Constructing English: pre-service ELA teachers navigating an unwieldy discipline (original) (raw)
Mapping the pedagogic practice of grade ten English teachers: a qualitative multi-lensed study
2019
This study addresses the issue of how to track the classroom talk of subject English teachers in Grade Ten classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Subject English, as a horizontal knowledge structure, presents particular challenges of content and methodological specification: what may be included, and the means of teaching and assessment, are contested, wide-ranging, and frequently opaque. English teachers are central to the construal of the subject in the classroom and their classroom talk is central to their construal of the subject to their learners. Classroom observations were conducted in four purposively selected KwaZulu-Natal state high schools, spanning the socioeconomic spectrum, across the period 2005-2009. Twenty-six lessons were analysed using code theory's concepts of classification and framing. This analysis presented broadly similar categorisations of strong classification and framing for most of the lessons, apart from some framing differences with respect to evaluation. However, my field observations had identified differences between the teachers' classroom talk that were not captured. This led to the quest of finding pedagogically well theorised languages of description of teacher talk capable of capturing the range of variation and flow with greater nuance. Application of the lenses of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Jacklin's tripartite typology extending code theory (2004), Brodie's expansion of classic classroom discourse analysis (2008, 2010), Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (2014), and conceptual integration theory (2015), were successful in describing and discriminating more fully the range of pedagogy. Detailed analysis of four literature lessons (two teaching novels, two teaching poetry) from the two schools at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, are presented as exemplars of these lenses' capacity as languages of description for subject English teacher classroom talk. The multi-lensed descriptions highlighted variations such as: o the degree of use of nominalised discourse (SFL); o more dominantly discursive pedagogy or more dominantly conventional pedagogy (Jacklin); viii o more overt or more implicit evaluations, greater use of insert moves versus greater use of elicit moves (Brodie); and o cultivation of a cognitively associative literary gaze versus cultivation of a decoding of the text gaze and intricate movements by the teachers between relatively stronger and weaker epistemic and social relations; more frequent and deeper versus less frequent and flatter semantic waving (LCT). A fifth lesson, focused on learner oral performances of infomercials, is analysed using conceptual integration theory, as the sole example in the data set, of pedagogic conceptual integration. These analyses highlight the potential of these lenses as tools for the unpacking and specification of teachers' pedagogic practice, particularly their pedagogic content knowledge, an undertaking which has been protractedly difficult to achieve beyond localised, intuitive description. They also illuminated the intricate complexity of pedagogy, and the propensity for pedagogic meaning to disintegrate when the level of analysis shifts down to too small a micro-focus. This highlights the ongoing need for research to pinpoint the 'sweet spot' of the optimally smallest unit of a pedagogic act. Key components of the pedagogic process emerged that we need more refined understanding of in relation to what teachers do and the impact of this on the epistemic access of learners: teacher pedagogic mobility, pedagogic coherence and pedagogic flow. The study points to the Jacklinian and LCT lenses as offering the most potential for the ongoing investigation of these dimensions.
Pro-Elt : The Unheard Voices of English Teachers
2017
Nowadays, the mushrooming of professional development programmes has been unstoppable and gaining its popularity in preparing teachers for the 21 century teaching and learning. In Malaysia, teachers of English are particularly among the targeted group of professionals who are believed to be in dire need of the aforementioned programmes and one of which is the Professional Up-skilling of English Teachers (Pro-ELT) programme. This stems from the fact that a massive number of Malaysian English teachers are reported to be lacking in English proficiency and thus, contributing to a rapid decline in the students’ command of English. Nevertheless, the implementation of professional development programmes without the exception of Pro-ELT has persistently been argued. Thereby, this study was conducted to investigate the English teachers’ perceptions of Pro-ELT and indirectly, bring their voices to the fore which has perpetually been overlooked in many in-service teacher training programmes. T...
This article discusses a pedagogic intervention on a pre-service teacher education course for student-teachers learning to teach English in the Singaporean, multilingual primary school. A case-method pedagogy was conceptualised in response to the teaching environment of Singapore and driven by two questions: one about the ability of student-teachers to make theory/practice connections, and the other about how they might develop professional values. Two examples of the case studies as they were employed during the course provide data. Another set comes from a survey which elicited student-teachers' reflections on their experiences of learning using this case-method pedagogy. The findings demonstrate that the contextualisation provided by the cases gave student-teachers opportunities for making effective theory/practice connections. It also led them to personalise their learning. Additionally, the results about ethics were suggestive of the development of professional values, showing an unexpected catalysis of a future-orientation to the profession. However, since the results about the development of teaching values were not conclusive, the article provided discussions on the current issue. Nevertheless, the case-method pedagogy is recommended as effective in teacher preparation, enabling theory and practice to be visibly connected through context.
