Opening doors to teaching: understanding the profession (original) (raw)
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English Language Teaching Today : Linking Theory and Practice
The Journal of AsiaTEFL, 2017
One of the most significant professional challenges for language learning researchers is to transform research findings into language teachers' pedagogical practices. For this reason, I am particularly attracted by this edited volume on English language teaching, in which Renandya and Widodo attempt to link theory and practice in teaching English with contributions from more than twenty leading researchers in the field. There are two parts in the book. The first part titled "Theories, Research and Principles" has seven chapters and covers a wide range of topics, from student-centered language learning to multilingualism. The second part titled "Pedagogical Practices" contains thirteen chapters and explores the use of those aforementioned theories and principles in pedagogical practices in teaching conventional language knowledge and helping learners acquire specific language in particular contexts. The book provides readers an up-to-date account of current principles and practices for teaching English, this reader-friendly book has clear content index, and every chapter is coherently and cohesively organized. Chapters in Part I provide some principles of English language teaching and thus establish a sound foundation for the practical accounts in Part II, and in so doing many chapters in Part I themselves have practical suggestions for teaching. In the chapter by Jacobs and Renandya, they present the principles associated with Student-Centered Learning in which students are expected to be independent of teachers and to be responsible for themselves since learning is truly a student-centered journey. Such focus on language learners is closely related with what Mahboob and Lin convey in their chapter, as supporters of the belief that mother tongue-based multilingual education can make students' lives more lively and diversified. Instead of strictly discussing the relevant theories, they provide some guidelines for teachers to use local languages productively in classrooms where language learners are immersed in a familiar experiential context. The fourth and fifth chapters depart from the theme of pedagogy and address the critical issue of curriculum and textbook development to support pedagogical practices. In Macalister's chapter, he reminds curriculum developers that language courses should strike a balance between meaning-focused input and output. In the next chapter, Tomlinson stresses the importance of using authentic texts and tasks in English language teaching to cater to diverse needs of learners of English as a global language, so it is quite essential that current material development should be internationally-oriented, and language teachers should prepare English learners for lingua franca interaction. In the subsequent chapter, Brown puts forward twelve theoretically sound assessment types. In the last chapter of Part I, Farrell documented how three EFL teachers made use of journal writing as a reflective tool to gain insights into their practice. Writing is of course a valuable opportunity for learners to reflect on their beliefs and assumptions on various experiences. Through different kinds of introspects or reflections, learners can gradually understand themselves and find their shortcomings, then make some
Language Teaching: Raising Expectations for Instructor Preparation
2000
This paper argues for considerably higher expectations for the qualifications of language teachers by focusing on what preparations could and should offer. Because efforts to address issues of teacher preparation confront tacit assumptions about language teaching, the paper draws on the experience of literature training and hiring as a parallel in order to identify some of these tacit assumptions and provoke questions. It points out the dramatic difference in expectations that are encountered when comparing the preparation for teaching language to the preparation for the teaching of literature or linguistics. (Contains 10 endnotes and 46 references.) (Author/VWL) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the ori inal document. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to a document produced by the Commission on Professional Standards of the American Association of Teachers of French, "The Teaching of French: A Syllabus of Competence" (Murphy 1987). The document uses the term "competence" somewhat differently than I do here but asserts the importance of competence in the areas of culture, language proficiency, linguistics, literature, and methodology.
Language and Language Teaching
As living social beings, we spend a large part of our lives either conversing with people, reading something written by others, or writing about something to someone. Every time we listen to what is said or read what has been written, we subconsciously evaluate what has been stated. This instinctive evaluation includes the language capability or proficiency of the person we are interacting with. We tell ourselves, at least in our minds: "good writer", "speaks well". We evaluate those we interact with, but such an evaluation is unconscious and instinctive; without it no conversation or correspondence between any two people would be possible. The evaluation of the language capability of a person is not mandatory, but the evaluation of what is said is essential.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2013
As Rod Ellis states in his Preface, Craig Chaudron's book, Second Language Classroom: Research on Teaching and Learning, published in 1988, reviewed systematically the L2 classroom research up to that time. Although Chaudron updated the research community on the development of classroom research in 2001 with an article published in The Modern Language Journal, the space given to it and the relatively brief nature of the review make it necessary that a new volume presenting a comprehensive survey and critical appraisal of the research into L2 learning and teaching in classrooms be available. Ellis' new book, Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy (LTRALP), serves this purpose perfectly well. Anyway, it has been over 20 years since the publication of Chaudron's 1988 book, and the rapid development of the field warrants the publication of such a comprehensive book. LTRALP includes 11 main chapters in addition to a concise Preface, where Ellis explains his own theorising of language teaching. He presents two views, one is what he refers to as the 'external view' and the other as the 'internal view'. The former regards language teaching in terms of methods, approaches, materials and techniques, and the latter in terms of it being a 'process'. He posits that such a distinction is important and that the studies he has reviewed in the book can be categorised according to this typology. It is also in his Preface that Ellis highlights the two principal research paradigms: the normative paradigm, which tends to test hypotheses and the interpretive paradigm, which 'seeks to describe and understand some aspect of teaching by identifying key variables and examining how they interrelate' (p. x). Chapter 1, 'Introduction: Developments in Language Teaching Research', as the title indicates, gives the reader a panoramic view of all the topics to be considered in the book. What needs to be stressed is that Ellis has successfully defined what language teaching research is and stated his rationale for electing to focus on it in his book. Ellis begins Chapter 2, 'Methods for Researching