Language Teachers: Research and Studies in Language(S) Education, Teaching, and Learning

1Aug 29 2012

Language Teachers: Research and studies in language(s) education, teaching, and learning in Teaching and Teacher Education, 1985-2012

Teaching and Teacher Education An International Journal of Research and Studies (TATE) appeared in 1985. I started doctoral studies in second language acquisition and teacher education (SLATE) at the University of Illinois during the 1984-85 academic year. I have “grown up” with and have been further developed byTATEthroughout my academic career. As I (re)read articles over the past 27 years concerning language teachers, I understood the language(s) teacher education landscape has certainly been influenced and challenged by TATEpublications and TATE has refined, broadened, and further created landscapes or pioneered frontiers of language(s) teaching and learning.

A landscape or landscapes of language teacher and language(s) teacher education may have slippery slopes. For instance, I was a German and English high school teacher, where German was a “foreign” language and English was the content subject matter for American native English speakers. I taught German during my Master studies as a “foreign” language, but was introduced to the issues of English as a “second” language becoming aware there was an increasing need to assist overseas college students who spoke their own languages to acquire English skills and proficiency whileattaining university diplomas. There were seemingly similar and different issues for “foreign” languages and “second” languages; I still leaned toward “foreign” aspects of language since my minor in a German literature department was foreign language pedagogy. I then further pursued a doctoral program emphasizing linguistics, applied linguistics, “foreign” and “second” languages, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), ESL (English as a Second language), EFL (English as a foreign language), teacher education, and my particular practical interest in communicative competence. It was so much easier saying I was in the SLATE program. I became aware of the challenges and numerous landscapes in language(s) teacher education and found it increasingly difficult to think I was “just” a foreign language pedagogue; it became clearer that issues blurred. I was further learning and being challenged to understand context of situation, participants, meaning-making, and meaning-potential, among other language ideas, issues, and conceptions. I was learning about school cultures, teacher perceptions, and considering the issues of curriculum (e.g., Schubert, 1986) in teacher education. I was (and at times remain) wet behind the ears when explaining what SLATE “really” meant (means).

My first job was in a curriculum and instruction department where I taught research, curriculum, models of teaching, and foreign language methods courses. My second job was in a Faculty of Arts where I taught methods, curriculum, and testing in Languages Other Than English (LOTE, i.e., “foreign”) and English as a second language (ESL), introduction to applied linguistics, second language testing and assessment, second language teacher education, second language education research, among others. My third job is in a Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation teaching a state mandated graduate course in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) and an online language testing and assessment course in a graduate ESL Master’s program. I have experienced varying slopes as a language teacher and language(s) teacher educator on various landscapes of language(s) teacher education. Yet, as Xu and Connelly (2009) proffer, “It is necessary to know what teachers already know when teacher education begins in order to understand the narrative context shaping a teacher’s learning. How teachers know and experience their knowledge is important to understanding the process.” (p. 222). How I know and experience professional knowledge is important in understanding a process of reviewingTATE language(s) teacher education articles.

Theoretical Backdrop: Postdisciplinarity

Larsen-Freeman and Freeman (2008) attended to various professionals’ plights in languages education by reviewing a relationship “between disciplines, knowledge, and pedagogy in foreign language instruction” (p. 147). They offer a “postdisciplinarity” view of a “foreign” language teaching and learning landscape. Using chaos and complexity theories they begin capturing a landscape terrain of “foreign” languages in classroom teaching and learning, and also further consider the phenomenon of English as an international or world language. “We see evidence that the field of “foreign” language teaching is becoming fractured in a decomposition that is animated by second-language acquisition (SLA) research, the changing roles for language teachers, the blurring of professional identities, and the globalization of English; in essence, there is no grand theory or primary discipline to anchor it” (p. 150). What is of interest for this review is how they consider the subject matter, content of language, and postdisciplinarity, among other issues within their extensive review. Larsen-Freeman and Freeman (2008) contend that language subject matter is protean because people in schools define it in various ways. “Language is also in, of, and for the world. It exists and flourishes in the lives and circumstances of its users, created of their worlds; it is thus a way of both being in and knowing about the immediate and more distant world” (p. 147, italics original). They further consider how foreign language may create tensions as a subject and a medium of instruction where some students focus on academic and social proficiency to access curriculum and that for some students learning language happens with learning subject matter. “The fact that language is treated simultaneously in two ways—as a medium of instruction and as a subject—tends to blur, if not confuse, issues of educational access and achievement” (p. 162). Yet, still an additional way would be learning a “foreign” language from the beginning at the ninth or tenth grade level to complete a two year foreign language graduation requirement. Moreover, when language is defined, “as mastery, proficiency, competency, or so on—this concept of outcome, what it means to know (an)other language(s), anchors the classroom teaching-learning enterprise and shapes in both explicit and implicit ways how the work of language teaching is understood and carried out” (p. 156).

