Using Bulgarian Mini-Lessons in an SLA Course to Improve the KAL of American ESL Teachers
This research was inspired by some of the challenges I faced as an instructor of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) courses in an MA TESOL program with mostly nontraditional student population. When I started teaching four years ago I had just finished my Ph.D. in Foreign and Second Language Education. I remember how thrilled I was at the idea of designing my own syllabus and teaching my first SLA course. I vividly remember my first class and the question I asked my students after introducing myself: “I assume you are students in the TESOL program who are preparing to become ESL teachers”, I said. The answer came back like a blow: “No”, they said, “We already teach ESL students”. I tried to conceal my surprise and started handing out the syllabus that described the goals and assignments for the course. Students had to read numerous articles on SLA and do a presentation on a topic of their own choice. When I finished, they asked for more information because they were not familiar with some of the topics that they were supposed to select for their presentations. It was only then that I realized that even though my students were teachers, they had no background knowledge in either Linguistics or Second Language Acquisition. Needless to say I had a very difficult first semester.
Since that time I have completely changed my way of teaching this class. I have learned through both my experience and my reading of the research (van Lier, 1996; Bartels, 2002; Lo, 2001) that students need more than lectures on the theories of SLA in order to be able to understand these theories and apply them in their future teaching.
Teacher knowledge has three major dimensions: subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge (Shulman, 1986). All three dimensions are important in making decisions in actual practice. However, most of these decisions are also based on beliefs and assumptions, which seem to be an inextricable part of teacher knowledge (Woods, 1996). Courses of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in language teacher education programs seem to emphasize only one aspect of teacher knowledge, that of content knowledge. However, most of the time students enter these courses with certain well-established beliefs and attitudes about the concepts and processes of language learning. These beliefs play an important role in all aspects of teaching as they seem to consciously or unconsciously inform one’s knowledge base.
Teacher trainers in SLA have their own hypotheses about what their students should be able to do as a result of taking a course. However, they do not always take as a starting point in their teaching the students’ current knowledge of language and language learning. One’s beliefs are usually a result of their current state of knowledge in a field. Most of the research on the role and importance of teacher beliefs and KAL in language education focuses on teachers’ classroom behavior (Woods, 1996; Borg, 1998). Only a few studies examine the changes of teacher trainees’ KAL over the course of study in a teacher education program (Peacock, 2001; Brown and McGannon, 1998 and Breen, 1991). The results from these studies indicate that studying pre-service and in-service teacher beliefs and knowledge base helps not only raise trainees’ awareness of their current knowledge (Horwitz, 1985) but also target some incorrect beliefs and correct them through both the teaching method and content of the training courses. Breen (1991) suggests that in order to achieve any changes in the trainees’ knowledge base, researchers need to promote teachers’ reflections and ask them to evaluate their beliefs on the basis of “actual classroom events.” Bartels (2002) talks about the double standards that seem to exist to date as “language teachers are expected to conduct research on their practice.... but KAL teachers are not expected to the same” (p.74). He suggests that KAL teachers should investigate the effect of their own teaching through different methods using quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis techniques.
There seems to be a need to look at the way teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL) changes as a result of particular applied linguistics instruction that offers them actual classroom experiences. One way to achieve this in a SLA class is through offering teacher trainees language experience with lessons in a foreign language that they do not speak. Thus through their personal experiences in the process of language learning and reflecting on this experience, trainees can better internalize the concepts of language acquisition and later apply this knowledge in their future teaching practice.
The purpose of this study was to examine the use of mini-lessons in a language students did not speak as a pedagogical tool to demonstrate different language learning theories, concepts, and methods and thus facilitate learning about SLA.
