How MA-TESOL Students Use Knowledge about Language in Teaching ESL Classes
OBSERVATIONS
Each of these four teachers incorporated her background knowledge in different ways while teaching. At times, the connections between underlying linguistic knowledge and pedagogical decisions were difficult to observe. In fact, even after probing into the teacher’s justifications for using certain techniques or methods, it was occasionally unclear that the teacher herself could make those connections, which indicates how difficult it is to find direct evidence of a causal relationship between knowledge and action. The relationships are evident, but causality cannot be said to have been established. Two specific areas of linguistic knowledge were probed in order to discover how these teachers made classroom decisions: grammar and vocabulary.
Lilly: “I thought it was a useful thing.”
The first participant I observed and interviewed was Lilly. She had not previously taught ESL, and was making a conscious effort to apply methodological approaches learned during her courses. A reading course lesson to prepare students for an upcoming exam was observed. In this class, Lilly focused on application of specific techniques (e.g., timed reading, Word Wall, sustained silent reading). Although she used grammatical categories, she denied teaching grammar in her reading class, because she viewed grammar as taught in writing or TOEFL classes.
Approach to vocabulary.
Lilly seemed to be focused on techniques for teaching rather than theories about language, combining concepts that she learned in the Methods and Materials course with traditional methods which she said she had experienced in grade school. For example, she showed KAL as she discussed finding word meanings, but used techniques remembered from grade school; she did not directly relate lexical analysis to the analysis of syntax or morphology, both of which she studied in her courses.
The technique of word recognition that Lilly used, where students have to match the word on the left to one of four words on the right, has firm linguistic justification from the reading research (c.f., Schmitt, 2000; Stahl, 1998), and one of the exercises for her Methods and Materials course was to create such a chart. When discussing her use of the word recognition technique, Lilly referred to the fact that it was suggested in a particular course by a particular professor, but she did not refer to the theoretical bases for the technique that were part of the readings and lectures for that course. Lilly also used the traditional “look the word up in the dictionary” approach, in a way that was not encouraged in her MA courses, even though it caused her students some problems. It is interesting that she did not seem to differentiate between these techniques, one remembered from grade school, another suggested during her MA course work, and the last specifically discouraged in her courses.
Jeff: “Finding word meanings, how do you teach them that?” Lilly: “I had them post words that are new...first decide on whether it’s a noun. Is it a verb? What role does it play?...Just using the context. . . a word with, like, prefixes and suffixes we take it apart.”
Jeff: “What is ‘word recognition’?”
Lilly: “It’s one of those exercises...one of those [professor’s name] things!”
Jeff: “Why do you do that?”
Lilly: “To speed up their eye movement and help them recognize things.”
Jeff: (Referring to the lesson plan) “What’s the difference between ‘finding word meanings,’ ‘word recognition,’ and ‘building vocabulary’ as a separate concept?”
Lilly: “Did I write that?…We pulled out different words...we found their meanings using the word meanings, but then I did vocabulary quizzes with them.”
Jeff: “How do you do a quiz?”
Lilly: “[the students] supply a definition and part of speech.”
The following exchange indicates what appears to be a missed opportunity to apply KAL to a specific class activity. The use of translation dictionaries versus learner dictionaries was discussed in Lilly’s methodology courses (Popko, 2003) but she never addressed that issue in the observed lesson. Moreover, when asked about learner dictionaries in the interview she stated that she had not used them with her ESL students. Her focus on having students do the work well meant, in the case of dictionary work, using a translation dictionary published in the US rather than one published in an EFL setting, despite the fact that her textbooks and her professor strongly recommended the use of learner dictionaries as a way to build vocabulary.
Jeff: “On the test, you said...you didn’t want them to define the words, but you wanted to write those in a sentence.”
Lilly: “Yes, because so many of them would just memorize exactly from the dictionaries. I couldn’t tell if they knew it or not.”
Jeff: “But then you told them where (which dictionary) to get the sentences from...aren’t you expecting them to come back having memorized those examples?”
