Language teacher development: Principles and practices, ideals and images

Research seminar

With speaker Dr. Anne Feryok, University of Otago, New Zealand

Approaches to language teacher development have been influenced by the cognitive turn in the 1980s (Freeman, 2002), the sociocultural turn in the 2000s (Johnson, 2006), and the most recent turn, that of complexity theory, which has been applied to areas related to teacher development such as such as teacher cognitions (Feryok, 2010), teacher change (Kubanyiova, 2012), and classroom change (Burns & Knox, 2011). I will explore these different approaches by considering the roles played in them by principles and practices and ideals and images. These notions will be illustrated through the different approaches I have taken to data I collected from one language teacher in order to illustrate how different theoretical frameworks capture different aspects of empirical data. I will argue that such a diversity of approaches not only enriches our understanding, but also pushes us to reflect on the role of our own reasoning and judgment in our research practices, which is a fundamentally ethical activity.

References

Burns, A. & Knox, J. S. (2011). Classrooms as complex adaptive systems: A relational model. TESL-EJ, 15, 1. Downloaded from http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej57/a1.pdf

Feryok, A. (2010). Language teacher cognitions: Complex adaptive systems? System, 38, 272-279.

Freeman, D. (2002). The hidden side of the work: teacher knowledge and learning to teach. Language Teaching, 35, 1-13.

Johnson, K. E. (2006). The sociocultural turn and its challenges for second language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 40, 235-257.

Kubanyiova, M. (2012). Teacher development in action: Understanding language teachers’ conceptual change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.