Theory and practice: between dichotomies and relations in the formation of English teachers
Revista Exitus
Many teachers in pre-service programs see knowledge about approaches, methods, and English teaching techniques – formulated and disseminated by specialists – as distant from reality or impossible to be developed. In order to understand better this problem, this research aims to analyze what is meant by the terms "theory" and "practice" and the possible relationships between them in the context of pre-service English teachers’ development. From that point of view, it may be observed new and/or different views about how teachers are formed and how much this formation has prioritized contact with theories, practices, and their relationships. The theoretical bases are Freire ([1968] 2011), Rajagopalan (1984), Pereira (1988), Kincheloe (1997), Japiassu & Marcondes (2001), Pennycook (2010) and Vieira-Abrahão (2010). Data was collected through semi-structured interviews (Lüdke and André, 1996; RIZZINI, 1999). The results indicate that student teachers understand these ...
English Education 38.4, 2006
In this article, we try to extend the complex and provocativeconver- sationsthat we held at the Conference on English Education Summit in Atlanta on the topic of "Roles of Methods Courses and Field Experiences in English Education." A compendium of our consensus belief statements and recommendations is availableon the CEE Website (see What Do WeKnow and Believe about Methods Coursesand Field Experiences in English Education?,2005). There we sketch out a set of proposals regarding English education programs, methods courses, and field experiences; offer lists of possible ways to implement each dimension of our recommendations; and reference a set of readings that influenced our thinking for each of these dimensions. We see this article in English Education as having a somewhat different purpose: to provide more of an argument on behalf of those proposals, one that we hope that readers can use both to reconsider their own English language arts teacher educationprogramsand to makeargumentsto their ad- ministratorsfor resourcesto supportany expandedeffortsin preservice teacher education.
Pensares em Revista
This paper aims to provide a framework-inaction , informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, to inspire reconstructive discourse analysis in language and literacy teacher education, with illustrative examples and provocative questions. We exemplify the use of the framework through the analysis of a community mapping project. We analyze the curriculum documents, as well as a sample of a racially aware educator's community mapping project, through the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, drawing relevant semiotic interpretations on the field, tenor, and mode. Findings highlight tensions in practice and possibilities for reconstructing curricular knowledge more deeply rooted in praxis that is intentionally transformative, context-specific, historically construed, and geopolitically sensitive. We pose a series of questions that educators can bring to bear on the discourse practices of teacher education. Whether one is studying texts, curricular documents, instructional dialogues, or policies, this framework-inaction provides tools and questions that may be useful for deconstructing whiteness and reconstructing anti-racism. It also situates teacher educators as agents of policy making and implementation who are able to reconstruct discursive practices to respond to pressing social needs in the context of literacy teacher education. The idea of a framework-inaction emphasizes the partiality of epistemological and ontological foundations and the need to connect our analyses in the social world in ways that make a difference.
Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2020
English language teacher education examines a range of challenges concerning professional training, curriculum design development, and English language learning. The book explores pre-service English teacher education, their professional experience, and the pursuit of becoming a better teacher. Also, this book provides comprehensive knowledge of English teaching in connection with personal and interrelated contextual issues such as the cultural linguistic background of teachers, beliefs, prior educational experiences, expectations, and previous teaching experiences. These issues are investigated contextually through university-school partnerships, policies, mentoring relations, and curricula. The author, Minh Hui Nguyen, critically analyzed the case studies of pre-service English Language teachers and professional learning experiences in the neoliberal world. In turn, the book addresses professional learning issues, including pedagogical learning, emotional practices, and professional identity development in detail. This book is comprised of nine chapters, and each chapter explores one issue of English language teaching (ELT) from a broader perspective. The keywords and key phrases that best describe this book are: second language teacher education, professional experiences, language teacher cognition, English language teacher education curriculum, school-based teaching, sociocultural theory, developing a knowledge base for English language teaching and activity theory. This volume investigates the socio-cultural experiences of ELT professionals as well as provides a conceptual contribution through a socialist analysis of the ELT learning experiences of