I am working in a British school in China, parents hope the first thing for their kids is to improve Oral English, but recently some parents said children's English level did not progress as much as few years ago! I think using quantitative methods to research, Do you have any good Suggestions?
Great, it’s helpful to explain to the parents. Sometimes they may not want to hear the statistics but something easy to understand.
If you want to use Quantitative Research ，I think you can consider to use the two different oral skill teaching methods as independent variable，and give a test to the two different classes.The result we want to have is to find out which teaching method can improve the children’s oral English.
I think Quantitative Research is one of the best way to find out the answer. However, maths or statistics never tell lies. But which method you will choose to finish the research? Experimental or Non experimental? or any other method?
I totally agree with your quantitative research method. Especially, in the case of large number of research individuals, I prefer the experimental data results. However, for more and more individual differences, the mixed method based on the later positivist paradigm can also be tried.
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Before the research method discussion, I'd. like to mention several ideas about the parents' feedback.
1. English as a language, the process of acquisition is quite different with Math, Science etc, the outcome of different levels shows differently. For example, from knowing knowing nothing to be able to sing the ABC song, that's basic and easily showed to everyone, including to their parents, but what about the next level? Some level needs their accumulation, and then showed in a specific moment(it even might be different times for each kids), but we can't tell that they had no improvements only according to a short period of time for showing nothing new.Just like growing of a seed, it grows with roots first and then you see it sprouts!
Parents are not professors, what they haven't seen for now doesn't mean nothing happened! So both parents and teachers need to accept this facts.
2. Usually their learning environments matters a lot. Leave the kids in a whole-English class will help them practice much more than the Chinese Assisting English Class. My students can say simple English sentences when they were grade 2, but after one-year english-forced math class, most of them can explain the math tasks in English.
My wife and I have written a book entitled PRONUNCIATION CONTRASTS IN ENGLISH. Here are two PowerPoints that will help you in teaching English pronunciation:
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