Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning
FINDINGS
Application of KAL in the Assignments
Integrating Content and Language in Grammar Lessons: Path 1
The lesson plan was an assignment in the grammar class and it followed Path 1, beginning with a language focus and then adding the integration of content. The integration of content and language in the grammar lessons (using criteria in Table 1 in “Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning METHODOLOGY Data Analysis”) was seamless in the best examples. An example of this caliber of work is a lesson developed by a participant (B.V.) who chose the grammar structure of non-referential it/there pronouns. The content that she chose to use was the geography of Ecuador. The lesson presented the structure first with a taped dialogue that was an advertisement for Ecuador, which included many natural instances of the targeted structure. This part of the lesson required students to listen to the text, try to write down structures, and then listen again while underlining the targeted forms. This introduction was followed by some explanations of the form, and then students were given an opportunity to practice the forms in a meaningful way by taking written information about Ecuador and writing sentences about geographic regions, and then presenting information to the class. The students were required to use non-referential it/there in their presentations, and the task was designed so this would be a natural fit. Finally, students were asked to write about traveling to a particular region of Ecuador, a task that would naturally elicit the targeted structure (e.g., There are many mountains in Educator. It is a country on the Pacific Ocean).
While most of the participants (15, or 75%) were able to achieve integration to varying degrees on this assignment, four participants (5 or 25%) we characterized as not succeeding in making the connection. This was because they used disjointed topics and the tasks were less well-designed for eliciting the structure. Typical problems were lessons that did not use a unified content throughout the lesson but instead jumped from one topic to another, used tasks that did not naturally call for the targeted structure, or imposed artificial restrictions on the communicative task.
