When did your primary school start to teach you English?
the first grade the second grade the third gradethe fourth grade
the fifth grade the six grade
5. When did you go to English cram schools in the primary school?
the first grade the second grade the third gradethe fourth grade
the fifth grade the six grade
6. Do you go to English cram schools in the secondary school?
Yes No
Instruction
The following statements are to understand your English learning experiences in
the secondary school English classes. Please read the statements carefully, and choose
the most adequate answer according to your own situation. Each statement contains
five items:
1. I never or almost never do this: The occurrence of the statements is 20%
2. I seldom do this: The occurrence of the statements is 40%
3. I sometimes do this: The occurrence of the statements is 60%
4. I usually do this: The occurrence of the statements is 80%
5. I always or almost always do this: The occurrence of the statements is 100%
6.
92
Statements Never
or almost
never
seldomsometimesusually always
or almost
always
1. I underline the major points in
the textbook.
1 2 3 4 5
2. I plan my schedule to study
English.
1 2 3 4 5
3. I used to preview the lesson. 1 2 3 4 5
4. I ask my classmates or teachers
to help resolve my English
problems.
1 2 3 4 5
5. I am concentrated in English
class.
1 2 3 4 5
6. I work hard on doing my English
homework .
1 2 3 4 5
7. When English teachers initiate
questions, I will think about them
seriously
1 2 3 4 5
8. I want to know how to improve
my English ability.
1 2 3 4 5
9. In English class, I am distracted
by something else.
1 2 3 4 5
10. Learning English in the
secondary school is easy for me.
1 2 3 4 5
11. I can accept my English teachers
teaching styles.
1 2 3 4 5
12. My English teachers instructions
are clear to me.
1 2 3 4 5
13. I cannot follow what teacher said
in class.
1 2 3 4 5
14. I cannot understand what my
English teacher said in class
1 2 3 4 5
15. I am satisfied with my
performances in English class.
1 2 3 4 5
16. I think my English proficiency is
great in this class.
1 2 3 4 5
17. My English proficiency becomes
worse when studying in the
secondary school.
1 2 3 4 5
18. I believe I can learn English well. 1 2 3 4 5






93
Appendix E:
Chinese Version of the Interview Guides for Students and English teachers


1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.







94


1.
2.
3.
4.

5.
6.
7.
8.



















95
Appendix F:
English Version of the Interview Guides for Students and English teachers

Students
1. What strategies do you use to remember new vocabulary?
2. What strategies do you use to learn grammar?
3. Which instruments do you use when studying English? How can it help you?
4. Are you used to reviewing?
5. Are you used to taking note in English class?
6. Do you plan schedule for studying English? Do you follow your schedule? Why?
7. What makes you feel learning English is difficult?
8. Are you concentrated when studying English at home?
9. What are your English learning objectives?
10. Do you ask others to help resolve your English question? Why?
11. Do you go to English cram schools? How do you feel?
12. Can you keep up with your English teachers instructions?
13. What types of teachers teaching styles do you like? How about your English
teachers?
14. Do you feel contents of the English textbook are too difficult to understand? For
example?
15. Which parts of English learning is the most difficult to you?
16. How do you prepare for your English exams?
17. Are you anxious about English test?
18. Are you satisfied with your English scores? Why?
19. Do you think tests are help for you? Why?
20. Will you be easily distracted in English class? Why?
21. Which places do you study English at home?
22. Have you ever turned in your English homework late? Why?
23. Do you plan your schedule for studying English? How many hours does it take
to study English?
24. Are you interested in learning English? Why?
25. Do you think you study English very hard? Can you give me some examples?






96
Teachers
1. Do you think English cram schools are helpful to improve students English
proficiency? Why?
2. Do you know why this student cannot learn English well?
3. Do you know whether students can keep up with the progress of English
curriculum?
4. Can you describe your teaching styles? Do you know whether the students are
interested in your teaching styles or whether the student can comprehend your
instruction?
5. Do you think the contents of English textbook are too easy or difficult for the
student? Why?
6. How do you interact with students in the class?
7. Can you tell me the students learning condition in the class?
8. Does this student are interested in learning English?

















