Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS INSTRUCTION IN TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS
The research presented here indicates that to enable language teachers to take full advantage of knowledge about language in their teaching, a significant amount of time in applied linguistics classes needs to be invested in helping novice teachers develop and engage in a variety of deliberate practice activities. These activities should have the following characteristics:
1) They should work on solving the kind of problems of procedure and understanding that language teachers regularly face in their practice.
2) They should focus on procedures used in language teaching or which could be used in a cognitively efficient way.
3) They should help novice teachers develop schemata of language learners and language teaching, especially schemata of information that is task-relevant and task-nonrelevant for a variety of language teaching situations.
4) They should focus on helping novice teachers organize their knowledge so that relevant information triggers is triggered by each schemata.
5) They should help novice teachers develop appropriate “rules of thumb” for their practice.
6) Applied linguistics activities should compliment each other and help novice teachers form a coherent network of knowledge about their practice.
In summary, these findings echo the arguments of Freeman and Johnson (1998) who argue that language teacher education needs to focus on the activity of teaching itself, the teacher as a learner of teaching, and the situated contexts in which teaching takes place.
However, there is a problem in making the activities in teacher education classes more similar to those in specific teaching contexts. First of all, a focus on the situated practice of language teaching while novice teachers are within a university program may put novice teachers in a situation where they have to function in a number of discourse communities (university seminar, school culture, student culture, etc.), each of which place different demands and have different standards of behavior, which can itself cause cognitive overload for the novice teachers (Schocker-von Ditfurth & Legutke, 2002). There is a need for the development of educational experiences which help novice teachers negotiate different discourse communities and engage in deliberate practice activities within them in ways that do not overload their cognitive capacities. (See Renkl & Atkinson, 2003, and Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler & Sweller, 2003, for more on designing learning experiences which seek to maximize human processing capacity.)
A further problem, as Larsen-Freeman (1983) has pointed out, is that language teacher education programs prepare teachers for such a wide variety of teaching contexts, that it is impossible to prepare teachers for each context they might find themselves in. How can we provide teacher education activities with enough surface and structural similarity to language teaching to allow knowledge to transfer if the individual teaching and teaching contexts are so diverse? First, the differences between different teaching contexts may be relatively superficial, which would mean that extended training for each context may not be needed. Furthermore, it is also possible that if teachers use KAL to investigate and solve specific teaching problems in a few teaching contexts, they will develop the skill and schemata for figuring out how to use that KAL in different teaching contexts, so that it would not be necessary to have them practice using KAL in all contexts (Anderson, Reder & Simon, 1996). In fact, there are teacher education programs who have developed ways to teach academic content in this way (e.g. Kessels, Lagerwerf, Wubbels, & Korthagen, 2001; Leinhardt, Young & Merriman, 1995; Wubbels, Korthagen & Brekelmans, 1997). Ways of reducing the cognitive load during learning are also being explored (Mayer & Moreno, 2003; van Merrienboer, Kirschner & Kester, 2003). However, these are issues that need further investigation in our field.
In addition, while it is often assumed that applied linguists provides at least part of language teachers’ content knowledge (Snyder, 2002; Yates & Muchisky, 2003), this is not supported by the research mentioned here because of the differences between the practices of language teachers and language researchers. In most contexts the purpose of language teaching is for students to acquire communicative competence, not to become applied linguists, which would mean that communicative competence in the target language is the content knowledge of language teaching. While language teachers may teach their students about phrase structure rules or negotiation of meaning, this is not the goal of the teaching or the content that students should gain, but rather a means for reaching that goal. Instead, the KAL produced by applied linguistics is perhaps better thought of as background knowledge which can be used to create knowledge used for teaching and to guide deliberate practice activities, much like biomedical knowledge is background knowledge which helps doctors understand and learn clinical knowledge, the principle knowledge they use in practice (Boshuizen & Schmidt, 1992, 1995; Schmidt & Boshuizen, 1992; Patel, Groen & Arocha, 1990).
