Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE)

Here’s an abridged version of part of Chapter 10 of Jordan & long (2023) ElT: Now and how it Could Be.

Introduction

What knowledge does a good teacher of English as a second or foreign language need? Various types of knowledge come to mind, but there is one in particular that concerns me, namely knowledge about how people learn languages. In their 2002 document (still binding on members), the TESOL International Association requires all teachers

to understand and apply theories and research in language acquisition and development (p. 31).

Specifically, they are required

to understand how different theories of language acquisition (for L1 and L2) have shaped views of how language is learned, ranging from nativist to cognitive and social interactionist perspectives (p.31),

and to be familiar with

“key research on factors that influence the acquisition of English, such as the amount and quality of prior formal education in an English-dominant country, the age of arrival and length of residence in an English-dominant environment, developmental stages and sequences, the effects of instruction and feedback, the role of L1 transfer, L2 input, and communicative interaction (p. 32).

They are also required to be able

to take pertinent issues in second language acquisition (SLA) into account when planning for instruction and apply these SLA findings in the classroom (p. 32).

The fact is that current SLTE largely ignores SLA research. There is a set of robust research findings in the field of SLA which have profound implications for ELT, but which the majority of those who are currently responsible for SLTE ignore. In some cases, the root cause is ignorance, while in other cases, the cause is support for coursebook-driven ELT - after all, why draw attention to evidence which demonstrate that coursebook-driven ELT is based on false assumptions about language learning!

?Background

In 2015, the British Council estimated that there were more than twelve million English teachers active in the world, adding that “this masks a huge global shortage, given the almost insatiable demand for qualified English language instructors across the globe”” (British Council, 2015, p.9). We may date the beginning of modern SLTE to the early 1960s, when demand for English language teaching began its dramatic worldwide expansion, and when the ‘Situational Language Teaching’ approach became widely used. The first ELT training courses in the UK were those offered by International House (IH) in London in 1962. They were highly intensive four-week courses which provided would-be teachers with a practical “hands-on” training in the classroom skills required to implement the IH version of the Situational method. At the same time, in the USA and in Europe, the first university departments of applied linguistics were established, and post-graduate programs in theories of? second language learning and approaches to teaching foreign languages started to be offered.

The contrast between short practical courses like the ones at IH, and the more academic courses like MAs in TESOL, led to a ‘practice versus theory’ debate about the relative importance of classroom teaching skills and an understanding of language and second language learning. Richards (2008) suggests that the distinction often made between ‘teacher training’ and ‘teacher development’ can be seen in terms of the distinction between these two types of SLTE, “the former being identified with entry-level teaching skills linked to a specific teaching context, and the latter to the longer-term development of the individual teacher over time” (p. 158). Richards further suggests that while the short, practical teacher training courses concentrate on “knowledge how” to actually teach, the longer, more theoretical courses deal with “knowledge about”, i.e., knowledge of “grammar, discourse analysis, phonology, learning curriculum development, and methodology” (p. 159). While this seems? plausible enough, it is both remarkable and indicative of the malaise of global SLTE? that Richards’ summary fails to even mention knowledge about how people learn languages. Richards’ dichotomy reflects the all too prevalent view that SLTE basically involves knowledge about the subject matter (the English language) and knowledge about ‘practical’ teaching techniques.

Wallace’s Models of Teacher Education

Wallace (1991) proposes 3 models of TE, beginning with the ‘Craft’ model: teaching is a craft, best learnt in the same way as any other skill-based behaviour by following in the steps of an expert who has already mastered the craft. Student-teachers learn by listening to, observing, and trying to copy the expert.

The second model is the ‘Applied Science’ model: teaching is knowledge-based, and classroom practice should be informed by scientific knowledge. Student-teachers are taught by experts – preferably university academics – about various theories of language, language learning and language teaching, and are then expected to apply the theory to their own classroom situation.

The third model is the ‘Reflective Practitioner ‘model, and this is the one Wallace favors. It is based on making a distinction between two types of knowledge, ‘received knowledge’ – research-based facts that are passed on to us – and ‘experiential knowledge’ – the knowledge (often subconscious) which comes from experience, and then stressing the importance of the second kind of knowledge, since this is the vital factor in developing ‘teacher competence’. Wallace cites Sch?n (1983), who calls experiential knowledge ‘knowing in action’, and explains that

every competent practitioner can recognize phenomena...for which he cannot give a reasonably accurate or complete description. In his day-to-day practice, he makes innumerable judgements of quality "for which he cannot state adequate criteria, and he displays skills for which he cannot state the rules and procedures. Even when he makes conscious use of research-based theories and techniques, he is dependent on tacit recognitions (Sch?n, 1983: 49-50).

