Assignment 2: Teaching Technique Essay (2500 words max)
Examine
best practice in planning, teaching, and assessing the four skills in second language acquisition general.
Evaluate
the various techniques and strategies with reference to the literature.
Create
a lesson plan and an assessment task based on what you have learned about current best practice.
Justify
your lesson plan and assessment task with reference to the literature.
Reflect on
lesson planning or assessment design. What do you think about the value of lesson planning? What did you find challenging about designing a lesson plan and/or assessment task? Write a 500-word reflection on your learning process for this assignment.
Marking criteria Possible marks
Discussion: 20 marks
Practical application: 10 marks
Academic writing: 5 marks
Reflection: 5 marks
Pedagogical Reasoning in EFL/ESL Teaching: Revisiting the Importance of Teaching Lesson Planning in Second Language Teacher Education Takashima, H., & Ellis, R. (1999). Output enhancement and the acquisition of the past tense. In R. Ellis (Ed.), Learning a second language through interaction (pp. 173–188). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. VanPatten, B. (1990). Attending to form and content in the input: An experiment in consciousness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 287–301. doi:10.1017/S0272263100009177 Yang, Y., & Lyster, R. (2010). Effects of form-focused practice and feedback on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 235–263. doi:10.1017/ S0272263109990519 Yoshida, R. (2008). Teachers’ choice and learners’ preference of corrective-feed- back types. Language Awareness, 17, 78–93. doi:10.2167/la429.0 Pedagogical Reasoning in EFL/ESL Teaching: Revisiting the Importance of Teaching Lesson Planning in Second Language Teacher Education MAY PANG The Hong Kong Institute of Education Hong Kong doi: 10.1002/tesq.283 & Lesson planning has always been an essential competence for teacher candidates to master in their education for teaching around the globe. This is reflected in the thirteen teacher preparation stan- dards required for English as a second language (ESL) P–12 teacher education program accreditation in the United States (Teaching Eng- lish to Speakers of Other Languages [TESOL]/National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education [NCATE]; TESOL, 2010). The component of instructional planning forms one of the five essential professional domains of teacher candidate assessments, namely lan- guage, culture, instruction, assessment, and professionalism (Newman & Hanauer, 2005; Thibeault, Kuhlman, & Day, 2010). And among the six minimum assessments of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions as evidence of benchmark for quality teaching, two involve assessments of planning and implementing instruction. The first requires teacher candidates to demonstrate an ability to plan for supportive classroom English learning, and the second an ability to implement their lesson plans in the English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) TESOL QUARTERLY246 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100009177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263109990519 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263109990519 http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/la429.0 classroom, based on student interests and levels of proficiency in Eng- lish, including using resources effectively. Outcomes of planning (i.e., unit lesson plans) therefore logically become commonly used tools for assessing teacher candidates’ professional readiness for practice. It is believed that, among other tools of teacher candidate assessment, les- son planning can best reflect a teacher’s competence in integrating theory and practice. Findings of research into the knowledge growth of teachers have shed light on the importance of engagement in lesson planning in teacher development. The novice teachers reported in Wilson, Shulman, and Richert’s study (1987) show that their subject matter knowledge is enriched and enhanced by other types of knowledge in the process of preparation for teaching. The case study of the practice of experienced teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Hong Kong reported in Tsui (2012) shows a dialectical relationship between theory and practice in teachers’ reflective reasoning of problem solving in teaching. In the process of solving the practical problems encountered, Marina, the head teacher of Tsui’s study, began with an application of theory to help address the curriculum problem in focus. Marina concretized the abstract principles for the new practice by drawing on her practical knowledge as procedures and classroom activities; subsequently new practice resulted, and further principles emerged. It is through such a dialectical integration of theory and practice that the teacher’s enhanced understanding of the subject matter is gained. As reflected in these studies, engagement in pedagogical reasoning of planning for teaching or practical problem solving provides an important site for developing pedagogical competence in handling content for teaching, which Shulman (1987) first called pedagogical con- tent knowledge (PCK). In the process, teachers draw on various types of knowledge to search for more effective ways of representing specific content for learning. This search for better representation of the sub- ject matter not only enables teachers to develop a more varied reper- toire of pedagogical strategies, but also develops awareness and ways of thinking that facilitate the generation of these representations for tar- get students as required (Wilson et al., 1987). In the context of Eng- lish as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) initial teacher education, this means student teachers can be guided to apply content knowledge, including knowledge about language as a system and that about language acquisition and development, as specified in the con- tent domain of TESOL/NCATE P–12 ESL teacher preparation stan- dards (TESOL, 2010) in lesson planning. Through the process of planning as mediated within a curricular context of ESL/EFL teach- ing, and guided by use of related pedagogical knowledge, student TEACHING ISSUES 247 teachers develop an integrated understanding of English for teaching, that is, their PCK for EFL/ESL instruction. Despite the importance of the role lesson planning plays in teach- ers’ development of practical competence, exploration of this essential pedagogical task of second language teacher