12 Language Teacher Education

1. 12 Language Teacher Education Prof. TIAN Bing Shaanxi Normal University

3. 1 Introduction • 1 Introduction • 2 Social, Political, and Cultural Background • 3 Aspects of Provison • 4 Ideology and Process • 5 From Novice to Expert • 6 LTE and Applied Lingustics Research

4. 1 Introduction • Much of the recent discussion of language teacher education (LTE) has focused on inner, “mental” process concerned with language teacher knowledge. • It is necessary to address two sorts of contextual factor: first, “social, political, and cultural factors” which highlight the range of different jobs that LTE has to do in a diverse world, and then “provision factors” which not only constrain what LTE can achieve but also have implications for who “owns” it. [准备，预备] • There follows a discussion of ideology and process including teachers’ knowledge, learning, and beliefs; then an account of novice and expert languages teachers and of possible progression from the one to the other; and finally an exploration of the possible relationship between LTE and applied linguistics research.

5. 2 Social, Political, and Cultural Background • Byram (1994, p. 7) argues that “the situation in teacher training reflects the historical development of an education system, of a socioeconomic system and of the political character of a country.”

6. In Spain a policy of decentralization since the mid-1980s had led to the rise of autonomous regions and the establishment of teachers’ centers as the main location for continuing education courses. • In Portugal, the rights of teachers to continuing education within normal working hours had been established by law, along with the right to apply for sabbatical leave in order to take a higher degree or do research which would be of professional benefit.

7. More recently, in many parts of the “developed world” LTE has become more problematical than at any time in its past, as a new political and managerial ideology of education overtakes it. • Mitchell (2000) for example claims that in “developed” countries such as the UK, USA, and Australia educational policy-making has become increasingly political, with increasing state intervention in matters previously seen as professional, leading to the standardized delivery of a teaching product and to a prioritization of measurable, evidence-based outcomes over processes. • Underlying this trend has been a feeling among politicians in power that not only has teaching at school failed to deliver a fully satisfactory product, but also that teacher education must shoulder much of the blame.

8. With reference to the “developing” world, Hallemariam, Kroom, and Walters (1999) describe the languages situation in Eritrea, where there are major challenges of textbook preparation, teacher training, low salaries, difficult living conditions, and ambivalent languages attitudes of parents of language minority children, since some prefer Arabic to their own vernaculars. • The emerging post-independence policy supports the equality of the various nationalities and a multilingual approach based on recognizing each of the nine Eritrean languages, with mother tongue education at the center. • Bruthiaux (2000) argues that in the developing world, with a major need to improve living standards, “language education” and “development economics” should go hand in hand, but in fact “language education has managed to stay aloof from mainstream economics” (p. 273). [远离，偏离]

9. Nonetheless, three positive examples are given from different parts of the developing world: micro-lending in Bangladesh[孟加拉国], property rights in Egypt, and agronomic research in Latin America. • These are not based on abstract knowledge deployed top-down by the state’s technical and educational agencies, but on a more bottom-up approach which “takes as its starting point forms of knowledge embedded in local experience [and involving] small-scale projects designed to respond directly to practical needs and involving elementary literacy in local vernaculars” (p. 288). • agronomic = 农学，农艺学

10. Issues such as those highlighted above give LTE an important and specific job to do and allow it to become usefully “engaged” with matters of pressing national concern, • but in another sense they imply that LTE should also have a less “accepting” role which consists if necessary of providing a critical challenge to the assumptions on which this “engagement” is based.

11. The context for LTE is not determined solely by conditions specific to any one state, and all states are affected by globalization. • In most states where English is not a national or official language there is an increasingly perceived need to equip many if not all citizens with a command of international English. This in turn can have negative consequences for the uptake of other “foreign” languages and also for local heritage or community languages. • On the other hand, in many states where English is the dominant language, there may be relatively little motivation for learning or maintaining any other language at all.

12. In their White Paper (1995) the European Commission recommended that all member states of the European Union (EU) should equip all students at school with a working command of three languages by the end of compulsory schooling, so that all students across the EU would be in a position to benefit from “mobility” (which is a fundamental political right of all citizens of the EU) and to participate meaningfully in “citizenship” at European as well as at local and national level. • European Commission =欧洲委员会 • 欧洲共同体European Communities (EC) • EU=European Union 欧盟

13. Thus, as a result of globalization or Europeanization, LTE is immediately “engaged” in diverse ways. • These may include the promotion of international English, the promotion of other major languages in order to restrain or at least complement the seemingly irresistible rise of international English, the maintenance and revitalization of lesser-used heritage or community languages, and the development of a strategy for “languages education” which brings together first language and additional language development within a broad framework of international mobility and citizenship.

14. 3 Aspects of Provison • 3.1 A framework for LTE provision • Table 26.1 suggests how diverse LTE provision is. The framework of LTE provision it illustrates is too comprehensive to be discussed here but it suggests that LTE can be many different things and is unlikely to be embraced within one ideology or one set of processes. • Gone are the days when LTE would be “owned” by one group called “LTE providers.” • In fact, the “ownership” of LTE may be plotted across three phases.

