Teacher Expertise and English Learners: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

• In Event: 75.044 - Teaching Academic Content to English Language Learners in the Context of New Common Standards

Abstract

The adoption of new, more selective and powerful standards to guide the education of American students K-12 affords the American educational field an opportunity to re-examine the way in which teachers are prepared to work with second language learners (Santos, Darling-Hammond & Cheuk, 2012). Unless this reconsideration takes place, setting up more demanding goals for all students will not render expected results. As Hiebert and Pearson commented “What makes us think that by raising the expectations . . . we will all meet the challenge?” (Pearson & Hiebert, 2013). The paper challenges long-held ideas that ELLs should first learn English to then be prepared to learn subject matter content and counterproposes a reconceptualization of teacher expertise and knowledge of language for learning in the 21st century, discussing how teachers can develop both.

The paper begins by outlining a model of the what of teacher expertise for promoting disciplinary learning by ELLs derived from two perspectives. 1) Shulman’s (1995) model of teacher understanding which represents teacher understanding as comprising six dimensions along which teachers grow: vision, motivation, knowledge, reflection, context and practice. Walqui adapted the model (2000) for the professional growth of teachers of ELLs. 2) A conceptualization of language as action (van Lier, 1998, 2000, 2013; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009; van Lier & Walqui, 2002). The notion of language as action builds on Halliday’s functional perspective (Halliday,1993) which argues that all learning is mediated by language and Vygotskian ideas proposing that human functions increasingly transform one another into higher-level interfunctional systems (Vygotsky, 1987a; 1987b). It also proposes that beginning with perceiving new sights and sounds learning starts not just in perceiving, but also in talking about what is perceived, and when students think with others about what it means, and what they can do with it, in the process of accomplishing increasingly more complex tasks. In this understanding of language, the development of disciplinary practices weaves inseparably conceptual, analytic, and linguistic practices (Valdés, Kibler & Walqui, 2014).

Addressing the how this expertise develops, the paper proposes that there is an imperative to reconsider the development of teacher expertise as taking place through a life of practice. Expertise is the knowledge teachers possess, added to their ability to enact it appropriately in situated action. During teacher preparation teachers learn basic knowledge about how to orchestrate learning, especially learning via the medium of a second language. The deliberate implementation of this knowledge in practice, the most important part of expertise, needs to be situated in the particular of their work. The US is alone among post-industrialized countries (see, for example, Wei, Darling-Hammond, Andree, Richardson & Orphanos, 2009) in considering teachers as ready when they graduate from a teacher education program. The paper argues that the often talked about, but never implemented, continuum of teacher development needs to be implemented to develop professionalism, true educator collaboration to change the negative pattern of underperformance by ELLs and all other students.

Author

• Aida Walqui, WestEd