Constructing English: pre-service ELA teachers navigating an unwieldy discipline (original) (raw)
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The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many " Englishes. " In a neoliberal context , where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory " Englishes. " This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field's vast and ever-changing terrain and support
Tensions in Learning to Teach English
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ELT Research Agendas I, 2018
This chapter aims at depicting the role and contributions of English Language Pre-Service Teachers (ELPT) to the field of English Language Teacher Education (ELTE). To achieve this, it is necessary to start picturing the current situation of ELTE, and then, setting the ground to foster an understanding of the current needs in English language teaching practicum (ELTP). I consider important to start analyzing what happens with pre-service teachers in their pedagogical practicum since they are not just passive learners; they have different ways of understanding the world, language teaching, and education, and those understandings could become a source of improving ELTE in Colombia. According to Correa and Usma (2013), it is urgent to come about a change of paradigm in ELTE that implies a reformulation of the way teaching practicum is constituted. In this chapter, I examine different standpoints related to ELPTs’ education. The first section presents my personal view regarding ELPTs’ education, based on my own experience and a revision of articles written by some Colombian scholars. The second section reveals the epistemological stances there are regarding ELTE, and along with it, I will be unveiling my own epistemological stance. The third section of this chapter states the aspects related to ELTE and how they have a direct repercussion on ELPTs’ current practices. Finally, the last section portraits some working conclusions that shed light on the problem stated.
Profile: Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 2019
In this article the author reports on a study of some English language student-teachers’ trans-formations of knowledge about language education. The question that guided the study was: How are English language student-teachers’ formative pedagogical and research experiences portrayed in a transformative and critical outlook for initial teacher education? Reflections, perceptions, and conceptions served as data and were collected by means of diaries, interviews, and degree projects or monographs. From the analysis of data, two main themes emerged: “Going Back and Forth from Utopia to Reality” and “EFL Student-Teachers as Novice Critical Researchers”. A conclusion was that the participants’ trans-formations mediated by pedagogical and research agendas represented alternatives with high levels of sensitivity towards socially associated issues in language education.
Addressing the "Essences": Making English Teachers
2013
Garth Boomer's democratic and often provocative vision for English teaching continues to play an important part in the professional development of English teachers. In particular, Boomer's work is often used by Teacher Educators in preservice degrees to introduce emerging English teachers to key ideas such as curriculum negotiation and student/ teacher collaboration. Importantly, Boomer's work encourages professional dialogue, reflecting the concept that theory and scholarship about teaching, like school English curricula, should be negotiated and debated. This is evident in many of his publications, and particularly in his 1993 article 'How to Make a Teacher'. In this article the writers (a teacher educator and pre-service teachers) engage in a close reading of Boomer's paper, and continue this dialogue by exploring the continued affordances of these 'essences' as a paradigm for English teaching in the 21st century.
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.