97
APPENDIX G
Sample Transcript of the Interviews of the Students

Time: 10/26/2006
Interview: Peter
(00:00-05:13)
1. R: How did you do on your first monthly English exam?
2. S: not very good.
3. R: Have you think about the reason why you cannot learn English well?
4. S: I dont know.
5. R: Is that hard for you to learn English in the secondary school?
6. P: Well, I dont know K.K. phonetic symbols.
7. R: Can you memorize the words?
8. P: Not if theyre long ones.
9. R: How long does it take to memorize the words?
10. P: Sometimes an hour, or several hoursit takes longer if the words are hard to
remember. However, even though Ive already memorized the words, I forget
them on the exam.
11. R: How did it happen?
12. P: No, I just couldnt remember them.
13. R: Say, the word book. How do you memorize it?
14. P: If the words are hard to memorize, I write them down again and again.
15. R: Have you learned any easier ways to memorize words?
16. P: I think itll be much easier if I can know the sounds of the K.K. phonetic
symbols.
17. R: Well, so can you understand your English teachers instructions in class?
18. P: Sometime, I cannot catch up with her.
98
19. R: When, can you give me an example?
20. P: For example, when the teacher is reading and teaching the sentences and texts
in the textbook.
21. R: If no, did you want to go to the English cram school to foster your English
ability?
22. P: No
23. R: Why not
24. P: I just dont want to go the cram school. I want to study English by myself.
25. R: How did you study English on your own?
26. P: Oh.. I tried to read the vocabulary and the text in textbooks.
27. R: But, you couldnt know the pronunciations of the vocabulary, did you?
28. P: No, I couldnt. So, like what I said, I would remember the vocabulary and the
sentences by writing them several times.
29. R: Did you spend time preview or reviewing what you had learned about English
in class?
30. P: Sometime, I did. And sometime I did not.
31. R: Why?
32. P: Because sometime I could not understand the meaning or sounds of the
vocabulary and texts. So, I might go to do other things like watching TV.
33. R: Did you ask your classmates or teachers to help you understand the contents
of the English textbook?
34. P: I would ask my classmate or borrow their English books.
35. R: Were they able to solve your problems?
36. P: Sometime, they were not.
37. R: So, what would you do?
38. P: I would wait for teachers to explain the meaning or rules again in class.
99
39. R: But, if your English teacher did not explain the meaning again, what you
would do?
40. P: I dont know.
41. R: Ok.. Did you take notes in your English class?
42. P: Sometime I did, sometime I didnt. I started to take notes after the first
monthly exam because I did not perform very well in the first monthly exam.
43. R: MM. ..Would you be distracted from the class?
44. P: Yes, sometime I would.
45. R: Do you know what distracted your attention from the class?
46. P: I dont know.
47. R: Is it because you cannot understand your teachers instruction?
48. P: yes!! And then I felt English class was very boring.
49. R: Could you point out which part you did not understand when your teacher
was teaching?
50. P: My mind was absent when the teacher was teaching sentences and texts.
51. R: Ok. do you want to upgrade your grades in the next monthly exam?
52. P: M..My father requested me to obtain over 60 scores in every subject.
53. R: And then what strategies did you apply to help you achieve this objective?
54. P: No, I dont any learning strategies I could use.
55. R: Yes, you did. For example, you start taking notes.








