Research on Second Language Teacher Education

A Sociocultural Perspective on Professional Development

Karen E. Johnson, Paula R. Golombek, Karen E. Johnson, Paula R. Golombek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415883320
• eBook ISBN: 9781136924064
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Embracing a sociocultural perspective on human cognition and employing an array of methodological tools for data collection and analysis, this volume documents the complexities of second language teachers' professional development in diverse L2 teacher education programs around the world, including Asia, South America, Europe, and North America, and traces that development both over time and within the broader cultural, historical and institutional settings and circumstances of teachers' work.

This systematic examination of teacher professional development illuminates in multiple ways the discursive practices that shape teachers' knowing, thinking, and doing and provides a window into how alternative mediational means can create opportunities for teachers to move toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices within the settings and circumstances of their work. The chapters represent both native and nonnative English speaking pre-service and in-service L2 teachers at all levels from K-12 through higher education, and examine significant challenges that are present in L2 teacher education programs.

Chapter 1
A Sociocultural Theoretical Perspective on Teacher Professional Development

Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek
The Pennsylvania State University
University of Florida

In this introductory chapter we argue that a sociocultural theoretical perspective, as a psychological theory of mind, has the potential to explicate the origins, mechanisms, nature, and consequences of teacher professional development at all phases of teachers’ careers and in all contexts where they live, learn, and work. In explaining the epistemological underpinnings of this perspective, most Vygotskian scholars start at its core: human cognition originates in and emerges out of participation in social activities. In stating “any higher mental function was external and social before it was internal” Vygotsky (1960/1997, p. 67) argued for the inherent interconnectedness of the cognitive and social, a more radical stance where behavior and consciousness are a single integral system. Readers of Vygotsky sometimes fail to recognize the significance of this stance. Without denying biological maturation that unfolds with time, Vygotsky (1978) clearly distinguished biological from sociocultural forms of development, suggesting instead that all higher-level cognition is inherently social. Put bluntly, it “is not that social activity influences cognition” as is argued by many social learning theorists “but that social activity is the process through which human cognition is formed” (Lantolf & Johnson, 2007, p. 878). This is significant because when human cognition is understood as inherently social, the critical question becomes how do external forms of social interaction become internalized psychological tools for thinking. Vygotsky (1978) proposed that this transformation, from external (interpsychological) to internal (intrapsychological), is not direct but mediated. Human cognition is mediated by virtue of being situated in a cultural environment and it is from this cultural environment that we acquire the representational systems, most notably language, that ultimately become the medium, mediator, and tools of thought. Consequently, cognitive development is understood as an interactive process, mediated by culture, context, language, and social interaction.

If we consider this stance within second language teacher education (SLTE), we know that teachers typically ground their understandings of teaching and learning as well as their notions about how to teach in their own instructional histories as learners (Lortie, 1975). They thus enter the profession with largely unarticulated, yet deeply ingrained, notions about what language is, how it is learned, and how it should be taught (Freeman, 2002). Such notions, or everyday concepts, are formed during extended periods of concrete practical experiences as students and learners of language in which we are situated in the cultural environment of schooling and/or language learning experiences in the everyday world. But these everyday concepts are limiting in that they are based solely on observations and/or generalizations gleaned from a surface-level understanding of what language learning and teaching is all about. This kind of empirical learning, resulting in everyday concepts, often leads to misconceptions about language learning and language teaching. Experiential knowledge is insufficient, even detrimental, in the development of teachers’ expertise, and this then is why SLTE programs can and must play a key role in supporting and enhancing teachers’ professional development.

When teachers enter SLTE programs, they are exposed to the scientific concepts that represent the up-to-date research and theorizing generated in various academic and professional disciplines. Such scientific concepts are based on systematic observations and theoretical investigations, and function as explanatory of, albeit abstract from, concrete everyday experiences. Vygotsky’s distinction between everyday concepts and scientific concepts has direct implications for SLTE in that to establish themselves as professionals, teachers must move beyond their everyday experiences toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices. Formal schooling, from a sociocultural theoretical perspective, is an exemplary context in which concept development emerges out of instruction that links everyday experiences with scientific concepts and thus enables learners to move beyond the limitations of their everyday experiences so that they can function appropriately in a wide range of alternative circumstances and contexts. This kind of theoretical learning is what we should promote in SLTE, but it should not be confused with decontextualized lecturing about and rote memorization of abstract concepts. The responsibility of SLTE then is to present relevant scientific concepts to teachers but to do so in ways that bring these concepts to bear on concrete practical activity, connecting them to their everyday knowledge and the goal-directed activities of teaching.

