THE LEVEL OF TEACHER LANGUAGE AWARENESS EXHIBITED BY ‘GOOD LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ IN THEIR PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
The second question the study attempted to address was whether these three ‘Good Language Teachers’ all exhibited highly developed levels of teacher language awareness in their pedagogical practice. The two lesson observations and three interviews referred to earlier constituted the data relating to this question. On the evidence provided by those data, the answer must be a qualified yes. There were a number of generally similar ways in which these ‘Good Language Teachers’ revealed themselves to be language-aware, for instance their willingness to engage with language and language-related issues, and their ability to control their own language to the level of the class. At the
same time, however, each of the subjects also revealed certain limitationsI in her teacher language awareness, a finding which lends support to the suggestion above that ‘Good Language Teachers’ are by no means the ‘finished article’ in terms of their teacher language awareness. These limitations became apparent in the ways in which the subjects mediated the input being made available for learning. The following paragraphs provide examples of some of these limitations. Because of space constraints, the examples are drawn only from the data gathered from the two Hong Kong-based teachers, Anna and Bonnie. In relation to the third subject, Trudi, such limitations as were apparent were primarily concerned with the selection of the vocabulary to be drawn to the students’ attention, for instance, the introduction of the names of different types of shellfish to a group of Chinese students following an elementary/lower intermediate EAP course. In the case of both Anna and Bonnie, the examples also involve vocabulary.
Both of Anna’s lessons were with students possessing a very high level of English proficiency. These students were nearing the end of their penultimate year (Secondary 6, or Year 12) in an English-medium girls’ school. The school, in a middle-class district on Hong Kong Island, generally has a highly academic intake. The observed lessons both had a study skills focus, with the specific skills being closely linked to those which would be tested in the public examinations towards the end of the following academic year. Both lessons had a strongly metacognitive dimension, with students being encouraged to reflect upon the skills they would need for examination success, and the strategies they might employ to develop those skills.
There were a number of ways in which Anna revealed a high level of pedagogical content knowledge in the two lessons. For instance, her knowledge of the curriculum, and in particular of the examination syllabus, was evident throughout both observations: not in any narrow obsession with the examination format, but rather in Anna’s awareness of the precise nature of the skills the students needed to develop and of the performance levels in those skills which would be required for exam success. This aspect of her teaching was also indicative of Anna’s knowledge of the students and her understanding of the context in which she was working.
At the same time, however, there were certain aspects of Anna’s teacher language awareness, specifically in the ways she made language input available to the students, which revealed limitations, both in terms of her knowledge of subject-matter and her apparent unawareness of the potential for student misconceptions arising from the input presented to them. These limitations were more apparent in the first lesson, and were in part a consequence of the decontextualized way in which language was presented. In this lesson, the students were invited to reflect upon their problems in learning English at Secondary 6, and to suggest things they should do more and less in order to improve their learning. To help them in their discussion of learning strategies, the students were given (via a Powerpoint slide) a list of fifteen verbs conveying the idea of increasing and improving, and another list of ten verbs concerned with reduction.
The potential difficulty overlooked by Anna related to the attempts students might make, following the presentation, to use these verbs to express their recommended strategies. None of the verbs was presented in context: each was treated as an isolated item, with certain pairs of verbs being highlighted as synonymous. Anna’s explanation of the denotation of each verb was perfectly adequate. However, when presenting on her slide the pairs of synonyms, Anna gave no indication to the students that there were differences in the patterns of complementation associated with each verb in the pair. Thus, for instance, increase, which can be used both transitively and intransitively, was presented as synonymous with augment. Augment, however, can only be used transitively. A similar problem arose with decrease (transitive and intransitive) being presented as synonymous with abate (intransitive). Anna also presented hold back as synonymous with restrain, with no indication that the two verbs could not be used identically.
In the post-lesson interview, Anna made it clear that although a number of these words were being taught primarily to increase students’ receptive knowledge, her hope was that students would ultimately be able to use a wider range of vocabulary: ‘They will usually use improve this, improve that ... I want them to enrich their knowledge ... I mean the lists of vocabulary would help them to use other vocab ... other words which are similar to the meaning that they want to say’. The production task in the lesson was relatively brief and did not provide any examples of learner misconceptions of the type mentioned above (or at least any example for which there was evidence audible or visible to the observer). However, Anna’s Powerpoint files were a resource students could consult at any time. There was therefore a continuing potential for misconception.
Bonnie’s students were rather different from Anna’s: a Secondary 3 (Year 9) class in a co-educational school in an industrial district in the New Territories with an intake of average/below-average academic ability. As with Anna, however, Bonnie’s highly developed pedagogical content knowledge was clearly in evidence throughout both videotaped lessons, in particular her knowledge of the students and her awareness and understanding of the challenges English language learning poses for them.