The model envisages three stages in TE. The ‘pre-training stage’ refers to the student teacher’s existing conceptual schemata or mental constructs before embarking on any SLTE courses – everybody has, after all, some pre-training knowledge about teaching. The second ‘professional development’ stage is where the student-teacher learns to teach through a combination of practice and reflection. When student-teachers get the opportunity to practice in a classroom environment, and to observe others teaching, they slowly “learn the ropes”, and the process of reflection starts: they reflect on their own performance and how it measures up to what they were told. They also compare it to how others, including experienced teachers, deal with the same situations. This reflection guides their development as they evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their teaching and recall past experiences. The third and final stage is increasing professional competence. The Reflective Model represents a cyclical process applicable to all stages of a teacher’s career.

Beyond Wallace’s Three Models View: The Socio-cultural Perspective on SLTE?

Wallace’s three models are not mutually exclusive and perhaps SLTE should take all three into account. However, while the limitations of the craft and applied science models are evident enough, Wallace’s preferred reflective practice model needs closer attention, particularly because of more recent developments of it, which take a radical socio-cultural perspective, where the constructs of ‘teacher cognition’, ‘teacher thinking’ and ‘teacher-learning’ are ubiquitous. An early and influential contribution to the socio-cultural view is Freeman and Johnson’s (1998) article, which argues that SLTE should focus on understanding how language teachers learn to teach and how their professional lives evolve, by focusing on their cognitive worlds and personal teaching practices. Studies by Bailey et. al., (1996), Freeman (1993), Gutiérrez (1996), Johnson (1994), Numrich (1996), (cited in Freeman and Johnson, 1998), all support the view that teachers’ previous learning experiences exert a powerful influence on how they learn from SLTE programs, to the extent that they can often completely subvert the content of the SLTE courses. In support of this contention, with regard to pre-service language teacher education programs, studies by Johnson (1994) and Richards et al (1996) showed that what pre-service English language teachers were taught in their training had little bearing on what they actually did subsequently in their classrooms.

More recent work by Johnson (2009), Freeman (2016), Borg (2015b), Norton (2013), Richards (2012) and Barkhuizen (2017) develops the argument that SLTE must reject the traditional “transmission of knowledge” approach to teacher education, because it pays insufficient attention to what the participants in the courses, the student teachers, bring to the course, and sees them, mistakenly, as “empty vessels” into which the knowledge needed to be good teachers is poured. Such an approach, the argument goes, must be replaced with one which helps teachers to reflect on and articulate their own personal theories, knowledge, and beliefs. Rather than telling teachers what to think and what to do, SLTE should be concerned with ‘teacher learning’ and ‘practitioner knowledge’; it should recognize the importance of teacher cognition in understanding the classroom decisions teachers take, and it should help them to understand and articulate their own beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge about subject matter and pedagogical practices.

Woods’ (1996) influential book on teacher cognition is the first to make teachers’ ‘beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge’ an acronym – BAKs. The three components of a teacher’s BAKs together are said to make up teacher cognition, and it is the argument of those taking a socio-cultural perspective that helping teachers get a clear understanding of their BAKs should be a leading priority of SLTE. Teachers’ BAKs crucially affect how they translate information on teaching into classroom practice; they explain the mismatch between what teachers are told to do and what they actually do, and also between what they say they do and what they actually do in the classroom. Thus, the socio-cultural perspective on SLTE concludes that awareness of teachers’ BAKS must be the starting point in reflections and play a key role in teacher education programmes.

In his review of research on “what language teachers think, know, believe, and do”, Borg (2003, p.88) says

?The general picture to emerge here then is that teachers’ prior language learning experiences establish cognitions about learning and language learning which form the basis of their initial conceptualisations of L2 teaching during teacher education, and which may continue to be influential throughout their professional lives (p. 88).??

Borg argues that teachers’ beliefs are not likely to be changed by being told (from above) that new beliefs should be adopted, and furthermore, changes in beliefs do not necessarily imply a change in teacher behaviour, Contextual factors (social, cultural, institutional, instructional and physical settings) are also important.

