SLA and Language Teacher Preparation: What’s the link?
Joan Kelly Hall, Pennsylvania State University, jkh11@psu.edu
Whether second language acquisition (SLA) theory has anything meaningful to say in the field of language teacher preparation depends in part on our understanding of two concepts at the heart of SLA activity: language and learning. The past decade or so has seen great change in SLA in terms of how these concepts are understood.
Language and Learning
Current views consider language knowledge to be variable, tied to contexts of use within specific sociocultural communities of practice, and dynamic, with stability arising not from something inherent in the language itself (Bybee & Hopper, 2001; Hall, Cheng, & Carlson 2006; Tomasello, 2003) but from social norms that value stability, evidenced in, for example, prescriptivist grammars. These norms are tied to human beings' psychological need for predictability and routine behavior, which allows us to perceive and analyze communication patterns, including specific forms needed to accomplish tasks and goals. We create and sustain stability because we need it to live cognitively and socially functional lives.
Current understandings of learning have also been transformed. We now understand it to be fundamentally interactive, integrating both social and cognitive processes (see Hall, Cheng & Carlsen, 2006, for a review of the supporting research). It is social in that it takes place in particular contexts of social activity. In fact it cannot occur except within goal-directed, regularly occurring activities in which learners aspire to become full participating members. In these activities, learners are guided by more expert participants into appropriating the skills and knowledge needed for full or competent participation.
Learning is cognitive in that as they are being assisted by the expert participants, the learners construct and hold in their heads the constellations of memories that represent their social activities and experiences. These memories are constructed from the activity-based resources including language, social relationships, and spatial conditions that are used by the experts to mediate the process. Learning is also fundamentally variable in that it occurs in particular contexts that are defined by the shapes and uses of particular resources. No learning, then, can be considered isolable from any specific context and its means. In light of this variability, our participation in different activities, different uses of means in similar activities, or even different opportunities and experiences with using similar resources give shape to different developmental paths and outcomes (Wertsch, 1991).
Pedagogy
These understandings of language and learning have helped to transform our understandings of language pedagogy in at least three ways. First, they change our understanding of learner language knowledge. The fundamental variable nature of language makes apparent that language knowledge is not a uniformly constructed structure independent of context but rather is tied to past experiences. Each of us—teachers and learners—brings with us to the classroom rich and very diverse constellations of language knowledge that are tied to our linguistic and cultural worlds outside the classroom. Knowing about the worlds that we as teachers and our learners bring with us is crucial to setting the stage for language learning.
Second, current views of language and learning change our understanding of instruction. We know that language development is intimately tied to our extended participation in goal-directed, regularly occurring activities that are significant to our everyday worlds. Because schools are important sociocultural contexts, classrooms and, more specifically, instructional environments and the specific resources that are used in these contexts are of consequence to learners' development in that they shape the development and outcomes of their language knowledge in specific ways. So, what we do in the classrooms—that is, the instructional and other kinds of activities we create and the means we use to enact these activities (including, for example, the particular social discourses, technologies, and books and other media)—leads to particular kinds of language learning outcomes.
Third, current understandings change our conceptualization of the curriculum. If language knowledge is dependent on use, and if use is variable, then what we are teaching when we say we teach English isn't a decontextualized structural system, but rather a set of social languages or discourses, each representing specific contexts, specific identities, and specific opportunities.
New Conceptual Framework for Teacher Preparation
These new understandings about learner knowledge, language instruction, and language curriculum call for a new conceptual framework for designing effective teacher preparation programs for developing in teachers the requisite skills, abilities, understandings, and dispositions for addressing three crucial questions. The first question is: What social discourses do our learners bring to our classrooms and what discourses do we as teachers and teacher educators bring? To address this, teacher preparation programs must provide opportunities for aspiring teachers to develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to (a) make visible their and learners' discourses from outside the classroom and (b) draw on the richness of these discourses in ways that inform and support the discourses created in the classroom.
The funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) is an example of an innovative approach from which language teacher preparation program can draw in designing curricula. The concept of funds of knowledge refers to the historically developed, significant sociocultural practices, skills, abilities, beliefs, and bodies of knowledge that embody the households of learners in the school community (Moll, 2000). A defining feature of the approach is the active involvement of teachers in the ethnographic study of their students' worlds outside of school and in the use of their newfound understandings to redesign or transform their curricula and instructional activities.
A second question to be addressed in teacher preparation programs is this: What kinds of communities do we/should we create in our classrooms and what means do we/should we use to mediate learning? To address this question, teacher preparation programs must provide opportunities for participants to develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to (a) uncover the links between specific classroom practices, including their mediational means, and learning outcomes and (b) design effectual classroom communities of learners. Lave and Wenger's (1991; Wenger, 1998) work on communities of practice and that of Wells (1999, 2000) on communities of inquiry are two important sources of information on which teacher preparation programs can draw in considering the instructional redesign of language classrooms.
The third question that teacher preparation programs must address is this: What social discourses are we/should we be preparing students to participate in? To answer this, teacher preparation programs need to provide learners with opportunities to develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to be able to (a) make their way among social discourses where meaning-making is increasingly multimodal and variable across cultural, social, and professional contexts and (b) identify those discourses that will prepare their learners for the challenges of being productive citizens in their globalized, linguistically and culturally diverse worlds.
An approach that can help teacher preparation programs address this question is the pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996). The goal of this pedagogy is to develop in learners a critical understanding of how their communicative activities—oral, written, and multimodal—are historically and socially located and produced with skills for shaping available meaning-making resources into new patterns and activities with new meanings. It is organized around four learning opportunities: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. The conditions for learning fostered in each of these opportunities promote learners' development of a complex range of understandings, perspectives, knowledge, and skills that allow them to see from multiple perspectives, to solve problems creatively, and to develop new ways of becoming involved in their worlds.
Conclusion
As current understandings of language and learning suggest, language teacher preparation programs cannot remain static and fixed. As the linguistic and cultural diversity of our learner communities grow and change, so do their needs and concerns and the linguistic and cultural resources for dealing with them. A hallmark of effective language teacher preparations programs, then, will be their ability to be ever-responsive to these challenges.
References
Bybee, J., & Hopper, P. (2001). Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hall, J. K., Cheng, A., & Carlson, M. (2006). Reconceptualizing multicompetence as a theory of language knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 27, 220-240.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Moll, L. C. (1992). Bilingual classroom studies and community analysis: Some recent trends. Educational Researcher, 21, 20-24.
Moll, L. (2000). Inspired by Vygotsky: Ethnographic experiments in education. In C. Lee & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research (pp. 256-268). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
New London Group. (1996). Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 66-92.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, G. (2000). Dialogic inquiry in education: Building on the legacy of Vygotsky. In C. Lee & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research (pp. 51-85). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
