General conceptions or principles: L2 teachers

As mentioned in the previous chapter, many earlier studies found that teachers’

conceptions (or beliefs) about teaching or language were similar to how they taught (Johnson, 1992a; Richards, Tung, & Ng, 1992; Smith, 1996; Woods, 1996). This led to the hypotheses that (a) general conceptions controlled teaching, and therefore (b) if SLTE programs could change teachers’ conceptions, this would result in these teachers teaching differently (MacDonald, Badger, & White, 2001; Peacock, 2001). This was very convenient for two reasons. First, because academics’ main focus is abstract generalizations about language and language learning, so a focus on general conceptions did not require much change in SLTE practices. Second, SLTE courses proved to be good at changing teachers’ conceptions. MacDonald, Badger and White (2001) used a Liker scale beliefs inventory questionnaire to examine the conceptions of 55 novice teachers about language and language learning before and after a course in SLA. There were significant changes in many of the scores, showing a movement by most of the teacher students towards academic conceptions of language and language learning.

Peacock (2001) used Horwitz’s (1985) BALLI questionnaire to examine the conceptions of 146 novice teachers’ before and after an SLTE program. He also found that teachers’

conceptions had become more like academic conceptions during the SLTE program.

These studies looked only at very general, abstract conceptions. However, Attardo and Brown (2005) developed a similar questionnaire which not only assessed such general conceptions on language variation, but also asked about specific (if hypothetical) classroom behavior, such as: “A student who says I don’t speak no French in the classroom should be corrected” (Attardo & Brown, 2005: 102). In their study there were significant differences between the novice teachers’ conceptions of language variation before and after an introductory course in applied linguistics. Riegelhaupt and Carrasco (2005) used data from teacher student journals to show that a seminar on applied linguistics was effective in changing the 27 ESL teachers’ attitudes toward non-standard varieties of English and teaching children who spoke such varieties. Villamil and Guerrero (2005) looked at the evolution of novice teachers’ metaphors for writing instruction over the course of a semester long class on L2 writing instruction and found significant changes in the metaphors of all 9 of the teachers in their study.

Unfortunately, studies examining whether changes in beliefs effect parallel changes in teachers’ practice have consistently shown that this is not the case: changes in conceptions do not cause a corresponding change in teachers’ practices. For example, the three teachers in Chaves de Castro’s (2005) study participated in a series of workshops on pragmatics. After the workshops the teachers declared that they would make pragmatics a focus in their teaching and that they would give L2 students feedback on their pragmatic errors. However, analysis of recorded lessons by these teachers revealed that the teachers did not comment or focus on the L2 students’ pragmatic difficulties at all. Kennedy (1996) reported on a study of Malaysian EFL teachers that showed that when they were in the UK, they held very interactive and student-centered view of language teaching; however, when they returned to Malaysia, their teaching reverted to traditional teacher-centered instruction. Studies of task-based learning (TBL) in Hong Kong show that EFL teachers there profess using TBL, but observation shows that, in fact, very little TBL instruction occurs in their classrooms (Carless & Wong, 1999;

Carless, 2003).

Other studies indicated that teachers would often not use their conceptions of language or language learning to guide their teaching if they felt that it conflicts with other priorities they had for their class. Apparently, having particular conceptions about learning and instruction does not mean that teachers will know how to use that conception in less than ideal circumstances. For example, Graden (1996) studied six Spanish and French teachers. She found that while the teachers had very definite conceptions about reading instruction, they often ignored these in designing instruction in order to increase L2 student motivation, which was seen as a more important issue when designing instruction. In a survey of foreign language teachers, Berne (1998) found that while almost all agreed that teachers should include activities which focus on listening skills, only 25% of the teachers in the survey actually did this. In the study mentioned previously, Liu, Ahn, Baek, and Han (2004) found that local constraints, such as time, local instructional norms, and classroom management issues, prevented the 13 Korean EFL teachers in their study from implementing their conceptions of when the L1 should be used in the classroom.