the Second Language Classroom', with a discussion of formal and practitioner research before examining the main research traditions in relation to their theoretical underpinnings, research design, data collection and processing methods. The focus of Chapter 3, 'Comparative Method Studies', presents studies that compare different teaching methods. Historically, such studies were once popular, as the ambition of doing so was to find the best methods for effectively teaching foreign language skills. Evidently, such studies have lost their popularity and attracted much criticism because of their insensitivity to the fact that different contexts require different methods and the search for the 'best method' has proven to be futile (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). Chapter 4, 'Second Language Classroom Discourse', examines the oral discourse in L2 classrooms and its nature in the lesson process. Ellis argues that "'teaching' is discourse. observation of the discourse that arises in actual classrooms is fundamental to developing an understanding of language teaching and its relationship to learning" (p. 75). Accordingly, discourse processes become the focus of this chapter. Descriptive research discussed in this chapter range from interaction analysis to classroom discourse analysis, types of language use, conversation analysis and the L2 classroom, and scaffolding in sociocultural theory. Chapters 5 and 6 place their foci on the teacher and the learner respectively. As can be easily imagined, the teacher is the main person that contributes to classroom discourse in most cases. Therefore, studies of teacher talk are the mainstay of a chapter with the teacher as the central figure. Various research studies on teacher talk (including teacher talk and L2 acquisition, teacher talk and teacher education) and teacher questions (including teacher questioning strategies and socially-oriented studies of teacher questions) are reviewed. There have been debates about the role of the learner's L1 in the L2 classroom, and such debates are also discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to various studies on the use of the L1 in L2 classrooms and on teachers' beliefs about the use of the L1. The use of metalanguage and related research into teachers' use of metalanguage, studies on corrective feedback, and teacher cognitions about language teaching are also reviewed. Given the centrality of the learner in the classroom in the field of language teaching and learning, Ellis rightly points out the relative scarcity of research into the learner's contribution to classroom discourse. Quoting Ortega and Iberri-Shea (2005, p. 27), who point out that 'Many questions concerning second language learning are fundamentally
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2013
As Rod Ellis states in his Preface, Craig Chaudron's book, Second Language Classroom: Research on Teaching and Learning, published in 1988, reviewed systematically the L2 classroom research up to that time. Although Chaudron updated the research community on the development of classroom research in 2001 with an article published in The Modern Language Journal, the space given to it and the relatively brief nature of the review make it necessary that a new volume presenting a comprehensive survey and critical appraisal of the research into L2 learning and teaching in classrooms be available. Ellis' new book, Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy (LTRALP), serves this purpose perfectly well. Anyway, it has been over 20 years since the publication of Chaudron's 1988 book, and the rapid development of the field warrants the publication of such a comprehensive book. LTRALP includes 11 main chapters in addition to a concise Preface, where Ellis explains his own theorising of language teaching. He presents two views, one is what he refers to as the 'external view' and the other as the 'internal view'. The former regards language teaching in terms of methods, approaches, materials and techniques, and the latter in terms of it being a 'process'. He posits that such a distinction is important and that the studies he has reviewed in the book can be categorised according to this typology. It is also in his Preface that Ellis highlights the two principal research paradigms: the normative paradigm, which tends to test hypotheses and the interpretive paradigm, which 'seeks to describe and understand some aspect of teaching by identifying key variables and examining how they interrelate' (p. x). Chapter 1, 'Introduction: Developments in Language Teaching Research', as the title indicates, gives the reader a panoramic view of all the topics to be considered in the book. What needs to be stressed is that Ellis has successfully defined what language teaching research is and stated his rationale for electing to focus on it in his book. Ellis begins Chapter 2, 'Methods for Researching the Second Language Classroom', with a discussion of formal and practitioner research before examining the main research traditions in relation to their theoretical underpinnings, research design, data collection and processing methods. The focus of Chapter 3, 'Comparative Method Studies', presents studies that compare different teaching methods. Historically, such studies were once popular, as the ambition of doing so was to find the best methods for effectively teaching foreign language skills. Evidently, such studies have lost their popularity and attracted much criticism because of their insensitivity to the fact that different contexts require different methods and the search for the 'best method' has proven to be futile (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). Chapter 4, 'Second Language Classroom Discourse', examines the oral discourse in L2 classrooms and its nature in the lesson process. Ellis argues that "'teaching' is discourse. observation of the discourse that arises in actual classrooms is fundamental to developing an understanding of language teaching and its relationship to learning" (p. 75). Accordingly, discourse processes become the focus of this chapter. Descriptive research discussed in this chapter range from interaction analysis to classroom discourse analysis, types of language use, conversation analysis and the L2 classroom, and scaffolding in sociocultural theory. Chapters 5 and 6 place their foci on the teacher and the learner respectively. As can be easily imagined, the teacher is the main person that contributes to classroom discourse in most cases. Therefore, studies of teacher talk are the mainstay of a chapter with the teacher as the central figure. Various research studies on teacher talk (including teacher talk and L2 acquisition, teacher talk and teacher education) and teacher questions (including teacher questioning strategies and socially-oriented studies of teacher questions) are reviewed. There have been debates about the role of the learner's L1 in the L2 classroom, and such debates are also discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to various studies on the use of the L1 in L2 classrooms and on teachers' beliefs about the use of the L1. The use of metalanguage and related research into teachers' use of metalanguage, studies on corrective feedback, and teacher cognitions about language teaching are also reviewed. Given the centrality of the learner in the classroom in the field of language teaching and learning, Ellis rightly points out the relative scarcity of research into the learner's contribution to classroom discourse. Quoting Ortega and Iberri-Shea (2005, p. 27), who point out that 'Many questions concerning second language learning are fundamentally