Within SLTE, achieving this goal remains a major challenge due to the persistent theory/practice divide where the scientific concepts to which teachers are exposed in their SLTE programs are often disconnected in any substantive way from the practical goal-directed activities of actual teaching. The institutional separation of subject matter knowledge (what to teach) from pedagogical knowledge (how to teach) epitomizes a longstanding quandary in SLTE in which what teachers learn about language, second language acquisition, and language use and users in academic coursework remains separate from the pedagogical concepts, procedures, and activities that constitute the activity of actual teaching. This results in teachers, especially novice teachers, knowing the subject matter knowledge but not having the essential procedural knowledge to confront the realities of the classroom. For example, a teacher may know the form and rules for using the present perfect tense in English but lack the ability to explain it in ways that students can make sense of and use intentionally. Or when met by a student’s query as to why Americans frequently leave out the have auxiliary in spoken language, the teacher may give an uninformative response (“It’s just what we do.”) or an incorrect one (“We sometimes speak ungrammatically.”). It is hardly surprising that teacher candidates are often left with empty verbalism, where they can name the scientific concepts that are relevant to SLTE but have not internalized these concepts in such a way that they become psychological tools for thinking. Vygotsky recognized this fact, that “scientific concepts … just start their development, rather than finish it, at a moment when the child learns the term or word-meaning denoting a new concept” (1934/1963, p. 159).

Within general educational research, distinctions have been made between the accepted subject matter knowledge of a particular field, the general pedagogical knowledge of classroom processes, and the pedagogical content knowledge that teachers use to make the content of their instruction relevant and accessible to students (Ball, 2000; Shulman, 1987). However, from a sociocultural theoretical perspective this separation of types of knowledge for teaching is not only counter-productive, it is contrary to the fundamental principles of Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development. From a sociocultural perspective, human cognition is understood as originating in and fundamentally shaped by engagement in social activities and, therefore, it follows that what is taught, is fundamentally shaped by how it is taught, and vice versa. Likewise, what is learned, is fundamentally shaped by how it is learned, and vice versa. Cognition cannot be removed from activity since it originates in and is framed by the very nature of that activity. From this stance, knowledge for teaching must be understood holistically, and the interdependence between what is taught and how it is taught becomes crucial to both the processes of learning-to-teach as well as the development of teaching expertise.

If SLTE programs adopt the central premise that individual cognition emerges through socioculturally mediated activity, this should cause teacher educators to take stock of how we are expecting teachers to develop teaching expertise. We should be asking ourselves: What is the nature of the activities embedded in our teacher education programs? What are we collectively attempting to accomplish in these activities? What sort of assistance are we providing for teachers as they engage in these activities? And how does participation in these activities support and enhance the development of teaching expertise? Asking such questions requires that we look critically at the social practices and situated contexts from which teachers have come, within which teachers are teaching, and through which teachers are engaged in professional development as these practices and contexts will shed light on the social interactions that Vygotsky viewed as central to the development of new forms of thinking. Within SLTE, these new forms of thinking will ultimately lay the foundation for the development of teaching expertise.

Mediation

Recognizing the inherent complexities in cognitive development, it is clear that internalization, or the transformation from external to internal does not happen independently or automatically. Instead, it takes prolonged and sustained participation in social activities that have a clear purpose (goal-directed activities) within specific social contexts. Yet, formal instruction does not lead directly to conceptual development in a straightforward manner; rather, conceptual development emerges over time and depends on the agency of the learner and the affordances and constraints of the learning environment. And this is why mediation is paramount.

Mediation is a central albeit complicated construct within Vygotskian sociocultural theory that underlies the transformative process of internalization (from external-social to internal-psychological). Humans do not act directly with their environments, but use, Vygotsky argued, various tools to mediate their activities. Adults teach these tools to children through their joint activities, and these tools serve simultaneously to regulate the child’s behavior and to make available various means of self-regulation to the child. These tools, or mediational means, represent cultural artifacts and activities, concepts, and our social relations with others.

