How MA-TESOL Students Use Knowledge about Language in Teaching ESL Classes
DISCUSSION
These four teachers had four ways of connecting theory to practice, of using KAL in their teaching. Lilly seemed to incorporate mainly ideas that had been pre–filtered and organized via the books she read or was using to teach and the courses she had taken. It would appear that to her, KAL applies to teaching if it has been organized into practical techniques, such as the observed ‘word search’ activity.
Pako apparently chose to resist incorporating KAL directly into the classroom. She openly claimed that she did not overtly teach grammar in her ESL classes, and questioned whether any concepts from her linguistics courses appeared in her teaching. Yet once the linguistic concepts had been organized, sorted, and packaged into a methodology, such as task–based curricula, she openly embraced them. She also seemed to be able to draw upon her underlying KAL to apply it to her teaching, as exemplified by her comparative/superlative chart.
Daisy used her KAL to teach, but in a way that was often not explicit. She drew upon any and all knowledge in her background to synthesize teaching techniques in a way that appeared to be quite spontaneous. If Lilly seemed to prefer using KAL that had been filtered into techniques and Pako those filtered into methods, Daisy seemed to act as the filter between her language knowledge and its application to classroom teaching praxis.
Joyce actively participated in the creative construction of her teaching practice from the bits and pieces of KAL that she had gathered in her career. In a conscious, metacognitively aware manner, she seemed to analyze, evaluate, and separate out useful pieces of information from her studies and experience, and then synthesize a workable approach to teaching, and apply it via a variety of techniques in the classroom.
It is difficult to prove anything given only negative evidence. In the case of these four teachers, KAL was seldom used directly in teaching ESL, but to what extent was this due to lack of opportunity? As an ESL teacher myself, with fifteen years experience, many times during the observations I caught myself thinking, “Now, draw on your knowledge of syntax.” “Ah, here you can explain semantic categories.” or “I would have used an example from my L2 learning to make that point.” Unfortunately, I did not codify and count those perceived opportunities. Rather, I focused on trying to see how in a variety of ways, KAL was incorporated.
These four teachers had received very similar preparation in their MA courses. They heard the same (or very similar) lectures, read the same books, and took and passed the same comprehensive exam (Popko, 2003). Presumably, they therefore had very similar KAL. Yet their incorporation of that knowledge varied widely. For Joyce, the connection of KAL to teaching was a conscious effort. For Daisy, it was an unconscious, intuitive occurrence. For Pako, direct application of KAL was overtly denied, though it occurred as a natural part of her task–based pedagogy. For Lilly, KAL seemed to lurk beneath her teacher’s intuition as she picked pre–packaged techniques to use in class.
Whether, like Lilly and Pako, a teacher chooses to utilize KAL only when it is prepackaged as a set of techniques or methodologies or, like Daisy and Joyce, a teacher chooses to begin with the raw KAL material and create their own means of applying that material, it may be that what is evident in the classroom is not KAL as such, but the application of KAL during praxis. If that is the case, it may be that what is of importance to ESL teachers (my students) is not so much KAL, but the ways in which that knowledge can be used to inform their practice.
In the cases of Lilly, Pako, and Daisy, it seems that a major problem is the lack of overt connections between declarative and procedural knowledge, between KAL and the classroom, while Joyce seemed to make her own connections. Perhaps teaching about language in linguistics and grammar courses, with separate methodology courses is not the best way to approach ESL teacher preparation. Language knowledge itself seems to be helpful, but no knowledge is helpful without application. It may be important to ensure that our students have protocols for applying certain aspects of KAL to their own teaching. Applied linguistics courses might be better in that regard than hard linguistics classes.
Certainly, direct references to knowledge gained in linguistics courses was mentioned by Daisy and Joyce, but at the same time, all four participants referred to knowledge gained in their methodology courses. Perhaps their Grammar course, in which they spent weeks diagramming sentences, could have been more helpful as a pedagogical grammar course in which the focus would be on methods of teaching grammar. Alternatively, given that curricula are difficult to change, there might be other options. Perhaps the issue is really one of articulation between courses, for example, the methodology course might include a unit on how to get from tree diagramming to useful grammar explanations. Phonology might be followed by a unit on teaching pronunciation. At any rate, it seems to be the case that while these participants did apply their KAL to their teaching, they did not always do so in a disciplined way, and they were frequently unable to articulate how and why they were doing so. A more deliberate articulation of methodology and linguistics within MA–TESL programs might provide teachers with a more disciplined approach to utilizing their KAL in ESL classrooms.