education (SLTE) seems scarce in language teacher cognition (LTC) research. This is reflected in Borg’s comprehensive review of research conducted in the previous decade on “what teachers think, know, believe, and do” (2003, p. 81) in the field. This gap remains in the related research conducted in the current decade. Common interests in LTC, for example, center on research exploring the practical knowledge base of EFL/ESL teachers (e.g., Kayi-Aydar, 2011; Mullock, 2006), teachers’ perceptions of their knowledge base and growth (e.g., Choy, Wong, Lim, & Chong, 2013; Kourieos, 2014), or teachers’ knowledge base for a few specific aspects of EFL/ESL teaching. For example, practical knowledge growth in communicative language teaching (CLT) is reported in Wyatt and Borg (2011), teachers’ PCK in reading instruction in Goldfus (2012) and Irvine-Niakaris and Kiely (2015), vocabulary teaching in Macalister (2012), and grammar explanation in Sanchez and Borg (2014). Despite the volume of work done, understanding gained so far about the “hidden side of the work” (Freeman, 2002, p. 1) in language teaching still seems insufficient. What often gets reported is limited to lists of skills or categories of teachers’ self-report of strategy use. For example, Mullock’s (2006) findings of teachers’ reported pedagogical thoughts are limited to a general profile of pedagogical action areas in EFL/ESL lessons. Goldfus (2012) identifies a list of insufficiencies in the EFL teachers’ surveyed content knowledge in the phonetic and phonological domains of their language system. In a study probing four EFL teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge in reading compre- hension teaching for test preparation, what Irvine-Niakaris and Kiely (2015) achieve is validation of discrete pedagogical strategies in snap- shots of practice in the pre, while, and post phases of reading in these teachers’ classrooms. Neither has the longitudinal study of Choy et al. (2013) of beginning teachers’ perceptions of practice in Singapore offered more than a general self-report of advancement in pedagogical skills within the first three years of service. By far what has been understood most about EFL/ESL teachers’ knowledge use in practice is in grammar explanation. The findings gained from Borg’s own studies (1998, 1999) reflect a more process- focused perspective in researching teachers’ underlying thinking in real classroom action. Such more in-depth awareness begins to show some dynamic features of decision making in reasoning for grammar teaching. Johnson and Goettsch’s research (2000) into the application of knowledge base in four experienced ESL teachers’ grammar TESOL QUARTERLY248 explanations in a Midwestern U.S. university intensive English program (IEP) reveals more specifically the dynamic nature of experienced EFL teachers’ use of knowledge in action. As shown in this study, an expe- rienced teacher in action draws virtually simultaneously on various cat- egories of knowledge acquired in handling the pedagogical problem at hand. In grammar explanation, for example, the teacher’s critical understanding of the linguistic content in focus may first help in dis- cerning the critical features of the grammar item/s in focus. The con- tinuing process of search is informed by the teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge accessed, as well as by a construction of the prob- lems students may have in using those items for the most appropriate pedagogical choice as perceived in the action. Such an orchestration of knowledge about the content, pedagogy, and learners’ current understanding of the teaching point in focus is geared to achieving the goal of best helping the target students to grasp the essential features as they use the language element/s effectively in communication. Andrews’s (1997) research on EFL secondary teachers’ grammar teaching in Hong Kong also echoes such a dynamic nature of knowl- edge use in action. In fact, he has been among the few EFL/ESL teacher educators who have probed the nature of language teachers’ PCK, in particular their content knowledge (Andrews, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2007). He argues that language teachers’ content knowledge refers not only to the declarative component about language (i.e., the teacher’s linguistic or lexico-grammatical competence) but also to the procedural dimension of using that knowledge for communication (i.e., the competences as encompassed in the notion of communica- tive language ability; Andrews, 2001) or language proficiency (Andrews, 2003) as he develops his model of pedagogical content knowledge for language teaching. It is this declarative–procedural nat- ure of the subject-matter knowledge of language that makes language teaching different from general subject pedagogy. The distinctiveness of language teaching is reflected in the fact that the content of language teaching is taught through language (Andrews, 1997; Borg, 2006), assuming using the target language as the medium of instruc- tion. In action, therefore, subject-matter reasoning for teaching—for example, framing of language content for lessons—is mediated through the teacher’s knowledge both of the language and about the language. In other words, language teaching is inherently mediated through the teacher’s communicative competence, although compo- nents of that competence may vary with different models of conceptualization (Celce-Muria, D€ornyei, & Thurrell, 1995). Andrews (1997, 2001, 2003, 2007) adopts the notion of teacher language awareness (TLA) to underline the special nature of content TEACHING ISSUES 249 knowledge for language teaching and the demand of awareness in teachers’ cognition when applying their content knowledge in practice. TLA includes the declarative components as subsumed within subject-matter cognitions and the procedural elements described under language proficiency in Andrews’s (2003) model of PCK. Andrews (1997) further differentiates possessions of knowledge and having the ability to make that knowledge explicit or accessible for learning, as in general subject teaching, or teaching language as knowledge about language, from using that knowledge in the context of language teaching/learning process. Effective language teaching involves an extra dimension of cognition about language as the subject of learning. Andrews refers to this explicit understanding about use of language as the teacher’s metalinguistic awareness. While more system- atic empirical support for the role of teacher metalinguistic awareness in EFL/ESL teaching