TESOL

10 Key excerpts on "TESOL"

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  TESOL: A Guide

  • Jun Liu, Cynthia Berger(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction: What is TESOL? The three dimensions of TESOL The term TESOL , an acronym for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages , has been used over the last 100 years to refer to English language teaching as a broad endeavour, as well as to various aspects of English language teaching specifically. For the purposes of this book, we intend to reference three primary dimensions of teaching English to speakers of other languages in our use of the acronym TESOL : TESOL as profession, as a field of study, and as an international association (i.e. TESOL International Association). Let us begin by briefly explaining what each of these dimensions represents before more thoroughly exploring each in the remainder of the book. TESOL as a profession When we use the phrase TESOL as a profession , we refer to the community of skilled practitioners who are actively involved in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. It is not surprising then that English instructors probably comprise the largest portion of TESOL professionals. That said, TESOL professional may also include researchers, curriculum designers, materials developers, teacher trainers, tutors, test developers, etc. – in other words, anyone who makes or directly influences pedagogical choices in the language classroom. Important to note is our use of the term skilled to qualify the TESOL practitioner. This is, admittedly, an aspirational quality. Anyone who has spent considerable time in countries where English is not a predominant language has probably encountered opportunities for paid yet unskilled English teaching, often accompanied by the assumption that being a native speaker is the only prerequisite one needs to teach English well. However, the goal of cultivating and supporting truly skilled English language teaching is one that has shaped 2 TESOL: A GUIDE the TESOL profession since the mid-twentieth century.

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  Success on your Certificate Course in English Language Teaching

  A guide to becoming a teacher in ELT/TESOL

  • Caroline Brandt(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  However, ELT/TESOL as a field is not limited to the teaching and learning of ESOL. It encompasses a wide range of related activities, including for example:  

  • development and administration of internal tests, such as those needed to place students in a language programme or to assess progress
  • development and administration of national and international examinations and tests of proficiency, including those such as TOEFL (the Test of English as Foreign Language) and IELTS (the International English Language Testing System)
  • development and publication of materials and textbooks for class use and for teachers’ reference
  • owning and managing private language schools
  • management and administration of departments within schools, colleges and universities
  • training and development of English language teachers at all stages: pre-certificate, certificate, diploma, Masters, Ph.D.; and for specializations such as EAP or Young Learners
  • training of ELT/TESOL trainers or tutors
  • moderation and assessment of teacher training courses such as those validated by Cambridge ESOL and Trinity College London
  • management and promotion of international associations such as IATEFL and TESOL
  • organizing and running conferences, seminars and workshops
  • research and publication of journals and research papers
  • publication of newsletters and magazines for teachers and language learners
  • design and operation of websites including chat rooms and discussion forums
  • recruitment
  • marketing and promotion of courses and materials.

    It is therefore easy to make a rich and diverse career in ELT/TESOL, including any or all of the above contexts, situations and activities.

  LINGUISTICS, APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND ELT

  Linguistics

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  Elements of English Language

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  • TEFL - Teaching English as a foreign language. This link is to a page about a subset of TEFL, namely travel-teaching. More generally. • TESL - Teaching English as a second language. The use of this term is restricted to certain countries. • TESOL - Teaching English to speakers of other languages, or Teaching English as a second or other language. • TYLE - Teaching Young Learners English. Note that Young Learners can mean under 18, or much younger.

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  Contemporary Foundations for Teaching English as an Additional Language

  Pedagogical Approaches and Classroom Applications

  • Polina Vinogradova, Joan Kang Shin, Polina Vinogradova, Joan Kang Shin(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The teaching profession is a lifelong learning experience; thus, teacher education and development goes beyond undergraduate or graduate programs in TESOL or language education. It includes continuous and regular professional development of in-service teachers in the form of professional discussion groups, professional associations, and professional development workshops and programs. For the purpose of this chapter, I focus specifically on academic preparation of TESOL candidates and discuss concepts and practical implications with this teacher population in mind. At the same time, these concepts and considerations are applicable and important in professional development of in-service English language educators as well.

