Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Structure
Foreign language teacher education
If language study (and its scholarly investigation) are conceptualized as the poor cousins of literary studies instead of as integral parts of them (as a discourse-based approach would ensure [see Kramsch, 2000a, p. 320]), then it follows that a proportional amount of (scholarly) attention will be paid to FL TE. In a recent review of the literature on second language TE, Vélez-Rendón (2002, p. 457) confirms this speculation when she writes that “very little attention has been paid to how second language teachers learn to teach, how they develop teaching skills, [and] how they link theory to practice...” The marginalized status of language TE in US FL departments may be reflected best in quantitative assessments of the published knowledge base in this field. Bernhardt and Hammadou (1987) found only 78 articles on FL TE in their review of the literature from 1977 to 1987 and only 8% of these were research-based (see also Freeman & Johnson, 1998, p. 398; Schulz, 2000, pp. 516-517, for similar reviews).The paucity of published research on FL TE may be related to the fact that only 14% of Language Program Directors (LPDs), i.e. those individuals entrusted with the education of graduate student-teachers, has received a Ph.D. in a field related to FLL&T (Teschner, 1987, p. 29). Although the demand for faculty members with expertise in a sub-discipline of applied linguistics has increased in recent years, Kramsch (2000, p. 311) notes that there remains “a certain confusion about what an SLA specialist actually is....”
In current educational scholarship teaching is recognized as a highly interpretive, socially negotiated, eminently situated, and continuously restructured process in which the beliefs, values, and prior experiences of teachers play a definitive role (Freeman & Richards, 1996; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Salomon & Perkins, 1998). Despite this complex characterization, Freeman and Johnson (1998) suspect
that many language teacher education programs continue to operate under the assumption that they must provide teachers with a codified body of knowledge about language, language learning, and language teaching [and that this] knowledge base...often remains compartmentalized in separate course offerings, continues to be transmitted through passive instructional strategies, and remains generally disconnected from the authentic activity of teaching in actual schools and classrooms (Freeman & Johnson, 1998, p. 402).
In Fran and Sam’s home unit, even the transmission of a codified body of language-specific knowledge was not guaranteed, since it was routine practice to send graduate student-teachers to another language department for their methods course. As a result, student-teachers in Fran and Sam’s unit did not have the opportunity to deal adequately with language-specific examples, texts, issues, and concerns in the course that constituted the curricular vehicle of their preparation as language teachers. Such an arrangement sends the implicit message to graduate student-teachers that FL TE (and, by extension, FL teaching) is not sufficiently important to be located department-internal and that it is thus peripheral to the intellectual work of the department.
