Practice What You Preach Dr Amos Paran Institute of Education, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Raising Subject Knowledge in Initial Teacher Education: Practice What You Preach

Dr Amos Paran Institute of Education, University of London

From this

To this

Interlude 1: Information exchange

Tell your neighbour about the most important incident (or an important incident) that happened to you in your learning (either of languages or other subjects) that influences you as a teacher. Spend about one minute telling your story, then switch sides.

Two critical incidents

• How to deal with a student who isn’t coming to class.
• The school mentor as role model

Issue 1: Defining Subject Knowledge for Language Teachers

The components of Andrews’ Model

• Language proficiency (labelled ‘Communicative Language

Ability in previous models); based on Bachman 1990.

• Pedagogical Content Knowledge:

‘the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding

• f how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized,

represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction’ (Shulman 1987:8 in Andrews 2003:87)

• Teacher Language Awareness: the intersection of the two

areas

Freeman and Johnson 1998

!

The interaction of teacher language awareness components

Leech 1994, p. 18

• A ‘model’ teacher of languages should:
• 1. be capable of putting across a sense of how grammar interacts

with the lexicon as a communicative system (both communicativeness and ‘system’ will need independent attention.)

• 2. be able to analyse the grammatical problems that learners

encounter;

• 3. have the ability and confidence to evaluate the use of grammar,

especially by learners, against criteria of accuracy, appropriateness and expressiveness.

• 4. be aware of the contrastive relations between native language and

foreign language

• 5. understand and implement the processes of simplification by which
• vert knowledge of grammar can best be presented to learners art

different stages of learning.

Issue 2: Proficiency issues in Language Teaching

• ‘a fundamental component of a language teacher’s

professional competence is his or her proficiency in the language her or she teaches. …(it) will in many cases determine the extent to which the teacher is able to use many current teaching methods appropriately and whether the teacher is able to provide a reliable model of target language input for his or her students’ Farrell and Richards p. 55-56

What teachers say about their proficiency

• Butler 2004: Teachers perceived a gap between what they

thought they should know and what they thought they knew.

• Peacock 2004: correlation between trainee beliefs about

vocabulary and grammar and proficiency.

• Kamhi-Stein and Mahboob 2005 (In Snow et al. 2006): use of

L1 affected by actual proficiency and beliefs about L2 teaching and learning.

Raising ITE Trainees’ Proficiency

• Good quality, best-practice language teaching
• English only policy, with a clear rationale and progression if

needed (e.g. Lee 2004)

• Creating a Speech Community

‘Language development in the individual does not happen in isolation; unlike physical growth, it will not take place without the interaction of another person who has already become a language user’. (Davies 2002:49)

• The group of trainees needs to become a Community of

Practice which operates in English.

One way of enforcing English only

Interlude 2: Opinion gap

Turn and speak to the person on your other side (not the person you did Interlude 1 with); if you are at the end of a row, speak to the person sitting in front of you or behind you. What do you understand by ‘Good quality, best-practice English language teaching’?

Issue 3: Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching (CLT), the most popular approach to the teaching of English around the world over the past two decades (Burns 2005) has been questioned on the basis that it relies on Western beliefs and values, and as such, is problematic because of the mismatch in expectations about teachers’ and students’ roles. Snow, Kamhi-Stein and Brinton 2006:264.

Most popular approach?

‘Surveys have revealed that students reach the Escuela de Turismo after some 12 years’ essentially teacher-centred language learning. Accuracy and form have dominated over skills acquisition and communicative efficiency’. (Walker and Pérez Riu 2008: 19-20). ‘Although most second language (L2) teachers today claim to use a communicative language teaching (CLT) approach, genuinely communicative classrooms still seem to be in the minority. … many teachers’ claims of using CLT are often unsupported by actual classroom events. When observed, these teachers are found to spend more time giving grammatical explanations and encouraging rule application than conducting role plays, games, puzzles and conversations.’ (Gatbonton and Segalowitz 2005: 325-326)

Most popular approach?

