К.п.н. Нищимова Е.А.

Северо-Кавказский Федеральный Университет (СКФУ)

Content knowledge desirable for ESL teachers.

(research experience of Australian scientists)

From many ways in which teacher knowledge has been classified, I will for the moment take Wood’s [2] distinction between declarative, or content knowledge (the ‘what’ of teaching) and procedural knowledge (the ‘how’ to teach it). As Woods admits, content knowledge is not easy to define unproblimatically when the content is language, and still less easy when the content is also the medium of instruction , as in the adult ESL class. After discussion of the interrelated nature of declarative and procedural knowledge in the case of language teaching, he frames the issue with the following questions:

– what does the teacher need to know about language use in order to manage the learning of it effectively?

– furthermore, does it need to be known consciously? For example, is having

native speaker intuition about the language necessary or sufficient?

My main concern here then is to unravel what that content and procedural knowledge might be as it relates to language teaching.

Content knowledge. In the field of ESL, content is clearly the teacher’s knowledge of the English language. However there are two main aspects of this content knowledge, which are that ESL teachers need to be both proficient users and skilled analysts of the English language [3]. So the two aspects of necessary content knowledge are:

a) the teacher’s ability to speak and write English as a competent user and

b) the teacher’s knowledge of English from phonology, grammar, syntax,

lexical properties, generic structures, pragmatic realizations and literacy conventions.

I would suggest however that there is a further dimension to content knowledge

in which the ESL teacher differs slightly from any other teacher. This dimension is:

c) the teacher’s knowledge/experience of the acquisition of the content in

formal contexts.

Here the content could be considered to be ‘English, or to be ‘a second

language’. This is in fact a crucial distinction. If (c) were considered essential by the profession, and the content is seen as English, then the profession would be composed entirely of non-native speaker teachers – an unlikely and indefensible proposition. However, if we take the second meaning of knowledge arising from having formally learned the content, seen as ‘a second language’, then it brings us to the contention which may be valuable for all teachers to have such knowledge. Non-native speakers have it by definition, and some native-speaker teachers have it.

Why, though, should we consider it necessary or desirable for content knowledge/experience of having learned the content? A parallel from a subject area other than language may help to make this proposition clearer. If we consider a teacher of biology, s/he must have acquired knowledge about biology as a learner in order to teach it. S/he may have learned it a long time ago, in very a different educational context, but s/he has essentially traveled the same route as his or her students, going from a state of knowing little of the subject matter to state of expertise in it. S/he will also have learned it formally, after early childhood, when there is a strong likelihood that the experience of learning is at least potentially accessible for reflection. It is not possible to have biology-as-a-first-language, so the content has inevitably been learned in a conscious way.

Now let us consider the ESL teacher. S/he will have learned English either as a first language, and be a native speaker (NS), or will have learned it as a second language, and be a non-native speaker (NNS). The letter usually supposes that the second language was learned post-early childhood since any earlier usually leads speakers to classify themselves as NS [1]. If the teacher is a native speaker of English, s/he has learned it in a qualitatively different way from the way in which his or her adult students are learning it. This teacher’s learning of English as a first language took place in early childhood, is unavailable for reflection and is considered by SLA researchers to be of a very different nature from learning a second language as an adult. If this teacher is monolingual, s/he does not have direct experience of what the student is doing (adult language learning). There is virtually no other subject, except for possibly the related area of adult literacy, in which the teacher does not have the experience of learning the content in the same way as the student. In science, in maths, in research methods, in driver education, in management or in any subject we could name except second language learning, the teacher has been a conscious learner of the content before undergoing training to impact it a new generation of learners.

If the teacher has learned English post childhood (non-native speaker) s/he has direct experience of what it is the student is doing, in task (learning a language as an adult) and content (English). If the teacher’s first language is English, but she has learned another language post childhood, (becoming a NS bilingual) s/he has experience of the task (learning a language as a adult) with slightly different content (a second language, but not English). So the NNS teacher is the most directly comparable with our teacher of biology, as is shown in the following points:

– The NNS teacher has learned the same content (English) in the same way as his or her student.

– The NS bilingual teacher knows the same content (English) but has acquired it in a different way, and has learned different content (a second language) in a similar way, to his or her students.

– The NS monolingual teacher knows the same content (English) but has acquired it in a different way. The monolingual teacher has no experience of learning any language beyond babyhood, and, as unequivocally accepted by SLA theorists, first language learning is a qualitatively different experience and one which is not accessible for examination by the speaker. I can also propose a further tipe of content knowledge:

d) knowledge of a second language and second language use.

If (c) is knowledge gained from the process of consciously learning a second language, (d) is that knowledge as a result of having learned another language. This may be the result of the process in (c) learning another language as a conscious endeavour, or it may be the result of early bilingualism, in which case the experience of learning it (c) will probably not be accessible for reflection. The language itself, however, is accessible source for comparison and contrast with English, giving the bilingual speaker (NS or NNS) some insight into what is similar to or different from English, in other words the potential for performing cross-linguistic comparison. Here it is timely to recall one of the statements in the ATESOL that it is desirable for teachers to understand the structure of the subject matter and its relationship to other areas of knowledge. These other areas of knowledge are not specified, but it is reasonable to suggest that in the case of English, they might include other languages. A further aspect of (d) is that if the second language is regularly used, or has been regularly used, the person may have experience of ‘bilingual lingual use’. That is he or she may have personal experience of differential proficiency according to domain or skill, and of code-switching. He or she may also have access to effective aspects of bilinguality, such as life as life as a bilingual, life in a bilingual family and related issues of the rearing and education of bilingual or monolingual children.

Literature

1. Davies, A. The native speaker : mith and reality. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2003.

2. Woods, D. Teacher cognition in language teaching. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

3. Wright, T. and R. Bolitho. “Towards awareness of English as a professional language”. Language Awareness 6 (2&3): 162-170, 1997.