The whys and wherefores
The globalised networks, increasing international employment and transnational mobility of people demand a lingua franca. English has become a global identifier giving experiences of worldwide citizenship, and belongingness to the universal community (Kaikkonen 2004, 126). In countries like Finland, where English has never been a native or official language, English has become a constituent of participation in working life, societal life as well as social and personal life (also Risager 2006, 9). The command of a foreign language, today English in particular, is part of democratic citizenship and active participation in society. It is seen as everyone’s right, a contributor to human autonomy, thus offering the possibility of change (see Rebenius 2006, 305–307). In working life, functional English is expected or required in far more numerous jobs than before. For many, English has by and by become a component of competence in daily work even when initially not a criterion of eligibility for the job and when the relevant qualifying studies have contained only short English studies, perhaps none at all.
Lifelong learning as continuous development of human resources benefits both society and the people involved in it (Pohjanpää, Niemi & Ruuskanen 2008, 15). Adult education is an economical solution to the demand for an educated labour force according to society’s transforming and developing needs. The extensive European adult education survey (for its coverage, see Pohjanpää et al. 62–63), which was nationally conducted by Statistics Finland in 2006, revealed that 52% of people aged 18–64 years and permanently living in the country participated in education arranged for adults (ibid. 20). The self-assessment scale was adapted from the Common Framework of Reference for Languages, abbreviated from now on to CEF1.
1 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment is an action-oriented approach published by The Council of Europe. The CEF contains common reference levels of language proficiency. It describes language use and language user/learners, their general and communicative language competences, language learning and teaching, discusses tasks, curriculum design and assessment (see CEF 2001, vii) presenting principles and practices but not determining the practice (CEF 2001, vii–ix).
Out of the respondents, 9% studied foreign languages (ibid. 63, 212). The respondents assessed their productive and receptive proficiency in the languages they had studied. Oral and written skills were not distinguished (ibid. 143, 144). Proficiency means “real world ability” here, what one knows and can do (CEF 2001, 183–184 and 37), for example, being able to converse in English. Instead, competences enable us “to perform actions” while communicative language competences in particular empower us “to act using specifically linguistic means” (CEF 2001, 9).
According to the results of the survey, English proficiency clearly decreased in each ten-year older age group (ibid. 144, 146 and 149). In the 18–24 and 25–34 ten-year age group, four out of five people were at least independent users (for the specification of the levels, see CEF 2001, 23–24), three out of five in the age group 35–44, only two out of five in the 45–54 age group and one out of four in the 55–64 age group (Pohjanpää et al. 2008, 149).
The increasing English proficiency especially in younger age groups speaks of the widening of foreign language education, of English in particular, especially thanks to the Finnish comprehensive school already launched in the early 1970s and expanded post-secondary educational opportunities available after it (see ibid. 144). The comprehensive school offered the whole age group more extensive foreign language studies. However, many adults in working life, among them adults returning to studies later in their lives, attended school before the increased emphasis on spoken skills. Adults are expected to be able to study on their own but the goal is difficult to reach especially with regard to speech (e.g. CEF 2001, 27).
At the universities of applied sciences (in Finnish ammattikorkeakoulu; also referred to as polytechnics, from now abbreviated to UAS), students’ English proficiency tends to vary quite widely. One common and influential source for this variability is that the general eligibility for basic degree studies at the UAS is gained in one of three ways: through the matriculation examination after the general upper secondary school (in Finnish lukio), through vocational qualifications (in Finnish ammatilliset perustutkinnot) in vocational secondary school (in Finnish ammatillinen oppilaitos) or through corresponding studies (Polytechnics Act 9.5.2003/351 §20, abrogated by Polytechnics Act 14.11.2014/932 §25).
Students entering the UAS after the vocational upper secondary school have usually studied only a small number of credits of English after seven years’ English studies in comprehensive school. For many of them, the road to reach B2.1, the level demanded for the UAS diploma can be long and complicated (cf. Jaatinen, R. 2007, 147–148). To graduate, the UAS students must achieve a foreign language competency level necessary for work and professional development in one or two foreign languages (Decree on Polytechnics Studies 352/2003, 8§, abrogated from Jan. 1st, 2015 by Polytechnics Act 14.11. 2014/932 §68). In English, this level is defined as B.2.1. on the CEF scale (CEF 2001, 24, 26–27 and 35) and the studies begin at the level reached in general upper secondary education.
The growing share of students admitted to tertiary education from each age group reveals increasing diversity among them (Kantelinen & Heiskanen 2004, 132), a feature which also applies to English. Minor English studies usually denote limited proficiency
in spoken English, which hinders students from full participation and its benefits. Similar impediments tend to be faced also by students who enter a UAS after many years in working life and by students, whose earlier English studies have taken place in countries where studies of spoken English have received only minor attention. UAS foreign language studies as part of tertiary education aim at professionally oriented language use necessary for the practice of the profession and professional development. Good general language skills are the prerequisite and are presumed. (Kantelinen & Heiskanen 2004, 122.)
