THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TEACHER LANGUAGE AWARENESS OF ‘GOOD LANGUAGE TEACHERS’
The third question sought to identify the characteristics of the teacher language awareness exhibited by these ‘Good Language Teachers’. The discussion of this question draws on all the data: the tests, interviews, and lesson observations.
The first, and perhaps most striking characteristic of the teacher language awareness of all three subjects is their willingness to engage with language, i.e. with the content of learning. In Andrews (2001) it is argued that teacher engagement with content-related issues in the classroom is a significant variable influencing the application of teacher language awareness in practice (Andrews 2001:83-88). The interviews with all three subjects show how central the content of learning is both to their thinking about language pedagogy and to their classroom practice. Each ‘Good Language Teacher’ engages with content in her own individual way, but for all of them content issues form the core of their thinking, planning and teaching. Trudi’s approach to engagement is offered as an illustration.
Trudi characterizes herself as a teacher who tries to be both communicative in everything she is doing and ‘very well structured at the same time’. She claims that her overall approach to L2 pedagogy is based upon her own school experiences as a learner of Latin and a student of her L1, German, together with her subsequent studies of linguistics, language acquisition, and humanistic psychology. She sees her knowledge of linguistics and psychology as going hand in hand, with the latter helping her to understand how best to draw on her linguistic knowledge to assist learners. With the students she currently teaches (post-secondary and adult learners in a tertiary institution) Trudi firmly believes that in order to learn the L2 they need explicit knowledge of grammar as a base on which to build up their implicit knowledge: ‘We know this intrinsic structure exists from psycholinguistics ... so we must give students all possible support to build it up ... If we teach the implicit way, then it makes the process so much longer ... If we try to use both the creative and the conscious way, then it helps ... They’re old enough to learn deliberately’. Trudi’s teaching in the two observed lessons is noteworthy for its attention to both the cognitive and affective/creative domains, as well as for the way in which she ‘scaffolds’ learners into using the language forms she is teaching: ‘... visualizing the rules in the first instance ... giving very carefully selected examples in the beginning ... make it clear what I’m talking about, and then go over to structured exercises, less structured exercises following, and ... to come more and more to a transferred situation in which they can speak freely’.
Trudi makes an interesting comparison between herself, as an experienced non-native speaker teacher of English with a study background in modern and classical languages, linguistics and psychology, and some of her native-speaker teacher colleagues with non-relevant degrees and basic TESOL training. She observes in one of the interviews that a number of those colleagues have said to her ‘Why are you doing tenses again?’ Trudi comments that as a non-native speaker she is constantly aware of her own mistakes and of the complexity of tenses in English. She suggests of her colleagues: ‘Maybe they don’t understand the difficulties the students face. So some of them said ‘Why do you teach tenses again?’ Sort of tick, tenses done, must understand them ...They don’t know that there is more behind ... especially behind the English tenses than ‘s’ in the simple present ... It’s how to use it’.
A second characteristic of the teacher language awareness of all three ‘Good Language Teacher’s is their self-awareness, in particular their awareness of the limitations of their own knowledge. As the Language Awareness test scores suggest, there are a number of areas of subject-matter knowledge, just in relation to grammar and vocabulary, which could be improved. Anna’s and Trudi’s comments above are indicative of the extent to which these teachers are aware of their limitations. At the same time, among these ‘Good Language Teachers’ such self-awareness does not have the effect (noted among some of the subjects in Andrews 1999a, for example) of inhibiting their engagement with content-related issues or causing any of them to adopt avoidance strategies. These are highly experienced teachers, all with very different classroom personalities but with very similar levels of self-confidence and self-belief. They all therefore confront language issues head on, with (as Trudi’s remarks suggest) self-awareness enhancing their sensitivity both to the challenges facing their learners and to those learners’ interlingual development. Their self-awareness is also linked to a quest for self-improvement. All three subjects reveal in their interviews the time and effort spent consulting grammars, dictionaries, and other reference materials in order to enhance their subject-matter knowledge to support their teaching. As a further illustration of these subjects’ recognition of the need for continuing professional development, it is worth noting that at the time of writing one of the two Hong Kong ‘Good Language Teachers’ had just begun a Master’s in English Language Education while the other had been accepted on to a Doctor of Education program.
Associated with their self-awareness is the willingness of these subjects to engage in reflection about the content of learning, and the extent to which they engage in such reflection as part of their pedagogical practice. From their interview responses, for example, including their stimulated recall comments about observed lessons, it was evident that for all three subjects the content of learning, and how best to make input available for learning was central to their reflections, both their reflection-on-action (before and after teaching) and their reflection-in-action (while teaching) (see, for example, Schon, 1983, for discussion of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action).
