Integrating Language Teachers’ Discipline Knowledge in a Language Course
FINAL REMARKS
A Model of Language Teaching and Learning
Both instructors define their lessons and the course as a combination of ‘theory’ (in the form of rules of grammatical usage put forward by the instructor through comments and explanations) and ‘practice’ (in the form of exercises). The analysis of the lessons and interviews reveals that the two instructors studied approach language teaching and learning from the point of view of the traditional PPP model (presentation > practice > production). Lisa introduces a variation of this model in adopting an inductive approach, going from practice to presentation. In either case, production seems to be excluded from the module.
In this model of language teaching and learning declarative knowledge has a dominant role and this is so at the expense of procedural knowledge. This state of affairs comes into conflict with the dominant communicative approach in language teaching. Perhaps, for this reason, we notice a certain tension in both instructors between wanting to introduce more ‘communication / skills work’ and stating that ES language courses should be different from regular EFL courses for non-specialists precisely in the higher level of declarative knowledge of ES graduates.
We believe that our analysis confronts those of us involved in the provision of language development courses as part of a program including training in linguistics with two issues that, we think, deserve to be considered in the future. In the first place, the analysis reveals a distinction between unsophisticated, user-oriented KAL, associated with language courses, and sophisticated scientific KAL, represented by linguistics courses. This is probably a reflection of the type of structural linguistics that is still dominant in many teacher-training programs at the expense of educational linguistics more geared to the needs of future teachers.
The second issue that is raised by the study in connection with the provision of language development modules in teacher-training programs is that, as we said in the introduction, they may become part of the methodological repertoire of future language teachers. Our experience tells us that the unresolved dualism between conscious and subconscious learning (McCarthy and Carter, 1994: 161) that characterizes the linguistic ideology of the two instructors is inevitably projected onto the next generation of EFL teachers. The analysis carried out reveals a teacher-centered model of teaching and learning that, while paying lip service to the importance of subconscious learning, it still relies mostly on conscious learning, characterized by the dominance of explicit learning about language and declarative knowledge. In general, the view that pervades this pedagogic approach is that of language as a static product. We believe that this traditional tendency in language teaching may be still reinforced in some teacher training programs that are characterized by the central role they assign to ‘lecture-and-notes’ teaching methodology and to a KAL curriculum based on a structural descriptive approach. These findings coincide with the situation outlined by authors such as Wright and Bolitho (1997) who advocate for the implementation of in-service teacher education programs that, based on graduates’ highly developed user-analyst dimensions, take an experiential approach to boost the teacher dimension. Their claim is that such programs may boost teachers’ confidence so that they are better equipped not only to adopt a stronger position in relation to materials and policies, but to move towards their own development as practitioners.
