17 results in Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms
9 - Language use in the classroom
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
One distinguishing feature of language classrooms is that language is usually both the goal of the lesson and the means by which this goal is achieved. The teacher has a number of competing concerns. For example, the teacher plans activities designed to facilitate the learners' acquisition and use of the target language. At the same time, however, the teacher uses the target language as the principal means for giving instructions and directions, modeling target language patterns, and giving feedback on student performance. The students likewise learn language both in order to negotiate classroom interaction with the teacher and other students, and to complete the demands of classroom work. This chapter focuses on the linguistic dimensions of these processes and their effects on the kind of language use that occurs in second and foreign language classrooms. The chapter examines in particular (1) how teachers modify their language, (2) how teachers use questions, (3) how teachers give feedback, and (4) the language of classroom interaction, including the language students use when completing activities.
How teachers modify their language
A major portion of class time in teaching is taken up by teachers talking in front of the class (see Chapter 7). No matter what teaching strategies or methods a teacher uses, it is necessary to give directions, explain activities, clarify the procedures students should use on an activity, and check students' understanding.
A large proportion of the teacher's total communicative efforts can be taken up with coaxing along the communicative process itself, especially when the learners are relative beginners. The teacher has to get the pupils' attention, monitor their understanding by constant checking, clarify, explain, define and when appropriate summarise.
(Ellis 1984: 120)
Epilogue
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
This book reflects a different perspective on teacher development from that implicit in many TESL education programs. Traditional views of language teaching have often seen it as an applied science, that is, as “Applied linguistics.” The significant theory and knowledge base underlying teaching is presented during the campus course. The teacher's job is to apply this knowledge in the classroom. Once teachers enter teaching they are expected to master the more “trivial” aspects of teaching, such as how to handle routine classroom techniques and procedures. Improvement in teaching comes about as teachers match their teaching more closely to the theories and principles introduced during their MATESL (or similar) course.
The concept of reflective teaching, however, as with other inquiryoriented approaches to teaching, makes different assumptions about the nature of teacher development. The process of reflecting upon one's own teaching is viewed as an essential component in developing knowledge and theories of teaching, and is hence a key element in one's professional development. This process is one which continues throughout a teacher's career. Formal programs of teacher education represent only an initial, though essential, first phase in teacher development. As Zeichner (1992: 297) observes:
… learning to teach is a process that continues throughout a teacher's career and no matter what we do in our teacher education programs and no matter how well we do it, at best we can only prepare teachers to begin teaching. Consequently, teacher educators must be committed to helping prospective teachers internalize the dispositions and skills to study their teaching and to become better at teaching over time, that is, to help teachers take responsibility for their own professional development.
6 - The structure of a language lesson
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Lessons are events which are fairly easy to recognize. They take place in a particular setting (e.g., a school or classroom), they normally involve two kinds of participants (the teacher and students), and they normally consist of recognizable kinds of activities (e.g., the teacher lecturing at the front of the class, the teacher posing questions and calling on students to answer them). A lesson is, hence, distinguishable from other kinds of speech events, such as meetings, debates, arguments, or trials.
Like other speech events, however, lessons have a recognizable structure. They begin in a particular way, they proceed through a series of teaching and learning activities, and they reach a conclusion. This pattern of structure or organization is a result of the teacher's attempts to manage the instructional process in a way which will optimize the amount of learning that can take place in the time available. Wong-Fillmore (1985: 23–4) observes:
How classes are organized and how instructional events are structured determine to a large extent the nature of the language that students hear and use in the classroom. … Two sets of characteristics appear to distinguish classes that work for language learning from those that do not. The first set relates to the way the classes are structured or are organized for instruction, the second to the way language is used in lessons.
3 - Focus on the learner
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Language teaching is often discussed from the point of view of the teacher. Elsewhere in this book, some of the ways in which teachers' beliefs, goals, attitudes, and decisions influence how they approach their teaching are examined (see Chapters 2 and 4). However, while learning is the goal of teaching, it is not necessarily the mirror image of teaching. Learners, too, bring to learning their own beliefs, goals, attitudes, and decisions, which in turn influence how they approach their learning. This chapter examines some of the contributions learners bring to learning by exploring learners' beliefs about teaching and learning, the influence of cognitive styles, and the role of learner strategies.