Richards (2008, p. 162) puts the case as follows:

Teacher-learning is not viewed as translating knowledge and theories into practice but as constructing new knowledge and theory through participating in specific social contexts and engaging in particular types of activities and processes. This latter type of knowledge, sometimes called “practitioner knowledge”, is the source of teachers’ practices and understandings.

He suggests that SLTE should be based on the “theorization of practice……, making visible the nature of practitioner knowledge”. Learning, says Richards, emerges through social interaction within a community of practice, and participants in SLTE courses should be seen as a community of learners engaged in “the collaborative construction of meanings” (p. 163).

Discussion

While paying attention to student-teachers’ BAKs may well be recommendable, and while research into teacher cognition and decision-making has produced some interesting findings, there is surely a problem in putting so much emphasis on teacher cognition. But first, those readers who are unaccustomed to the peculiar style of socio-cultural postmodernist discourse might well have trouble working out what it all means, and what the point of it is. What, for example, does Richards mean when he insists that we must see student-teachers as “a community of learners engaged in the collaborative construction of meanings”? How exactly do people collaborate in constructing meanings? What do these constructed meanings look like? What ‘postmodern frame’ is Freeman referring to? What does he mean by “the storied character of teachers’ knowledge”?

Perhaps Freeman’s claim that “different people will know the same things differently” is the most revealing, because it uncovers the relativist epistemology of the socio-cultural approach which informs their work. Those adopting a scientific approach to research adopt a realist epistemology which assumes that an external world exists independently of our perceptions of it. The main way we study this external world is by observing it and testing hypotheses about it, using logic and an appeal to empirical evidence. For example, we notice that all our L2 learners seem to learn certain parts of the target language before others. We decide to do a study of the phenomenon of what we suspect might be staged development among L2 learners, and we find that the participants in the study do indeed go through a series of “transitional stages” towards the L2 target language. Now, if we accept a realist epistemology, we assume that the external world will remain stable enough for different observers who carry out the same study in similar conditions with similar participants to observe the same things. Thus, replication studies, if done carefully, can test the robustness of our study's findings, by providing evidence that either supports or challenges the results of the first study.

Those adopting a sociocultural perspective reject this realist epistemology, which they refer to as the "positivist" epistemology of scientists, whose research methods, epistemological assumptions, and authority they roundly reject. Early on in her book extolling the virtues of a sociocultural perspective on SLTE, Johnson (2009, p. 7) explains the need for a “shift” in teacher education towards an “interpretative epistemological perspective”, which involves “overcoming” the “positivist epistemological perspective”. Johnson urges us to adopt the view that there is no one fixed, immutable reality, but rather, a multiplicity of realities, all of which are social constructs. Since the construction of reality is a social process, it follows that there are simply different ways of looking at, seeing, and talking about things, each with its own perspective, each with its own set of explicit or implicit rules which members of the social group construct for themselves. From this new perspective, it follows that the ‘knowledge base’ which Johnson, Richards, Freeman and others refer to is actually "knowledge" that has no common, objective base at all. Johnson, et al all argue that what one teacher ‘knows’ at the end of a teacher education course about interlanguage development or criterion performance tests, for example, will differ from what another teacher will ‘know’, since every teacher has their own ‘knowledge bases’ and thus sees the same ‘knowledge’ differently.

I reject the relativist view expounded by Freeman, Johnson, Richards and others as unclear and unhelpful. I don’t dispute the need to appreciate what teachers’ prior experience and set of beliefs bring to any learning task, or that it’s important to take into account the many contextual factors which affect the implementation of any particular SLTE program in any particular context. Neither do I dispute that different student teachers will learn different things from the same program, and that every teacher’s practical classroom work will be crucially affected by the local context in which it takes place. But none of this warrants the view that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, or that there can be no rational assessment of rival explanations of language learning or rival approaches to language teaching, or that SLTE should focus only on reflecting on teachers’ subjective feelings, beliefs and experiences. For me, teachers’ subjective feelings, beliefs and experiences – their BAKs – refer to their experiences in the real world, and to theories and views which have real effects on teaching outcomes. I ask: What is the actual content of teachers’ BAKs? How do we evaluate that content?