One of the strategies Bonnie frequently employs in her teaching is that of using authentic texts, particularly recent articles from the ‘Young Post’, an English language newspaper aimed at readers of secondary school age. Bonnie made use of such texts in both observed lessons. In the first lesson, however, Bonnie’s treatment of vocabulary in her chosen newspaper article set up the potential for both misunderstanding and false hypotheses on the part of the students. As with the examples from Anna’s teaching, the potential problem arose primarily as a result of dealing with vocabulary items in isolation. The difference in Bonnie’s case was that this occurred even though the students encountered those vocabulary items within a text.
The theme of Bonnie’s first observed lesson was pets, and the advantages and disadvantages of keeping different animals as pets. Shortly after the lesson began, the students were asked to read a letter to the Editor extracted from the ‘Young Post’. The letter was headed Treat your pets with love and respect. Bonnie had underlined seven words in the text, including treat and respect in the headline, and had written seven definitions in speech bubbles surrounding the text. The students’ task was to match each word to its meaning.
Bonnie said to the students that she had herself looked up each word in a dictionary, and used the dictionary definition in the speech bubble. It was this strategy, however, which led to potential confusion for the students, because Bonnie had taken each word in isolation, without seeming to have paid much attention to its meaning in the text. For example, the definition provided for respect in the headline Treat your pets with love and respect was a feeling of admiration. Leaving aside the question as to whether students who do not understand respect would understand the word admiration any more easily, there is clearly something odd about treating a pet with a feeling of admiration. Bonnie’s linking of admiration to looking up to and wanting to copy made the application to pets even stranger. However, this oddness was overlooked, because the words were dealt with as separate tokens rather than as forming part of a sentence or a text.
A similar problem occurred with the word treat in the same headline. The definition provided by Bonnie was to behave in a nice way, which again failed to fit the headline very well. Its inadequacy as a definition was clearly shown in the second sentence of the letter, which began ‘If you treat your pets badly...’
Immediately after the vocabulary matching task, Bonnie focused the students’ attention on the following pairs of words: obey/disobey and treat/mistreat. In the post-lesson interview, Bonnie confirmed that she would often try to make her students aware of the meanings associated with particular prefixes and suffixes, not as the main focus of a unit of learning but opportunistically in the context of tasks with a different primary focus. In this particular instance, Bonnie asked the students to spot the pattern in the pairs of words, which she then demonstrated on the blackboard by putting ticks next to obey and treat and crosses next to disobey and mistreat to indicate positive and negative respectively.
Bonnie’s focus on the negative meanings associated with the prefixes dis- and mis-was not in itself confusing. The potential for student confusion arose from Bonnie’s treatment of the meaning contrast as if it were the same in each pair, rather than between positive and negative in the case of obey/disobey and neutral/negative in the case of treat/mistreat. In the post-lesson interview, Bonnie acknowledged that there was something potentially confusing. She said of her strategy ‘I guess when I did this ... all I wanted to do was to point out the positive and negative ... But I did realize that with this particular line here [the sentence beginning If you treat your pets badly...] the smarter ones would think ‘OK, there’s something wrong here’ ... So, they can come and see me’. Unfortunately, the data provided no evidence of either learner confusion or of learner initiatives to resolve such confusion by consulting the teacher.
In relation to both Anna and Bonnie, it should be emphasized that the alleged limitations in each of the lesson extracts above relate specifically to teacher language awareness and the mediation of input for learning. In each case, those limitations could be considered as relatively minor, and there is no intended criticism of the pedagogical strategies themselves. It is interesting to note that such limitations in teacher language awareness as were evident in the pedagogical practice of both these teachers were mainly vocabulary-related rather than grammar-related. This is perhaps hardly surprising given that on the Language Awareness test both teachers performed less well on the vocabulary component than the grammar component, and that when interviewed both revealed a lack of confidence about vocabulary. Anna, for instance, said twice during the first interview ‘I myself am not very good at vocabulary’ and blamed herself for the limitations of her students’ vocabulary knowledge: ‘I may not have given them a good model to stimulate them to know enough. So, I still think that they have not enough [vocabulary knowledge] because of me to a certain extent’.
I It should be noted that these were limitations in our subjective judgement as researchers. In some cases, a subject’s behavior was judged to reveal limitations in teacher language awareness if, for example, the input she made available to learners contained inaccuracies of form or erroneous information about language. In addition, when a subject made content-related decisions that we considered inappropriate given, for instance, the level of the learners, we also took these to be indicative of teacher language awareness limitations.