17. In phase 1, it was “owned” by LTE professionals who in keeping with professionals generally were trusted to put their particular expertise at the service of society, e.g., Nixon et al., 1997. • It is possible that some LTE courses for TESOL still fall into this category, taking students from many different countries, giving them what the staff consider will be a good LTE experience, and then sending them back home but without any real accountability for their capacity to use these experiences in a professionally productive way.

18. In phase 2, LTE professionals are considered as “providers” in a provider–client relationship and are held accountable for the extent to which they satisfy “customers” such as Ministries, local authorities, and schools. • Finally, in phase 3, LTE is viewed as not being owned exclusively by any one group but as jointly owned by a range of stakeholders. As a consequence, curriculum, processes, and outcomes have to be negotiated. • stakeholders= 利益共享者 • ethos= 1社会（或民族、时代、制度、文学作品等）的精神特质 2 （文化、群体等的）气质、性格

19. 3.2 What is provided • What then is the distinctive contribution that LTE providers might make from a knowledge base that is informed by applied linguistics? • They can support language teachers, student teachers, and others in respect of:

21. First, it is unlikely that all of the above can be provided or absorbed in one course or program, so there is an issue as to how these various topics might relate to each other over the course of a language teacher’s period of study, training, and professional career. • Second, many LTE programs are not self-contained but form only a part of a broader program leading to an initial qualification to teach or offering continuing professional development to qualified teachers. • Third, given the multiple ownership of LTE, it is conceivable that particular “stakeholders” such as national or regional inspectors, or schoolteachers themselves, may hold strong views on particular topics which may be built into official guidelines for schools and for LTE and which may pose problems for LTE specialists.

22. 3.2.1 International and national agencies • 3.2.2 Teacher supply • 3.2.3 Continuous professional contact • 3.2.4 Adequate conditions of work • 3.2.5 Supportive ethos

23. 4 Ideology and Process • Freeman’s (2002) excellent review of teacher knowledge and teacher learning traces the emergence of a view of teaching as “mental activity” over the past 25 years, proceeding through three phases. • In the first phase, pre-1980, the notion of “mental activity” was absent, as the content and the methodology of a teacher’s task existed in two totally separate and “given” domains (one influenced by university courses in the target language and the other by broad methodologies of language teaching) which seemed self-evident and which teachers were not expected to reconcile. • reconcile=和解，调和

24. Then in the years 1980–90 there came a phase in which what was happening inside a teacher’s head became worthy of research and development interest, as teachers came to be seen as decision-makers, albeit ones who operated on a still behavioral process-product basis, taking decisions about processes which seemed conducive to the delivery of particular learning products. • albeit=尽管，即使，虽然 • conducive=有助的，有益的，助长的

25. Finally, in the last ten years of the decade, a more subtle and multi-layered view developed as language teachers were understood as seeking to bring content and methodology together and to reconcile different images which were operating simultaneously, including • not only an image of the self as teacher at present, and of the learners who were being taught, but also as embodied in a number of former and potential selves, for example as trainee teacher, as learner, as future expert.

26. Another perspective on the evolution of thinking about LTE is provided by Schulz (2000), writing mainly about the United States. • Teaching was viewed in the early part of the twentieth century as an art and teachers were born and not made, with little if any formal training required and an accurate pronunciation considered the most fundamental of all teacher attributes. • By 1941, however, language teacher development had become an established field, concerned with methods, foreign languages at elementary school, training and supervision of teaching assistants in university foreign language departments.

27. Recent innovations figured highly, for example language laboratory, tape-recorder, closed-circuit television, video, micro-teaching. • Schulz argues that today teaching is no longer viewed exclusively as an art. The creative element is still important but importance also attaches to principles, processes, skills, behaviors, techniques, strategies, beliefs, and attitudes which impact on teaching and learning and which can be empirically studied and taught. • micro-teaching=is a training technique whereby the teacherreviews a videotape of the lesson after each session, in order to conduct a "post-mortem". Teachers find out what has worked, which aspects have fallen short, and what needs to be done to enhance their teaching technique.

28. Before 1966, teacher education was mainly in the hands of literary scholars, but today it is in the domain of applied linguistics or foreign language education specialists. • They are no longer exclusively concerned with methods but seek a wider and deeper knowledge base drawing on interdisciplinary connections with second language acquisition (SLA), psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and education. • Schulz argues that we are nonetheless still discussing many of the issues which were discussed over 80 years ago and to which we have still not found convincing solutions. “Foreign language teacher preparation is still long on rhetoric, opinions and traditional dogma, and short on empirical research that attempts to verify or test these opinions or practices” (pp. 516–17).

