The Plurilingual TESOL Teacher

Elizabeth Ellis

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501501197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book introduces a new topic to applied linguistics: the significance of the TESOL teacher's background as a learner and user of additional languages. The development of the global TESOL profession as a largely English-only enterprise has led to the accepted view that, as long as the teacher has English proficiency, then her or his other languages are irrelevant.

The book questions this view. Learners are in the process of becoming plurilingual, and this book argues that they are best served by a teacher who has experience of plurilingualism.

The book proposes a new way of looking at teacher linguistic identity by examining in detail the rich language biographies of teachers: of growing up with two or more languages; of learning languages through schooling or as an adult, of migrating to another linguaculture, of living in a plurilingual family and many more.

The book examines the history of language-in-education policy which has led to the development of the TESOL profession in Australia and elsewhere as a monolingual enterprise. It shows that teachers' language backgrounds have been ignored in teacher selection, teacher training and ongoing professional development. The author draws on literature in teacher cognition, bilingualism studies, intercultural competence, bilingual lifewriting and linguistic identity to argue that languages play a key part in the development of teachers' professional beliefs, identity, language awareness and language learning awareness.

Drawing on three studies involving 115 teachers from Australia and seven other countries, the author demonstrates conclusively that large numbers of teachers do have plurilingual experiences; that these experiences are ignored in the profession, but that they have powerful effects on the formation of beliefs about language learning and teaching which underpin good practice. Those teachers who identify as monolingual almost invariably have some language learning experience, but it was low-level, short-lived and unsuccessful.

How does the experience of successful or unsuccessful language learning and language use affect one's identity, beliefs and practice as an English language teacher? What kinds of experience are most beneficial?

These concepts and findings have implications for teacher language education, teacher professional development and the current calls for increased plurilingual practices in the TESOL classroom.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen,
but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everyone sees.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

The purpose of this book is to introduce a new issue into the literature on English language teaching and English language teacher education: the language background of English language teachers – whether they are monolingual, bilingual or plurilingual; whether they have grown up speaking more than one language or learned other languages later in life; and the relevance of this additional language experience for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)1.

The book reports research undertaken with teachers in Australia and several other countries that queries the accepted view that, as long as the teacher has English proficiency, their other languages, or lack of them, are irrelevant. It proposes that language learning experience and the experience of L2 use are valuable assets for all TESOL teachers. They may have gained that experience as ‘circumstantial bilinguals’ (Valdés and Figueroa 1994), caused by factors such as migration or growing up in a multilingual family, and be native or nonnative speakers of any variety of English. They may have learned L2 as ‘elective bilinguals’ (Valdés and Figueroa 1994) who have learned by choice (and again be native or non-native speakers of any variety of English). Or they may be monolinguals. Even teachers who consider themselves monolingual usually have some experience of L2 learning, but by definition the experience resulted only in a low level of proficiency and was largely unsuccessful. How does the experience of successful or unsuccessful language learning and language use affect one’s identity, beliefs and practice as an English language teacher? What kinds of experience are most beneficial? I draw on literature on bilingual identities (Pavlenko 2006) and on teacher cognition theory (Borg 2009) to explore the role of language learning experience in the formation of teacher identity, knowledge and beliefs. I also borrow from narrative inquiry in exploring teacher language biographies and their formative effect on identity, personal theory and practice.

I highlight three major findings from the three studies reported here: firstly, that teachers’ own experiences of language learning and language use are rich, varied and diverse. Hence it is more useful to talk of circumstantial and elective experiences, since many teachers have both, rather than to talk of them as fixed characteristics. So rather than describe a teacher thus: “Jeane is an elective bilingual” as if it were a fixed identity, it is both more accurate and broadens our ability to think about language experience in different ways, to say “Jeane has elective bilingual experiences”. So far I have used the term ‘bilingual’ to refer to teachers with more than one language. From here on I will use the term ‘plurilingual’ to denote “the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social actor has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures” (Coste, Moore and Zarate, 2009: 11).

