Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning
FINDINGS
Reflections from the Thematic Units
Thematic units were written toward the end of the program in the second semester of the pedagogy courses. The units were created with the participants’ secondary ESL contexts in mind. In this analysis, we were able to examine only a subset (13) of the thematic units because not all participants chose to contribute them to our study. Nine of the 13 thematic units we examined included discussions about integrating content and language in their reflections, suggesting that this issue was still on their minds. For two (K. N. and M. L.), language included use of one or more of the four modalities. For the remaining seven, language meant linguistic forms. Four participants voiced specific challenges to teaching language through content. One participant (S. J., reflection, 4/02) expressed the difficulty of separating content objectives from language objectives conceptually in the planning phase. She went on to say that CBI is “exciting and fun when it all does actually come together – I only wish it didn’t have to be so time-consuming!” Another participant explains the archetypal challenge of CBI:
My main difficulty was incorporating language into the lessons. I found myself continually so wound up on the idea of poetry that focusing on a grammar form was a sort of barbed wire fencing me in. In reality, of course, structures can be highlighted and incorporated into nearly any lesson, but for me it was a struggle to lone down the poetry content and focus on language skill development necessary for my students. (G. K., reflection, 4/02)
Another participant found a solution to the challenge of integrating meaningful and contextualized grammar objectives. She candidly admitted, “I got around this challenge by simply not integrating them. Again, if I were to go through and re-work the unit again I would attempt to integrate grammar more effectively” (M. L., reflection, 4/02). The challenge of integrating functions was articulated by this participant:
I think I got so wrapped up in the topic and content part of the lesson that I forgot to add these valuable language functions in order to teach the students to be successful in these areas. The students did well with the lesson before I added this, but I understand how much more rich I could have made it! I definitely learned a valuable lesson in how to integrate content with language functions and not just content. (K. G., reflection, 4/02)
Two participants noted that a starting point in their planning was the language-learning task, exemplified here: “The tasks I decided to focus on lent themselves to studying the grammatical concepts” (D. B., reflection, 4/02). Another said that sometimes she started her planning with the activities, but said “overall I find it easier to write the objectives first (using a standard or learning strategy occasionally) as a starting point” (M. L., reflection, 4/02). This indicates that preservice teachers may need practice with finding language aims not only in content materials, but also in the content tasks.
The reflections from the thematic units centered on the challenges of doing CBI. Participants discussed the struggles of balancing content and language, keeping language in focus and the intense amount of planning required to accomplish this. This indicates to us that the struggles are in the application rather than the acquisition of KAL. The challenges of engaging both their pedagogical knowledge and their KAL are reflected in the following analysis of the lesson plans.
