Researching the Effectiveness of Professional Development in Pragmatics
As Bartels (2002) notes, applied linguists working in the area of knowledge about language (KAL) have been conspicuously slow to research their own practice and the assumptions underlying it. We report on our attempt to address this shortcoming by researching whether and in what ways a professional development project impacted on the subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge of the teachers who were involved.
The project was conducted with teachers from the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), which is a government-funded program providing eligible immigrants to Australia with up to 510 hours of English language tuition. AMEP teachers are required to undertake a certain amount of professional development each year, which is usually in the form of short, discrete workshops organized on the basis of teacher needs and interests, rather than of a full in-service course leading to a formal academic qualification. There is also a tradition of encouraging teachers to participate in research-based professional development aimed at investigating different areas of practice within the AMEP. This approach generally involves a more substantial time commitment on the part of the teachers, who complete relevant readings and participate in data collection and analysis. The assumption underpinning this is that both the research process, and the incorporation of their findings into their classroom practice, will be beneficial for them as teachers (see Burns 2000, Brindley 2001, Wigglesworth 2000a for a further discussion of these issues). We will explore the validity of this assumption, and the impact on teachers of the more ad hoc workshop approach to professional development, by reporting on a project which incorporated both approaches.
In this project, we were interested in comparing learner and native-speaker performance on a complex request task with the aim of informing teaching practice and materials development through involving a group of teachers in empirical research. Our assumption was that this would deepen their understanding of how native speakers might negotiate such requests, and that this deeper understanding of ways in which complex requests could be prepared and mitigated would enable them to develop classroom materials. We hoped that the materials could also be used as the basis of workshops with other groups of teachers so that the practical professional development benefits of our project would extend exponentially beyond the small group of teachers initially involved, to much larger numbers of practitioners.
As work on the project progressed, we were also keen to explore just how useful the teachers found their involvement in the different phases of the project. We wanted to investigate whether our initial assumption was justified, that is to find out whether and to what extent the teachers felt they had benefited from their involvement in the project. For this reason, we also collected their reactions to their experiences on the project.
