Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning
CONCLUSION
The study raised several issues related to language teacher education. How can we best support the development of KAL in preservice teachers and its applicability to CBI? More fundamentally, what constitutes successful integration of language and content in CBI? What is the ideal amount of grammar instruction in CBI in any given context? To more effectively prepare our preservice teachers to meet the challenges of CBI, we need a clearer idea of what that instruction should entail. Presently, there seem to be competing notions: Masters’ (2000) position that CBI instructors need to make sure that they adequately cover grammar versus the suggestion to teach grammar only as it arises from the content on a “need to know” basis (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994). While any definitive answer to the question of ideal grammar instruction depends on the particular learning context, the loosely defined role of grammar in CBI may be responsible for the observed lack of attention to that aspect of language in classes using CBI. To ensure that ESL students get instruction in grammar, it may be advisable to encourage teachers to take Path 1 (language to content) when appropriate. While the general assumption in CBI is that teachers should derive the grammar from the content rather than vice versa, it may be necessary at times to start from the language needs and then fit content to grammar instruction. This would be important to address problematic structures as identified by learners’ errors/omissions, as well as externally set standards and curricula. The reality of the K-12 context in the U.S., however, is that teachers also need to be particularly skilled in the planning process of Path 2 (content to language), because schools are increasingly instituting inclusion and collaborative models, which require the ESL teacher to base instruction on grade-level content. Even pull-out models are moving their curricula toward alignment with the grade-level content and skills to support students’ success in the mainstream. Therefore, the challenges of Path 2 need to be addressed more extensively in ESL teacher preparation.
This research has shown us that transfer of KAL to instruction does not happen automatically simply because students take a grammar class, even one that focuses on pedagogy. Integration of language and content needs to be a deliberate goal and teachers must develop language analysis skills in order to decide what structures to teach when. As teacher educators, our role is to provide many and varied scaffolds to teachers new to CBI. As we reflected on what we learned from this research, we identified several areas where we could expand on our existing practice:
1. Analyze texts. Analyzing oral and written texts for challenging vocabulary, structures and discourse is an important step for teachers to take in assuring that language features are not forgotten in CBI. To some extent, the English Grammar course practices this skill through the use of authentic texts. However, we now see a potential benefit of bringing more of this linguistic analysis into the pedagogy courses to encourage students to attend to language while planning their content-based lessons.
2. Analyze tasks. In addition to analyzing texts for linguistic features, it is important to be aware of the linguistic demands of the tasks that teachers give language learners. We could encourage novice teachers to investigate what language is needed to complete the tasks they design. This goal could be reached by asking teachers to do the ESL learner task themselves or role-play it with a classmate. Another possibility would be for teachers to analyze recordings and task artifacts for whether the language they believed they targeted was actually used.
3. Analyze language functions. It would be useful to provide teachers with more practice in making the links between the functions in the TESOL Standards and specific linguistic features.
4. Use assignments that require integration of content and language. As we reflected on the different patterns of attention to language in the lesson plans for the grammar course and those for the pedagogy courses, we realized that the demands of the assignments were very different. The lesson plan for the grammar course started from the primary requirement that the lesson would involve grammar instruction, whereas that was an optional feature in the lesson plan assignments in the pedagogy courses. Therefore it was not surprising that grammar lessons included specific linguistic objectives while the content-based lessons were less likely to do so. The fact that the grammar lessons were generally successful in contextualizing the linguistic instruction demonstrated that students could plan for integration when asked to do so. Based on this observation, we have begun to rethink the requirements for the content-based lessons, i.e., require attention to language in content-based lesson assignments.
