Title : The Role of Teachers’ Future Self Guides in Creating L2 Development Opportunities in Teacher-Led Classroom Discourse: Reclaiming the Relevance of Language Teacher Cognition
Researcher : Magdalena Kubanyiova
Year of Publication : 2015
Source : The Modern Language Journal, 99, 3, (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/modl.12244
C 2015 The Modern Language Journal
Summary :
This study examines the missing link in this line of inquiry, which concerns ways in which language teachers interpret and enact principles of beneficial TLD (Teacher-LED Discourse) in their everyday instruction and what shapes this enactment. The aim is to account more fully for the role of the teacher as “the practical link between SLA research and classroom practice” (Crookes, 1997, p. 93) and extend the current focus on pedagogic purposes of teacher–student interaction to consider a fuller range of inner resources that guide language teachers’ discursive behaviours in the classroom and, ultimately, shape the quality of opportunities for students’ L2 development. These findings are juxtaposed by an exploration of ethnographic data which shed light on some of the key inner resources that this teacher drew on in her reasoning about, emotional responses to, and interpretations of classroom events and which shaped her TLD practices and, consequently, opportunities for students’ L2 development.
Crucially, in the context of this guest-edited issue, this study also demonstrates that, in order to reclaim the relevance of language teacher cognition, this domain of inquiry would benefit from focusing its research lens more firmly on understanding the hidden side (Freeman, 2002) of those teaching practices that are consequential to students’ L2 development in the language classroom.
The contribution of this study is bridging what has typically been pursued as largely separate disciplines of applied linguistics, SLA, and teacher cognition (Kubanyiova, 2011), to gain new understandings of the ecology of classroom interaction (van Lier, 2000), and to increase the relevance of both disciplines to the real world (Bygate, 2005; Ortega, 2005, 2012a).
Research on whole-class teacher–student interaction, henceforth teacher-led discourse (TLD;Toth, 2008), has shown that the quality of teachers’ use of language in TLD can have significant consequences for students’ L2 development
(Hall & Walsh, 2002; Toth, 2011), often in ways that are superior to language learning benefits in learner-led discourse (Kayi–Aydar, 2013; Toth, 2008; Van den Branden, 1997). A key finding that has emerged from this body of scholarship is that TLD can be effective to the extent to which it affords opportunities for students’ active participation, public (Consolo, 2000; Hall, 2010) or private (Batstone & Philp, 2013; Ohta, 2001), in the regularly occurring patterns of classroom interaction in ways that are congruent with its pedagogical purposes (Toth, 2011 ; Walsh, 2002).
Additionally, it has been dismissed as a largely restrictive discursive pattern of Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) in TLD, in which the teacher typically initiates an exchange by asking a question, the student responds, and the teacher provides feedback, can in fact successfully facilitate students’ engagement in classroom discourse. The effectiveness depends on the purposes for which IRF is employed and how its three interactional moves are orchestrated by the teacher to involve students’ participation in alignment with those purposes (Nassaji & Wells, 2000; Schwab, 2011; Wells, 1993).
Proposing a variable approach to understanding profitable features of TLD, Walsh (2006), for instance, has presented discourse data to demonstrate that a tightly controlled IRF pattern with the teacher’s extensive use of display questions and evaluative feedback in the third move of the IRF exchange is fully justified and successful in generating learning opportunities if the pedagogical aim is to enable students’ practice around a piece of material or to check and display correct answers. Such interactional microcontexts have been labelled by Walsh (2006) as materials and skills and systems modes, respectively.
Rather different discursive IRF strategies have been found effective in classroom context mode (Walsh, 2006), that is, an interactional micro context whose pedagogical aims are to encourage meaning-focused communication. Waring’s (2008) research has demonstrated that in this type of interactional setting, the teacher’s explicit positive evaluation in the third move of the IRF exchange (e.g., “very good”) can function as conversation closure and thus have negative consequences for language learning. If, on the other hand, the last turn of the triadic exchange is used to invite students to expand, elaborate, or clarify their contributions rather than to evaluate them, useful opportunities can arise for students’ meaning-making even within the confines of IRF (Hall & Walsh, 2002; Nassaji & Wells, 2000).
