Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Love, Mark

Titel

Student-Generated Teaching Suggestions: A Post-Transmission Approach to Localizing Theory in Postgraduate TESOL Teacher-Training Seminars

Ist Teil von

• Electronic journal of foreign language teaching, 2019-06, Vol.16 (1), p.49

Ort / Verlag

Singapore: National University of Singapore, Centre for Language Studies

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Many student-teachers in master's programs in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) desire to learn practical teaching suggestions applicable in their local situations, yet most of their time is spent learning theory with little time spent applying it to local teaching situations, a problem commonly described as the theory/practice gap. While a number of approaches have been proposed to bridge this gap (e.g. Canagarajah, 1999; Kumaravadivelu, 2003), this study reports on an attempt to devise a readily-usable-technique, and accompanying strategy, that can be used to localize theory in a variety of graduate courses designed for classes of in-service teachers in South Korea comprised of both local Korean teachers and visiting native-English speaking teachers. The technique devised was to ask in-service teacher trainees to generate teaching suggestions for their own classrooms that used the theory covered in readings as a springboard for them to create and develop teaching ideas, and the strategy devised to employ this technique was to ask these participants to post a teaching suggestion to a Moodle forum and discuss it with other class participants. Running over a number of years, this study employs a practitioner research method to assess the value of deploying both the technique and strategy. Data from representative examples of student suggestions as well an open-ended survey on student reactions to generating and discussing their teaching suggestions are provided and qualitatively analyzed. It was found that asking in-service teacher-trainees to generate teaching suggestions equipped some of them with a conceptual mode of reading that regularly considered how to creatively adapt ideas from readings for use in their local teaching environments. The activity also helped some participants to become more reflective practitioners and demonstrated to other teachers the value of a community of practice that reflected on how to adapt the content of readings to their local environments.