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van Leeuwen and Humphrey (1996) frame an
important goal for your language pedagogy:
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The role of the language teacher is various. It might be considered from three basic perspectives:
- Roles and responsibilities within the organisation of the school
- Roles and responsibilities within the community
- Roles and responsibilities within the classroom
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All the facets of teaching and learning
within this subject falls within the scope of the language teachers roles
and responsibilities in the classroom.
In the first place we must keep up with current theory and research; we need to know our field, be experts. Most of you will be just beginning to develop expertise in the finer points of language research and grammatical knowledge. I have been working with systemic functional linguistics since 1977, and ways in which it might serve language pedagogy, and during those years there have been many changes to its applications and extensions of the theory. Now it is being applied to multimodal texts in a way we did not dream of in 1977.
Second Language Acquisition theory (Nunan 1995) and research is another source of expertise for us; although is is not necessarily sociocultural research much of it can be adapted to all language classrooms. you will find information online.
The kind of expertise and knowledge you
need about official policies, strategies and syllabuses at a school level
will be implemented in your classroom.
You will need to carry out on-going assessments
to monitor students' proficiency and needs, using various form of assessment
and records.
Designing a consistent, sociocultural,
based on MEANINGFUL, PURPOSEFUL classroom interactions which are designed
to give students knowledge, power, over how language works is fundamental
to good language teaching. I suggest that even when you are reading Nunan's
classroom ideas you need to fill out that pedagogic structure which will
take into account the intersubjective dynamics of your classroom. All of
the material in this subject should alert you to the subjectivitiy and
social formations which are in play in all language exchanges. Every time
we say, "Good", or repeat a student's comment in a rising intonation (Nunan
1995) we are participating in subjectivity and social formations. Awareness
of power relationships between dialects, of the marginalising of groups
through ways in which they are identified, are not just matters of our
teacher knowledge, they are things to be included in our curriculum, at
organisational and metawareness levels. Here are some quotations to reiterate
these themes:
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Now, too, we need to included technologies
within our language and literacy programs. Lankshear, Snyder and Green
remind us about the relationship between change and literacies and that
literacies are not a capacity in the head but a feature of meaningful exchanges:
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changes and related changes in social practices beyond the school are now
forcing us to challenge some of our conventional assumptions about literacy,
another challenge to long-held beliefs about literacy has been developing
within literacy theory since the 1960s and 70s. This is what has become
known as a 'sociocultural approach' to literacy.
' Traditionally, literacy has been thought of 'as a largely psychological ability - something true about our heads' (Gee, Hull & Lankshear 1996: 1). That is, to become literate is to have something done to our brains, so that we achieve a special kind of cognitive 'faculty' or inner capacity. This view reflects the domination of psychology in educational theory and research throughout this century. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word-formation skills, phonics, grammar, and comprehension skills. According to this view, encoding and decoding skills serve as building blocks for doing other things and for accessing meanings. For instance, once people are literate, they can get on with learning through the medium of texts - by studying subjects in a curriculum, or by other print-mediated means. When people are literate, they can use 'it' (the skill repertoire, the ability) as a 'tool' to pursue all sorts of 'goods' (employment, knowledge, recreational pleasure, personal development, economic growth, innovation). But to 'get literate' in the first place is seen from this perspective as a matter of inserting the necessary skills into people's heads. There are debates about how best to achieve this (for example, phonics, letter recognition, 'letter chunking'), but those debating the most effective way all share the idea of literacy as basically a 'head thing', a psychological ability. By contrast, understanding literacy as sociocultural practice means that reading and writing can be understood and acquired only within the context of the social, cultural, political, economic and historical practices to which they are integral. This idea was captured by Brian Street's (1984) distinction between the 'autonomous' and 'ideological' models of literacy. Incidentally, the 'sociocultural practice' view of human activity applies equally well to literacy technology and learning. From the sociocultural standpoint, literacy is best understood as 'shorthand for the social practices of reading and writing' (Street 1984: 1). As such, literacy is really 'literacies' as print-based activities take many different forms-some of which are very unlike others in terms of purposes and the kinds of texts involved. According to a sociocultural approach, these differences must he seen as residing in the literacies themselves, rather than outside or independently of them, as we never learn, teach or employ literacy 'skills' in context-free ways, but always within some context of practice. Different social practices - different contexts of practice - 'embed' different forms of literacy. The relationship between human practice and producing and sharing meanings underlies the sociocultural view. Human practices are meaningful ways of doing things, of getting things done (Franklin 1990). For example, social practices of cooking-feeding-eating are not mere 'biologically necessary acts'. They are saturated with cultural meanings, and different groups practise 'cooking-feeding-eating' in different ways. The practice (not one practice, in fact, but many practices) means different things to different groups. And these different meanings do not exist just in the head, and are not produced just in the head. There is a head component, of course, but the 'meaning-making' is based largely in the material practices that take place in the social-cultural settings of the groups involved. According to the sociocultural view, the same is true for literacy as for practices like cooking-feeding-eating. Reading or writing is always reading or writing something in particular with understanding. Different kinds of text require 'somewhat different backgrounds and somewhat different skills' if they are to be read meaningfully (Lankshear and Snyder with Green 2000: 27-29) |
| In a social semiotic theory of language (Halliday 1978), the concept of register is central: language is seen, not as a unified whole, but as a set of registers, and these registers, rather than differing primarily in their phonology and syntax. as do dialects, differ in the kinds of meanings they realise, and in the ways in which they realise them, so constituting the discursive heterogeneity which, today, characterises languages like English. Definitions of literacy should take account of this, and define literacy in terms of plurality, as literacies, and in terms of register, as proficiencies in speaking and (where registers are also written) reading and/or writing specific registers. The question is not so much 'Can you speak, read and write English?' but 'What can you speak, read and write in English?' (van Leeuwen & Humphrey in Hasan & Williams (Eds) 1996: 29) |
We need to be readers and viewers of many
kinds of texts so that we can draw on these resources in the classroom.
You may, or may not be involved in co-teaching.
It is common practice particularly in Asian language classes. There is,
of course, extensive literature on the practice, although not so much on
Second Language Teaching.
You may, or may not have an official curriculum;
some new International Schools may be developing a curriculum. Even if
there is a curriculum, or syllabus, in place you will have some scope for
choosing materials and planning implementation, evaluation and assessment
procedures. The important thing in any planning it must take account of
the students needs and aspirations. It must be tied to their purpose for
learning English. If you are in a NSW school those purposes will probably
be transparent. If you are in an Asian situation you need to know whether
the student needs and English to enter Year 11 high school and then there
is the necessary preparation for TOEFL as well as the need familiarise
the students with what will be required of them in an Australian - or English
- or American site.
As you would know these are essential elements
of all teaching. You need to plan the procedures with your program, adhering
to school and Governmental requirements. I found even in China I had reasonable
scope for interactive, engaging lessons, because I adhered to weekly testing
activities and assessments. The tests were usually related to something
the students could communicate to me as an interested reader, although
there was always a section on metalanguage awareness and knowledge. You
need to follow school policies and other guidelines for assessment and
reporting purposes.
A research role is essential in a pedagogy;
it is part of evaluation. But in your role as language teacher can also
be about profiling the languages in your school, the different languages
spoken at home, the available community language schools. Keeping the presence
of community languages in the school might become another objective for
you.
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