Larsen-Freeman and Freeman (2008) agree that classroom language curriculum and pedagogy has attended to its increasing landscape and understandings of communicative language challenge different concepts of proficiency. Nonetheless, as they recognize, language proficiency is no longer "mastering the language system in its entirety but rather one that envisions competence as a dynamic and expanding proposition driven by need and tailored to situation”(p. 157). This move, among other issues is how, as Larsen-Freeman and Freeman render “the intense localness of the various practices of subject-language teaching has defined language knowledge in increasing local and contextual terms” (p. 149). I was reminded of the treatise by Larsen-Freeman and Freeman while reading abstracts and articles published in TATE regarding language teachers and language(s) education.Yet, I was neither experiencing nor considering TATE articles serving as examples of a “decomposition” of a field, rather, I saw a burgeoning “composition” of a field; the other side of a decomposition coin. I was developing a sense the articles provided local and contextual expressions, that taken together began composing landscapes or a sphere where various language education researchers shared wonderments and puzzlements, queries and inquiries, and insights and understandings concerning language(s) teaching, and learning (albeit using exclusively TATE articles). In this manner, I found TATE articles provided puzzle pieces of a larger compositionthat lent evidence to a plausible postdisciplinarity sphere of growing and developing research and studies inlanguage(s) teacher education.

Scanning, Reading, and Selecting the Articles

TATE offers a venue for articles dealing with teachers interested in foreign languages, second languages (L2), English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), German as a foreign language, French as a foreign language, and bilingualism, etc., among others (see Table 1). I drew together published TATE articles on language teachers and language(s) education and heeded Clandinin and Hamilton’s (2011) advice “to review how a particular research topic has emerged, been taken up, and influenced subsequent research,” to situate “current research in its historical context, that is, in the theoretical and practical context in which the research was originally grounded” and “to attend to the previous researchers who had gone before and on whose shoulders current researchers stood” (p. 1).

SCOPUS helped identify articles published from 1985 until 2012 (volume 28, issue 6). Searches for various labels were conducted (Table 1). These terms combined with “teachers” and “teaching and learning” offered a total of 111 articles. Duplicates and a few focusing on native English language study were removed. Although I feel English language articles deal as much with “language” as other “languages,” I reminded myself the lay public, as well as some landscapes within second languages, still demarcate “native” language from “second” language. I wasaware, as Larsen-Freeman and Freeman (2008) acknowledged, there were challenges with using the term “foreign,” reminding me that “foreign” language is “relative to the speaker and mutable in the situation.” For example, they cited Spanish in the United States as an example of a heterogeneous identity that “could be considered as a ‘foreign’ language to those with little or no knowledge of it, or as a ‘second’ language to those who use it in addition to their first language, or as a ‘native’ language to those for whom it is a home or heritage language” (p. 147). Although I hope eventually to see barriers removed, some do not yet hold postdisciplinarity views. I removed those few articles on “first” or “native” language and focused on 79 articles identified with categories in Table 1.

To acquaint (or reacquaint) myself to these articles I read all abstracts. I developed an excel worksheet and for each article noted country where study took place, country of author(s), pre- or in-service (or other), educational environments (e.g., primary, secondary, or tertiary levels), methods, participants, and major themes (selected from title or abstract).

The studies were situated in 23 countries (see Table 2) and a majority completed in the United States (N=31); however, ten further countries had more than one article, while twelve countries had one article each. At times the authors’ home institution or country affiliation was in a different country than where the study was completed (N=15). The focus on inservice language(s) education was represented in 61 articles (this included not only “inservice” teachers, but studies reporting on learning environments in schools covering students, administrators, parents, etc., and in university environments including undergraduate, graduate, and institutional [e.g., language center] courses, it also included researchers who were at times participants and tallied under inservice). There were 15 articles dealing with pre-service teachers, mostly for school environments, but including institutional (e.g., language center) environments (e.g., university and private language learning centers). Three articles attended to both pre- and inservice teaching. Qualitative analyses (N=59) were identified more than quantitative analyses (N=12), with some using both quantitative and qualitative methods (N=8).

During the first 10 years of TATE publication (1985-1995) five articles appeared pertaining to language(s) education. These articles were situated in the United States (N=4) and South Africa (N=1) and written by authors who were affiliated with institutions within the same countries (see Table 3). To gain some perspective from the first ten years, in the past year and half (2011-mid 2012) there have been 17 articles published in TATE pertaining to language(s) education situated in countries of Japan (3), USA (3), Hong Kong (2) and one each within nine other countries (see Table 4). Some authors writing four of these articles reported they were affiliated with other countries from where the specific study took place. A surge of articles (N=52 or almost 66%) relating to language teacher education has appeared in TATE the past five and half years (2007-2012), with almost 44% (N=27) appearing between 1985 and 2006.

