Teaching Second Language Acquisition Courses: Views from New Faculty.

Second language acquisition (SLA) courses are a perennial feature of graduate level teacher preparation programs in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. While there has been recent interest in exploring the interfaces of second language acquisition research and classroom teaching (Ellis, 1997), the teaching of SLA courses at the university level is little studied. This report describes a faculty-initiated self reflection and development program done by two new U.S.and Japan-based graduate faculty teaching SLA for the first time. The authors’ responses to a written interview protocol, analyzed using Shulman’s (1986, 1987) pedagogical reasoning model, revealed the challenges they faced and also the strategies they employed in teaching SLA content to M.A. students. The authors argue for a greater awareness of faculty development in TESOL and applied linguistics, and a new view of SLA teachers and students as stakeholders in SLA. Introduction Despite a strong research agenda on alternative modes of instruction in language teaching, university faculty in TESOL and applied linguistics continue to rely on traditional “lectures and large group teaching” in second language teacher preparation courses (Richards, 1998, p. 16). This suggests that an exploration of the teaching of university faculty in TESOL and applied linguistics courses should be undertaken for a number of reasons. First, the literature suggests that faculty learning and development in TESOL and applied linguistics M.A. and certificate programs have been little studied (e.g., Bartels, 2002). Second, public accountability is increasing in many educational contexts; as a result, academe must learn to reward efforts to investigate and improve university teaching (Dinerman, Feldman, & Ello, 1999; The scholarship ‘on’ teaching, 2000; Wright, 1994). Third, there is a growing perception that current models of university faculty preparation and in-service development are inadequate (Dinerman et al., 1999; Eison & Stevens, 1994; Hativa, 2000; Richlin, 1994). Fourth, there has been a growing interest among some scholars in improving TESOL graduate and certificate programs (e.g., Ramanathan, The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language Home About TESL-EJ All Issues Books How to Submit Editorial Board Access Sitemap Davies, & Schleppegrell, 2001; Richards, 1998). For these reasons and more, studies that seek to understand faculty learning are likely to play a crucial role in understanding the beliefs that graduate level teachers bring to their profession, the types of knowledge they rely on, and how they make sense of their professional worlds. [-1-] Purpose While understanding that teaching and learning do not lend themselves to straightforward analyses, our initial purpose was to make sense of our first experiences teaching a specific course, second language acquisition (SLA). We wanted to develop ourselves as teachers of this content area, as we viewed it as a compelling field of study that we would likely be asked to teach repeatedly during our careers. However, as we carried out long distance, reciprocal peer interviews midway and at the end of our first semester teaching SLA, our purposes became more strongly centered around three propositions. The first proposition is that pedagogical content knowledge, a content-specific teaching knowledge that has often been used to describe teaching at the primary and secondary school levels, can also be applied to other levels of education. We believe that pedagogical content knowledge has adequate conceptual power to characterize our weaknesses and strengths as instructors of a course new to us, and can be usefully applied to the interview data gathered in this study. If our experiences can be used to predict some of the fundamental issues that may confront new TESOL and applied linguistics faculty, then this information can be used to plan both formal and informal faculty development activities. Formal activities are those that have been devised by doctoral level faculty in charge of preparing new faculty or by those who hire new faculty and who have the stated purpose of preparing new faculty for their future teaching duties. Informal activities involve private efforts made by new faculty members themselves or doctoral level colleagues or supervisors to enhance the teaching skills of new faculty members. This report constitutes an account of an informal self-development project. The second proposition is that pedagogical reasoning, a model proposing a process through which pedagogical content knowledge may be developed, can be used to illuminate the teaching development of university instructors. By documenting our initial experiences teaching SLA, engaging in reciprocal interviews and then reviewing the data in terms of the pedagogical reasoning model proposed by Shulman (1987), we found that the model shed light on how our instructional approaches were developing and helped