Lilly: “At least then they’ll be useful definitions!”
“A useful thing.”
The following exchange seems to indicate that Lilly’s primary focus is on techniques rather than underlying KAL. When Lilly discussed reading activities both in class and in the interview, she tended to give rather broad, macro–definitions rather than focused, detailed discussions of language. While she discussed specific reading techniques, she never took the opportunity to explain how language works. Lilly had learned the concepts of main clause, embedded clause, discourse markers, and subject–verb–object constructions in English (Popko, 2003). However, during the observation she did not provide these tools to her students to help them in reading activities, nor did she refer to them to explain or support her teaching practices.
Jeff: “You’re doing timed readings every day? What would you normally do following the timed readings?”
Lilly: “Then I’ll have them practice skimming things...the skimming and scanning they can do, so the faster ones I’ll have them practice that...Recognizing paragraphs is what we worked on recently just finding out if there’s time ordered, listing, all that.”
Jeff: “Where does that come from?”
Lilly: “In the book I’ve been using. I thought it was a useful thing.”
Lilly grounded her teaching in methodologies and specific techniques which struck her as potentially useful. In a sense, it is the application of theory as presented to her in ESL textbooks and methodology courses that had an impact on her daily teaching. In other words, in order for KAL to have an impact on her classroom, her teaching practices suggested that KAL first needed to be filtered through specific techniques and textbooks. Though she had studied semantics and vocabulary teaching theory, she drew upon techniques presented in textbooks rather than on her theoretical knowledge to explain her pedagogical choices.
Pako: “I guess I just have to go on teacher intuition.”
Pako was observed in a “core” class, which emphasized integrated skills for academic purposes. In the lesson she showed a video, discussed a reading, and played a game based on the theme of the travel and tourism industry. Pako exhibited KAL during the observed class, but during the interview, she downplayed its role in her teaching.
Pako’s background (teaching high school Spanish) provided her with alternatives to standard ESL classroom routines, and points of comparison between a variety of techniques that the other participants did not have. Like Lilly, Pako chose to focus on vocabulary learning in the observed lesson. However while Lilly was focused on individual word recognition and definitions, Pako chose a more holistic approach, focusing not only on pre-, during, and post-activities, but on the four skills.
Jeff: “Could you explain to me how you put the lesson together?”
Pako: “I always try to review a lot...multiple exposures...pre-, during-, and post ...That’s something I’ve learned from my methodology classes...I try to look at ‘Are they getting speaking practice? Are they getting listening practice? Are they getting some note taking? Are they getting some reading? Are they getting some writing?’ And I try to look at every day and see how can I get all five of those things in.”
Conscious choices
It is interesting that Pako seemed to have a clear sense of what she had done in Spanish classes. Yet, in her current ELI job, she also seemed to have rejected that type of linguistically based, grammar focused teaching. It appeared that her MA–TESL courses provided her with an alternative way to conceptualize the classroom. The curriculum at the ELI also provided her with flexibility to explore those alternatives without worrying about exit exams.
Jeff: “Was there any difference in what you would have done back when you were teaching high-school and what you did today?”
Pako: “I don’t think I was as good in doing the pre-, during-, and post-...It had to be grammar based because...that’s how you decided that you had the student ready to move to Spanish two or Spanish three...I had to get them to, you know, whatever, to pluperfect before they could go to Spanish four...The assessment was definitely done on grammar, a lot of explicit grammar.”
The ELI where the participants taught has a tradition of designing syllabi from a content–based instruction (CBI) model. However, Pako actively rejects CBI as a model, claiming instead to use task–based instruction (TBI) to write her syllabi. There is some justification for her claim, in that she chose activities for her students (e.g., writing a report, summarizing a video) prior to choosing the topic of each exercise. Examples of “tasks” observed in the lesson included taking notes while watching a video and playing a board game that focused on the language of travel.