Learner belife systems
Many models of second language acquisition attribute a central role to learner beliefs (e.g., Bialystok 1978; Naiman et al. 1978). Learners' beliefs are influenced by the social context of learning and can influence both their attitude toward the language itself as well as toward language learning in general (Tumposky 1991). Learners' belief systems cover a wide range of issues and can influence learners' motivation to learn, their expectations about language learning, their perceptions about what is easy or difficult about a language, as well as the kind of learning strategies they favor.
Beliefs about the nature of English Learners often have very focused perceptions about which aspects of English they find difficult, and about the status of English in comparison to other languages. This is seen in the following statements made by ESL learners in Japan: English is much more difficult to learn than other languages.
References
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Series editor's preface
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
A recent trend in second language teaching is a movement away from “methods” and other “external” or “top down” views of teaching toward an approach that seeks to understand teaching in its own terms. Such an approach often starts with the instructors themselves and the actual teaching processes, and seeks to gain a better understanding of these processes by exploring with teachers what they do and why they do it. The result is the construction of an “internal” or “bottom up” view of teaching. The approach is often teacher initiated and directed because it involves instructors observing themselves, collecting data about their own classrooms and their roles within them, and using that data as a basis for self-evaluation, for change, and hence for professional growth.
It is this “reflective approach” to teaching, as it applies to second language classrooms, that Charles Lockhart and I have illustrated in this book. Reflective teaching goes hand-in-hand with critical self examination and reflection as a basis for decision making, planning, and action. The book focuses on a number of important dimensions of teaching, including teachers' and learners' beliefs, teacher decision making, and teachers' and learners' roles. It introduces the significance of each issue along with related theory and research and then presents a number of exploratory tasks and activities, such as journal writing, peer observation, and action research, which teachers can carry out in their own classrooms. Each chapter thus promotes the role of reflection, self inquiry, and self-evaluation as a means of professional development.
Contents
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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5 - The role of the teacher
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
There are many factors that influence how teachers approach their work and which particular strategies they employ to achieve their goals. The contexts in which teachers work have an important influence on teaching, since different teaching settings involve teachers in different kinds of roles. For example, in some institutions teachers are fairly autonomous and are free to make decisions concerning course goals, materials, teaching methods, and assessment procedures. In other settings these kinds of decisions are made by a supervisor or program director, and the teacher is seen primarily as someone who carries out decisions that have been made by others. Even in situations where teachers have primary responsibility for how they teach, they may assume very different roles within their own classrooms. Some teachers see their role primarily in managerial and organizational terms. They spend a considerable amount of time planning their lessons, monitoring their teaching, and managing student learning and behavior to ensure that their goals are accomplished. Others see their role more as a facilitator, and believe that the best kind of lesson is one that arises out of the dynamics of the teaching-learning situation. In this chapter we examine the roles teachers carry out in their teaching institutions, the responsibilities that different kinds of roles create for teachers, the roles teachers assume in their own classrooms, and how these roles contribute to the teachers' teaching style.
The nature of roles
A role can be defined as the part taken by a participant in any act of communication (Ellis and McClintock 1990). In some interactions, roles are relatively fixed (e.g., doctor–patient or teacher–student) whereas in others, roles are temporary and open to negotiation.
Preface
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms is designed for use in pre-service and in-service teacher education programs offering a teaching practicum or courses on classroom observation, theories of teaching, or language teaching methods and approaches. Instructors can use the book as a basis for either individual or collaborative teacher development activities, including peer observation, self-evaluation, program evaluation, and action research.
Each chapter presents an important dimension of teaching and poses questions that form the basis for classroom observation and investigation as well as critical reflection. The suggested small-scale investigative tasks can be carried out by teachers or student teachers in a variety of classroom situations.
