Abstract
While research on teachers’ mental lives (Walberg, 1972) in language teacher education (LTE) emerged in the early 1990s, today research on teacher cognition, or the unobservable or hidden side of language teaching, has helped to capture the complexities of who language teachers are, what they know and believe, how they learn to teach, and how they carry out their work in diverse contexts throughout their careers. Recently, a special issue of the Modern Language Journal (2015, Vol. 99, No. 3) revisited the epistemological, conceptual, and ethical foundations of language teacher cognition research and sought to reinvigorate inquiry into and reestablish the relevance of LTE (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015). Investigations of teacher cognition have constituted one of the strands of publications also in this journal, Language Teaching Research (LTR), since its inception. In fact, the steady stream of article submissions on teacher cognition that we receive makes it occasionally possible to devote a whole issue to the topic. The present issue of LTR is an example of this, as it brings together articles that share the underlying goal of understanding teachers’ perceptions of and attempts to enact theoretically consistent instructional practices in their language classrooms.
The first two articles in this issue focus on teacher cognition in relation to language assessment practices during professional development programs. For most language teachers, assessment is the bane of their existence; however, when assessment is integrated into task design, high-quality, authentic assessments can become productive tools for both language teaching and language learning. Koh et al. look at the experiences of 12 teachers of Chinese to ethnic and heritage Chinese students in two Singapore elementary schools. Given changes in the national curriculum, these teachers were charged with creating assessment tasks that are more authentic, foster higher order thinking, and are more connected to the real world. This was deemed to be a formidable task given the entrenched national high-stakes testing system that drives Chinese language instruction in Singapore. However, for this group of teachers, a two-year professional development program was designed with the specific goal of developing these teachers’ assessment literacy; in other words, their abilities to design and use high-quality authentic assessments task designs. To capture teachers’ developing assessment literacy the researchers collaboratively assisted the teachers in creating authentic, high intellectual, real world tasks and examined the ‘authentic intellectual quality’ of both the assessment task design and student performance. Their findings reinforce the benefits of high-quality, long-term professional development for both teachers’ developing literacy assessment and student learning outcomes. Teachers were able to re-align their assessments with higher-order outcomes and assessment became an integral part of lesson planning. Yet, while development was uneven, teachers’ assessment practices and students’ performances continued to be influenced by national high-stakes assessment practices that emphasize knowledge reproduction and factual knowledge over higher-order thinking and/or authentic language use. Such findings remind us that all language teaching takes place in particular social, cultural, and institutional contexts and the conflicting priorities and inevitable contradictions that exist in these contexts matter.
While the Koh et al. study created a professional development program for teachers to accomplish a particular type of language assessment, McNeil’s study traces how teacher professional development emerged through a process of engaging in the actual activities of assessing and assisting second language (L2) learners. Framed as Exploratory Action Research (Smith, Connelly, & Rebolledo, 2014), McNeil investigates emergent issues that he experienced while teaching a graduate course on computer-mediated dynamic assessment (CMDA) for language teachers in South Korea. A major component of the course was opportunities for his teachers to use CMDA during 3 one-hour tutoring sessions with an undergraduate student of English as a foreign language (EFL). Dynamic assessment (DA), which theoretically unites assessment and instruction, requires that teachers assess learners’ potentiality to complete a task and use language in a principled way to offer assistance based on immediate need with an eye for their potential development. While both face-to-face and computer-mediated DA have been found to support L2 development, preparing teachers to both understand the principles of DA and enact CMDA productively with L2 learners has proven to be more challenging. Therefore, the first cycle of McNeil’s research centers on the struggles his teachers had with developing a clear understanding of the underlying principles of DA, managing the task types embedded in the tutorials, and controlling the levels of the mediating strategies they employed. Crucially, he found that teachers were very explicit in their mediation, potentially masking learners’ potential to complete the task more independently. Therefore, in the second cycle, his plan of action included modifications to course readings, more targeted journal prompts that asked teachers to reflect on their learners’ development, altering the task types, and providing teachers with cue cards that offered them concrete strategies to mediate their own DA performance. These instructional adjustments enabled the teachers in the second cycle to maintain greater control over the mediating strategies they employed with their learners. The strength of McNeil’s work rests on the fact that rather than implementing an instructional innovation and seeing if ‘it worked’ (or not), he captures how it worked, for whom, and why and why not, and then made theoretically sound instructional adjustments that proved to support productive teacher professional development. McNeil’s research highlights the importance of having teachers engage with theoretically-driven instructional practices in the course of their work with L2 learners, and the educational value of having teacher educators investigate their own pedagogy.
