Using Bulgarian Mini-Lessons in an SLA Course to Improve the KAL of American ESL Teachers
METHODOLOGY
Course description
The SLA course is one of the required courses in the TESOL program. The text that we used was Principles of language learning and teaching (Brown, 2000), supplemented by articles and chapters from Richards and Rodgers (1992), Approaches and methods in language teaching. The course focuses mainly on theories of SLA and factors that affect the acquisition process; towards the end of the semester we briefly discuss different methods for teaching ESL.
Students in this course usually have no theoretical background in the subject and often complain of not being able to relate the theories they study to their teaching practice. It seems difficult for them to find any connection between the concepts, constructs, and models they read about, and their own, or their students’ personal experience of learning a foreign language. As educators we should strive to help them in the process of conceptualizing and operationalizing the concepts. One way of achieving this is to bring the abstract theories to life by illustrating how they work in the process of learning a foreign language. I have done this through teaching 15 minutes mini-lessons in Bulgarian, which is my native language and which my students do not speak. One can achieve the same result through constructing rules and a lexicon for a hypothetical language and teach those to the students. The questions I wanted to answer through this study were:
1. What do TESOL students know about language and language learning before taking a course in Theories of Language Learning and Pedagogy?
2. What is the role of the mini-lessons in Bulgarian as a pedagogical tool in teaching about SLA?
3. Do the mini-lessons help to bridge the theory to practice gap?