100
APPENDIX H
Sample Transcript of the Interviews of the English teacher

Time: 1/21/2007
Interview: Miss Huang
(00:00-06:25)
1. R: Could you describe how did you arrange your teaching activities for each
lesson?
2. T: Usually, I would start the new lesson by teaching vocabulary first. Then,
3. T: I would usually start the new lesson by teaching vocabulary first to help
students know the pronunciation of new vocabulary. Then, I would test students
to see if students remember the new words well. Next, I would explain the
meaning and some language structures of the texts in English book. Also,
students were required to take a Chinese-English translation test to make sure
students understand the meaning of the texts. Finally, I would explain the
grammar rules for each lesson and gave students some exercises to practice.
4. R: Could you tell me how did you teach the texts in textbook?
5. T: I would usually translate texts from English into Chinese and then I would
explain some sentence structures of the key sentences in textbooks.
6. R: MM.. then, how did you teach grammar?
7. T: For example, to help students tell the differences between plural forms and
singular forms, I would tell students that the nouns could be divided into plurals
and singulars when I was teaching vocabulary. Then, I would make a sentence to
tell students the differences between plural subjects and singular subject in
English sentences. For instance, I would make a sentence, Are these books, to
explain students that the be-verb, are, should be employed to make agreement
with the plural subjects, books. After my explanations, I would ask students to do
101
exercises on the textbooks.
8. R: In your opinion, is Peter able to catch up with your instruction in class?
9. T: Peter is a very hard-working student. He would note down every thing I wrote
on the blackboard. But, I am not sure whether he was able to catch up with me in
class. He studied very hard. For example, he would try his best to memorize the
vocabulary and his grades in vocabulary test were very good. But, he was unable
to perform very well in the translation tests in which students were required to
translate the Chinese texts into English in the textbook. Maybe it was because
Peter was not able to understand the Chinese meaning of the texts in the
textbook.
10. R: MM..Peter also told me that he was unable to apply the pronunciations of the
vocabulary to help memorize the new words due to his lack of knowledge about
phonics and K.K. phonetic symbols. He had to repeatedly write the same
vocabulary several times to memorize the new words. He also had to memorize
the sentences in textbook by repeatedly writing the same sentence to help form
an English sentence. It seems that Peter was unable to use a meaningful way to
learn to memorize vocabulary and for a grammatical sentence.
11. T: He said he was unable to pronounce the new vocabulary because he had no
ideas about K.K. phonetic symbols?
12. R: Yes, this was one of his primary problems in English learning.
13. T: This was also the major problem I found in students learning. Most of the
students were unable to recognize the K.K. phonetic symbols. Some of students
would even use Pin yin to help memorize the pronunciations.
14. R: Did you find any other English learning problems in your class?
15. T: The disability to recognize K.K. phonetic symbols was the most serious
learning problem among students. Students would not be able to pronounce the
102
new vocabulary, one they could not name the sounds of those K.K. phonetic
symbols. Another problem was that students were not equipped with sufficient
grammatical knowledge. For example, most of the students were unable to tell
the differences between is, are, am in English. But, these basic grammar rules
were not mentioned in students English textbook.
16. R: MM. In primary school, teachers only teach students to use phonics to learn
vocabulary, and do not focus on the grammar analysis.
17. T: But, in my opinion, phonics are not suitable for Taiwanese students for
English is not our first language. Students should learn to use K.K. phonetic
symbols to learn English.
18. R: so.. This is the gap between primary school and secondary school in English
teaching. Did this gap impede your teaching?
19. T: Yes, in order to follow the syllabus of the school, I usually dont have much
time to teach students these basic rules. So.. I have to assume that students could
learn the vocabulary or grammar rules by themselves.
20. R: But, did you try to spend 5 or 10 minutes in your class to teach students those
basic grammar rules?
21. T: Yes, but some students were still unable to analyze the grammar rules. They
need much more inputs. Then, students would be distracted from the class for
they could not understand what I was teaching in class.
22. R: So.. You mean there should be specific class designed to equip students with
basic knowledge, such as K.K. phonetic symbols and basic grammatical rules.
23. T: Yes, but we as teachers do not have time to teach students the knowledge
24. R: So..In your opinion, what problems Peter might have due to his lack of
knowledge about K.K. phonetic symbols and fundamental grammar rules.
25. T: For example, he would not be able to understand the meaning of the text in
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English textbooks and would forget what he had learned easily. In terms of
grammar, he would further be unable to use some basic sentence patterns to help
form a grammatical sentence.