29. Thinking about LTE has often been expressed in terms of “models” or “theories” which compete with and possibly succeed one another. • Wallace (1991) for example identifies three such models: • the craft or apprenticeship model; • the applied science, or theory-practice model; and • the reflective model. • Writing about language teaching at present, Crandall (2000) perceives a shift from transmission, product-oriented theories to constructivist, process-oriented theories of learning, teaching, and teacher learning.

30. In parallel there is a change of focus from methods to methodology. • “Methods” courses may be innovative, e.g., Silent Way, or traditional, e.g., grammar-translation, audiolingual, communicative, but • “methodology” on the other hand is more flexible and constructivist, involving exploration of the nature of teaching and learning and discovering the strategies of successful teachers.

31. Van Patten (1997) claims it is not well known or documented how language teachers use class time, what types of arrangement they provide to students, what the theoretical and other underpinnings of their decisions are, and thus it is not clear how language teaching is “constructed.” • He suggests however that this can be investigated at two levels. • At the micro-level the key question is how they construct class time, how their philosophies of teaching develop, how decisions are made.

32. At the macro-level the object of research is language teaching as a profession, for example trends in textbooks, the context in which teachers teach, notions of change and innovation, and there is a need to deal with the multiplicity of multiple issues which impinge on languages teachers all at the same time, to help practitioners construct their own “coherence” systems. • Underlying much of the recent discussion of LTE has been a somewhat polarized debate which views LTE as being either competency-based or reflection-based.

33. 4.1 Competency-based LTE • 4.2 Reflection-based LTE • 4.3 Teachers’ knowledge and beliefs

34. 5 From Novice to Expert • For LTE to be effective over the course of a teacher’s career, it helps if there is a clear view of what the different stages in a career might yield. Richards (1998) plots three such stages on a continuum of language teacher development. • First, inexperienced teachers require the technical competence of proven principles (a science-research conception); • second, with more experience they can begin to interpret their classroom practice and shape it to fit certain theories (a theory-philosophy conception);

35. third, they construct their own personal theories and progress to an art-craft approach, matching their teaching to the demands of their learners and the particular classroom situations in which they find themselves. • On this view, teacher development is an evolutionary process of self-discovery and self-renewal. • LTE has a central role in helping teachers learn how to record, reflect on, and profit from their own thoughts in relation to their practice, and to use this for their own professional development from novice to expert.

36. Johnston and Goettsch (2000) examined the knowledge base on which experienced teachers draw in their work when concerned with grammar. This was on the assumption that “there are certain forms of knowledge possessed by experienced practising teachers in the field, and language teacher education would do very well to incorporate these into its curricula” (p. 443). • They focused on three categories: content knowledge (e.g., of English grammar); pedagogical content knowledge (e.g., explanations of particular grammar points); knowledge of learners (e.g., teachers’ constructions of what students know about grammar and how they learn). • These were found to interact with each other in complex ways as the teachers taught.

37. 6 LTE and Applied Lingustics Research • It has already been suggested that in many if not all LTE programs there may be competition for space. • Potential input from applied linguistics research may have to compete with more generic input from educational policy, theory, and research and also with mixtures of insight and ignorance deriving from language teachers’ and other stakeholders’ personal ideology or professional experience. • If the discipline of applied linguistics is to “defend its corner” and maintain a respected place in LTE, then what sort of case may be made?

38. The case is not completely straightforward. For example, a number of eminent researchers in SLA have cautioned against any assumption that there is a direct connection between SLA research and language pedagogy (LP). • Mitchell (2000) for example claims that, at least in relation to modern languages at secondary school in the UK, it is not possible to make firm research-based prescriptions from applied linguistics about the detail of “what works” in foreign language grammar pedagogy. • Below, five roles within LTE are suggested to which applied linguistics research might make a key contribution.

39. (1) A “But it’s not quite like that” role. • In many countries across Europe and elsewhere there is a massive policy commitment to the early introduction of an additional language. • In some cases this has been justified by the claim that young children are better adapted for additional language learning than are older children, adolescents, or adults. In fact, in the recent past a number of reviews have been published of research on the “critical period hypothesis” (CPH) in respect of learning an additional language, e.g., Marinova-Todd, Marshall, & Snow (2000), Scovel (2000), Singleton (2001). • All of them recommend caution. If the early learning of an additional language is to be justified, then this should not be based on an uncritical acceptance of the CPH, and several key conditions should be met.

40. (2) A “Maybe this is worth considering” role. • (3) A “How might we evaluate/analyze/measure/better understand our practice?” role. • (4) A “Can we analyze what we really think about/mean by this?” role. • (5) A “But haven’t we been here before, so what are we going to do about it this time?” role.

41. There is no suggestion that there are only five such roles, those sketched out above. • Taken together, however, they do suggest that LTE has a vital part to play in mediating between applied linguistics research and the professional practices of language teaching and of languages policy development. • They suggest also that LTE is itself an important domain within Teacher Education research.

42. Thanks!