How MA-TESOL Students Use Knowledge about Language in Teaching ESL Classes
My current research agenda as a Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics focuses on professionalization processes of teachers of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL). My goal is to work as a teacher educator in this growing field. As I observed, interviewed, and examined the participants in my dissertation study (all students in a master’s program in teaching English as a second language, MA-TESL), questions gradually emerged: How will the knowledge about language (KAL) that these students are learning in their course work help them teach English? What is the connection between the declarative knowledge base they are building, and the procedural knowledge they will need in their classrooms? Finding a way to begin answering these questions, in theory, should better enable me to prepare the ESOL teachers of the future. I hoped to discover the links between coursework in an MA –TESL program and classwork in the ESOL classroom. These questions were beginning to be raised in the literature as well. What was the required underlying knowledge base for a teacher of ESOL (Fradd & Lee, 1998; Freeman & Richards, 1993)? How exactly do ESOL teachers put their underlying theoretical knowledge into practice (Jones & Vesalind, 1996)? What were appropriate components of teaching English as a second language (TESL) teacher preparation (Bardovi–Harlig & Hartford, 1997)? Some researchers have also argued for a need to completely reconceptualize the knowledge base of TESL teachers’ education (Freeman & Johnson, 1998).
One problem which arises from these discussions is that “the assumptions that have underlain the practice of language teacher education have focused more on what teachers needed to know...than on what they actually knew, how this knowledge shaped what they did” (Freeman & Johnson, 1998, p. 398). If one wanted to study what TESL teachers know and how that knowledge affects their teaching, how could that knowledge be gained? While specific aspects of language teachers’ metalinguistic awareness (Andrews, 1997, 1999, 2001) have been examined, particularly with respect to their use of metalinguistic grammar terms while teaching (Borg, 1998, 1999a, 1999b), the current study is an attempt to look at broader issues encompassing the whole range of KAL taught to MA–TESL students in order to answer the research question, “How do students in an MA–TESL program apply their knowledge about language to their ESL teaching praxis?”
