Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
Factors Enhancing or Inhibiting Knowledge Transfer
What factors were important in determining whether KAL was transferred or not? One factor which emerges from these studies is the tangibility of the knowledge learned. Angelova found that concrete experience with concepts from SLA helped the novice teachers in her class understand them. Lilly, from Popko’s study, seemed to need to focus on specific teaching techniques in order to understand the KAL being taught. Similar findings have been reported by Kerekes (2001) and Pennington (1995). Hislam and Cajkler claim that their teachers’ lack of exposure to using KAL in specific teaching contexts made it difficult for them to use their KAL to make quality grammar lessons. Other research has also shown that contextualizing the knowledge to be learned (Sherwood, Kinzer, Bransford & Franks, 1987) and participation in, rather than observation of, hands on activities similar to the target activities (Berry, 1991; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman & Yoon, 2001) helps knowledge retention and use. Furthermore, it is not likely that knowing structural or rule-based KAL, for example: “Teachers should know the principles of word formation” (Fillmore & Snow, 2002: 23), alone will help L2 teachers (Andrews, 2001). Studies show that humans have great difficulty applying abstract rules (Griggs & Cox, 1982; Price & Driscoll, 1997; Wason, 1966; Wason & Shapiro, 1971) and, in many cases, find examples much easier to use than rules (Brown & Kane, 1988; Johnston & Goettsch, 2000; Stanley, Mathews, Buss, R., & Kotler-Cope, 1989).
Research also suggests that intensive work over a significant period of time using KAL to work on classroom problems is important for transferring KAL to use in the classroom. Teachers who worked intensively on an action research study on pragmatics reported gains in their knowledge of language and their conceptions of teaching language. However, this was not the case with teachers who only attended workshops which presented the findings of the study that the other teachers had engaged in (Yates & Wigglesworth).
Furthermore, the teachers in Hislam and Cajkler’s study reported that it was only through teaching and preparing lessons, not explicit applied linguistics instruction, where they gained expertise in using their KAL for teaching. In the most convincing demonstration of knowledge transfer in a complex domain, Carpenter and his colleagues ran a 4 week workshop for elementary school teachers aimed at (a) helping them understand how children develop addition and subtraction concepts, and (b) providing them with the opportunity to explore how they might use that knowledge for instruction. In this workshop only 40% of instructional time was used to help teachers understand the theoretical concepts and 60% of the time was spent experimenting how these concepts could be used to design and teach elementary math lessons (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989). Thus one possible reason why teachers have difficulties transferring their KAL may be that their instruction focused primarily on the KAL and devoted very little time to understanding what that knowledge could mean in specific teaching contexts.
Teachers of applied linguistics also need to be aware that language teachers use a variety of ways to learn the KAL in their classes. The four teachers in Popko’s study had four very distinct styles of learning KAL. Perhaps more important, some teachers, Joyce and Zsanna actively seek out KAL and are constantly working on integrating their KAL with their knowledge of teaching, while other teachers do not. This is similar to Tsui’s longitudinal study of four ESL teachers of varying degrees of expertise. She found that it was not it was not teaching experience that had the most important impact on the development of teacher expertise, but the willingness and ability of the teachers to consistently reinvest their time in learning more and more about their teaching (Tsui, 2003). This is interesting because it has also been shown that air force technicians who actively try to improve their mental models of the technical systems they use are able to use this knowledge when transferred to another system. However, technician who do not actively seek to enrich their understandings of the systems they work with are not able to use their knowledge of the previous system to understand the new one (Gott, Hall, Pokorny, Dibble, & Glaser, 1993). Furthermore, in the field of education, Franke and her colleagues showed that it was generally the teachers who continually sought to expand their understanding and facility with Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) in the 10 years after an intensive workshop that continued to use and expand their usage of CGI in their teaching practice (Franke, Carpenter, Levi & Fennema, 2001).
Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993) refer to this as “deliberate practice” and define it as activities where (a) learners (even very advanced learners!) are motivated to concentrate on the task and exert effort to improve their performance, (b) the practice task is beyond the learner’s present ability, but close enough that mastery can be obtained after short periods of sustained practice, (c) immediate informative feedback is provided, and (d) the learners repeatedly perform the same or similar activities, and (e) while this practice is guided by others at beginning levels, to achieve expertise learners have to develop their own tasks and provide their own feedback. Interestingly enough, this is in many ways similar to sociocultural views of learning, where (a) participation in an activity, (b) working in the zone of proximal development (ZDP) which consists of tasks beyond the competence of the learner alone but achievable with the help of others, (c) feedback on the situated appropriacy of the learners activities, and (e) moving from object-regulated participation, where learners receive help and feedback from other people or cultural objects, to self-regulated participation, where the learner is in control of this process, are all seen as crucial for learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985; Lantolf, 2000).
The results of Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer’s (1993) extensive survey of studies on learning showed clearly that in a wide variety of domains high levels of expertise are gained not simply from long experience with an activity, but only through this kind of sustained deliberate practice. (See also Brehmer, 1980.) This would suggest that if developing conceptions and schemata of using KAL for specific teacher activities in specific contexts is left to the last 10 minutes of class or week 13 of the semester, then L2 teachers will not develop expertise in using their KAL to notice patterns of errors and explaining them, using their knowledge of negotiation of meaning to plan lessons, or using their knowledge of interlanguage variability to design assessment tools simply by acquiring KAL and then working as an L2 teacher. It may well be that applied linguistics courses will need to provide teachers with opportunities for engaging in deliberate practice and designing deliberate practice activities.
Finally, it is important to not only look at individual applied linguistics courses in terms of these issues, but also to examine teacher education programs as a whole. For example, many studies show that the coherence of the different elements within a teacher education program (which can mean more than classes) was a very important factor in helping teachers acquire and use knowledge about teaching (See Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998, for a review.) Related to this is the issue of the kinds of roles students are learning within different parts of language teacher education programs. In many programs it is assumed that language teachers learn to engage in specific roles in separate classes; they learn to be L2 users in language classes, L2 analysts in applied linguistics classes, L2 teachers in teaching methodology classes. However, as Cots and Arno have shown, the roles of language user, language analyst, and language teacher are not exclusively the domain of particular subject matter classes, but are may all developed within one type of class. Therefore, it is important to investigate (a) the extent that the conceptions of language and language teaching are compatible and coherent or contradictory within the diverse parts of such programs and (b) the kinds of roles language teacher education programs prepare novice teachers for and the extent to which the images of these roles are compatible from class to class.
Summary
To summarize the findings so far:
1) The provision of propositional knowledge about language can be successful in changing conceptions of and intentions for language teaching.
2) The acquisition of KAL and the changing of conceptions of teaching alone does not appear to allow full and consistent transfer of KAL to L2 teaching.
3) Well-formed KAL does not seem to be necessary to be a superior language teacher.
4) Situational constraints pose significant problem with transferring KAL.
5) Knowledge of context based instruction (CBI) was easier to transfer to planning grammar lessons than it was to use knowledge of grammar in planning CBI lessons
6) The factors that help knowledge transfer are: concrete information (vs. abstract), a focus on using the KAL on specific teaching activities, time spent on such practice tasks, deliberate practice, well developed mental models, and the cohesion of the teacher education program.
