AINVESTIGATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE INTEGRATED APPROACHES OF DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION AND UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN: A QUANTITATIVE CASE STUDY OF BAHAUDDIN ZAKARIYA UNIVERSITY MULTAN

Abstract

In countries like Pakistan, English language is the major concern of the academic lay out, be it teaching, learning, assessments or simply means of communication. But the implementation of processes that involve the teaching and learning of the language in Pakistani classrooms is complex. The diversity, this study aims to focus at, is the academic diversity, which involves the variety of school-systems that run across the country with varied teaching methodologies and curriculums employed for the teaching of English language. This paper aims at quantitatively investigating the effects of Carol Ann Tomlinson’s (2017) integrated approaches of Differentiated Instruction (DI) and Understanding by Design (UbD) in English Language university heterogeneous classrooms of Pakistan. This case study was designed to promote evidence-based classroom practice in Pakistan’s Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan by developing a module of the integrated approach to measure the effects on learners’ English language proficiency. Weekly lesson plans were designed keeping in view the curriculum of the University for every Course and learning style preferences, for 14 weeks, for which a semester spans, on an average. English language proficiency of the students was evaluated via pre and post-tests. The participants of experimental group appeared to have performed well with significantly higher scores in post-test of two-tailed paired sample t-test, as compared to the students of control group. Results from paired sample t-test for experimental group revealed that the intervention was effective. These findings support previous researches in stating this approach as student- centered approach of learning. The research endorses the Pakistani government’s concept of “quality education for all by 2030” (Usman et al. 2019) suggesting that researches of similar perspective are to be carried out around the nation in order to generalize these reported findings.