The selection of (twelve) articles reviewed here was difficult; similar, to how many of the previous editors of the five TATE Virtual Issues felt describing their selection processes (Adamson, 2012; Avalos, 2011; Ben-Peretz, 2011; Bullough, 2011; Kaur, 2012). As with Avalos (2011) and Bullough (2011), I sought to represent different geographical regions and international groups of scholars, research procedures, and/or modes of inquiry. To this I would add I further considered inservice and preservice perspectives, varying teaching and learning environments, and with these came the participants with an array of languages and educational backgrounds and experiences. As with Ben-Peretz (2011), I tried to limit the selection to avoid a list of papers to be summarized; however, this may have been more difficult to achieve because of the diversity of topics, backgrounds, and perspectives. As with Adamson (2012), I loosely organized the selected articles into focal themes (acknowledging “loosely,” fully granting themes are not mutually exclusive). I resonated all too well with Kaur (2012): “I begin by acknowledging that another reviewer or I, at another time, would construct a different review since this exercise reflects the limits of my current understandings in the areas of [languages education] in teaching and teacher education as much as it mirrors the contents of the TATE articles” (p. 491).

I am interested as a researcher in various methodologies and multiple perspectives (viewpoint, voice, agency, etc.). I was further attracted to studies emphasizing context as a social organizational theorist (e.g., Kleinsasser, 1993; Foss and Kleinsasser, 1996; Sato and Kleinsasser, 2004). I am particularly cognizant of how methods and methodologies assist in offering data to collect, analyze, and present. Methods and methodologies create portals for documenting, capturing, and understanding participants’ context and for providing varying means to represent the vastness of participants’ experiences and identities. My particular focus in this review on methods and methodologies hinges on providing a lens to discuss what methods and methodologies allow and how the methods and methodologies shape shared evidence and knowledge. Methods and methodologies, along with context, shape as well how we understand language(s) teachers and teacher educators’ learning, how language(s) teachers and teacher educators know, and what language(s) teachers’ and teacher educators’ experience. Methods and methodologies interact with local and contextual terms and influence how language(s) teachers and teacher educators cast their concepts of language, language proficiency, language teaching and learning, etc. These and other preferences and interests probably coloured my selection process. Nonetheless, I attempted to select articles that assist in understanding the wealth of local and contextual insights, understandings, and queries that benefit growing, ever-expanding, and ever-moving (postdisciplinarity) spheres of language(s) teachers, language(s) teacher educators, and language(s) education.

The most prevalent theme emanating from a cluster of the 79 articles was that of narrative inquiry and identity. These two themes were easiest to identify while shuffling items on an excel sheet. The first five articles offer insights into autobiographical inquiry and inquiry with participantsas well as various ways to conceptualize, research, and study identity. The first two specifically highlight narrative inquiry and how it can be undertaken and are situated in China and Israel, while the next three articles give portraits of identities respectively of a language teacher educator in the USA, preservice language teachers in South Korea, and inservice language teachers in Iran. The next categories were less easily created. The majority of remaining studies variously looked at pieces of practical and pedagogical content knowledges, teacher knowledges, school cultures, attitudes, perceptions, and materials, among other more global categories. Themes particularly did not easily coalesce together but represented various and plausible pieces within these global categories and then I decided on two further sections that might focus on some of the representations of the varying themes. I first chose three articles dealing with themes that concern topics in language(s) teaching methods classes: reading comprehension, lesson planning, and teacher and learning autonomy. I label these Teacher Education Topics and these studies are situated within the countries of the Netherlands, Australia, and Japan, respectively. The final four articles I loosely label “Contexts” where learners, teachers, teacher educators, and wider members of educational environments deal with language teaching, language learning and development, and learning to teach language(s) within the countries of South Africa, Peru, Finland, and the United Kingdom. (I do order the two narrative inquiry articles, the three identity articles, the three topic articles, and the four context articles respectively in the years they were published to assist in allowing for the awareness of temporality. Also, see Table 2 for overview).

Narrative Inquiry and Identity

Xu, S., & Connelly, F. M. (2009). Narrative inquiry for teacher education and development: Focus on English as a foreign language in China. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25, 219-227.

Xu and Connelly (2009) provide languages teachers, teacher educators, and researchers with ideas from the wider literature of narrative inquiry, curriculum, and teacher education (e.g., Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Their article instructs and assists those interested in what a narrative inquiry encompasses using an example of English as a foreign language in China. They offer three general guidelines that honour considerations of reform, narrative inquiry as phenomenon, and narrative inquiry as method. These serve as catalyst to narrative inquiry, enhancing and highlighting the commonplaces of narrative inquiry including temporality, sociality, and place (Clandinin, Pushor, & Orr, 2007).

A generic quality I gained from this article is that it allows me to further enhance my understanding of narrative inquiry. It also serves for additional and further individual and collective (narrative) inquiries, prompting language teachers and language teacher educators potentially to inquire narratively into their language contexts, spheres, and landscapes. The article’s title alone caters as example for such potential; for instance, one could easily exchange “China” for any other country and pursue narrative inquiry. Various groups could also easily further replace “China” with a region, university, language learning environment, and/or language and education department to develop narrative inquiries that reveal collective contextual understandings.