Interchange author Jack C. Richards is looking at what distinguishes the very best language teachers, and what we can learn from them. Today, Jack continues to explore the role played by content knowledge.
A sound grounding in relevant pedagogical content knowledge should prepare teachers to be able to do things such as the following:
- Understand learners’ needs
- Diagnose learners’ learning problems
- Plan suitable instructional goals for lessons
- Select and design learning tasks
- Evaluate students’ learning
- Design and adapt tests
- Evaluate and choose published materials
- Adapt commercial materials
- Make use of authentic materials
- Make appropriate use of technology
- Evaluate their own lessons
The role of pedagogical content knowledge is demonstrated in a study by Angela Tang (cited in Richards 1998), in which she compared two groups of English teachers in Hong Kong – one with training in literature and one with- out such training – and how they would exploit literary texts in their teaching. Some of the differences between these two groups of teachers are seen in the following summary of the research findings.
So we see here that possessing relevant content knowledge made a substantial difference in how teachers planned their lessons. Teachers with relevant content knowledge should consequentially be able to make better and more appropriate decisions about teaching and learning and to arrive at more appropriate solutions to problems than a teacher without such knowledge. However, the central issue of what constitutes appropriate disciplinary knowledge and what is appropriate pedagogical content knowledge remains an unresolved issue, and studies that have sought to investigate the impact of content knowledge on teachers’ practices have produced very mixed results (Bartels 2005).
A further important component of professional knowledge in today’s classrooms has been termed “technological pedagogical content” knowledge, or TPCK (Mishra and Koehler 2006) – that is, the ability to incorporate and integrate technology into teaching. Reinders (2009, 231) points out that depending on the teacher’s level of technological expertise, this could involve “being able to first, use a certain technology; second, being able to create mate- rials and activities using that technology; and third, being able to teach with technology.”
The use of technology in teaching becomes more important in present times because teachers also have to be able to keep up with the technological knowledge of their students. Young learners today have more access to information and more tools available to them to manage their own learning. Reinders (2009, 236) suggests that “the challenge for teachers will be more one of helping learners develop the skills to deal successfully with the increased control and independence that technology demands.”
Becoming a language teacher also involves learning to “talk the talk,” that is, acquiring the specialized discourse that we use among ourselves and that helps define the subject matter of our profession. This means becoming familiar with several hundred specialized terms such as learner centeredness, learner autonomy, self-access, alternative assessment, blended learning, task-based instruction, phoneme, and common European Framework that we use on a daily basis in talking about our teaching. Being able to use the appropriate discourse (and, of course, understand what they mean) is one criteria for membership in the language teaching profession.
You can find all the references for this series of posts here.
Read all the posts in this series:
Competence and Performance in Language Teaching #1 – Introduction
Competence and Performance #2 – The language proficiency factor
Competence and Performance #3 – The role of content knowledge (i)
Competence and Performance #4 – The role of content knowledge (ii)
Competence and Performance #5 – Teaching skills
Competence and Performance #6 – Contextual Knowledge
Competence and Performance #7 – The language teacher’s identity
Competence and Performance #8 – Learner-focused teaching (i)
Competence and Performance #9 – Learner-focused teaching (ii)
Competence and Performance #10 – Pedagogical reasoning skills
Competence and Performance #11 – Theorizing from practice
Competence and Performance #12 – Membership of a community of practice
Competence and Performance #13 – Professionalism