'And the teacher started dictating some notes that the students copied diligently…' A washback study of the English literature HSC exams in Mauritius
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Unjore, Sanju. 2024. 'And the teacher started dictating some notes that the students copied diligently…' A washback study of the English literature HSC exams in Mauritius. Other thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text ('And the teacher started dictating some notes that the students copied diligently…' A washback study of the English literature HSC exams in Mauritius)
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Abstract or Description
The HSC exams are one of the most competitive exams in multicultural Mauritius which also serves as a pre-university entry exam. As a former teacher trainer, I noticed an inexplicable gap between the theories of teaching and learning that we taught in classrooms and what the teachers ended up using with their students. My instinct was that the competitive Mauritian society, the high stakes nature of the HSC exams along with some unexplored Mauritian classroom reality could be causing this gap. Hence, through this thesis, I wanted to explore this Mauritian reality, by investigating the washback effects of the high stakes Higher School Certificate (HSC) exams on the teaching and learning of English literature on a group of Mauritian teachers and learners.
This study can be considered as innovative because it addresses the limitations of several previous washback studies and aligns itself with the future of washback research as recommended by scholars like Cheng, Sun and Ma (2015). Firstly, I adopted an ethnographic approach to explore the washback phenomenon that included classroom observations, interviews and questionnaires, which helped me to gain richer data compared to other one-method based washback studies; Secondly, I adopted a more expansive definition of washback that sees the phenomenon as beyond a linear relationship between testing and teaching and learning, hereby accepting the complexity of washback; thirdly, I drew from other related theoretical fields such as theories of teaching literature and motivation to better make sense of the teaching and learning practices; fourthly, there were three educational stakeholders that were included as informants in this study, namely teachers, headteachers and learners.
My contribution to the washback research field is that the findings of the study reaffirm washback's status as a multifaceted, multifactorial in nature and that varies from teacher to teacher, from learner to learner and from setting to setting. By focusing on investigating English literature rather than English language, the study also demonstrated how the teachers can use exam preparation activities even with a subject that does not have past exam papers. While the teachers' dominant usage of teaching strategies modelled around the transmission model of teaching literature seems to produce the grades and the laureates, the teaching and learning of English literature remains primarily a 'passive' and non-engaging experience for most of the teachers and the learners; and after two years of learning English literature, it remains difficult to assess whether the students do develop the analytical skills to analyse texts or they rather master in reproducing their notes in the exams.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Other) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Washback, Teaching and Learning literature in English, Higher School Certificate, Mauritian Education System |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
31 July 2024 |
| Item ID: |
37477 |
| Date Deposited: |
16 Aug 2024 10:20 |
| Last Modified: |
21 Aug 2024 16:04 |
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URI: |
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