The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teacher Education

Steve Walsh, Steve Mann, Steve Walsh, Steve Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317335207
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teacher Training

The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teacher Education provides an accessible, authoritative, comprehensive and up-to-date resource of English language teacher education. With an overview of historical issues, theoretical frameworks and current debates, this handbook provides unique insights into a range of teacher education contexts, focusing on key issues relating to teacher and learner priorities, language and communication, current practices, reflective practice, and research.

Key features include:

• a cross-section of current theories, practices and issues, providing readers with a resource which can be used in a variety of contexts;
• the use of data, transcripts and tasks to highlight and illustrate a range of practices, including examples of 'best practice';
• 'snapshots' of ELTE from a number of contexts taken from all around the world; and
• examples of current technological advances, contemporary thinking on reflective practice, and insights gained from recent research.

This wide-ranging and international collection of chapters has been written by leading experts in the field. The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teacher Education is sure to be core reading for students, researchers and educators in applied linguistics, TESOL and language education.

PART 1
Second language teacher education

An overview

1
What counts as knowledge in English language teaching?

Donald Freeman, Anne-Coleman Webre and Martha Epperson

Introduction: defining communities and their knowledge

A handbook is a sort of community statement. It is a socio-professional endeavor in defining what counts as worth knowing in and to a particular professional community. It puts a public face on the knowledge and understandings that community sees as central to its work. Compiling a handbook involves determining who is asked to contribute, about which topics and how these topics are organized, all of which reflect decisions about the knowledge that is seen as important in the professional community. These determinations are, by their nature, interested, by which we mean they represent a point of view. They will include some topics and miss others; they will mention certain views and overlook counter-examples. The point being that there is no perfect set of choices. However, examining the choices as choices – not with the intent of challenging or changing them – can offer insights into the state of mind of the community.

In this case, there are two communities involved in English language teaching¹: the ELT² community and the group that is concerned with teacher education. How this second group, the English language teacher education community (known in this handbook as ELTE), relates to the first, the ELT community, is central to understanding what counts as knowledge in English language teaching as a field. While there is give-and-take between ELT teachers and the ELTE community, ultimately the teacher education community selects and curates what ELT teachers are expected to learn and know. By publishing and presenting professional information, by consulting on and contributing to national polices and professional standards, by determining what is (or is not) included in preparing ELT teachers, the ELTE community defines knowledge in ELT. The teacher education community, as it prepares people to teach English to learners across a wide variety of settings and circumstances, and as it supports them in doing so through professional development, functions as a sort of gate-keeper and sustainer of what counts as worth knowing in ELT.

This view of ELTE as curating the knowledge of ELT teaching differs from the more commonly exercised one in which ELT knowledge exists and ELTE simply ‘packages’ it for teachers to learn. These two views – of ‘curating’ versus ‘packaging’ what ELT teachers need to know – contrast in important ways, particularly in how each frames the role of the ELTE community. In the packaging view, it is unclear where (or how) the knowledge comes from. Content is grouped, usually by theme or topic, to be delivered into courses and modules. This packaging is more historically based than rigorously systematic. As a socio-professional practice, teacher education is a conduit for inducting people into ELT teaching. In the curating view, teacher education is seen as playing a central role in selecting, promoting, and downplaying the content of what ELT teachers need to know. This gate-keeping role exposes questions of which socio-professional institutions – from universities to examination boards, from professional associations to governmental bodies – are contributing to determining what the knowledge base of ELT is.

Inasmuch as the first move in teaching anything is to choose what is being taught, examining what is selected as knowledge in ELTE exposes these choices. Based on this reasoning, we argue that the curating function represented in the development of this handbook provides a view of what counts as knowledge in ELTE. It offers a snapshot of ELTE knowledge at this particular moment in time. A handbook is a synchronic view of what is being taken as important to know. This knowledge is clearly not static, however, especially in a global undertaking like English language teaching. The knowledge is produced by people and used interactively in a variety of socio-professional contexts. Capturing the broad snapshots like those compiled here can offer a sort of archeology of how past thinking fits into current knowledge. The topics of the handbook offer this form of evidence of what the ELTE community (as reflected by the editors, entry authors, and publisher) see as important and worth knowing.³

This chapter uses the abstracts for chapters in this handbook to examine what counts as knowledge in English language teacher education. We acknowledge that these abstracts are, by their nature, condensed forms and authors may address knowledge differently in the longer chapter. That said, the abstract is what the author chooses to foreground; it highlights the content readers will encounter in the chapter itself. It is part of a socio-professional exchange that offers a succinct preview of the text. In organizing these abstracts into categories, we examined the versions of ELT teaching knowledge each abstract presents. We started from a framework of knowledge generations (Freeman, 2016), described in the next section.

Initially we anticipated this analysis would focus on the knowledge of classroom ELT teaching. However, this focus was substantially less than abstracts about knowledge in ELTE teacher education. Our first move was to decide whether the abstract primarily addressed knowledge of ELT, which nine abstracts did, or knowledge of ELTE, which 27 abstracts did. After making this determination, we applied the same a priori coding approach to both domains, taken from the knowledge-generations framework. In doing so, we are arguing that, as with ELT, knowledge in ELTE is not randomly organized, but that there are shared views across the ELTE community. We expand this argument subsequently in this chapter.