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to classroom investigation procedures, including teaching journals, lesson reports, surveys and questionnaires, audio and video recording, observation, and action research. Chapter 2 examines how teachers' ideas and beliefs about teaching and learning can influence their classroom practices. Chapter 3 deals with learners' beliefs, goals, and attitudes and how these influence their learning styles and strategies. Chapter 4 discusses the thinking processes underlying teaching and considers three areas of decision-making: planning, interactive, and evaluative decisions. Chapter 5 examines the roles teachers perform in their institutions and their own classrooms, the responsibilities these roles create, and how they contribute to the instructor's teaching style. Chapter 6 explores how teaching events are structured and how different structuring choices can influence the coherence and dynamics of a lesson. Chapter 7 focuses on the nature of classroom interaction, the interaction patterns typical of second language classrooms,and ways in which teachers can influence these patterns.
1 - Approaches to classroom investigation in teaching
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
The assumption underlying this book is that in every lesson and in every classroom, events occur which the teacher can use to develop a deeper understanding of teaching. Teachers sometimes fail to exploit these events, letting momentum of all the other events of the day take precedence.And yet these experiences can serve as the basis for criticalreflection, if teachers can find ways to capture the thoughts of andreactions to these events, as well as ways to gather fuller informationabout the events themselves. From this basis, teachers can develop strategies for intervention or change, depending on their needs. In this chapter, a number of simple procedures are introduced that can be used to help teachers investigate classroom teaching. Each procedure has advantages and limitations, and some are more useful for exploring certain aspects of teaching than others. The reader will have to decide which procedures are useful and for what purposes.
The procedures discussed here will be referred to throughout the book and consist of:
Teaching journals. Written or recorded accounts of teaching experiences.
Lesson reports. Written accounts of lessons which describe the main features of the lessons.
Surveys and questionnaires. Activities such as administering a questionnaire or completing a survey, designed to collect information on a particular aspect of teaching or learning.
Audio and video recordings. Recordings of a lesson, or part of a lesson.
Observation. Tasks completed by a student teacher observing a cooperating teacher's class, or peer observation (i.e., tasks completed by a teacher visiting a colleague's class).
[…]
4 - Teacher decision making
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Chapter 2 examined the role that beliefs play in shaping the instructional decisions and practices that teachers make use of in teaching. This chapter examines the nature of teacher decision making in more detail and the effects of these decisions on teaching and learning. For many educationists, decision making is viewed as an essential teaching competency. Shavelson (1973: 143–5) observed:
Any teaching act is the result of a decision, either conscious or unconscious … What distinguishes the exceptional teacher is not the ability to ask, say, a higher-order question, but the ability to decide when to ask such a question.
From this perspective, teaching is essentially a thinking process. Teachers are constantly confronted with a range of different options and are required to select from among these options the ones they think are best suited to a particular goal. The option the teacher selects is known as a decision (Kindsvatter, Wilen, and Ishler 1988). Teaching involves making a great number of individual decisions. Before a lesson can be taught it must be planned. Decisions at this stage are called planning decisions. During the lesson itself, another level of decision making is involved. The teacher has to make on-the-spot decisions concerning different aspects of the lesson, many of which may not have been planned. These are known as interactive decisions. After the lesson, the teacher must make decisions about its effectiveness and what the follow-up to the lesson will be. These are known as evaluative decisions. These three types of decisions form the focus of this chapter.
Introduction: Teacher development through exploring classroom processes
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Asking questions about teaching
This book explores the nature of teaching in second language classrooms, and introduces teachers and teachers-in-training to techniques which can be used to explore teaching. The book aims to develop a reflective approach to teaching, that is, one in which teachers and student teachers collect data about teaching, examine their attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and teaching practices, and use the information obtained as a basis for critical reflection about teaching. Critical reflection involves asking questions such as the following, which form the focus of the individual chapters of the book.
