Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
RESEARCH FINDINGS ON USING KAL
Knowledge Transfer
Several trends emerge from the studies in this area. The first is that courses in applied linguistics do seem to have the potential to be successful in changing novice teachers’ conceptions about language and language teaching. Both Attardo and Brown (chapter 5) and Riegelhaupt and Carrasco (chapter 7) showed that an introductory course can help novice teachers change their conceptions of dialects and those that use them. The teachers in Angelova’s (chapter 2) study reported that input on SLA helped inform their conceptions of language learning and teaching and the teachers in Yates & Wigglesworth (chapter 15) reported that doing research in pragmatics changed their conceptions of teaching languages. In addition, the teachers in Villamil and Guerrero’s study (chapter 6) demonstrated that the KAL they had been presented with had changed their conceptions of the writing process.
Furthermore, applied linguistics courses can also change teachers’ intentions of how they will teach. After a short course in Pragmatics the teachers in Chaves de Castro’s study (chapter 16) said that they would pay more attention to pragmatic aspects of language in their teaching. In Attardo and Brown (chapter 5) the teachers changed the kind of feedback they would give to students of non-standard dialects. However, in one study, it was found that although teachers did have plans to change their teaching after a course in Discourse Analysis, these changes were not very substantial (Balocco, Carvalho & Shepherd, chapter 8)
The studies in this area also make it clear that not only do teachers feel that applied linguistics courses, even those which are not always seen as central to learning to teach languages such as sociolinguistics, are an important part of their professional development (Owen and Edwards, chapter 3; see also Grabe, Stroller, & Tandy, 2000), but also that teachers do try to use the knowledge gained from applied linguistics courses in their teaching (Burns & Knox chapter 14; Hazelrigg, chapter 21; Bigelow & Ranney, chapter 11; Hislam & Cajlker, chapter 17; Popko, chapter 22).
KAL
Nevertheless, the results of one study indicate that a high level of KAL, while helpful, is not necessary to be a good L2 teacher. Andrews and McNeill (chapter 10) show that even superior L2 teachers have problems with things like explaining errors or metalanguage. Thus while it seems like KAL may be able to help teachers improve their teaching, it does not seem to be a necessary condition for good teaching.
