Pre-Service ESL Teachers’ Knowledge about Language and its Transfer to Lesson Planning
METHODOLOGY
Students and Learning Context
The Masters of Education program in Second Languages and Cultures at the University of Minnesota allows novice teachers to earn an ESL license, and often an extra license in a world language, after 15 months in the program. (For more information on this program, see González and Darling-Hammond (1997) and Bigelow and Tedick (in press). In this program, students take classes and engage in student teaching throughout the academic year. Before this study began, the participating students took introductory courses in linguistics and language acquisition. We began the study at the beginning of the academic year in the courses we teach – a 3-credit English Grammar class (Ranney) and a 6-credit pedagogy seminar (Bigelow and Ranney).
The data for this study came from 20 participants. The program uses a cohort model and during the year of this research the group numbered 25 students, of which 22 agreed to participate in the study. Two were eliminated from the data pool because they were not pursuing an ESL license. The average age was 27, with 18 women and 2 men in the group. They were native speakers of English; however, all of them spoke at least one other language at a high level of proficiency. The participants averaged 1 year and 2 months of prior classroom teaching experience, excluding tutoring and volunteer work. All but one student had lived, studied or worked overseas, with an average of 1 year and 5 months abroad, excluding one student who spent the first 14 years of her life in Germany. In general, we would describe the students in the program as mature, reflective, and with a wealth of intercultural, linguistic, and life experiences.
While we knew from previous years that students entering this program have varying amounts of KAL, we wished to gather information on what they knew before and after the English Grammar course in a more systematic fashion. We designed a task that asked participants to identify examples of 20 different metalinguistic terms in a short reading text. The results at the beginning of the semester showed the group mean to be 44% with a standard deviation of 3.02, which is lower and with greater variability than we had imagined, given their skills in their second language proficiencies. The same instrument, given at the end of the grammar class, showed an improvement of 25% to and average of 69% correct with a standard deviation of 2.84. Comparing means using a paired samples t-test showed that the group improved significantly (p = .000) at the p < .05 level. This statistic simply shows participants improved in their ability to identify certain grammatical forms within an authentic text. Of the items that gave participants particular difficulty, both on the pretest and the posttest, were phrasal modals, adverbial clauses and non-referential pronouns. We were not surprised with these results because the course did not give a great deal of attention to these three items. Almost all of the participants could identify examples of superlatives, past progressive verb forms, prepositional phrases and direct quotes. The skill this instrument tests was only one of many aims of the English Grammar course. Other evidence, such as course assignments and quizzes, also suggested that participants were developing their knowledge about syntax as well as their skill in identifying student errors and their ability to identify the structures focused on in the course.
