Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning
DISCUSSION
From the journals and reflections, we gained an understanding of the challenges involved in the transfer of KAL to CBI. The narrative data showed that teaching language through content, and an expanded view of grammar instruction meant a departure for participants, on many different levels, from what was comfortable to them. The emphasis on CBI in all of their coursework gave them many opportunities to think about and practice CBI and the grammar course supported participants’ learning and application of English grammar. The journals in the grammar course revealed the importance of application and although the linguistic material itself was sometimes technical and demanding, the participants were more concerned about such applications of this knowledge to teaching than with mastering the material. Their reflections lend doubt to the assumption that it is enough to provide separate instruction on grammar and instruction on pedagogy with the expectation that preservice teachers will then be able to put the two together. Even with a grammar course that was especially designed to make these connections, the issue of how to apply the knowledge to teaching was the major concern that participants expressed.
In looking at the lesson plans to see how KAL was applied, we saw places of success as well as holes that needed to be addressed. The lesson plans for the grammar course showed an encouraging trend to implement the principles of CBI into grammatical instruction, yielding many plans that were richly contextualized and focused on meaningful use of the targeted structure. The successful integration of language and content in most of the grammar lesson plans demonstrated that participants were able to shift into the new paradigm of language instruction and to transfer their KAL into meaningful content in the lesson planning stage. When handed a grammatical form, most participants were able to contextualize language in content very well. We attribute some of their success in integration in the grammar lesson plans to the narrowly focused planning assignment where the goals were quite manageable. But, we also see their success as evidence of transfer from the methods course, where CBI was emphasized. We had expected transfer to flow in one direction, from the grammar class to the pedagogy class, and yet this shows there was bidirectionality in how transfer was operating in our program.
On the other hand, in the CBI lesson plans and units, we saw less use of KAL. The plans most often addressed content and general language skills but not grammatical structures. In other words, beginning with the content (Path 2) brought into play the classic struggle of CBI: The content often eclipses the language objectives of the lesson. Because we knew from the grammar lesson plans that participants were capable of integrating language and content successfully, we wondered why the transfer seemed limited in these assignments. One factor may have been the demands of the assignments. The grammar lesson plans required the language structure to be the major focus of the lesson even though it was presented through content. In the thematic units, we encouraged participants to consider grammar points to include, but that was not a focus of the assignment. Based on the newness and complexity of the approach, the cognitive load produced by going from content to language (Path 2) seems greater than that produced from going from language to content (Path 1). It appears to be easier to contextualize language, as in Path 1, than to decontextualize language, as in Path 2. Path 1 requires building content and meaningful tasks around a given structure. Path 2 requires the teacher to first identify the language structures required to comprehend texts or perform tasks, thus adding another cognitive layer to the planning process. While grammar instruction that works from language to content differs from traditional grammar instruction, it still uses grammatical structures as a starting point. Instruction that develops from content to language may be a new way of teaching language for novice teachers, meaning that for many, learning to plan language lessons that begin with content will take longer and require more models.
To further add to the complexity involved in creating the thematic units, the grammar objectives were not the only possible language objectives, because we also wanted participants to plan instruction that developed fluency, skills and strategies in speaking, listening, reading and writing. In addition, they needed to align their plans with national and state standards. We suspect that the TESOL Standards may have led participants away from formulating specific grammar objectives. They are written to address language functions and they do not specify the grammar needed to perform language functions. This is left to the teacher to uncover. This could explain why our students often designed content-based lessons/units that targeted language skills in a general sense but neglected specific linguistic forms. A final challenge in the thematic units was the need to think about curriculum on a broad scale rather than focus on a single day of instruction. The reflections from the units support the idea that participants experienced cognitive overload and the neglect of grammar was probably due to the pressures of other competing task demands. The weight of these competing demands may explain the general trend of neglecting grammar instruction in CBI as well as the results in this particular study. Moreover, no one has determined an optimal level of grammar integration in CBI, and the vague admonitions to bring in grammar instruction in an integrated way when it arises naturally from the content may be driving the trend to neglect grammar in this approach to language instruction.