Teachers may have difficulty using general conceptions or principles for teaching when they only have a superficial understanding .of that concept. Research indicates that just because teachers understand a particular concept in general in no way means that they

understand the concept in terms of language teaching in specific contexts. For example, Nunan (1987) observed the lessons of five ESL teachers. According to Nunan:

All of the teachers taking part in the study were knowledgeable about and committed to communicative language teaching…On the surface, the lessons appeared to conform to the sorts of communicative principles advocated in the literature…However, when the patterns of interaction were examined more closely, they resembled traditional patterns of classroom interaction rather than genuine [communicative] interaction (Nunan, 1987:

137).

Another example is an in-depth study of 14 French teachers by Mitchell (1988), who found that these L2 teachers were not able to distinguish between communicative and non-communicative activities. Sato (2002) spent a year studying 19 EFL teachers and found that they did not use communicative language teaching (CLT) because did not know how to achieve it given constraints in school context. Similar findings have been reported by Karavas-Doukas (1996) and Andrews (2003).

It is not just with CLT that teachers have problems figuring out what their conceptions mean in practice. Johnson (1994, 1996c) looked at novice teachers in their practicum.

She found that these novice teachers used conceptions or images which they found inadequate because they lacked knowledge of alternatives. Schocker-von Ditfurth’s (2001) study of 16 novice teachers in their practicum produced similar findings. The college-level ESL teacher in Ulichny’s (1996) case study wanted to have her students engage in rich discussion of the readings, but did not know how to create the conditions for such discussion in her teaching context. Kerekes (2001) investigated the effect of an inservice course on SLA. While the teachers conceptions did change somewhat, when asked what they had learned which was useful for their practice, the teachers cited specific activities and techniques they had learned in the class, not general SLA findings.

Finally, recent studies indicate that a good deal of teaching may not be guided by teachers’ conceptions. For example, Tsang’s (2004) study of 3 novice teachers showed that only about 50% of their teaching actions were due to identifiable teaching principles.

Likewise, the three teachers in Basturkmen, Loewen and Ellis’ (2004) study sometimes used activities and practices which reflected their conceptions of focus-on-form, but sometimes they did not. For example, one of the teachers, Mark, stated that (a) feedback on pronunciation was more important for him than feedback about grammar and (b) feedback should not interrupt communicative tasks but should happen after such tasks are complete. The data on Mark’s actual teaching showed that Mark did indeed give more feedback on pronunciation (29% of feedback) than grammar (20%), but, contrary to his stated position, 62% of his feedback interrupted communicative tasks the L2 students were engaged in. In addition, Almarza (1996) found that the teacher students she studied did not use their conceptions of language learning to guide their practice.

Instead, their instruction followed the teaching methods that their SLTE program expected them to follow, regardless of whether this reflected their conceptions or not.

Finally, Liu and his colleagues found that EFL teachers’ use of code-switching was only partially consistent with their stated principles.

[T]he teachers’ code switching followed certain patterns and principles, although

…other cases appeared not to be governed by such principles. For instance, teachers often switched from English to Korean to say something very simple, which they could have said easily and time cost-effectively in English, a practice that

contradicted their stated principle of using L1 to explain difficult material (Liu, Ahn, Baek, & Han, 2004: 605).

These problems have often been framed as a problem of teaching contexts preventing teachers from using their general conceptions for teaching, rather than SLTE programs failing to prepare teachers to use conceptions under such local constraints. “A considerable body of literature now exists documenting the role of context, and particularly constraints, that can hinder teachers from implementing their stated beliefs”

(Basturkmen, Loewen & Ellis, 2004: 246). However, every practitioner needs knowledge which takes into account the normal constraints of their practice. Architects need to know about the strength of building materials or the effect of wind on buildings, cooks need to know how to vary their menus due to the availability of ingredients in different seasons, and teachers need to be able to use concepts given the constraints of their practice. If knowledge gained in SLTE programs does not include knowledge of how to adapt concepts to the everyday constraints of teaching, then it is not surprising that teachers do not find such knowledge very useful.