One of the themes raised by Pako was the difference between being a classroom Spanish teacher, largely controlled by curricular objectives not chosen by her, and being an ESL teacher trained in the areas of syllabus and curriculum design. She expressed a feeling of autonomy to design and carry out her own course that provided validation to her as a teacher. In moving from a grammar driven curriculum with exit tests at every level to a curriculum chosen by the teacher, Pako had lost her sense that needing to meet outside standards was the driving force for her teaching. This allowed her to implement her own “task–based” approach, not based on “the linguistic perspective.”
Jeff: “Can you name the curriculum style that you think you prefer?”
Pako: “I like to think I’m task based…I try to find things that I think that the students will be asked to do in the regular university classes such as taking notes, lectures, and that task and I try to provide practice in that...I try to find things that I think that the students will be asked to do in the regular university classes such as taking notes, lectures…I try to provide practice in that…I have approached it as task based as my guiding principle.”
Approach to grammar
Pako, unlike Lilly, did use one example of explicit grammar teaching in her lesson: a chart to explain comparative and superlative forms of the adjective. However, she did not seem to see this type of explicit grammar instruction as a key element in her teaching.
Jeff: “You did that fill–in chart with the adjective, the comparative, and the superlative, do you use charts quite often?”
Pako: “To be totally honest with you...I haven’t done explicit grammar a lot.”
Approach to vocabulary
Like Lilly, Pako used explicit teaching of vocabulary learning techniques as a primary focus of the observed lesson. Yet she seemed to downplay the importance of this aspect of the lesson. Unlike her detailed discussions of recycling, task–based curriculum, and balanced skills, her responses to questions about vocabulary instruction were sparse.
Jeff: “I noticed that there were three techniques which you used for giving vocabulary: One was to give the antonym, right, one was to give a definition, and then one was to give an example...Are there any other vocabulary learning tools that you use?”
Pako: “I use synonyms a lot...I have them come up with sentences...vocabulary lists. That’s all I can think about right now.”
Approach to language
In general, Pako seemed more comfortable discussing methodology than language. During the observed lesson, her ability to draw on KAL to teach was demonstrated several times. Some of that knowledge either originated in or was reinforced by linguistics courses she had taken (e.g., the adjective chart; in her Grammar course, the ability to create a comparative is presented as one test to prove that a word is an adjective [Popko, 2003]). However, she did not credit these courses with having any influence on her teaching.
Jeff: “Was there anything that you did in class today that you think was either implemented or encouraged by what you consider to be the linguistics courses of this program?”
Pako: “You mean not in the methodology classes?...I seriously doubt that there was anything from the linguistic perspective.”
Jeff: “On what do you base (ELI student) grades?”
Pako: “I give them a point breakdown…I give assignment points based on...is their writing...persuasive, and is it correct, is it grammatically correct?”
Jeff: “How do you make a decision that one is at an A–level of correctness, and another is at a B–level of correctness?”
Pako: “I guess I just have to go on teacher intuition.”
Although she has gained KAL in her courses, Pako separates linguistic concepts, KAL, from pedagogical practice. While she might have chosen to consciously ground her ESL teaching in KAL in fact she did not appear to do so. Rather, she moved to holistic teaching methods, grading student success based on what she calls her “teacher’s intuition.” This separation is perhaps not unexpected, given the way courses were structured in her MA–TESL program, with discrete classes labeled “Linguistics” and others labeled “Methodology.”
Daisy: “Actually, it just kind of came to me.”
Daisy’s observation took place in a core class, with an integrated skills lesson around the theme of national parks. Students had brought in some paragraphs they had written, did a mapping activity, and had a reading activity based on a travel brochure. In the lesson, the language focus included both grammar and vocabulary, with an emphasis on learning and mnemonic strategies. During the interview, I was particularly interested in finding out the source of the rules and pointers Daisy provided for her students.