There are a number of characteristics of the classroom practice of all three ‘Good Language Teachers’ which could be attributed to their teacher language awareness and the quality of their reflections about the content of learning. As noted earlier, they all engage fully with the content of learning, and share a belief in focusing on formI at appropriate points in their teaching. Anna, for example, describes her own practice as follows: ‘I will make the language as a core in the language lesson, and then I think of contexts, situations for them to use the language’. In the same interview she discusses her own pedagogical approach in relation to task-based learning, the approach upon which the most recent English Language syllabuses for Hong Kong schools have been based. She describes task-based learning as ‘old wine in new bottles’, and says that for her ‘Language learning is central ... I mean there is some central element we need to learn: the grammar, the sentence patterns, the vocabulary, the writing, the reading, the listening. Whatever term we give, we still have to teach them [the students], we’ve to motivate them, to stimulate and engage them into purposeful discussion and purposeful tasks’.
In focusing on form, whether grammar or vocabulary, all three ‘Good Language Teachers’ appear to have an intuitive understanding of the importance of ‘input enhancement’ (see, for example, Sharwood Smith, 1991), making salient within the input the key features of the language area in order to enhance the chances of the learners’ ‘noticing’ as a prerequisite for subsequent ‘intake’ (Schmidt, 1990). The three subjects adopt different strategies to this end. Anna, for instance, uses a range of colors on her PowerPoint slides, to highlight particular lexical items, and to indicate contrasts of meaning, such as positive and negative personality traits. Although Anna does not use the term ‘noticing’, it is clear that this is her goal: ‘Only for familiarization. If they want to use it, they use it. If not then at least they have seen it before, it’s not something totally new ... Because it’s sometimes scary to find there are so many new words, but by association, by thinking ‘Oh, I’ve come across this’ ... then it will make them feel better’. Meanwhile, Bonnie, relying on rather more basic technology, makes use of the blackboard and different color chalks to highlight patterns. Trudi, too, relies on the blackboard. Like Bonnie, she frequently builds up patterns on the board at the beginning of the lesson, and leaves them there throughout the class in an attempt to promote assimilation by the learners. When interviewed, she talks of her very deliberate use of a combination of drama, colors, gestures and voice to help anchor the patterns she is teaching and to help set up appropriate associations. Bonnie attributes her current practice to observing and reflecting upon the practices of other teachers: ‘I’ve always thought that the organization on the board is very important for the students ... When I go for classroom observations, I’ve seen teachers who, when they explain things, they write on the board and they write everywhere ... and when they don’t have enough space, just clear up one patch and write on it. I thought that what the teacher writes doesn’t stay long enough for the students to absorb ... so I’ve made a point to be organized when I write on the board’.
The motive underlying Bonnie’ use of the blackboard is illustrative of another characteristic shown by all three ‘Good Language Teachers’: their awareness of learners’ potential difficulties. This awareness shows itself in the strategies that these subjects employ to make input available for learning: their strategies for input enhancement, the support they all give individual learners, based on knowledge and understanding of their specific problems and needs, and also the way in which they all skillfully control their own language so that it presents an appropriate level of challenge for the learners. Whether the students are at an advanced level, as in Anna’s case, or elementary level (as with Bonnie and Trudi), the teacher-mediated input in each case is pitched at precisely the right level.
It could, of course, be argued that many of these characteristics are part of the pedagogical content knowledge of ‘Good Language Teachers’, rather than specifically their teacher language awareness. We would respond to any such argument by emphasizing the close relationship between pedagogical content knowledge and teacher language awareness, and by suggesting that the characteristics outlined above are all either facets of teacher language awareness or aspects of pedagogical content knowledge which impact upon teacher language awareness in operation. As noted earlier, the model of teacher language awareness proposed in Andrews (2001) sees teacher language awareness as a major sub-component of the L2 teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge, which interacts with the other sub-components (Andrews, 2001:79). Recent reconceptualization of Shulman’s pedagogical content knowledge construct have proposed that pedagogical content knowledge is an amalgam of various knowledge bases which interact and intermesh in the process of teaching (Turner-Bisset, 2001), and have portrayed pedagogical content knowledge as an ‘integrated body of knowledge’ (Tsui, 2003:247). It therefore seems appropriate to include the points mentioned above in the discussion of the characteristics of the teacher language awareness of ‘Good Language Teachers’ because of the close interrelationship of these different facets of teacher knowledge and their impact on the procedural dimension of teacher language awareness, i.e. how teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and awareness of the language systems affect their pedagogical practice.
I No distinction is implied here between ‘focus on form’ and ‘focus on formS’ (see, for example, Long and Robinson, 1998).