Second, the findings show that these experiences are powerful contributors to teachers’ professional identities, and third, they are marginalized in current TESOL practice. In Australia, and very probably in many other teaching contexts, teachers’ languages are not valued: they are not required for entry to TESOL teacher education programs, and in a monolingual English teaching professional context they often atrophy (Ellis 2004, 2008). Now that there are calls for the learners’ L1(s) to be recognised as a key part of learning L2, (Taylor and Snoddon 2013: 439) it is crucial that we also investigate teachers as L2 users. These concepts and findings have implications for teacher language education, teacher professional development and the current calls for increased plurilingual practices in the TESOL classroom.

This book fills a gap in the literature which examines TESOL practice from a critical perspective. Major authors (Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994, Widdowson 1997, 2001, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000a, Mahboob and Lin 2016) have criticised the monolingual focus of the TESOL profession and the privileging within it of native speakers as teachers. Their critique of the monolingual native-speaker model has been followed by debate about the undervaluing of non-native teachers, who often have superior knowledge of their students’ language and culture (Braine 1999, Moussu and Llurda 2008). This debate about the relative merits of native/ non-native speaker teachers has been an important one, but it has obscured a larger, more fundamental question which is the one on which this book is based:

Does a teacher of English as a second or foreign language need to be an L2 learner and/or user, whether or not s/he is in a position to use the L2 in teaching?

To put it another way: is it acceptable for an ESL or EFL teacher in London, Sydney, Helsinki, Toronto or Bangkok, to be a monolingual? There are two traditional answers to this question: firstly that since the direct method – English taught through English, usually by a native speaker – is still favoured in many ESL and EFL teaching contexts, a teacher’s being monolingual does not matter, since only English is used in the classroom. The second traditional answer is that in English-speaking countries such as Australia, most TESOL classes are made up of learners from a wide variety of language backgrounds, and as the teacher cannot possibly speak all the languages represented therein, being monolingual does not matter. The argument of this book, based on three studies of monolingual and plurilingual teachers, as well as on a careful analysis of current thinking in the field of educational linguistics, is that it does matter, and that teachers who are active learners and users of second languages have greater metalinguistic knowledge, greater awareness of language and a deeper understanding of what learning a second language means, at linguistic, sociolinguistic and emotional levels.

A hypothetical monolingual TESOL teacher says to her students, in effect:

“Although I have never learned a second language successfully, I am going to teach you a second language”.

“Although I have no direct experience of second language learning strategies, I am going to train you in such strategies”.

“Although I have nothing to contrast them with, I am going to teach you the structure and patterns of English and all its idioms and idiosyncracies”.

“Although I do not know what it is like to be a user of a second language, to be an emerging plurilingual, to be the parent of potentially plurilingual children, I am going to teach you all these things (or, more likely, I will ignore them as I have no way of relating to them)”

Let us contrast this with a hypothetical teacher with additional language experience, who might say:

“I have learned one or more additional languages so I can assure you it is possible, and I can model success”

“I’ve used a variety of learning strategies – they may not all work for you, but I can help you discover the ones that do work for you”

“I’ll teach you the structure and patterns of English, knowing from my study of (French and Chinese) that there are many other ways languages can be organised, and that your own L1 is bound to differ substantially from English”

“I know what it’s like to be an L2 user / to struggle in the classroom / to be an immigrant / to be the parent of plurilingual children, and these experiences will inform my approach in the classroom”

The book examines the experiences and perspectives of plurilingual and monolingual teachers in depth, drawing substantially on the literature in teacher cognition, and expanding on the notion of ‘experiential knowledge’ (Wallace 1991) which experienced L2 users can bring to their teaching. It examines the history of language-in-education policy which has led to the development of the TESOL profession in Australia, linking this to broader critiques of the devaluing of other languages in the world of TESOL.