Several questions were designed to elicit comments about Daisy’s course work. It seemed that she was resisting this attempt by focusing on her own prior language learning experiences rather than on KAL recently gained in MA courses. Daisy had taken Sociolinguistics, a course in which the linguistic concept of register variation is extensively discussed. Therefore, her attempts to separate spoken from written registers through teaching of specific grammatical markers during the observed class seemed to show a direct link to the KAL she had acquired during her MA–TESL coursework. However, while the following exchange seems to show that Daisy connected her pedagogy to ideas learned in her MA courses, she does not make those connections explicit. When the interview finally brought up a point that required an explicit grammar rule, Daisy could provide one, but she downplayed its importance, and when teaching, she “didn’t want to go into it.”
Jeff: “Do you remember...where you learned that ‘and,’ ‘but,’ and ‘so’ don’t go at the front of a sentence?”
Daisy: “From grade school.”
Jeff: “Not abbreviating, was that something also that you – it was a long term thing?”
Daisy: “Yes, I can’t remember where I learned that”
Jeff: “When did you decide that written English was different from spoken English?”
Daisy: “Just from my own use in papers and it not working.”
Jeff: “Do you remember studying that construction at all?” (On Daisy’s correction of ‘I think I wanna’ to ‘I think that I want to.’]
Daisy: “Yes, that clauses, it’s like the object of think. It’s the that clause D.O.”
Jeff: “Do you remember the deletion rules at all for that clauses?”
Daisy: “Well, I mean it can be deleted...in written it sounds better with it. I don’t know, what are they?...I didn’t remember it, and I didn’t want to go into it.”
In the end, Daisy clearly indicated her knowledge of grammar, even using the jargon term “D.O.” for ‘direct object,’ but her focus in the lesson was on the practical “it sounds better.” It is interesting to note Daisy’s choice not to focus on the grammar rules, in what seems a rejection of their importance at this point in the class.
Approach to vocabulary
During the observation, many techniques for determining the meanings of new words were used by Daisy’s students. Since Daisy had taken a methodology class in which an entire unit was dedicated to vocabulary acquisition (Popko, 2003), it seemed likely that she had applied KAL acquired in that course to her teaching, given this evidence of her students’ vocabulary learning techniques. Daisy had trouble making this connection, however. Eventually, when asked quite directly to make a connection, she acknowledged that some of her teaching strategies might be connected to KAL learned in her courses.
Jeff: “They seem to have some pretty good skills for determining the meaning of new words.”
Daisy: “We’ve done context clues, and prefixes, and suffixes, and stems...I tried to recycle that...how you know that this is an adjective.”
Jeff: “Why did you focus on vocabulary this way?”
Daisy: “I want them to try to guess it. I want to promote learner autonomy.”
Jeff: “Did you do that in Japan when you were teaching?”
Daisy: “No, not really. That’s more of an academic thing... It’s just a study skill that’s good for EAP.”
Jeff: “Did you get any ideas for ways to attack the words in the (MA–TESL) program? Can you think of any classes that you took where some of these ideas came from?”
Daisy: “Oh, grammar, looking at the pans of words, morphology.”
In general, it seemed to be difficult for Daisy to overtly connect what she did in practice with where she had learned the concepts. She taught students rules she remembered from her elementary school days (e.g., Don’t start a sentence with ‘and,’ ‘or,’ or ‘but.’), and from her time teaching in Japan (e.g., context clues), alongside concepts taught in her MA courses (e.g., learner autonomy, her morphological focus on affixes). It became apparent that Daisy was not resisting, but honestly trying to answer the questions about the ultimate source of her KAL. However, that knowledge had been gained slowly over time, and she often could not precisely say when she had learned it.
Connecting practice with theory
When she could remember a specific source for her knowledge, Daisy very directly presented that source. In the exchange below, she not only related a pedagogical practice to an underlying applied linguistic theory, she went on to state that “connecting practice with theory” is something she learned in the MA program. She further teased apart these ideas by differentiating between the technique of reviewing and the explicit, theoretically grounded concept of “recycling” or “revisiting.”
Jeff: “Did you use skimming and scanning activities before you came to SWU?”