The next two articles in this issue rely on questionnaires and self-reports to gather teachers’ understandings of prevalent theoretical concepts in L2 teaching and to probe the extent to which they are willing and able to enact theoretically consistent instructional practices in their classrooms. Extending the work of Sercu et al. (2005), Oranje and Smith administered an expanded multi-item scale questionnaire to measure New Zealand language teachers’ understanding and practice of intercultural teaching. Their findings overwhelming concurred that even though language teachers (including teachers of French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Mandarin, Maori and English) are favorably disposed to intercultural teaching, most teachers reported that they do not practice this approach in their local instructional settings. Language teachers who did practice intercultural teaching reported that they were familiar with the particular culture and were members of professional organizations. Not surprisingly, most language teachers continue to separate language (reading, writing, listening/speaking, grammar) from culture and, similar to Sercu et al.’s original findings 15 years ago, the teachers cited lack of time in the mandated curriculum and institutional constraints as reasons for their inability to enact intercultural teaching. Noting the significant scholarship and funding that was invested in establishing New Zealand’s intercultural communicative language teaching (iCLT) approach, the authors note insufficient and/or ineffective professional development opportunities for teachers to reconcile the goals of the iCLT approach with their largely traditional language teaching practices.
Along a similar vein, Tavakoli and Hunter collected both quantitative and qualitative data on teachers’ understanding of the construct of L2 fluency and the practices they use to promote L2 fluency in the classroom. Overall, they found that teachers tended to equate the term L2 fluency with more general speaking abilities rather than its narrower, more technical use in applied linguistics, where it refers mostly to temporal qualities of speech such as speech rate, and to dysfluency phenomena such as hesitations, false starts, and repetitions. The teachers thus offered definitions of L2 fluency that were dissimilar to those that are prominent in the SLA literature. Also their instructional activities were found to be targeted at overall speaking ability rather than activities which researchers purport to be beneficial in promoting L2 fluency in its narrower sense. When considering the latter, the teachers expressed comparatively low confidence in their ability to design effective classroom activities, but they also expressed the belief that (better knowledge about) L2 fluency research could be beneficial for their teaching in this regard.
As the authors of both studies indicate, there were two somewhat discouraging but not surprising findings that emerged. In both studies, teachers reported they were favorably disposed to the particular theoretical concept (i.e. iCLT and L2 fluency) being investigated. Unfortunately, they overwhelmingly reported that they did not engage in instructional practices that were consistent with these theoretical concepts. To some extent the gap between what teachers know and believe and what they do may be exaggerated by the different discourses that researchers and teachers use to describe their conceptual and professional worlds. The teachers in Tavakoli and Hunter’s study described their instructional practices as focusing more generally on speaking abilities (discussions, debates, etc.) while L2 fluency research offers very specific instructional tasks (learning formulaic sequences, task repetition, etc.) as having positive effects on L2 fluency. This apparent gap may also be due to the fact that teachers enact their instructional practices in complex social, cultural, and institutional contexts that often constrain what they are willing and able to do. The institutional conditions and the normative instructional practices embedded in them were cited as the main reasons why Oranje and Smith’s teachers failed to enact iCLT. Questionnaire and self-report studies may uncover discrepancies between what teachers know, believe, and what they do, but rich descriptions of innovative and exploratory professional development experiences may offer the key to how teacher educators can create sustained structured mediational spaces for teachers to engage with theoretically-driven instructional practices while actually engaging in those practices with L2 learners.
Finally, in their retrospective meta-analysis of research published in LTR over the last 20 years, Stapleton and Shao offer an inventory of research trends that coalesced around instructional effects, teacher cognition, and learner cognition and behavior. As a journal that specifically focuses on research on language teaching, this may not be a surprise to its readers or the field at large. Yet, what is striking from their survey is how the field’s conceptualizations of these trends has shifted over time. And this shift, the authors attribute to the impact that the sociocultural turn has had on research published in LTR and language teaching research as a whole. For LTR, the bulk of the research on instructional effects has attempted to demonstrate how innovative teaching techniques and the social dimensions of classroom interaction (classroom discourse, feedback, and peer collaboration) have led to improved L2 student performance. The sociocultural turn has also re-conceptualized how the field understands both teachers’ and learners’ cognition and behaviors. Teachers have been increasingly understood as sociocultural beings, with powerful beliefs, attitudes, identities, knowledge, and reasoning, and such insights have allowed us to peer into the hidden side of teachers’ mental lives. Research on how to prepare teachers to apply theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices for the complex social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which they teach has also steadily increased. Likewise, research on learner cognition and behavior has re-conceptualized learners as sociocultural beings under such theoretical constructs as motivation, agency, and willingness to communicate. Here too, learners are understood as having rich histories, emerging identities, personal and academic needs, beliefs, and attitudes that shape both what they learn and how they experience language instruction.
As the research on teacher cognition continues to enhance our understanding of the complexities of teachers’ professional worlds, much work is left to be done if language teachers are to fully embrace and enact theoretically consistent instructional practices in the L2 classrooms where they teach. One key to that work will continue to be research on the design, enactment, and consequences of LTE pedagogy so as to better realize the professional development of current and future language teachers in an ever-changing world. Apart from the regular inclusion of articles in forthcoming issues of the journal that will continue to highlight the importance of this topic, a special LTR issue devoted to teacher cognition is currently in preparation. That special issue will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Freeman and Johnson’s (1998) call for re-conceptualizing the knowledge-base of LTE, and it will address how the landscape of language teaching and LTE has changed over the past 20 years and propose an expanded knowledge-base in order to meet the needs of current and future language teachers in an increasingly diverse, mobile, unequal, and globalized world.