• the critique of CLT is normally that ‘foreign language

classrooms very often reproduce teacher- and form-focused instruction while at the same time teachers readily describe their teaching practice as communicative language teaching.’ Breidbach 2011: 101.

• there is a sense of crisis among language educators

concerning unfulfilled promises of CLT, a crisis that is also echoed in reports of learners’ language learning experiences Breidbach 2011: 110.

Misconceptions about CLT (Thompson 1996)

• Misconception 1: CLT means not teaching grammar
• Misconception 2: CLT means teaching only speaking
• Misconception 3: CLT means pair work, which means

role play.

• Misconception 4: CLT means expecting too much from

the teacher.

Another misconception

CLT does not provide something ‘concrete and tangible to go home with …. Ever since its inception, the main concern of CLT had been simply to expose students to comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985), interpreted widely to mean having students use language in genuine interactions. Gatbonton and Segalowitz 2005:327

Some other reasons

• Examination focus (Evans 1996 in Miller and Aldred

2000)Breidbach 2011 – large scale testing; ‘from washback to backlash’

• Textbooks which are ‘traditional, examination oriented and

‘teacher proof’.

A digression

Principled Communicative Approach (Dörnyei 2013) 1. Personal significant principle 2. Controlled practice principle 3. Declarative input principle 4. Focus-on-form principle 5. Formulaic language principle 6. Language exposure principle 7. Focused interaction principle

And now for the REAL reasons

• ‘Teachers’ beliefs may be incompatible with those espoused in

CLT’ (Gatbonton and Segalowitz 2005: 326)

• ‘many teachers have difficulty seeing the learning value of

communication activities… (they) are used to highly structured activities such as teaching grammar rules, conducting drills, and teaching vocabulary lists, which makes it hard for them to accept that activities such as games, role-plays and problem solving with little obvious language teaching purpose can actually count as ‘real teaching’. (Gatbonton and Segalowitz 2005:27).

• ‘Teachers schooled in teacher-centred classrooms maintained

beliefs and attitudes that made it difficult for them to embrace CLT.’ (Miller and Aldred 2000).

• Miller and Aldred 2000: Teachers’ beliefs about their own culture

and the role of the teacher in that culture. (Teachers are dominant, and are always right.)

How one teacher trained

The scene: Breakfast at the ETAS conference hotel, Yverdon, 1998. Me: So, where did you train as a teacher? Teacher: I didn’t train – I don’t need training. I had a wonderful English teacher so I know how English needs to be taught. Me: Errr…. Mmmm….Uhhhhh….. Would you like some more tea?

The Apprenticeship of Observation

Lortie (1975) A teacher trainee starts their training with ca. 13-15,000 hours

• f observing teachers teaching

Borg (2004)

Subject matter cognitions: Training or prior beliefs?

Miller and Aldred 2000:1 ‘what student teachers learn about in their pre- service education frequently has to compete with

• ther factors which make up their beliefs system, for

example, their own experience as language learners and established practice within education systems’.

Research into trainee beliefs

Often uses the BALLI (Horwitz 1985)

• Peacock 2001

‘some detrimental beliefs were very slow to change despite instruction over 3 years on the nature of language learning (p. 187)

• Busch 2010

Found significant differences in beliefs before an SLA course and after the SLA course.

• Miller and Aldred 2000

Some changes after an awareness raising exercise which enabled trainees to situate their learning within their beliefs; change was found after the practicum.

Falling back on the past

Richards and Pennington 1987:187 ‘the teacher preparation course was not able to make changes in the teachers’ schema that were substantial enough to direct their behavior in the classroom’. Busch 2010:319 ‘novice teachers describe how they default into methods and techniques that they themselves experienced rather than what they had been trained to do in the practicum classes that they were teaching’

• ‘… students continue to teach the way they themselves have

been taught, in spite of new pedagogical theories and research findings. Theorising that is not congruent with former practice experiences has limited impact on behaviour.’ Trebbi 2008:42

