This week I wanted to begin investigating teacher training and pedagogy in the ESL field. I was curious to find out if anything would suggest why the fields are so divergent or if there is overlap of any kind. The two pieces I read provided different perspectives: one was on what the research showed about teacher training, and the other talked about the difference between theory and practice in the classroom, or the difference between teacher training and classroom outcomes. Both are an important part, but an incomplete one, in looking at ESL teacher training. They are, however, a good place to begin.
The first article, “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half-Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory” by Suresh Canagarajah, discusses the development of “significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly” (7). While this study was specifically about a particular journal, Canagarajah suggests that it is a fairly encompassing view of the trends the field went through over the course of 50 years.
What was so interesting about this piece in particular is that the TESOL field, while clearly segregated from English and composition in scholarly activities, had a similar trajectory as far as how the field developed and how practitioners saw themselves. That segregation can be seen when Canagarajah mentions, “there is a need for TESOL to establish its autonomy” from other “older and larger organizations” (7). However, distinct overlaps in what the two fields value remain. For example, as late as the 1960s and 70s, a “modernist” approach to teaching language was most important, in which the assumption was that we all learned languages the same way (whether your native language was Spanish or Arabic) and that “grammar was key to knowing a language” (11).
However, by the 1980s things began to shift, and the modernist approach no longer made sense, because of growing awareness of both technology, diverse communities, and the “knowledge traditions” of other cultures (12). Here, the postmodern approach took over, and “language purity” was challenged, with the field looking at how languages came in contact with other languages and created new grammars and meaning in these various “contact zones” (14). By the mid-1990s, language learning was no longer seen as linear and the social met the cognitive, with an increased focus on emphasizing negotiated social practice to learn grammatical structures “according to [students] own needs and contexts” (16). It was also acknowledged that nonnative speakers simply couldn’t be effectively measured against native speakers with those nonnatives seen as deficient (17). There was also continuing acceptance of the idea that English couldn’t be or shouldn’t be separated from other languages and that learners create and co-construct meaning with their own grammars for the changing communicative need (19).
Canagarajah also argues that the field became “post-method” as of the 1990s, which means that the scholarship acknowledges there is no “best method” for teaching in such diverse contexts in which students have different expectations and teachers their own philosophies (20). Additionally the field now values meaning and rhetorical structure in reading and writing tasks over “sole focus on form,” and multimodality is also a central to the field (21-22). While teacher development was once focused on grammar knowledge and “implementing prescribed methods” teacher development programs now focus on communities of practice, identity theory, collaboration, and are concerned with teaching teachers to acknowledge and contextualize their values and beliefs (23-24). Finally, the field has developed their own research using both qualitative and quantitative approaches and the field is becoming more professionalized. Canagarajah also sees connections and overlaps to other fields in which they are making contributions, such as sociology and anthropology (31-32).
In this study, I see the overlapping social turn that seemed to happen around the 1980s and 1990s in both English and TESOL, where the focus was less on grammar and drills and became about, obviously, the social. Canagarajah gets at that clearly in the study of the literature, which shows a greater emphasis on teaching students to value their power in using English and the ultimate interconnectedness of language systems to each other. What was so fascinating is that he articulates connections and overlaps to fields such as anthropology, but never to English or other writing courses. It’s unclear if this is because he simply failed to make those connections explicit, or if the field of TESOL is so interested in separating its professional identity that it purposely severs these connections. However, this article talks only about what is being published in the field, not what is actually happening in classrooms, which could also reflect different practices than solely what is being published.
The second article I read this week gave some depth to the types of work that ESL teachers do in graduate school, but I felt it was a bit of an incomplete picture. I think I may continue with this work a bit further next week and follow a few more leads to see what else I can find about ESL teacher training. However, some of the insights in “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development” by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison were still highly useful in thinking through the differences between theories and practices in professional development.
Crandall and Christison mention, as does Canagarajah’s article, that prior to the 1980s, most teacher training programs emphasized applied linguistic theory, which would focus on things such as grammar. However, by 2000, a change had occurred to a more sociocultural perspective, which “recognized the teacher as one who creates knowledge by bringing prior learning and beliefs to the teacher education program.” This included acknowledging teacher learning as situated in communities of practice and allows teachers the chance to become both “users and producers of theory” in their teaching and learning (4). Likewise, instead of an emphasis on “teacher training” the field now stresses “teacher development” in which learning is a lifelong process. This is reflected in studies which show that for most teachers, even with education in teacher training programs, most teachers have “’surprisingly little change’” during their graduate programs on beliefs such as the importance of teaching grammar, vocabulary, or incorporating new ways of teaching and learning that are outside of their previous teaching and learning experiences. For example, while many teachers were able to incorporate learning strategies they learned during pre-service training, they did not continue with them after their education was over (6-7).
In addition to the importance of previous teaching and learning experiences on their own careers, new teachers often notice “the gap” between what they were taught in their education programs and what the reality of their new positions were, which led them to often have difficulty implementing these taught methods. For example, there was a lack of emphasis on things such as classroom management and working with special needs students or technology. This gap led to a disconnect between theory and practice. In fact, many teachers wished for more practical matters in their teacher education and less theory, which they found “not very helpful” (9-10) Ironically, this flies somewhat in the face of Canagarjah’s work, which suggests that the “post method” turn of the 1990s allowed teachers to acknowledge that there was no “best method” for teaching diverse communities. Crandall and Christison suggest here that some methods other than “do what works best for your communities” must have been taught during graduate training, yet what those methods are is not clear here.
Finally, Crandall and Christison discuss reflective teaching and collaboration as important parts of teacher development after graduate programs are complete. These are ways in which teachers continue to learn and improve their teaching well into their careers. Reflective teaching asks teachers to “confront their own beliefs, values, and assumptions about their teaching, their students, their curriculum, and their practices” and encourages them to consider how to best improve their work and help their students. Such work might involve creating teaching portfolios to best see over time the changes between their classroom learning and the practices they undertake in their classrooms (15-16). This also goes hand-in-hand with collaboration, in which teachers work together in peer review, coaching, and discussion, which reduces loneliness, stress, and improves practice (19). Ultimately, Crandall and Christison acknowledge the gaps between theory and practice taking place in teacher development, but see great hope in research in best providing a fix to help improve student learning outcomes (22).
While this piece was very useful in thinking through the ways in which theory and practice either align or fail to align in teacher training, what isn’t quite clear are the types of theories that are being taught, whether ultimately used or not, and if research is helping to improve such gaps, as Crandall and Christison suggest, what is being valued in that theory, and what types of learning outcomes teachers currently value. This is particularly important because it somewhat contradicts Canagarrajah’s work and makes both feel a bit incomplete. These gaps suggest that I need to dig just a bit deeper, and I will continue reading next week to see what else I can discover about what these theories and further information about preparation in TESOL master’s and PhD programs. Unfortunately, while neither of these pieces has great insight into the division of ESL and composition, I hope more light will be shed next week.
Works Cited
Canagarajah, Suresh. “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7-41.
Crandall, JoAnn, and MaryAnn Christison. “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development.” Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives, edited by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison, The International Research Foundation for English Language Education and Routledge, 2016, pp. 3-34.