In working life, insufficient English skills arouse feelings of incompetence and inadequacy, something which concerns especially English because so many people are proficient and fluent in it. The inability to express oneself in oral English causes stress and anxiety and is frustrating and difficult to accept, even when caused only by the mere lack of fluency. Starting to use English publicly is an issue of identity and demands a favourable situation and environment. Crucially limited English oral proficiency is seldom sufficient for situations and contexts where adults use English. In her research among engineers, Valtaranta explored foreign language use, especially English by Finnish engineers in their own professional work contexts. Emailing was often preferred to phoning because it was not always possible to prepare for a phone call. Teleconferencing and presentations had become common. Interactional skills were considered difficult. Even so, the engineers enjoyed face-to-face communication. (Valtaranta 2009, 92–93.) The growing amount and variety of the use of oral foreign language use in a diversity of situations show the increasing significance of oral proficiency and readiness for it in working life.
Multicultural societies, the globalisation of the world and its increased networks, diverse changes and development trends in society also entail teacher development. The Act on the Universities of Applied Sciences (9.5.2003/352, 20 §; 10.6.2005/411) in Finland confirms the three-dimensional role of the UAS teacher as a pedagogue, an expert performing as a researcher and developer, and as a regional agent. The responsibility attached to the teacher’s work demands continuous maintenance of professional development and growth of expertise (Day 2004, 122). I had the benefit of working with young language teacher colleagues, which made me even more interested in the teacher’s professional development.
Their recent studies and pre-service training had offered them comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge of the field, contact with expertise and opportunities for discussion and counselling. It is impossible to gain these merely by committing to self-development, keeping an eye on the developments in the field and by participating in occasional in-service training. Tacit and accumulated knowledge is often unsystematic knowledge. They cannot be compensated for by the experience of years, knowledge, the teacher’s personal theory and its promotion through work. Instead, when explored and recognised, they can serve as an authentic foundation for further professional development.
At the beginning of this research, I had some ten years of my teacher’s career ahead.
I wanted my enthusiasm and the meaningfulness that I experienced in my work last across those years. Professional development including researching would contribute to this. Another research interest, arising from these considerations, was to be the teacher’s
professional development. This interest would first materialise in the context of the promotion of oral English proficiency among adults, which also related to my work and interest at the UAS. Otherwise, I left investigation of this, more abstract interest to be defined in the research process.
Research problems
1 How do the oral English studies developed and lived in the research serve adult students at the level represented by the research group? How do these studies fulfil adult students’
expectations, aims and needs and the assumptions and expectations society poses on them?
The first part of this research question entails the development of an English course on oral English proficiency for adults at the level defined by CEF as A2–B1. The research should answer the question of which way the course can serve these people. In other words, the research should reveal what is demanded of such a course. Proficiency here means here “real world ability”, what one knows and can do (CEF 2001, 183–184 and 37) while competences are the resources that empower a person to carry them out such as communicative language competences and the general competences (CEF 2001, 9 and 11).
The self-assessment-grid in the table on the Common Reference Levels divides speaking into spoken production and spoken interaction (CEF 2001, 26–27). They intertwine and alternate in speech situations as part of oral communication that entails productive, receptive and interactive language activities. In both, the participants alternate as speakers and listeners taking turns and giving them. The difference is that spoken interaction is characteristically interactive (also CEF 2001, 73–82, 92 and 26–27) and the turns alternate in a quicker sequence. In addition, spoken production and spoken interaction challenge a person’s communicative competence in ways that differ to some extent (see e.g. existential competence CEF 2001, 105–106, for sociolinguistic competence CEF 2001, 118–120) and relate to different situations, activities and strategies (cf. CEF 2001, 57).
Spoken interaction involves collaboration, negotiation, alignment, unexpectedness, use of social language, information change (see also CEF 2001, 73) and spontaneity leaving little time for planning, controlling and solving problems of understanding (also Canagarajah 2004, 271). Although my primary interest was spoken interaction and interactive language use and the emphasis was on them, I have mostly used the general term oral interaction because it corresponds well with the use of English on the course, where the tasks included, for example, short narratives.
In spoken interaction, the threshold level B1 being the lower level of the Independent User (CEF 2001, 24, 26, 33–34 and 74) provides the entrance to English speaking communities and English interaction. The same grid and scales also show that initial prerequisites for such oral communication already appear at A2, being the higher level in the category of the Basic User. These facts and definitions created the main criteria for the
choice of A2–B1 and the exclusion of B2 (see CEF 2001, 24, 26, 35 and 74). The research level corresponded to the level reached in the studies of the first new language after the native one at the Finnish comprehensive school and approximately to the level attained at the form of school it replaced in the 1970s. This and a few credits of English at vocational education can be all their English studies when they enter tertiary education, often at the UAS.
In line with CEF the research assumption was that the use of any language is affected not only by communicative language competencies, which include linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences, but also general competencies, such as one’s “knowledge, skills and existential competence and also their ability to learn” (CEF 2001, 11–13, 108, and 105;
italics in original). My teacher experience had shown that many other factors, other than learning more, influenced the promotion of a student’s foreign language proficiency. For this multitude of possibly influential factors, the verb ‘learn’ has often appeared imprecise to express the idea of promotion.