• The Apprenticeship of Observation is extremely powerful.
• To combat it we need a combination of explicit and implicit

strategies

Explicit discussion of beliefs

• Peacock 2001:180

‘It is important for both trainers and trainees to be aware

• f the strong influence of the ‘apprenticeship of
• bservation’ on trainee beliefs’
• Breen (in Peacock 2001)

‘suggests that investigators ask teachers to evaluate their beliefs on the basis of ‘actual classroom events’. ‘one route to curriculum change (…) lies through the promotion of teacher reflection, particularly by encouraging teachers to make connections between classroom action and personal theory’

• Miller and Aldred 2000

Implicit modelling for the learners: What is being modelled?

Miller and Aldred 2000 ‘The tutor uses a variety of presentation techniques: lecture delivery, demonstration, quiz, video viewing

• f the technique and discussion with students about

their own experiences of being learners of English in a Hong Kong secondary school. This combination of explanation and discussion of personal experiences grounds the theory of the method firmly in the classroom’.

What is being modelled for the learners?

Cots and Arnó 2005

• ‘the two instructors construct the classroom activity in a

teacher-centred interactional format, as a combination of declarative knowledge, supplied by the teacher, and procedural knowledge, through usage exercises. (p. 74)

• The analysis reveals … a teacher-centred model of teaching

and learning that, while paying lip-service to the importance

• f subconscious learning, it still relies mostly on conscious

learning, characterised by the dominance of explicit learning about language and declarative knowledge. (p. 76)

Flipping the classroom

• Traditional lecture

Teacher Educator provides a summary of a number of methodological and research articles and distils principles for the students

• A flipped classroom
• Students read a variety of articles on the topic; different students

read different articles

• Each student provides a summary of what they read
• Students themselves come up with a summary (or summaries) that

express the commonalities and differences between the different papers that they read.

• Teacher Educator comments on students’ work.

Interlude 3: Group work

• With the people sitting in front of you (or behind you) form

groups of four.

• In your group, produce a definition of learner autonomy.

Issue 5: Learner autonomy

Aspects of learner autonomy

• Learner centredness
• Not all learner centred activities exemplify learner autonomy
• Learner training and learning to learn
• Guided, restricted and full (?) autonomy
• Lifelong learning

Teaching Methodology Cline (Miller and Aldred 2000)

Traditional CLT Autonomy Teaching practices practices

Focus on: Focus on: Focus on : Language form Language use The learner Accuracy Fluency Authentic contexts Language exercises Communication tasks Life-long learning Teacher centred Student initiative Lock-step approach Individual progress Passive participation Active participation

Issue 6: Teacher Identities

Interlude 4

• Please take out a blank piece of paper.
• What you will write is for your eyes only; I will not ask you to

discuss it or show it to anyone else (which is why I am asking you to write it on a new, blank piece of paper).

• On your piece of paper write down the one idea in this talk

that appealed to you most, and which you would want to take forward and implement. Alternatively, if nothing appealed to you, write down the point you disagreed with most.

One word to conclude

Congruence

Thank you.

• When we come back from the coffee break, please sit in

groups of 6

• Try not to sit with people you know well, and definitely please

don’t sit with someone from your own institution. I would like us to work in mixed groups, from different institutions and hopefully from different regions

In your groups:

• Introduce yourselves – please make sure that you know the names of

the people in your group and where they work. (10’)

• Each group will be assigned one of the six areas that I have raised in

the morning’s talk.

• Discuss any, all or some of the following: (20’)
• How is this area dealt with in your institutions? Does it receive explicit

attention? Does it receive implicit attention? Is it problematic at all?

• What are the problems that this area creates?
• Draft points for a strategy document that addresses the issues that you

raise in your discussion at a new university that will be called UUELT (Utopic University of ELT). Present both strategic, general points, but also think about specific ways in which the strategy can be

• implemented. (30’)
• Prepare a summary or diagram of the main issues that arose in your

discussion. I will be circulating and if any problems arise or you have any questions, please call me to your group. The last part of the session (30’) will be devoted to presentation and discussion of your strategy document drafts.