Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
QUESTIONS FOR RESEARCH
I would like to pose questions that need to be investigated in order to understand the problem of applied linguistics in language teacher education more completely.
First of all, there needs to be more research on the cognitive aspects of language teaching. What kinds of procedural and conceptual problems do they engage in solving? What kinds of information is task-relevant or task-redundant for those problems in teaching contexts? What kinds of cognitive procedures are used by language teachers in their practices? How is teachers’ knowledge organized and what kind of schemata are important and useful for the practice of language teaching? What kinds of “rules of thumb” do teachers use and which would be helpful if adopted? If we are to help provide teachers with domain specific knowledge, we need to have a much better idea of what this is.
Secondly, more information is needed on the link between task similarity and knowledge transfer. To what extent are teachers able to use declarative information on language and language learning to develop the kind of complex knowledge and schemata for language teaching? How similar do activities in teacher education have to be in order for knowledge to transfer? How long, intensive and varied do the practice activities have to be in order to facilitate transfer? Does this vary according to the type of knowledge being learned or according to characteristics of the individual teacher? How similar are the activities of teaching in diverse contexts? In general, there is a crying need for in depth studies of teachers acquisition of KAL in teacher education contexts and their subsequent use (or non-use) in later teaching contexts.
More research is needed on learning in applied linguistics classrooms: What kinds of educational experiences are offered in such classes? What sorts of practices are teachers apprenticed to? How do teachers understand and interpret the KAL presented in such classes and how is this similar to and different than the way applied linguists understand that KAL? What differences are there between classes in the different fields within applied linguistics (i.e. sociolinguistics, SLA, discourse analysis, etc.) in terms of the educational experiences offered, the tasks practiced, the teachers’ learning, etc.
Furthermore, we need to know a lot more about possible forms of deliberate practice: How feasible are they? What kinds of knowledge do they help teachers acquire? What can be done in teacher education programs to foster the habit of deliberate practice? Do different types of people prefer different types of deliberate practice and are there some people who do not benefit from it? Do teachers need different kinds of practice at different stages of their development (e.g. Renkl & Atkinson, 2003; Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler & Sweller, 2003)?
We also need more information on the variety of ways that the diverse parts of teacher education programs can be made more interconnected and coherent and the impact of this on teacher learning. It would also be nice to know how interconnected a program has to be in order to reap the benefits of this and whether there are aspects of teacher education programs that are more or less easy to link with other parts of the program.
Finally, we need more understanding of the cognitive complexity of certain areas of KAL. What makes it more difficult to transfer some kinds of KAL than others? What cognitive processes are needed in order to transfer such knowledge? What can teacher education programs do to make the transfer process less complex for teachers?
