Language teaching is a profession which is international in character. Language teachers often work and study in foreign countries, and distance education has become very important in the education ...of language teachers. Drawing on two international surveys, this paper explores language teacher education by distance from the perspective of students (i.e. trainee or practicing language teachers) and teacher-educators in such distance programs. There are significant educational advantages for language teachers who choose to study by distance, and e-learning technologies have enhanced these benefits. This paper also includes an in-depth analysis of the qualitative survey responses from two individual students, highlighting an individualized perspective on the data that complements the 'collective' analysis, and provides additional insights into how student experiences of such programs can vary widely, and how such disparities may be addressed.
In today’s world, the great demand for using English entails language users to be pragmatically competent so that they could adapt themselves to differing requirements of various contexts. Within ...those contexts, some factors such as the culture of the target language, the speech act used in the interaction, status and gender of the interlocutors are accepted as essential components. Refusals, one of the most difficult speech acts to perform based on their face threatening nature, were chosen as the main concern of the present study. In an attempt to find out what kind of refusal strategies are employed by Turkish pre-service teachers of English, 27 first year students (14 males and 13 females) at Çukurova University were randomly chosen. Data for the study were collected via a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) in which the participants were to respond nine scenarios (three lower, three equal and three higher interlocutors). Data analysis concentrated on two main variables: gender of the participants and the status of the interlocutors. In addition to those, refusal combinations utilized by the participants was another focal point of the study. The whole qualitative data were discussed through descriptive statistics and chi-square analyses, and “excuse, reason, explanation” was found to be the most frequent refusal strategy used by the participants. Another important finding is that males were found to prefer directly uttering “no” more frequently than females. It was also found that the number of the strategy combinations increases as the status of the interlocutor rises.
South African Council for Educators’ Code of Professional Ethics requires teachers to help learners develop values consistent with the fundamental rights contained in the Constitution of South ...Africa. To engage with such rights, teachers need to have the agency to develop such values, and this article explores how teachers of English in South African schools recognise (or fail to recognise) their change agency. Using a qualitative, interpretivist approach with narrative inquiry, twenty-two teacher-researchers were tasked with listening to the stories of teachers of English in order to answer the research question: do teachers consider themselves to be agents of change in their English classrooms? While the findings indicate that some teachers fail to enact agency, other teachers, despite claiming otherwise, do serve as agents of change in their classrooms. By respecting who learners are and enabling a democratic environment, teachers are able to engage with possibilities for change despite challenges. By having a clear vision of who they are as teachers, they are able to use interventions to improve the conditions for learning and make a difference to the lives of their learners.
With the globalization and internationalization of education, many teachers from Asian countries pursue their professional development in English-speaking settings. However, there seems to be scarce ...research on these teachers’ expectations, lived experiences and identities in these contexts, and how their personal experiences influence their views and teaching when they return to their home countries. Using interviews and email correspondences, the current article examines the perceptions and personal experiences of three teachers of English (from Vietnam, China and Taiwan) who studied in Australia. Among others, findings suggest that the participants negotiated their expectations, lived experiences and sense of identity in different ways regardless of the degree to which their experiences in Australia matched their expectations. As teachers of English, they were constantly reflecting on the suitability of applying the teaching methods learned in their local teaching contexts. When they returned to their home countries, all of them found it useful to share their personal experiences of living and studying abroad with their students. Their strategic and practical application of what they had learned and/or experienced in Australia assisted them in having new options in dealing with teaching and learning issues in their home countries. This article hopes to shed light on aspects that may influence the growth of teachers of English.
Recently, those examining the role teachers of language minority students play in the language policy-making process have found that their autonomy has been threatened by increasing standardization ...as reflected in rigid one-size fits all curricular mandates focused on the learning of discrete skills in the national language, enforced high-stakes standardized testing, and external monitoring. Given the pervasive nature of this policy environment, we are heartened by our experiences working with a teacher collective in Northern California that has resisted policies of standardization requiring them to teach in ways that ignore students’ instructional needs, interests, and experiences. In elucidating a perspective that considers all educational stakeholders, including teachers, as engaged in the LPP process, this article provides an account of how the collective is negotiating educational policies concerning the teaching of language and literacy to students designated as English language learners. As a members of the collective, the authors draw on participatory and ethnographic approaches to describe how resistance and agency are implicated in the LPP processes, paying special attention to the processes, actions, and impacts that have comprised our collaboration. In addition to discussing how these findings contribute to a dynamic and complex view of the role teacher agency and resistance play in the LPP process, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for promoting agentive teacher education.
Teacher professional standards and accountability are today writ large on the landscape of both schooling and teacher education practice around the world. This paper explores some of the related ...debates through a discussion of four discourses on teacher professional standards: namely, discourses of commonsense, professionalism and quality, managerialism/performativity, and strategic manoeuvring. It is argued that each of these discourses legitimises particular understandings of standards and quality, illustrating the competing set of lenses through which they are viewed, as well as the broader ideologies from which they emerge, including neoliberalism and technical rationality. These discourses also represent the interpretive practice that characterise a context in which teacher professional standards are being entrenched and institutionalised through policy design and accountability processes. In analysing these discourses, a number of questions emerge, primary amongst which is the issue of the unintended consequences of a focus on standards, some of which may act to inadvertently mask other 'quality' matters. Author abstract
This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of ...Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.
The importance of teachers’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) in conducting effective technology-enhanced instruction has been recognized; however, the understanding of ...teachers’ TPACK when teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL), as well as the need for their further TPACK development, has not been properly addressed. To fill the gap in TPACK research in the EFL domain, this study aims to explore the TPACK among 22 in-service EFL teachers at elementary schools in Taiwan. Also, the possible needs of these EFL teachers for their future professional development were investigated. In order to better portray the TPACK of the EFL teachers, both their synthesized TPACK and performance on the seven TPACK construct components were evaluated in this study. A quantitative questionnaire was used to assess the EFL teachers’ performance on the seven TPACK construct components. Their synthesized TPACK was revealed by means of interviews and classroom observations. The Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and the pedagogic framework for computer-assisted language learning were used to analyze the qualitative data collected from the interviews and class observations. The results indicated that the EFL teachers needed more technology knowledge to further develop their TPACK, and that the EFL teachers’ TPACK focused much on motivating students, rather than on using technology for creating opportunities for students to use English language meaningfully and authentically.
Teachers in classrooms throughout England are facing a shifting demographic in their pupil intake. Where the teaching of children whose first language was not English was once considered an ...inner-city teachers' role, more recent migration patterns have challenged this preconception. In England in particular, this change sits against an historical backdrop of centralised control of the curriculum for English. This article explores how primary school teachers responded to the arrival of Polish children in county settings following EU accession in 2004. Interviews with a small sample of teachers in schools that had previously been mainly monolingual were coded using Bourdieu's Logic of Practice. Analysis revealed a complex mix of experiences that appeared to rest on assumed pedagogical norms and professionally assimilated external pressures. Discussion centres on the author's interpretation of teachers' ownership of linguistic capital and its relationship to the linguistic field.
Our study focuses on the verbal interactions of university teachers at the department of English, Constantine University I. After recording some of their interactive discourses in pedagogical ...meetings, we used a questionnaire as a complementary research tool. The analysis of our corpus revealed that these teachers’ language practices are characterized by code switching from French to classical/Algerian Arabic/ and English. One of the major findings in this study is that French is the dominant language used by teachers of English in their oral interactions in a supposed English speaking environment where the medium of teaching and learning is the English language.
PDF
