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An Simpson, T. Ced) (aan) The tortlndge handbs ole of ape lied (UNgUISHS. Landon’ Rat ledge, 15 Language teacher education Simon Borg Introduction This chapter examines key contemporary themes in the field of language teacher education (henceforth LTE), focusing specifically on the initial preparation and continuing professional development of second (12) and foreign language (FL) teachers. My scope is broad, and the analysis that follows is not determined by a concern for particular languages, types of teachers and learners, teacher education programmes or geographical contexts. In fact, highlighting the diverse global scope of LTE ~ and the need for greater connections among its various sectors — is, one of my goals here, Brief history As a field of activity, LTE does not have a long formal history; Schulz’s (2000) review of articles about FL teacher development published in the Modern Language Journal between 1916 and 1999 suggests that methodology courses for FL teachers in the USA were available in the 1920s. The first teacher training course for EFL (English as a foreign language) tea- hers, however, only started in London in 1962 (Haycraft 1988). These courses were the pre- cursors of the Certificate level TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualifications that exist today in the form of the Cambridge ESOL’s CELTA and Trinity's Cert, TESOL (see Howait and Widdowson 2004: 246, for a brief comment on the emergence of these courses). ‘The 1960s also witnessed the emergence of applied linguistics as a field, and ‘with it came a body of specialized academic knowledge and theory that provided the foundation of the new discipline. This knowledge was represented in the curricula of MA programs, which began to be offered from this time’ (Richards 2008: 159). On such programmes, professional develop- ment as a language teacher largely entailed becoming familiar with the latest theory and research in applied linguistics; it was assumed that such knowledge would enhance teachers’ classroom practices. Early in the 1980s, teacher training emerged as a priority in the work of the Council of Europe (see Trim 2007 for a historical account of modern language teaching in Europe). It is 215 Simon Borg not clear how the work on LTE being done in continental Europe and that in the UK and USA interfaced at this time. ‘As a field of inquiry (ie, one which is systematically researched and theorized), it is only in the last twenty years that LTE has emerged, In 1990, Richards and Nunan (1990: xi) wrote that the field of teacher education is a relatively underexplored one in both second and foreign language teaching. The literature on teacher education in language teaching is slight compared with the literature on issues such as methods and techniques for classroom, teaching. Few of the articles published in the last twenty years are data-based, and most consist of anecdotal wish lists of what is best for the teacher. (Richards and Nunan 1990: xi) The publication this extract comes from was a landmark in the development of LITE as a field. First, it acknowledged the limited empirical basis of LTE and stressed the need to address this Second, this text argued for a new view of the education of language teachers, which it summarized as follows: ‘¢ a movement away from a ‘training’ perspective to an ‘education’ perspective and a recog- nition that effective teaching involves higher-level cognitive processes, which cannot be taught directly; ‘© the need for teachers and student teachers to adopt a research orientation to their own classrooms and their own teaching; ‘# ess emphasis on prescriptions and top-down directives and more emphasis on an inquity- based and discovery-oriented approach to learning (bottom-up); ‘¢ a focus on devising experiences that require the student teacher to generate theories and hypotheses and to reflect critically on teaching; # less dependence on linguistics and language theory as a source discipline for second fan- guage teacher education, and more of an attempt to integrate sound, educationally based approaches; © use of procedures that involve teachers in gathering and analyzing data about teaching. (Richards and Nunan 1990: xii) These perspectives on LTE have been developed through a number of publications since; some early ones were Wallace (1991), Flowerdew et al. (1992) and Richards and Lockhart (1994). More recent contributions which have extended our understandings of what it means to become, be and develop as a language teacher are Freeman and Richards (1996), Richards (1998a), Tedick (2005), Grenfell (1998 - in the context of MFL — Modern Foreign Languages ~ in the UK), Johnson (2000), Johnson (1999), Johnson and Golombek (2002), ‘Tsui (2003), Woods (1996), Borg (2006b), Farrell (2008b), Malderez and Wedell (2007), Bailey (2006), Johnson (2009) and the collection of thirty chapters on LTE in Burns and Richards (2009), Many of these sources which predate 2000 were reviewed in Crandall (2000), who identified four trends characterizing the LTE literature in the 1990s, These were: «a shift from transmission, product-oriented theories to constructivist, process-oriented theories of learning, teaching, and teacher learning; «efforts ... to transform teaching through a focus on situated teacher cognition and practice and the development of conerete, relevant linkages between theory and practice throughout the teacher education programme; 216 Language teacher education © 8 growing recognition that teachers’ prior learning experiences play a powerful role in shaping their views of effective teaching and learning and their teaching practices; * a growing concern that teaching be viewed as a profession (similar to medicine or law) with respect for the role of teachers in developing theory and directing their own professional development through collaborative observation, teacher research and inquiry, and sustained inservice programmes (Crandall 2000: 34-6) This list and that above from Richards and Nunan (1990) overlap in certain respects; together they provide a summary of key themes in LTE in the 1990s. As we will see below, these themes continue to be of relevance today. The analysis I present in the remainder of this chapter derives predominantly from literature on LTE published since 2005. This is not to suggest that material that predates this period is no longer valuable; as noted above, seminal work in the field stems from the 1990s. It has, though, been reviewed and discussed elsewhere (Richards 1998b, 2008, Crandall 2000, Borg 2003, Freeman 2002). 1 will thus focus here on more recent work in the field of LTE. Volume of LTE research It is clear from the available literature that a substantial body of work exists in relation to TESOL teacher education. In other areas of LTE the picture, however, varies. In the teaching of English language Jearners in the USA, for example, research interest in teacher education is a recent phenomenon (see the review in Lucas and Grinberg 2008), while the context of English as an additional language (EAL) in the UK would not scem to be characterized by any formal process of teacher preparation itself (Franson 2007), Jet alone a body of research examining this process. Also in the UK, a rapidly evolving ESOL context has in recent years witnessed increased LTE activity (see Morton et al. 2006 for a review of this work), MFL teacher education in the UK, at both primary and secondary level, does not seem to have been extensively researched (but see Hunt er af. 2005), while language teacher education in con- tinental Europe has been the focus of projects supported by the Council of Europe and the European Commission (e.g. Kelly and Grenfell 2005) and also of some research articles (eg. Garrido and Alvarez 2006; Ruiz 2008). FL teacher education in the USA has also been the subject of a number of recent journal articles (e.g. Antenos-Conforti 2008; Bateman 2008; Bell 2005; Geyer 2008; Pearson et al. 2006). The diversity of LTE is a theme I want to continue emphasizing, and the varying levels of research activity in the different domains noted here continues to support this point. One other point T want to stress further is the general lack of connections across the LTE sector as a whole. Lucas and Grinberg (2008) is an example of this; they present a thorough review of research on the preparation of non-specialist (in a language teaching sense) classroom teachers to support English language learners in the USA; the review is thoroughly grounded in mainstream teacher education literature yet makes no reference to key work in the field of TESOL teacher education generally or fo the UK ESOL sector. In addition to this general survey of the volume of research available in different areas of LTE, I assessed the prevalence of LTE research by examining the contents pages of six applied linguistics journals for the period 2005-9. Table 15.1 presents the results of this analysis. ‘These figures indicate that, between 2005 and 2009, less than 10 per cent of the articles in the journals analyzed focused on LTE. This suggests that LTE, while an established domain of enquiry, still lags far behind language learning and language teaching as core areas of research interest, 217

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