Cultural artifacts and activities have been described as “simultaneously material and conceptual (or ideal) aspects of human goal-directed activity that are not only incorporated into the activity, but are constitutive of it” (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 62). For example, Poehner (Chapter 12) describes the experiences of a second grade teacher who participated in an inquiry-based professional development approach known as Critical Friends Groups (CFG). Within CFGs different protocols (cultural artifact), or sets of procedures, questions, and time-frames, are used to guide the activity of the participating teachers as they collectively engage in critical examinations of pedagogical dilemmas that they have identified as present in their work. While CFG protocols function as material tools that are used to direct teachers’ thinking through social interaction in a systematic fashion, they also function as conceptual tools in that the kinds of questions used to direct teachers’ thinking are initially in the CFG protocol facilitator’s mind. In this sense, CFG protocols were not only used in the activities of the CFG, they made up that activity. And while CFG protocols can also be viewed as symbolic (i.e., reflective teaching represents good teaching) given their social, historical and cultural value of supporting teacher professional development, they can also become psychological tools, as was the case for Poehner’s focal teacher who adapted the reflective and evaluative qualities of a particular CFG protocol for her own elementary students as a way to engage them in peer reviews during writing workshops. Similarly, Verity (Chapter 10) uses a variety of cultural artifacts in her MA Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) pedagogical grammar course to challenge Japanese English language teachers’ normative characterizations of grammar as an abstract formal system. Tools, such as crossword puzzles, cartoons, journals, and tree diagramming, are transformed from products containing correct answers to processes that mediate teachers’ understanding of grammatical concepts. So, while the physicality of these tools matters, since they are material objects that exist in her course, it is their sociality, or how they are used to organize the activities of pedagogical grammar instruction, that matters more.

Concepts, both everyday and scientific, as discussed above, also mediate the transformative process of internalization. In SLTE, scientific concepts are presented to teachers in order to restructure and transform their everyday concepts so that they are no longer constrained by their apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975), but instead are able to use scientific concepts as psychological tools (thinking in concepts) to further problem solve across instructional contexts and activities. However, it is only through explicit and systematic instruction that the mastery of scientific concepts will lead to a deeper understanding of and control over the object of study. Formal instruction, for Vygotsky, “is the systematically organized experience of ascending from the abstract to the concrete” (Lantolf & Poehner, 2008, p. 12). In Allen (Chapter 6) and Nauman (Chapter 7) the scientific concept of “literacy” as defined by Kern (2000) was explicitly taught and collectively explored through various professional development activities in an attempt to enable teachers to reconceptualize literacy as more than a set of mental processes that go on inside the head of the reader or writer, but as means of human communication involving interconnected linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural dimensions. Throughout their respective professional development programs both Allen and Nauman trace the uneven path of cognitive development as their teachers’ everyday notions about literacy were exposed, challenged, and restructured as they begin to internalize Kern’s conceptualization of literacy as dynamic, variable within and across discourse communities and contexts, and involving “the use of socially-, historically-, and culturally-situated practices of creating and interpreting meaning through texts” (p. 16). In both studies, teachers’ conceptual development was not the straightforward appropriation of Kern’s conceptualization of literacy from the outside in, but a dialogic process of transformation of self and activity (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). In fact, critical to the uneven and rather idiosyncratic nature of their conceptual development was their own learning and teaching histories, the institutional and cultural contexts in which they were situated, and the nature of their engagement in the professional development experiences provided by their respective professional development programs.

Social relations, or human mediation, are also central to understanding how the network of our external social interactions mediates the transformative process of internalization. The social here is the centuries old historical and sociocultural legacy into which we are born. From birth, a child is involved in dialogic interactions in which caregivers use language to regulate the child. For Vygotsky, the child’s social speech, originally intended to regulate others, transforms eventually into inner speech through which s/he regulates her/his own mental functioning (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). However, human mediation is not limited to the realm of child cognitive development. Within SLTE, such forms of human mediation represent key ways to move teachers from and between everyday and scientific concepts so that the emergence of “true” concepts becomes the psychological tools that enable teachers to instantiate not only locally appropriate but also theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices for the students they teach. Of course, the specific forms of human mediation used will differ depending on the goal-directed activities teachers and teacher educators are engaged in as well as the institutional settings in which that mediation is embedded. For Smolcic (Chapter 2) involvement in a 7-month TESL certificate program that included a short-term field teaching experience and cultural/language immersion in Ecuador enabled her teachers to move towards greater interculturality, or intercultural competence. Critical to this shift was the coupling of direct personal interaction in a carefully structured cultural and linguistic immersion program with guided discussion, reflection, and guidance from inter-culturally experi...

Table of contents

• ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 A Sociocultural Theoretical Perspective on Teacher Professional Development
• Part I Promoting Cultural Diversity and Legitimating Teacher Identities
• Part II Concept Development in L2 Teacher Education
• Part III Strategic Mediation in L2 Teacher Education
• Part IV Teacher Learning in Inquiry-Based Professional Development
• Part V Navigating Educational Policies and Curricular Mandates
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index