  CONCEPTS AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

  If we think about TESOL programs, we often envision a great diversity of students and environments. In some programs, students come from various places around the world, planning and getting ready to go and teach around the world; many are going to places which might not be where they came from or socioculturally familiar to them. In others, still quite diverse, there are students sharing a common local knowledge, having a common cultural framework, and expecting to teach students in settings rather familiar to them. What are the principles and knowledge that TESOL candidates need to be exposed to and explore in order to be teaching professionals who are able to research, explore, and understand the nuances of their teaching settings?

  In this chapter, I focus on aspects that define contemporary teacher education and that can enable teacher candidates and practicing teachers to implement critical, culturally responsive pedagogy that creates space for translingual multimodal practices, views literacy as multilingual and multimodal, and recognizes advocacy as an essential component of teaching and professional development.

  EL Teacher Expertise

  A substantial part of teacher preparation and professional development undoubtedly focuses on the development of teacher expertise. But what does this expertise mean in the postmethod era when we need to prepare TESOL candidates to implement critical participatory pedagogy? Following Farrell (2013) and Johnson (2006), we can suggest that EL teacher expertise has historically included learning about the subject of teaching, in our case English; learning about teaching methods or, in postmethod terms, professional theories; observing and practicing professional theories through microteaching and practicum activities; and developing pedagogical expertise during the first years of teaching. Thus, from being a novice teacher, we observe a gradual movement toward developing expertise that Farrell (2013) views as both a state and a process. Expertise as a state refers to teacher’s knowledge after years of teaching, while expertise as a process describes teacher’s development over time. Johnson (2006) further expands on the development aspect of teacher expertise and describes teacher learning as

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  A Student's Guide to the MA TESOL

  • Nancy Bell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Key Concepts in TESOL The previous chapter concentrated on the broad areas of language, learning, and teaching, and in doing so introduced you to a number of important concepts in the field. We discovered areas in which there is broad agreement, but also learned more about the wide variety of perspectives that teachers and researchers hold about L2 teach- ing and learning. That theme continues in this chapter, as we take a closer look at some specific concepts related to TESOL. My goal here, as always, is not to provide a definitive survey, but merely to help familiarize you with the kinds of ideas you will be learning about in hopes that this will make it easier when you do encounter them and so that you might begin to identify areas that are of particular inter- est to you. If you are reading this book as part of a class where you are assigned a research project (see Chapter 5 for help on conducting research) this chapter can be a source of ideas, suggesting avenues for further inquiry. Whereas in the previous chapter we dealt to a greater extent with theories of language, teaching, and learning, this chapter will lean toward the practical, emphasizing many of the issues that face teachers in the classroom. Some of these issues have been selected because they are of par- ticular interest to the field at present, such identities and the use of technology in language learning. Others, like motivation and culture, are those about which new students seem to be consis- tently curious. The chapter is roughly organized from a micro to a macro view of SLA, beginning with individual differences in learn- ing and ending with a discussion of the ways in which larger social influences can affect what happens in the classroom. Other topics 51 52 A Student’s Guide to the MA TESOL include the myth of the NS, the nature of classroom discourse, the possibilities that exist for choosing and developing texts and mate- rials, and the challenges of L2 assessment.

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  Preparing Teachers to Teach English as an International Language

  • Aya Matsuda(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  University of Bristol Course (MA TESOL) Globalization and the Politics of English University of Bath Course (MA TESOL) Teaching and Assessing EIL Birbeck, University of London Course (MA TESOL) Language, Culture and Communication Kings College, London Course (MA Applied Linguistics and ELT) Sociolinguistics: Language in its Social Context (compulsory) Newcastle University Course (MA Applied Linguistics and ELT) English in the World: Global and Cross-Cultural Issues Surrounding ELF UCL Institute of Education Course (MA TESOL) English in Diverse World Contexts University of Cambridge Course (MPhil/MEd in Research in Second Language Education [RSLE]) Policy Context: International Perspectives on Language Education Policy and Multilingualism

  Table 5.3 Job advertisements

  https://jrecin.jst.go.jp/seek/SeekJorDetail?fn=4&id=D115020145&ln_jor=1&ln=1 (November 2014)

  Title: ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) instructor

  Department Center for English as a Lingua Franca, Tamagawa University, Japan

  https://jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=474114F4 (October 2014)

  Title: Lecturer in Applied Linguistics (English Language Education, Global Englishes)

  Department: Centre for Global Englishes

  Requirements: ‘The successful candidates will have established research/teaching expertise in …Global Englishes’.

