EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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© EAQUALS 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development

in a Changing World

Plenary presentation by Rod Bolitho, Norwich Institute for Language Education

Introduction

In his influential study English Next, David Graddol focuses heavily on the rapid rate of change in the world and the need for ELT to recognise and keep pace with this. He has, perhaps surprisingly, relatively little to say about teacher education and professional development, but he does include this quote from an article by Andy Kirkpatrick of the Hong Kong Institute of Education in the Guardian Weekly of January 1, 2006.

“In today’s complex and globalizing world, well-trained, multilingual and culturally sophisticated teachers are needed to teach learners of English....”

Elsewhere in the book, Graddol examines the relationship between English and other languages and predicts the end of the era of American-dominated globalisation and linguistic hegemony, and also, interestingly, of intra-national monolingualism.

Given these conditions it would be remiss of organisations such as EAQUALS (never mind government ministries and teacher-qualifying examination boards) not to keep their teacher training and development programmes under scrutiny, with a view to keeping up with and ahead of the changes in the world beyond schools and universities. In this paper I look at some of the factors at play in this key area while also speculating about the qualities and attributes a language teacher is likely to need in the years ahead. I conclude with some thoughts about the kind of curricula that might be needed to make teacher education and INSET programmes fit for purpose.

The Changing landscape of education, and the impact on language learning and teaching

1. Languages in the school curriculum

The days of foreign languages in general and English in particular as discrete subjects on the school curriculum may very well be numbered. There is an increasing focus on languages as means to an end, for example in Content-and-Language-Intergrated-Learning (CLIL) contexts, and it will be increasingly difficult to plead a case for them as subjects in their own right. This has potentially scary consequences for career language teachers. In some European countries I have met English teachers who hesitate to co-operate in CLIL initiatives because they feel threatened.

2. Plurilingualism in the European Context

There is, however, a counter-trend which affects other languages as well as English. The notion that future employment prospects for the next generation of school and university

EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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© EAQUALS 2009

graduates will depend to some extent on their ability to function in two or even three languages other than their own is becoming ever-more widespread. There is even speculation that proficiency in a foreign language will soon be seen as a basic requirement, just as much as numeracy and literacy in the mother tongue (L1). But language teachers will have to engage much more closely with the subject disciplines and professional specialisations of their learners if their inputs are to remain relevant.

In the special case of English, the growing awareness that it is a genuinely international language, used far more commonly between people who are not L1 users of English than between L1 and L2 users, is leading to a blurring of the boundaries between native and non-native speakers, and to a need for native speakers to be far less ‘proprietorial’ about ‘their’ language.

3. Cross-curricular, transferable skills

There is hardly a school curriculum around the world that fails to mention skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving or presentation skills as desiderata for future citizens. A recent informal survey I conducted in South America revealed that responsibility for teaching these skills is seen as everybody’s responsibility and nobody’s. Many language teachers reported that they would not know where to start in taking this on in their classes, while others maintained resolutely that they are there to teach language and not thinking!

4. International standards

Prompted by initiatives such as the Bologna Process and the PISA comparative studies of educational achievement, countries across the world (not just in Europe) are beginning to understand the importance of adopting international standards in the assessment of language proficiency rather than relying on internally-determined benchmarks. This is leading to a quantum shift in teachers’ thinking about their objectives and their own language proficiency as well as in learners’ increasingly well-informed aspirations. The widespread availability of the Common European Framework of Reference is playing a key part in accelerating this shift and it is already having a significant backwash effect on teaching and learning through its emphasis on what learners can do in a language rather than simply what they know.

5. Alternatives to class-based learning

Developments in learner autonomy and the increased availability of self-study options to replace or supplement traditional classroom-based learning are giving rise to a rethink in the role of the teacher and the resourcing of foreign language learning in many contexts.

6. Language change

The millionth word in English was recorded in April 2009, and many teachers, native-speakers as well as non-natives, are struggling to keep up with the speed and scope of language change.

EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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© EAQUALS 2009

All these factors add up to a potentially worrying set of challenges for those involved in language teaching, whether they are learners, teachers, trainers or school managers. Language teacher education and development offer a forum to engage with these challenges and yet, as will become clear in the next section, the prospects for this kind of engagement are not as positive as they might be.

Obstacles to Change in Teacher Education

1. The nature of the pre-service teacher training (PRESETT) curriculum

Reforms in the school curriculum are more politically ‘high profile’ and more newsworthy than reforms in teacher education. This has, in many countries I am familiar with, enabled those involved in teacher education to keep their heads down and to continue to deliver their programmes in the same old way. This involves chopping up the teacher education curriculum into discrete chunks, each delivered by a specialist in a given area. In language teacher education, for example, there will be methodologists, phonologists, grammarians and maybe also psycholinguists, sociolinguists and second language acquisition specialists. These specialisms often reflect the higher degrees which individual lecturers have obtained, which in turn means that they have a considerable interest in maintaining the status quo in the curriculum. The underlying approach can best be described in Wallace’s (1991) terms as an ‘applied science’ model.

For students on these courses, however, the experience is all too often fragmented. They are left with the problem of piecing together the jigsaw of all the different handed-down inputs in order to construct a coherent whole which is somehow relevant to their future role as teachers. Is it right to leave this process of ‘making sense’ to students, or should more effort be directed at integrating the curriculum from the outset so that the teams of teacher educators can work, with some sense of shared philosophy and values, towards common objectives? It has been widely accepted that a knowledge-centred curriculum is not sufficient at school level and that learners should be equipped with a range of thinking and life skills, so isn’t it appropriate to look for ways of integrating these skills into a teacher education curriculum too?

By sharp contrast, some of the initial qualifications available in our field, such as Cambridge ESOL’s CELTA are targeted at initial classroom survival for pre-experience trainees, and are firmly rooted in a ‘craft’ training model. On such courses there is usually precious little time for attention to ‘whole person’ development or even to kick start the process of becoming a reflective practitioner.

2. Assessment

It is almost a truism to say that nothing in education changes if assessment doesn’t change. We know this in language teaching from very recent experience, when examination authorities were very slow to react to the advent of the communicative approach as manifested in teaching methods and textbooks. In teacher education, too, it is much easier and more convenient to check a student teacher’s knowledge base in formal

EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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examinations than to assess the development of her thinking skills, her ability to reflect on her own practice or her awareness of language as a dynamic system. Thus, product is overvalued at the expense of process. This is one of the reasons why assessment practices remain conservative, often reflecting the atomistic nature of the knowledge-based components of the curriculum and doing scant justice to the ‘whole teacher’.

3. Tradition

Teaching, more than many other professions, remains susceptible to the power of traditions that are handed down. In many countries, in Europe and beyond, where there is still a very theoretical approach to the preparation of teachers, beginning teachers very often fall back on the principle that if they teach the way they were taught, that can’t be bad since they did well enough under their teachers at school. And if they need advice and support during their early ventures into the classroom, who better to turn to than the experienced teacher sitting in the corner of the staffroom, who knows the game backwards and is always ready to help with well-meant advice. That this experienced teacher may not have undertaken any development activity for years, and that he has been teaching the same material in the same tried and trusted way for years, may not be apparent or important to the novice, who is ready to clutch at any straw.

4. Structures and status in education

The divide, at governmental level, between departments responsible for schools and for teacher education often means that initiatives are not synchronised and liaison often problematical. In some countries this has made it extremely difficult to involve schools in the process of teacher education, or to involve teacher educators in schools. Being a teacher educator is perceived as a higher status occupation than being a teacher, which means that many college and university lecturers would be reluctant to leave their ivory towers to get in some much-needed classroom experience even if the existing structures were changed to make this kind of transfer easier. Yet without this possibility teacher educators remain vulnerable to the criticism that their ideas are not relevant to school realities. They are vulnerable in another way too, or at least potentially so. We insist on teaching qualifications as a ‘sine qua non’ for entering a profession with huge responsibilities. If we invoke the ‘multiplier effect’ mentioned earlier in this paper, the responsibilities of a teacher educator are by many factors greater. But what are the qualifications needed to enter this field? Can we really say that a higher degree in applied linguistics, for example, is adequate preparation? Surely it is possible to identify the skills and attributes needed to become a good teacher educator, and to find some method of quality assurance or qualification which reflects these.