A number of additional features have been identified as facilitating authentic conversation in TLD, including allowing students to “speak as themselves” (Ushioda, 2011, p. 14) by evoking their personal rather than learner identities in classroom conversation (Richards, 2006; Waring, 2013) and acknowledging the role of students as equal contributors to TLD (Donato, 2004). This implies the need for teachers to consider relinquishing control over the initiation and follow-up parts of the triadic exchange (Clifton, 2006; van Lier, 1996); provide opportunities for students to propose topics and build on others’ contributions in a collaborative manner (Ko, 2014; Toth, 2011); create openings in TLD to enable students to move out of the IRF (Waring, 2009); and, generally, ensure that all participants in TLD share conversational goals and perceive these as legitimate for L2 development (Donato, 2004).
The author adopted Walsh’s (2006) framework for analysing classroom interaction, which acknowledges the situated nature of classroom discourse and assumes that different interactional patterns are appropriate in different instructional modes, defined as L2 classroom micro contexts with “clearly defined pedagogic goals and distinctive interactional features determined largely by a teacher’s use of language” (Walsh, 2006, pp. 62–63).
By connecting research concerns of SLA and language teacher cognition in a single study, this research makes several significant contributions to applied linguistics. First, in line with past theorizing, it confirms TLD as a powerful interactional
space in which opportunities for students’ meaningful participation in classroom discourse and, by extension, for their L2 development can arise. The second contribution is in detailing the nature of these interpretive frameworks and in foregrounding those that have been found consequential to students’ L2 development opportunities in TLD. The data in this article have confirmed that teachers’ discursive behaviours are goal-oriented, and this is true even if they may at first sight appear to be no more than a random mixing of interactional modes (cf. Walsh, 2006).
Conceptually, the construct of language teachers’ possible selves is not dissimilar from Clandinin’s (1986) concept of image as a personal organising framework within teachers’ personal practical knowledge through which they interpret and reconstruct their experience (Feryok, 2012; Feryok & Pryde, 2012) and which encompasses their affective and moral ways of knowing (Golombek, 1998). The key distinctive theoretical contribution of language teachers’ possible selves and their explanatory power in the context of this study, however, lies in foregrounding the central role that teachers’ future-oriented identity-relevant investment in those images play in guiding their action. This study has shown that language teachers may have to negotiate multiple images of desired future selves, which may be shaped by their past experiences, imposed by the wider contexts of their teaching worlds, or evoked by specific interactional events, such as participation in research. The extent to which these become guides of teachers’ actions and what consequences these have for students’ learning is contingent upon the specific social situation in which these images become salient, the degree of teachers’ self-identification with them, and the actual content they carry (cf. Kubanyiova, 2012).
Finally, the findings of this study suggest that in order to reclaim the relevance of the language teacher cognition domain and establish more firmly the relationship between “how teachers cognize” and what “effects their cognitions have on learning” (Ellis, 2009, p. 141), future research in this domain will need to extend the current concerns with what teachers think, know, and believe (Borg, 2006) to include questions about who language teachers in specific sociocultural contexts strive to become, what kind of learning environments they envisage for their students, and what impact these images of future selves have on what they do and what their students learn.
Comment :
This is an interesting study in educational context related to the discourse analysis. The author conducted a research and found a methodology for teacher to teach a well-prepared lesson. It is about how the way a teacher should do to make the students certainly understand the materials addressed.
This journal has well-structured arrangement. Therefore, it abridges the readers to understand the substances of this journal.
Moreover, I think the author should clarify the result and discussion sections to avoid confusion because the author mention the theories inside but in not well written that make the readers don’t clearly know what the results are and the theories are.
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