The latter part of the first research problem emphasises that foreign language users are people with a personal and social life, societal membership and expectations of the future. Hence, the latter part concerns how studies like this can promote the fulfilment of students’ hopes and meet their present and future needs arising from their present and past life contexts, experiences and histories as language students and users. This relates to the CEF terms (language) learner/user or user/learner (e.g. 2001, 14 and 101). Foreign language students are language users from the very beginning of their language student career, which is one aspect of holism. Therefore, it was important to explore what kind of studies are necessary for adults who have studied English but whose proficiency does not suffice for their participation in oral English communication in their work, their personal, social and societal lives and in the increasing multicultural communication. Finally, the first research problem includes the assumptions and expectations of society as demands, which raises the question of what kind of studies can help adults in meeting the assumptions and expectations of society.
2 What does this kind of investigative teaching, especially its researching component demand of the teacher and how does it support her and develop her professionalism?
This research problem was more difficult to put into practice than the first one but the ways of answering it developed during the research process. The context and research activities of this research problem and work on its data and especially the results obtained from them were an essential part of answering this second research problem. The teacher’s work denotes development but as a chosen aim, it takes place more consciously, effectively and deeply.
I was convinced that professional development would get a concrete point of departure from an interim change to another type of educational institute where students of English were already involved in working life. It would give the advantage of a different educational culture and teacher role and could challenge and develop the teacher’s professionalism in
ways different from those at the UAS (see Luukkainen 2005, 187–188). Teaching in liberal adult education could place new demands on my teacher’s theory and practice and bring both of them under scrutiny in different ways. Liberal adult education was remote from my present work but familiar to me. Becoming a teacher of much younger people would have given an UAS teacher less and brought more change and therefore less depth.
In another institution, the implementation of a study unit would necessitate much planning and concrete teaching. I would have to find out about these students’ learning and I would have to study new issues and apply them appropriately. The CEF published in 2001 was one example of such a new aspect. I had not got properly acquainted myself with it. Liberal education would offer independent work and therefore risks; it would mean communication with people who studied without being formally committed to their studies and only as long as they found it rewarding. As a teacher there, I did not have the same status as a UAS teacher and had to earn the students’ trust from the very beginning.
Liberal education institutions had another ethos. They were differently organised and demanded a different orientation. A definite benefit was that students in liberal adult education were more familiar with the needs of working life English that the UAS students would be soon facing. However, on my return to the UAS, I made the decision to continue my research there with respect to professional development. Qualitative research on human experiences, life-related meanings and situations cannot and must not be exactly predefined in advance but steered according to gradually unfolding research. The concrete impetus for this came through diary writing that had started in liberal education and now spontaneously continued at the UAS with the focus on exploration of the second research problem.
The duration of the research, research data and research sites
The research spanned the years 2004–2016 covering the last nine years of my teaching career and the first few years of my retirement. The planning of the course, its implementation and the first conversational interviews except one took place during the study leave from the UAS. In the spring of 2004, I made an agreement with two liberal adult education institutes about a 45-hour course on oral English communication for the forthcoming autumn term and was given permission to use the course and the student conversational interviews as the empirical research data for my doctoral thesis. The first conversational interviews, altogether 25 conversational interviews, took place at the conclusion of the course or within a couple of weeks after it, all except one in 2004. The two diaries written on these two courses, one on each, are called course diaries. The second conversational interviews, a total of 19 took place in December 2005 when the follow-up research at the UAS beginning in January 2005 had continued for a year. By the end of the year 2007, new entries written in the teacher-researcher’s diary had become few, which I interpreted as the conclusion of the follow-up research.
It was best to write about the course contents and events as soon as possible. Therefore, writing the first version of Part II excluding the results started first, already in 2005. The research journal consisted of separate files mainly written from the outset of the research to the year 2009. During the last few years, I wrote down my own questions and thoughts and the advice and ideas of others in a notebook. Despite its informality, it turned out to be a handy aid in the last phases of the research. The student interview data and the teacher’s course diaries served the first and second research problem. The teacher-researcher’s diary written at the UAS relates to the second research problem dealing with the teacher’s professional development that was supported and enriched by the work at the UAS, especially in the communication with its students. The table below briefly presents the research data. The session plans are included because they helped to return to each session and the events that had taken place in them. In the table as in the text, the WE group stands for the weekend group meeting at three weekends and the E group for the group meeting in the evening once a week. One reason for the relative shortness of the WE group diary was that I probably failed to remember all that would have been worth writing on the whole day studies even if I had taken some notes during the breaks. Another reason was the group members’ enthusiasm in conversing in English in small groups among themselves.
The numbers after E (1–13) and WE (1–6) indicate the given session, which provides more useful knowledge than the date.
Part of the data concerned the main elements of the language course. They served as predefined themes in the interviews (see Appendix 1). The researcher started the discussion on these, often through open questions. Despite this, the interviews with the students were conversational by nature, even if less conversational than those that emerged spontaneously.
Conversational interview data refers to both. For the sake of shortness, both are often called just interviews.
Table 1. Types and amount of the research data and other research material and the time of their
Table 1. Types and amount of the research data and other research material and the time of their