Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
Linguists and applied linguists argue that language teachers need to learn about the theories and research findings generated by linguists and applied linguists (e.g. Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens, 1964; Spolsky, 1979; Stubbs, 1986; Pica, 1997; Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1997). These claims are often accompanied by lists of items or facts which L2 teachers should know.
“Teachers should be aware of the principles of word formation in English....They should be aware, for example, of such patterns as the d/s alternation in words like evade and evasive, conclude and conclusive...Teachers should be aware of certain accent-placement regularities involving the suffixes written –y and -ic.…” (Fillmore & Snow, 2002: 23).
It is claimed that teachers will be able to transfer this knowledge to the activities and contexts of L2 teaching. The hypotheses is that, armed with this knowledge about language, teachers will, among other things, be able to understand and diagnose student problems better, provide better explanations and representations for aspects of language, and have a clearer idea of what they are teaching. For example:
“Understanding how languages can change and how dialects vary in their phonological rules provide teachers with insights into the pronunciation patterns of learners in a classroom, as well as an explanation for the consistent difficulties that language students experience in speaking” (Grabe, Stoller & Tandy, 2000: 6).
The problem with this argument is that the concept of knowledge transfer has been used more as “a justification for the activity of educators and teacher educators rather than an empirical concept [to be empirically investigated]” (Freeman, 1994: 4-5). The purpose here is to examine this hypothesis in light of the findings in studies on learning and using applied linguistics knowledge, as well as other related research.