Daisy: “Well in my course that I took that certificate (the RSA), I learned about that and we did have to practice on students with that one.”
Jeff: “Can you remember where you first got the definition you gave them?”
Daisy: “From that course.”
Jeff: “Is there anything that you can think of that you do with vocabulary building that you didn’t know how to do before you came into our program?”
Daisy: “I learned, like Schmidt’s, noticing theory...I had the words underlined in that passage to bring it to their attention, maybe connecting practice with theory...Just recycling...I didn’t really know about, I mean not explicitly. I mean, I think I had thought about it, reviewing, but not recycling. I mean, what is the other one? Revisiting.”
In the following exchange, Daisy demonstrated how she applied her KAL, gained throughout her years of learning and teaching, to a teachable moment. This incident was particularly interesting in that it was a spontaneous classroom event. Daisy had not planned to teach word–attack skills, and had nowhere indicated that she used syntactic categories to explain vocabulary. At a key teaching moment, this aspect of her KAL became important, and was applied.
Jeff: “You led (one student) through that in a very kind of step-by-step way...Do you remember what steps you took to get…the right answer?”
Daisy: “I said ‘What part of speech is ‘attraction’?...What’s the word after that?’ I thought she’d know the word ‘is’ is a verb, you know, so ‘What’s the word after “attraction”? It’s a verb. What do you remember about the pattern SVO? What usually comes before a verb? Subject. What does a subject usually have? So, which word is the noun?’ And then I think she got “attraction” at that point, that that was a noun, and I said, “So, OK, what comes before a noun?”
Jeff: “Then you reinforced that for her, that, yes, -tion is a noun.”
Daisy: “Oh ya, I asked, ‘Why is it a noun?’ and she didn’t know.”
Jeff: “Did you consciously consider that SVO pattern as a guessing technique for your students prior to the (MA–TESL) program?”
Daisy: “Not prior to today. Actually, it just kind of came to me... I was trying to use that for placement of parts of speech within a sentence. I guess it kind of worked.”
Daisy was an active consumer of her own education, picking and choosing among theories and techniques, filing away those she found interesting or useful to be retrieved later. The source of a good idea seemed to be much less important to her than her own ability to take that idea and make it her own. In the end, the exigencies of the teaching situation brought her background knowledge forward to be applied as needed.
Joyce: “I’m constantly revising my own theories.”
Joyce was observed in a writing class teaching one in a series of lessons on writing the academic essay. Students had come up with topics, and had been asked to create thesis statements to focus those topics. The interview focused on various techniques Joyce used to help students improve their thesis statements, including having the students write their statements on the board, and reading a few of those statements, either as they were written, or with corrections to the grammar.
Joyce’s metacognitive awareness seems to apply not only to her application of KAL, but also to her ability to weigh the importance of KAL in a given teaching moment, and to make teaching choices based on criteria other than language. In the following exchange, she has chosen not to correct a student, based on what seemed to be sociolinguistic rather than on linguistic knowledge. In a later communication, Joyce stated that, to her, the issue here was more with keeping the flow of the lesson, rather than with issues of error correction. As the focus of the observed lesson was on “a good thesis statement,” she chose not to make an issue of grammatical accuracy. However, she affirmed that, “especially in EAP writing, when the target language is pretty clear–cut, grammatical accuracy is very important.” In either case, her choice not to correct the student’s language use was a reasoned decision, not a lack of KAL.
Jeff: “One (student error) that you read exactly the way it was...‘Starbucks is the place where it makes everybody happy by smell and people can get a good mood easily all over the world.”
Joyce: “To me, that is non-native-like but not necessarily grammatically incorrect. I mean, there might be a few things in there, but it was more it had to do with naturalness than glaring grammatical error...I understood what she meant...sometimes I like the way my students write even though it’s non-native-like, and so I’m very careful with changing their phrasing...There are some arguments in sociolinguistics, you know, there isn’t one necessarily one target that we’re shooting for...in an EFL situation you would look at the ‘appropriate target’ rather carefully and see that your students are aware of with whom they’re going to be using English”
The following exchange shows how Joyce applied KAL in creating a modeling exercise. Rather than focusing on details of morphology and syntax, she chose the model for this exercise in order to develop her student’s discourse competence, drawing directly on the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis.