5. Provide examples of effective integration. A common problem in teacher education programs is the gap that students perceive between the theory they learn in their coursework and the practice they see in their student teaching placements. This gap is especially apparent in our experience with CBI. Our students sometimes do their student teaching in settings where the syllabus is grammar driven and there is little use of content-based instruction, or conversely in settings where CBI is used without any deliberate attention to developing language. The disparity between what we advocate and what the students see in their placements may also account for some of the lack of integration in their CBI assignments. Ideally, we would like to provide student teaching experiences that embody our goals. However, if this is not possible, perhaps as teacher educators, we need to provide more and varied examples of lessons and programs that integrate language and content so that novice teachers are able to envision themselves teaching this way. (See Bigelow, Ranney and Hebble (in press) for an example of a sustained content-based program.)
The question of how novice teachers learn to use their KAL in planning CBI, then, involves not only questions of teacher development but also questions fundamental to the practice of CBI. It would be helpful if, as a field, we would explore further what effective integration is. We have put forth a list of criteria (Table 1 in “Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning METHODOLOGY Data Analysis”) as one possible starting point. There has been work that recognizes the shortcomings of the implementation of CBI without attention to language (e.g. Short, 2002) and that calls for a balanced approach to grammar instruction (e.g. Larsen-Freeman, 2001). To help both novice and experienced teachers achieve a more balanced approach, we need to provide more specific guidelines and examples of how integration works in practice. If we want our students to transfer their KAL into planning for CBI, we need to present it as an approach that can incorporate deliberate, yet not traditional, grammar instruction, and we need to make that integration a criterion in our assessments. If we believe that grammar should play a more important role in content-based language classes, the skills needed to do the complicated task of integrating content and language need to be given more importance in curricula for preservice teachers.
We learned from this research that the directionality of transfer of knowledge is not necessarily from the grammar class to the pedagogy class, but rather that the classes seem to inform each other. This is surprisingly similar to the phenomenon that ideally occurs between language and content in CBI, where both are taught simultaneously and each grow through the other. When we began this study, we believed that the English Grammar class, as well as the linguistics and language acquisition courses, built KAL that would be applied to instructional planning in the pedagogy courses, not the reverse. As we survey other programs, we find that this is a common belief and that it is common to save practicum experiences and instruction in CBI for the end of programs. This reveals that many believe that the language teacher knowledge base is constructed in a sequential way and that there are some courses that are seen as building blocks and others that are seen as synthesizing pieces to a program. However, we would argue that pedagogical skills and KAL develop together and may benefit from being kept together from the beginning. (See Borg, this volume, for a concurring view.) We had the advantage of a program design that allowed for more ongoing synthesis of knowledge from the grammar course, the pedagogy course and the student teaching experiences because all were happening concurrently. The difficulties that we observed even under these favorable conditions suggest that the issues are likely to be issues faced by many programs that are trying to prepare language teachers who can integrate language and content effectively. Perhaps it is incumbent upon language teacher education programs to seek more ways that systemically facilitate practice-theory exchange, such as offering a wide range practicum experiences that occur when teachers are doing their coursework. Those in programs that already have many opportunities for crossover, as ours does, can look for ways to build more cohesion and thereby maximize the learning opportunities available.
Research on how novice teachers learn and what facilitates their transition into the profession is essential for the field of teacher education. Perhaps the most beneficial thing we learned about how to aid transfer of KAL to practice was by learning more about this issue as it relates to our program and students. Specifically, it was helpful to discover how novice teachers feel about learning to teach grammar in ways that do not match their preconceived notions about how grammar should be taught. This allows us now to address this issue explicitly with our students and design instruction that is sensitive to their stage of professional development as well as common affective reactions to the grammar course. By engaging in this work, we have come to be more interested in exploring how teachers, both novice and experienced, learn and choose to integrate grammar when teaching through academic content. It is in these teacher decisions where the interface between theory and practice lies with regard to integrating grammar meaningfully. It is the responsibility of teacher education programs to offer ways for teachers to see links between theory and practice. By structuring programs in such a way as to narrow the gap between the language-learning classroom and the theoretical pedagogy of language teacher preparation courses, it is hoped that knowledge gained from both will benefit both.
