THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT IN PRAGMATICS
Teacher responses to phase one
Gains in pedagogical and curricular knowledge
We had anticipated that the materials development phase of the project, in particular, would enhance the teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and curricular knowledge. However, we found that involvement in the data collection and analysis phases of the project not only enhanced their knowledge and understanding of the pragmatics in substantive terms, but also impacted directly on their pedagogical understandings. Thus, even before the materials development phase of the project was underway, when the teachers talked about the aspects of language use highlighted by the empirical study, they tended to immediately consider the pedagogical implications of these and to reevaluate their past practice. The fact that the teachers often talked of the two kinds of knowledge in the same breath challenges a clear-cut distinction between substantive and pedagogical knowledge (McEwan & Ball 1991), which interacted at different levels.
On a general level, as the teachers became aware that a number of different aspects of language and language use were involved in requests, they began to shift from the view that they could simply teach items such as polite request formulae as part of the linguistic system to a realization that students also needed a greater understandings of the communicative values and cultural dimensions of the contexts which they are used as illustrated by this exchange from the focus group interview:
SE: So it seems to me that you need to...in doing those tasks with students or setting up any role play you need to set it up, spend a long time discussing what the relationship is and what’s accepted...
A: Yeah what’s appropriate
G: ...in that context...
E: But a- but also I think that as a teacher, you know, I think I tend to teach requests, y’know nice and neat...
G: In a box
E: ...not think about it in contexts
One teacher (C) commented that the project had enabled him to see language differently, as some sort of complex ‘3-dimensional...machine or organism’ that operates on multiple interacting levels. This realization led him to speculate on the complexity of language in areas other than mitigation, and to advocate working on deeper levels of understandings with students so that they understood the cultural expectations underlying a request. This view was echoed by others:
C: [...] and I think just to teach somebody the words as I said before doesn’t really work, and y’know we don’t understand why it doesn’t work and I think if you raise students’ awareness, leading up to the degree we’re doing in a project [...] then perhaps [it] unlocks a bit more for them and uh....
D: There’s something very similar that you have to um know what the whole scenario is going to be, also the cultural differences, I think that should be ... er discussed even before you get into all this [i.e. using polite language].
This increase in awareness also extended to other aspects of language such as ideas about individual variation in language use. As the participants reflected on the variation they had found in the native speaker data, they became interested in how expectations and practices may vary in different varieties of English, in rural as opposed to urban communities, as well as among individuals with different personalities, backgrounds and needs. This led to a pedagogically-oriented reflection on what the most appropriate model to use with learners might be and how far we, as teachers, should make our students aware of the sociolinguistic complexities of language use:
D: Yeah, so what model would we be looking at?
A: That’s right, so in terms of thinking about teaching materials you’re thinking so what’s an appropriate model to teach people, that’s kind of a generic model and...yeah...
C: I think maybe one model that works at raising awareness, that there are different approaches,
The pedagogical insights they gained from the project seemed to expand out to areas beyond those specifically addressed in the research:
A: So a lot of what I got out of it [the empirical research and materials development] was actually a whole lot about language teaching as well as actually, you know, the language itself. Yeh... I think I understood but I suppose it has really highlighted it. You have to be really quite analytical I think, you know, in our teaching
On a more specific level, there were also instances where the importance of particular features was noted. For example, the prevalence in the native-speaking data of embedded phrases such as ‘do you think it would be possible if you’, caused one teacher to comment:
C: [...] ‘cause I thought what’s going on here? – I couldn’t work it out...but it was something that sounded quite natural when it came out, but, it’s something I’d never teach in a million years.
The project specifically addressed curricular knowledge, in that existing materials were reviewed before new materials focusing on mitigation were developed. This review confirmed what this group of experienced teachers already suspected: that there was a severe shortage of materials for the teaching of this aspect of spoken English, especially spoken Australian English. They reported that their work in the project had helped them to realize how to analyze and present this area better for learners, and they felt better able to develop more teaching material themselves:
E: I got more of an awareness of what we do say and how we do use language and how what the coursebook gives you is so stilted and not based on reality
Overall, the teachers seem to have really appreciated being involved in both the empirical and the more pedagogically-oriented aspects of the study. They felt that it was very rewarding to be involved in the empirical research and then use the findings to develop practical materials, and they appreciated the opportunity to be involved in discovering things about language for themselves and to watch something ‘unfolding’ before their eyes. This greater personal investment in ‘knowledge’ seems to have conferred a deeper understanding than other forms of professional development:
A: Well, ahm, there’s a sense of discovery... so, you know, good to actually, you know, doing the actual interviews with the people themselves. Good to see the way people actually do that and be involved in collating the data so I suppose you’ve got more ownership of it. The sense of having ... the unfolding a bit.
E: That was stimulating; that was good; it was quite exciting when you start to see a few patterns
All five teachers reported that they would teach the area of mitigation much more successfully now than they had before their involvement with the project, and that they would approach it on levels that they would have ignored before:
Inf. So did you teach it much? Did you incorporate it into classroom practice?
D: Urn no, no. It would only be uh to be polite, um it would be using how to approach somebody, the openers and the closing, but not so much the uh type of vocabulary you would use, the type of words you would use in the negotiation, and I became very aware of that through the project, using words like just, past tense, you know and continuous, yeah.
They also found that they could use in the classroom what they had learned through the project, and that students were very appreciative:
B: I’ve been using it [the insights and materials from the project] a lot in my classes and I’ve been doing this competency and you know, and just going through the different stages that people use and speak, and you know the students have been really interested. In fact they said to me, they said to me, you know, this lesson has been really interesting because you know we had no idea that this is what people do......, and so a student of mine came to me and said, you know, she went home and told her husband, you know, we learned something really interesting today about how to argue for these different things.
And they enjoyed the opportunity to share their findings and the materials with their peers:
A: You do get this sense of ownership of it but a heightened sense of awareness of it as well. And then trialing the materials is also good...seeing how people respond to them.
....If they respond well to them it’s actually a very nice sort of thing, and then the other element is being involved in giving PD sessions for other people is another aspect of it as well. You know sort of quite nice.
Overall, then, this phase of the project appeared to be highly successful, both in terms of its products: useable research findings and teaching materials; and in terms of the benefits to teachers of their involvement. The teachers were expected to make a substantial commitment to the project, but this investment appeared to result in a strong sense of ownership of the knowledge they gained, and immense satisfaction at being part of something which created, as well as disseminated, knowledge.
However, such high levels of involvement are extremely demanding of time and effort and, as one teacher (B) put it, only ‘a certain type of person’ is able or willing to make such a large commitment to their professional development. The second phase of the project was therefore designed to offer less demanding professional development within the same area of subject knowledge by addressing the perennial concern of teachers: what can I do on Monday? This phase tackled a substantive area of subject knowledge (the mitigation of a request) through the materials designed to teach it in the classroom.