Jeff: “You gave the example from...a Chinese student who had written a paper in (your freshman composition class) and the outline of that paper. Why?”
Joyce: “I try to model everything that I want for them to do in class…Having each main point clearly stated and repeated and restating a thesis is not something that every culture does.”
Jeff: “How do you know that there are different ways of doing it in different cultures?”
Joyce: “I think [my professor] came into one of our writing workshop classes1...but I had also heard a little bit about it when I had taught before. . . I remember her little diagrams of different cultures and how they like to organize their thoughts”
Jeff: “Any idea who – or what the hypothesis is, where that comes from?”
Joyce: “I don’t know. Does Kaplan talk about it?...We did read about it I believe in the Grabe and Kaplan book.”
Like Daisy, Joyce drew on knowledge gained “before I came here.” However, she focused on the theoretical aspects of her teacher preparation rather than on individual techniques or methods when discussing her lessons. Here, Joyce shows metacognitive awareness of the pedagogical choices she made. Having decided what her students “need to learn,” she has drawn explicitly on her KAL and specific theoretical concepts of linguistics to inform her teaching.
Jeff: “Do you have a standard belief system about error correction?”
Joyce: “Most of the error correction happens in their writing, because that is when the error correction is most important…If I draw attention to it…they can usually figure it out by themselves.”
Jeff: ‘“Drawing attention to it?’...Where does that come from?”
Joyce: “Schmidt, I guess...and the whole focus on form versus focus on forms debate...Whether you want to present rules in isolation or not, I think some kind of attention should be on what you think your students need to learn.”
Jeff: “What kind of curriculum do you think you’re using?”
Joyce: “I think we read newspapers differently than you do articles...the purpose of reading is different...part of my class content–based, but it was mostly register.”
Jeff: “Had you considered register prior to arriving at SWU?”
Joyce: “I didn’t know what it was.”
‘Register’ is a concept, built on corpus linguistic analysis, which provides empirical linguistic bases for discussions of language use. Interestingly, though she had taken the same courses as Joyce, Daisy did not refer to register (in fact seemed not to remember it) when teaching her students not to use spoken forms in their written work. Joyce, on the other hand has embraced register as a driving force behind her teaching. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Joyce professed to consciously making the effort to connect theoretical KAL in MA courses to her ESL teaching praxis.
Jeff: “Everybody in my project is stating very clearly, very strongly, that the [MA–TESL] program is very helpful, that they’ve learned a lot, and that they really are going to apply it. Yet observing four different people, I’ve seen four different ways of application, and not all of them can say why.”
Joyce: “It’s not that I always sit down and say, you know, ‘Now what do I need to use from what I’ve read in this lesson today?’ I don’t. But when I’m in...my own [MA–TESL] classes I instantly think of ways to use it in the classroom. I picture in the classroom when I’m reading and when, like, professors are lecturing, and so I think that’s where I make the connection. And when I plan out a syllabus or I’m thinking about a whole curriculum I definitely draw from…classes and I get out my sources and look at them and think about what I want to accomplish from day to day...It’s a mixture...pulling from other sources but of course you make it your own at the same time, and the way you interpret things is going to be different from other teachers...I did some research on focus on form versus focus on forms in SLA...and I, you know, draw different things from that and try to fit it into what I’m comfortable with and what seems to work with my students...I’m constantly revising my own theories...I’m constantly experimenting with what I feel comfortable with in my own classroom...I don’t think I’ve ever read someone and thought, you know, that’s completely useless, not that I can think of.”
1. The writers’ workshop is a tutoring lab for freshman composition at which Joyce worked for one year. During a biweekly meeting of tutors, professors present in–service training sessions.