  Overview of the Global Englishes for Language Teaching course

  Rationale

  Teacher education and ambivalence to change represent a possible barrier to moving toward GELT in the field of ELT/TESOL (Galloway & Rose, 2015). GELT (Table 5.4

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  Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL

  Global Perspectives

  • JoAnn Crandall, MaryAnn Christison(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  III Second Language Teacher Education for Diverse Contexts Passage contains an image

  5 Diversity within TESOL Teacher Education Programs

  Ali Fuad Selvi and Megan Madigan Peercy DOI: 10.4324/9781315641263-5

  What does it mean to be and become a teacher of English? This simple question has challenged and intrigued teacher educators for many decades and has urged them to rethink some of the most fundamental assumptions regarding teaching and teacher education. The increasing linguistic, cultural, and geographic diversity among English language learners (ELLs), especially in North America, has underscored the critical importance of equipping teachers with knowledge, skills, and dispositions to individualize planning, instruction, and assessment for a variety of student backgrounds and needs (Genesee & Harper, 2010 ). As a result, the notion of diversity functions as a common thread running through many professional benchmarks, standards, and statements in teacher education (e.g., AACTE, 2015 ; edTPA, 2015 ; Guyton & Byrd, 2000 ; TESOL/CAEP, 2010 ), and serves as a driving force that is reshaping teacher educational practices (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005 ; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005 ; Villegas & Lucas, 2002 ).

  Motivation for the Research

  Because of the dynamic nature of TESOL and second language teacher education (SLTE), it is difficult to generate sustainable models and programmatic structures. In addition, the task of creating viable responses has become even more challenging due to two important trends: (1) the exponential growth in diversity among ELLs and their teachers and (2) the recent calls for reconceptualizing the epistemological orientation of SLTE. The growth in diversity in SLTE is operationalized at various levels, including ethnic and racial (Curtis & Romney, 2006 ; Kubota & Lin, 2009 ), religious (Wong & Canagarajah, 2009 ), linguistic (Adamson, 2005 ; Valdes, 2006 ), intercultural (Corbett, 2003 ; Deardorff, 2009 ), and dialectal/variational (Crandall, 2003 ; Jenkins, 2014 ; Kachru & Smith, 2008 ). Recent epistemological orientations for SLTE construct teacher learning and thinking as situated in social contexts (Johnson, 2006 ; Johnson & Golombek, 2011 ; Zuengler & Miller, 2006 ). Collectively, these efforts redefine our inherent assumptions regarding the sociocultural and linguistic contexts of teaching, learning, and teacher education. Consequently, they underscore the urgency of examining divergent realities afforded by SLTE programs (Ramanathan, Davies, & Schleppegrell, 2001 ) in preparing the teacher workforce for both ESL and EFL contexts (Govardhan, Nayar, & Sheorey, 1999

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  Content Knowledge in English Language Teacher Education

  International Experiences

  • Darío Luis Banegas(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  5 Multiple Languages in a TESOL Course T. Leo Schmitt Introduction

  The New School’s MA TESOL programme is a thirty-credit curriculum that prepares students to be able to teach English as a second/foreign/new language to adults in a wide variety of circumstances. It promotes a socially conscious approach to teaching with an emphasis on issues of social justice in the classroom. Students are encouraged to not only become familiar with various paradigms and teaching methodologies but also to build and expand their own approaches to teaching based on their own strengths and beliefs, their institutional expectations, and in particular their needs. Such flexibility in the many potential educational contexts is a hallmark of New School MA TESOL graduates. Students can complete the degree entirely online, entirely on site in New York City, or in a combination of online and onsite courses. Students come from around the world and from a diverse mix of personal and professional backgrounds.

