The Influence of Teacher-Student Conferencing on Student Motivation in Armenian EFL Classroom

Abstract

The study I have carried out is aimed at discovering whether conducting teacher-student conferences in the Armenian EFL classroom can have any effect on students’motivation to learn English. My initial hypothesis was that the teacher’s individual or group conferences with the students can help them feel more responsible for their learning and initiate activities to improve their English; in other words such conferences increase the students’ motivation towards learning English. Due to the nature of my thesis topic, which refers to motivation, I have conducted a classroom study using a qualitative methodology. My research also includes some aspects of ethnographic investigation in that it focuses on the learners’ attitudes towards learning English and their motivation level, before and after the implementation of conferences in their real language-learning context. In addition, my study involved some elements of experimental research; in a way, it can be considered a pre-experimental study. I had three conferences during the four-week writing course that I conducted with my students, one of which I have tape-recorded. As the participants in my study were 12-13 year-old children of the fifth and sixth grades of school, I conducted the conferences in the Armenian language for the students to be able to express their feelings and ideas freely. During each conference, I had a discussion with the students related to their written work. Following each conference I conducted an interview with the learners, which aimed at finding information on the effects that the writing course, and the conferences as a part of it, might have both on the learners’development in writing and on their motivation towards learning English. Besides this, I used two questionnaires, one at the beginning and one at the end of the course as another source of collecting information on the same phenomena. As another additional source of data, I have used the students’ reflections that I had asked them to write on both the writing sessions and the conferences immediately after each session, which the majority of the students have done in Armenian. The results of the data interpretation showed that most of the students were highly motivated to learn English from the very beginning of the study and as most of them stated during the interviews and in their questionnaires, they became even more motivated by the end of the study. The study had some limitations such as the limited number of the participants and the short time allocated to it. However, the study revealed some very useful information, which can serve as a basis for longitudinal studies on the effectiveness of teacher-student conferencing as a collaborative teaching methodology in Armenian EFL settings.