In doing this analysis, we assert three interrelated premises. First, we argue that connections between ELT teaching knowledge and ELTE deserve careful examination. Second, the prevalent view in which ELT teaching knowledge is simply a subset that defines the content of ELTE practices is problematic. This ‘subset’ view reduces a complex set of teacher-learning opportunities and processes to the problem of how to ‘package’ content referred to above. Third, we argue that this ‘ELTE-packaging’ view of knowledge needs to be rethought. We need to examine what is proposed as important to know for both teachers and teacher educators in English language teaching, and how the process of curating these ideas operates.

The knowledge-generation framework

To identify versions of knowledge, we use the framework of knowledge generations from Freeman (2016) who defines knowledge-generations as ‘patterns in how ideas about thinking and about knowledge in language teaching have been understood’ (p. 115). The generations are summarized in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Knowledge generations

Generation	Key issue	Versions in ELT
Disciplinary knowledge (what)	If this is the knowledge needed to teach languages, how is the knowledge used?	1.0: linguistics + psychology 1.1: + literatures 1.2: + sociology & anthropology
Knowledge of pedagogy (how)	If this is how to teach languages, are differences in teaching deficits in knowledge evidence of individuality?	2.0: + ‘innovative methods’ & SLA 2.1: + Communicative Language Teaching 2.2: + eclectic teaching; ‘best methods’; ‘post-method condition’
Knowledge-in-person; in-place (who and where)	If this is how individuals use knowledge in teaching, if personal experience and context shape what they do, what do language teachers have in common?	3.0: PPK & identity 3.1: PCK & transforming subject matter in teaching 3.2: knowledge as ‘contextual, contingent, and developmental’
Knowledge-for-teaching (why)	If this is how knowledge works in the process of teaching …	4.0: Knowledge-for-teaching languages 4.1: English-for-teaching

Source: Freeman (2016, p. 115).

As de facto socio-professional agreements, these generations characterize broadly defined – if tacitly held – consensuses. They evolve in time through a process akin to software development. Similar to a new software version, each iteration or generation replaces the existing version, usually for one of two reasons. Either it is in order to remedy a defect (or problem in the existing knowledge) or it is to introduce new features (or understandings). A new knowledge generation addresses shortcomings in the one it subsumes; these shortcomings arise out of new insights into, or changes in, English language teaching. It is important to note, as Freeman (2016) argues, that the generations are not intended to be read as a history of English language teaching, but rather as ‘patterns of ideas’ that develop over time. In this sense, the framework is meant to chart how socio-professional perceptions of what matters in ELT have shifted and changed over time.

The first generation: disciplinary knowledge

The first generation centered its focus around ‘the what’ of teaching knowledge with linguistics and psychology playing central roles. Knowledge in these domains served to specialize language teaching knowledge. Influenced by behaviorist theories, for example, the Audio-lingual Direct Method (ALDM) translated the psychology of the day into the classroom. Over time, as new teaching methodologies developed, the field began distancing itself from notions of language teaching in which disciplinary knowledge alone served as the basis. Less emphasis was placed on what was taught and more on how it was taught. The ‘parent’ disciplines of linguistics and psychology gave rise in ELT to the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition respectively. These shifts led to the second-generation focus on the how of language teaching.

The second generation: teaching knowledge-as-pedagogy

In moving beyond language teaching as the simple application of disciplinary knowledge to classrooms, the next generation centered on ‘the how’ of teaching. A range of so-called ‘innovative methodologies’ emerged (e.g. Community Language Learning, the Natural Approach, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia) (e.g. Blair 1982). Each methodology represented a self-contained system of belief and action with its own set of social facts. Teaching using a particular methodology meant subscribing to its definitions of learning and language. Responding to the mutually exclusive – and sometimes competing – views of language teaching promoted by the different methodologies, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emerged as a common language. Propelled by increasing global use of instructional ELT materials (e.g. textbook series such as Interchange and Headway, among others), CLT moved classroom practices from belief-based to more generic principles of teaching. The net effect was for teachers to assert greater agency in individual decision-making based on their students, their classrooms, and their context.

The third generation: teaching knowledge as in-person, in place

The third generation sought to reconcile the parochial notions of closely aligned belief and action found in the different innovative methodologies with the catholic views of teacher decision-making. In doing so, the generation focused on the relational nature of language teaching in the classroom, and it served as a basis for teacher decision-making. Supported by conceptual developments in general education, notably Shulman’s (1986, 1987) work on pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK, the third generation positioned teachers as knowers – of their students, their content, their classrooms, and their teaching contexts. This view recognized that teachers made decisions based on who (the students in their classrooms) and what (the specific content), and that expert teachers drew on such knowledge to transform content into something meaningful for their students. Thus, the what and the how of language teacher knowledge became dependent upon the who and the where. Inasmuch as teaching was shaped by how teachers’ approaches interacted with their contexts, the notion of identity – both students’ and teachers’ (e.g. Kanno & Norton 2003) – developed as an important aspect of research in second language teaching. Ultimately, this knowledge generation pushed back against notions of teaching as simply idiosyncratic, co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Second language teacher education: an overview
• Part 2 Core contexts
• Part 3 Language perspectives
• Part 4 The pedagogic knowledge of second language teacher education
• Part 5 The processes of L2 teacher education
• Part 6 Teacher perspectives
• Index