  The linguistic analysis courses form a core part of the New School’s MA TESOL programme. The two linguistic analysis courses (Language Analysis for Teachers: Phonology, Lexis, and Syntax and Language Analysis for Teachers: Grammar and Discourse) are required of all graduates and aim to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the basic linguistic building blocks of language, including phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse. These courses support the other courses in the programme that address pedagogy by giving students the conceptual framework, as well as the metalanguage, necessary to understand how language is formed and how it can be analysed and examined. While an entire review of all of the idiosyncrasies of English would be beyond the scope of a two-semester sequence, students should gain the tools necessary to be able to approach any linguistic question intelligently, analytically and critically. They should also gain the ability to explain these features to learners when and if appropriate.

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

  • Margie Berns(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier

    (Publisher)

  318 Others argue that with professionals and advanced academic students, in particular, academic and occupa-tional goals, often long-term, should be the primary considerations. Additional concerns entail the preparation, theo-ries and proficiencies of teachers within a given peda-gogical context. Teachers who have been educated in linguistics or language teaching pedagogy are often able to cope with a syllabus that is much more demanding than teachers who have been prepared in literature or another field – or who have had little preparation. Many teachers, especially in a foreign-language context, follow a single theory of language teaching such as Grammar–Translation or ‘intensive reading.’ Others have heard about certain methodol-ogies and practices such as ‘communicative language teaching,’ but do not understand the principles and theories on which these approaches are based. Plans for LSP teaching curricula must consider teachers’ backgrounds and theories; otherwise, the teachers may attempt to defeat the purposes of the curriculum designers. In addition, there are many LSP teachers in the world whose proficiency in the target language is quite limit-ed. Again, the choice of syllabus and language activities will have to be adapted for the language skills of the teachers, as well as for the students in the program. Like students, teachers have visions of student/teach-er role relationships. They, too, can believe that tea-chers are obligated to take the sole responsibility for classroom decision-making and learning. For these rea-sons, teachers must be an integral part of LSP curricu-lum development and training. If they do not accept the aims of a more learner-centered LSP program, for example, there may be conflicts between curriculum design intentions and classroom outcomes.

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  The Plurilingual TESOL Teacher

  The Hidden Languaged Lives of TESOL Teachers and Why They Matter

  • Elizabeth Ellis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The five sections above have covered issues from the field of bilingualism studies which are pertinent to the consideration of the bilinguality, or lack of it, of TESOL teachers. These were: definitions and dimensions of bilinguality; views of relative competence; routes to bilinguality; the bilingual as a person and bilingual language use. There are two further topics which lie at the intersection of bilingual theory and TESOL professional practice which need consideration here. One is the matter of the status and merits of native and non-native English speaker teachers, and the other is the conflation in the profession of the term ‘native English speaker’ with ‘monolingual’ and of the term ‘bilingual’ with ‘non-native English speaker’. These aspects are discussed in the next two sections.

  Native and non-native English speaker teachers

  In the context of TESOL teaching, native English speakers clearly have different linguistic experiences from those of non-native English speakers. While there are moves to abolish the distinction in a formal sense, the issues of their varying skills and abilities is a vexed question in the profession and deserves review here as a foundation for discussion of the native and non-native speaker teachers in the study.4

  In a practical sense the terms ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ are well understood in the field of English language teaching. Sharp distinctions exist worldwide in employment opportunities, promotion opportunities and even pay scales between teachers who have English as a first language and those who have English as a second or third language. Students of English often have strong preferences for native speaker teachers (Takada 2000, Widdowson 1992). In a very real sense, then, non-native teachers tend to suffer second-class status in both English-speaking and other countries. (Oda 1999, Liu 1999a, Kamhi-Stein 1999, Taniguchi and Oda 1997). Braine (1999) and Canagarajah (1999) both refer to the paradox of the American education system, which willingly accepts students from overseas onto MA TESOL courses but then limits their employment opportunities as TESOL teachers, once qualified, on the grounds that they are non-native speakers.

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