How can lesson study be used to develop MFL teachers and their practice?

Thesis

This study sets out to explore how Lesson Study (LS) can be used to improve the teaching and learning of Modern Languages in a UK secondary school. LS is a method of teacher collaboration, which originated in Japan and facilitates teachers working together to develop best practice by observing one another’s lessons, developing resources, interviewing pupils, analysing their work and discussing relevant pedagogy in a collegiate environment.

Findings show that this method can be adapted well to develop new, or improved teaching methods and departmental practice. Teacher participants generally reacted very positively to being involved in the project and chose to continue to use LS in their work after the data collection part of this project had ended.

This method has also shown that it can lend itself to investigating and then refining many aspects of teachers’ work, such as marking and giving feedback on pupil work, group work, behaviour for learning and developing specific aspects of the curriculum (translation from a foreign language into English here). It enables teachers to get straight into discussing the detail of what teaching their subject is really about and avoids some of the superficiality, which sometimes can result from other methods of lesson observation.

Authors: Humphries-Robertson, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-o00kr6zdp
• Type of award: MSc
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Keywords: Modern Foreign Languages; MLT; MLT2016
• Subjects: Education