us identify the triggers for the development of pedagogical content knowledge. A clearer understanding of these issues will assist us in defining the areas in which formal and informal efforts at faculty preparation and development may best be directed. The third proposition is that long-distance peer interviews are an effective means of reflecting on graduate level teaching experiences and thus arriving at new comprehensions. We believe that all teachers are ultimately responsible for their own learning (Beglar, 1999; Gorsuch, 2000), whatever new courses they undertake to teach. We further believe that for a variety of reasons, prevailing models of university-level teacher preparation and development are not optimally effective, an opinion that is shared by many educational researchers (cf., Boice, 1987, 1992; Cox, 1994; Dinerman, Feldman & Ello, 1999; Eison & Stevens, 1994; Gorsuch, 2000; Qualter, 2000; Richlin, 1994; “The scholarship ‘on’ teaching,” 2000; Trigwell, 1994; Wright, 1994). If we are not mistaken in this view, choosing an effective and relevant means of reflection becomes an important issue for new TESOL and applied linguistics instructors. There are a number of possible responses to this assertion, and ours was to keep records of our teaching experiences, interview one another about those experiences, and use pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical reasoning as a lens through which to view those experiences. By engaging in this process, we developed a number of new comprehensions that we could directly apply to our future teaching. These comprehensions involved areas such as syllabus design, the selection of instructional materials, the development of course goals and more valid forms of student assessment, and the creation of effective, personal approaches to class preparation. By situating this concrete approach to self-development in the larger context, our long distance interviews can be seen as an example of the reflection stage of the pedagogical reasoning model and a door to our new comprehensions of a specific content area. [-2-] Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Reasoning Before continuing, we need to describe the twin frameworks within which this study is situated: pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical reasoning. These are closely related to a conception of teaching as a “meaning making activity” in which teachers seek solutions to actual and anticipated classroom situations (Breen, 1991, p. 231). Shulman comments on teachers’ meaning making: “teaching necessarily begins with a teachers’ understanding of what is to be learned and how it is to be taught” (1987, p. 7). The merging of content knowledge (what is to be learned) and pedagogy (how it is to be taught) has been termed pedagogical content knowledge (Chen & Ennis, 1995; Cochran, DeReuter, & King, 1993; Grenfell, 1998; Johnston & Goettsch, 2000), which has been characterized by Shulman (1987, p. 15) as: “the capacity of a teacher to transform the content knowledge he or she possesses into forms that are pedagogically powerful” and “most germane to its teachability” (1986, p. 9). In addition to pedagogical content knowledge, pedagogical reasoning plays a key role in successful teaching. Pedagogical reasoning is the process by which teachers apply their pedagogical content knowledge of specific content to an actual teaching situation. Although this process is clearly central to all teaching, we would further argue that pedagogical reasoning is the process by which pedagogical content knowledge is developed. Through pedagogical reasoning and reflection, teachers may arrive at “new comprehensions” of “purposes, subject matter, students, teaching, and self” (Shulman, 1987, p. 15). Pedagogical reasoning, as explained by Shulman (p. 15), is a process which potentially has six stages: comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, reflection, and new comprehensions (see Shulman, 1989, p. 19 for caveats on viewing pedagogical reasoning as a chronologically ordered six stage process). Some of these stages will be used as units of analysis of our peer interview data, and so will be discussed here. Comprehension. Teachers generally begin with comprehension of the subject matter to be learned by the students. That teachers should have adequate knowledge of the content they teach is widely accepted in general education (Cochran, DeRuiter, & King, 1993; Elbaz, 1983; Kay, 1975; Korthagen & Kessels, 1999; MacDonald & Rogan, 1990; Shulman, 1987; Tarvin & Faraj, 1990) and in TESOL teacher education (Johnson, 1999; Richards, 1998; Widdowson, 1997). More specifically, Shulman has proposed that teachers must have a multifaceted comprehension of “a set of ideas” (1987, p. 14) that they can relate to each other within a particular field and to other ideas outside the field. Thus, this constitutes a call for the development of a broad, multi-disciplinary, well-integrated knowledge base. Transformation. The second stage of pedagogical reasoning is tra