Allied to this is the rather unseemly qualifications race which has developed in the language teaching profession, and most notably in ELT. Many institutions, particularly those at tertiary level are insisting that teachers gain a Master’s level qualification or in some cases even a PhD if they are to be retained in their posts. There is no evidence that qualifications at either of these levels make teachers better at teaching. Teaching is and will remain a ‘doing’ profession based on principled thinking, rather than one which

EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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© EAQUALS 2009

depends on theoretical constructs derived from research. The challenge here is to find ways of according status to excellent teachers rather than reinforcing a career ladder which ultimately takes them away from what they do best.

In the next and concluding section I will look at what all this might mean for the initial training and continuing professional development of language teachers.

Factors to Consider in Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education

1. What demands will be placed on the next generation of language teachers? • They will need to think globally as well as locally, both in relation to the language they are teaching and to the issues and topics they deal with in the language classroom.

• They will need to leave their subject-centred comfort zones behind and engage more broadly with the school curriculum, and in particular with the ‘transferable skills’ referred to above.

• They will have to be less ‘territorial’ and ‘purist’ about their subject and to adapt to demands placed on them by a redefinition of the place of languages in the curriculum.

• Teachers of English in particular will need to adjust to the emergence of English as an International Language

• They will need to evaluate critically ideas from other contexts and, if necessary and desirable, to adapt them to local contexts.

• They will have to know how to respond more fully to learners’ language and learning needs and to cater for these in and beyond the classroom. Each new generation of learners is more sophisticated than the last, and more aware of what they want from their language classes.

2. So what kinds of pre-service Language Teacher Education courses do we need?

• Courses which start where trainees are, not where lecturers are; • Courses which are less method-obsessed and focus on learning, as well as teaching; • Courses which integrate (rather than isolate) curriculum subjects; • Courses which foster debate and critical thinking; • Courses which encourage methodological choice rather than a fixed orthodoxy (eg

Presentation-Practice-Production);

• Courses which foster enquiry, reflective practice and experimentation and (ultimately) lifelong learning;

• Courses which encourage an investigative approach to real language, rather than delivering language as a set of fixed systems;

• Courses which focus on good process as well as product; • Courses which acknowledge that there are many ways of being a good teacher • Courses which integrate theory and principles with practice.

3. Implications for in-service teacher training (INSETT) and continuous professional development (CPD)

EAQUALS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ISTANBUL – 25th April 2009

Reconceptualising Language Teacher Education and Development in a Changing World – Rod Bolitho

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© EAQUALS 2009

In times of economic crisis it is often the INSETT budget that gets cut first, whether at national, local or institutional level. PRESETT programmes are needed to keep the stream of new teachers entering the profession, but INSETT and CPD for teachers are too often seen as optional areas of activity which can be ‘mothballed’ or completely cut when times are hard. At the time of my writing this paper, the Italian government had just taken such a step. Nothing could be more short-sighted. When teachers feel undervalued, they lose motivation and underperform. The global context of change and the technology explosion mean that teachers will probably need to ‘reinvent’ themselves several times during their career. However, the quality of education in a system, just as in an institution, will continue to depend on the quality of its teachers, and any decision to cut investment in their professional development is bound to have a negative impact on quality. The newly designed EAQUALS scheme will provide a tool for institutions to assess their staffing profile and to assess professional development needs within a principled framework. It presents an opportunity, which member institutions should be ready to work with and capitalise on, to put in place a sound staff development policy with proper funding and appropriate recognition of teachers’ needs and achievements. References Graddol, D. 2006. English Next. London: The British Council Wallace, M.J. 1991. Training Foreign Language Teachers Cambridge: CUP