Imagine a seminar on language learning. The question of ‘learning styles’ comes up; a student teacher says that they really like the way the Neuro-Linguistic Programming theory developed by?Bandler and Grinder?in 1970 has been applied to ELT. The teacher leading the course goes to some lengths to explain that there is not one shred of evidence to support the NLP view that all language learners have a predominant learning style (visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic). They describe the emergence of the NLP theory, its popularity, its growing acceptance (it’s approvingly discussed in the 3rd edition of Harmer’s The Practice of?English?Language Teaching), its growing criticism, its increasing challenges from studies, and its demise (no mention whatsoever in the latest edition of Harmer’s magnum opus). After that, the student teachers are encouraged to talk about their own beliefs and experiences of NLP, how they were taught, how their bosses and colleagues and students might react to NLP, and so on. In the end, there is general agreement that NLP is baloney and that ELT should not be influenced by the so-called principles of NLP.

Now, according to the epistemological perspective adopted by Richards, Freeman, Johnson and others, the fact that the appealing arguments for NLP were slowly shown to be built on sand, and that successive studies revealed zero support for NLP from empirical evidence, counts for very little. What sense does it make for the teacher trainer to get the student-teachers to articulate their beliefs about NLP if all beliefs are equally "true" and mutually incommensurate? ? What is the point of everybody becoming more aware and able to articulate their BAKs about NLP, beyond noting that some agree with them and others don't? It would only have a point if their reflections led them to change their beliefs, reach a consesnsus and decide to make changes. to their future behaviour. But why should they? On what authority can we say that neuro-linguistic programming is mistaken, or not worthy of belief?? In general, how do Johnson, Freeman, Richards and others decide on the content of any SLTE course, on recommendations, on what they want the participants to learn? Trapped in the Humpty Dumpty relativist world, how do they escape the culture of navel-gazing?

?In education, as elsewhere, we need to improve our understanding of things in order to make progress. Assuming a realist epistemology and recognizing the usefulness of a reliance on rational argument and an appeal to empirical evidence has led to enormous progress in science and education, and seems like a more promising way of going about designing and assessing SLTE than shifting towards the ‘interpretative epistemological perspective’ adopted by Johnson and others. Let’s accept that many of the SLTE courses currently being implemented do not meet the needs of their participants, and that Tarone and Allwright (2005, p. 12) are right when they say “differences between the academic course content in language teacher preparation programs and the real conditions that novice language teachers are faced with in the language classroom appear to set up a gap that cannot be bridged by beginning teacher learners”. The conclusion to be drawn is surely that the SLTE courses must change in such a way that the gap is bridged. This involves critically evaluating courses, identifying weaknesses, recognising shortcomings, listening carefully to stakeholders, trying out alternatives, using carefully-assembled knowledge to design and implement improved principles and practices which we constantly monitor and upgrade. Engaging teachers in reflective practices, uncovering their assumptions and beliefs, improving collaboration and feedback channels, introducing more and better-organized teaching practice and peer observation, all these are welcome suggestions. But they do not persuade me that SLTE should make “teacher reflection on learning to teach” the main focus of SLTE. As Bill VanPatten argued in his plenary at the BAAL 2018 conference, language teaching can only be effective if it comes from an understanding of how people learn languages. ?

??????????? I think SLTE should begin with the critical examination of theories which attempt to explain how people learn additional languages, and in particular how people learn English in instruction settings. These theories can be evaluated in terms of their coherence, cohesion, logical consistency and clarity, and their empirical content. From the basis of an understanding of the reliable findings about second language acquisition which emerge, we may then examine various approaches to ELT in order to decide on the methodological principles, pedagogic procedures, syllabus, materials and assessment procedures most likely to be efficacious in different teaching contexts. Such a course of action would revolutionise ELT!

References??

Barkhuizen, G. (ed.) (2017) Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research. Routledge.

?Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36, 2, 81-109

British Council (2015) The English Effect Report. Retrieved from? https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/english-effect-report-v2.pdf

?Freeman, D. (2016). Educating Second Language Teachers. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

?Freeman, D. and Johnson, K. (1998). Reconceptualizing the Knowledge-Base of Language Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 3, 397–417.

Norton, B. (2013). Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation (2nd ed.) Bristol, Multilingual Matters.

?Richards, J.C. (2008).? Second Language Teacher Education Today. RELC Journal, 39, 2, 158–177.

Richards, J. C. (2012). Competence and Performance in Language Teaching. RELC Journal, 41, l, 44-59.

?Sch?n, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books

?TESOL (2002).?TESOL standards for teachers of adult learners. TESOLAssociation.

?Wallace, M.J. (1991). Training Foreign Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press.

Woods, D. (1996). Teacher Cognition in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.