How can I collect information about my own teaching? (Chapter 1)
What are my beliefs about teaching and learning, and how do thesebeliefs influence my teaching? (Chapter 2)
Where do these beliefs come from? (Chapter 2)
What kind of teacher am I? (Chapter 2)
What beliefs do my learners hold about learning and teaching? (Chapter 3)
How do these beliefs influence their approach to learning? (Chapter 3)
What learning styles and strategies do my learners favor? (Chapter 3)
What kind of planning decisions do I make use of? (Chapter 4)
What kind of on-the-spot decisions do I make while I teach? (Chapter 4)
What criteria do I use to evaluate my teaching? (Chapter 4)
What is my role as a teacher? (Chapter 5)
How does this role contribute to my teaching style? (Chapter 5)
How do my learners perceive my role as a teacher? (Chapter 5)
What form or structure do my lessons have? (Chapter 6)
How do I communicate goals to my learners? (Chapter 6)
[…]
Index
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Frontmatter
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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2 - Exploring teachers' beliefs
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
Teaching is a complex process which can be conceptualized in a number of different ways. Traditionally, language teaching has been described interms of what teachers do: that is, in terms of the actions and behaviors which teachers carry out in the classroom and the effects of these on learners. No matter what kind of class a teacher teaches, he or she is typically confronted with the following kinds of tasks:
selecting learning activities
preparing students for new learning
presenting learning activities
asking questions
conducting drills
checking students' understanding
providing opportunities for practice of new items
monitoring students' learning
giving feedback on student learning
reviewing and reteaching when necessary
In trying to understand how teachers deal with these dimensions of teaching, it is necessary to examine the beliefs and thinking processes which underlie teachers' classroom actions. This view of teaching involves a cognitive, an affective, and a behavioral dimension (Clark and Peterson 1986; Lynch 1989). It is based on the assumption that what teachers do is a reflection of what they know and believe, and that teacher knowledge and “teacher thinking” provide the underlying framework or schema which guides the teacher's classroom actions (see Chapter 4).
Looking from a teacher-thinking perspective at teaching and learning, one is not so much striving for the disclosure of the effective teacher, but for the explanation and understanding of teaching processes as they are. After all, it is the teacher's subjective school-related knowledge which determines for the most part what happens in the classroom; whether the teacher can articulate his/her knowledge or not. […]
7 - Interaction in the second language classroom
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
A common theme underlying different methods of language teaching is that second language learning is a highly interactive process. A great deal of time in teaching is devoted both to interaction between the teacher and the learners, and to interaction among the learners themselves. The quality of this interaction is thought to have a considerable influence on learning (Ellis 1985). The focus in this chapter is on the nature of classroom interaction and how teachers can influence the kind of interaction that occurs in their own classrooms. These issues will be explored through examining the teacher's action zone within the class, learners' interactional competence, learner's interactional styles, and the effects of grouping arrangements on classroom interaction.
The teacher's action zone
The following notes were written by a teacher after teaching a lesson.
Today I taught a lesson around a discussion on an environmental issue. The lesson went very well First, I introduced the topic by talking about environmental problems in our city and got students to give examples of the major environmental problems we face. This got lots of comments from the class and everybody had an opportunity to say something and express an opinion. After ten minutes I divided the students into small groups and asked them to come up with a solution to one of the problems we talked about. During this time I moved around the class, monitoring the students' language use and giving feedback. After twenty minutes I got the group leaders to report their groups' recommendations and I wrote key points on the board.
8 - The nature of language learning activities
- Jack C. Richards, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore, Charles Lockhart, Hong Kong City Polytechnic
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Summary
This chapter examines lessons in terms of the activities teachers use to achieve their instructional goals. An activity is described as a task that has been selected to achieve a particular teaching/learning goal. Research on teaching (e.g., Clark and Yinger 1979) suggests that the notion of activity is central to an understanding of teaching. It influences both how teachers conceptualize teaching as well as the ways they organize their lessons. In this chapter, the kinds of activities commonly used in ESL classes are described and the decisions that teachers have to consider when planning and using activities are discussed.
Lesson planning usually begins with consideration of general goals for a lesson, and then leads to decisions about the kinds of activities which will help attain these goals. Rather than breaking down the goals into behavioral objectives and then developing activities to match objectives, however, teachers often develop objectives as they plan specific teaching activities (see Chapter 4). According to Macdonald (1965) and Eisner (1967), it is while developing activities themselves that consideration of objectives becomes important, for this is where “ends for learning become integrated with means for learning” (Clark and Yinger 1979: 232). Activities are, hence, “the basic structural units of planning and action in the classroom” (Clark and Yinger 1979: 237). Nunan (1989b: 17) similarly observes:
[Teachers] tend to see lessons or units of work as the basic building blocks of their programmes. These lessons and units in turn are composed of sets of more or less integrated tasks and manipulative exercises of various sorts. […]
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