The data presented here demonstrates the surprising breadth and depth of second language expertise among TESOL teachers of adults in a variety of sites in Australian cities and in TESOL centres in 7 other countries. It examines, through interviews, class observations and language biographies, how this language experience is a significant resource for the individual teacher in forming and developing her or his conceptions of professional language teaching practice. It shows how this resource has hitherto been ignored in teacher selection, teacher training and ongoing professional development. It concludes by suggesting directions for the profession to develop and use this resource to improve the learning of adult students. Such initiatives include the recruiting of teachers who have L2 experience, and the integration of the kinds of knowledge derived from that experience into their training and development, through, for example, structured reflection and cross-linguistic comparison.

There is currently renewed interest in re-establishing a view of the learners’ L1 as a key contributor to second language learning (Hall and Cook 2012, Taylor 2009); part of a movement towards a more plurilingual view of TESOL. This is a welcome move, but re-admitting the learners’ ‘own language(s)’ to use Hall and Cook’s term, or ‘local languages’ (Mahboob and Lin 2016) means that we must look critically at what other-language capabilities are desirable for teachers in such inclusive classrooms. The teacher may share a common language with students, in which case the advantage is obvious, since it renders possible a form of teaching using both languages. If, however, there are many languages in the class, bilingual teaching as such is not possible. In such multilingual classes, the traditional argument goes, teaching must be exclusively in English, and hence it does not matter whether the teacher speaks other languages. The book rejects this notion, arguing that firstly teachers who speak more than one language have greater language awareness than monolingual teachers: secondly that they have greater language learning awareness, and thirdly that their other-language experiences contribute to a teacher identity that is a valuable classroom resource. The book then discusses the aspects of teacher plurilinguistic identity that are most beneficial.

Once teachers’ language expertise is recognised and fostered, new possibilities for teaching and learning open up. They include selective bilingual teaching, translanguaging sessions, language exchanges, recognition and valuing of the students’ L1, the building and use of print and online resources in L1 and so on. Only by exploring such possibilities, the book argues, can we legitimately call ourselves ‘second language teachers’ and avoid well-founded critiques of the TESOL profession as a ‘monolingual monolith’.

My story

In this section I relate a small part of my own experience as a newly-qualified TESOL teacher, which explains how I became interested in this topic and eventually to research it.

Most native-speaking teachers of English as a Foreign or Second Language will have had the same reaction as I have had from friends and strangers when I tell them my profession. On telling others that we teach English, our own language, to people of other language backgrounds, a common response is: ‘Oh, you must speak a lot of languages!’ Fresh from a TESOL teacher training course in London in 1980, I at first took delight in explaining that in fact it was neither necessary nor possible to speak the language(s) of all our students. First there were likely to be too many languages spoken in any given class for even the most linguistically gifted teacher to master them all. Second, even if we could speak multiple languages, we couldn’t use them all at once in a mixed-language class. Third, our training as EFL/ESL teachers had equipped us with ingenious skills in analyzing and breaking down grammar, word meaning and pronunciation so that they could be explained in simple English. We were skilled at teaching English through the medium of English and had no need to know or use the language of our students, both for the pragmatic reasons given above and also for the fact that teaching via other languages smacked of the horrors of old-fashioned ‘grammar translation’ teaching. Holliday echoes this sentiment, stating that as he arrived to take up a post in Iran, “I felt supremely confident that I possessed the most up-to-date, systematic method for teaching English efficiently” (Holliday 2005: 60).

As I gave this explanation time and time again, I began to feel that I was under-representing myself both as a graduate in French and German and as a keen learner and user of languages. After all, the reasons I had become an EFL teacher were because I had loved studying languages, and because I wanted to live and work overseas, and for me, a large part of that attraction was living in another language. So I began qualifying my explanation by saying ‘well I do speak French and German pretty well, and I’ve studied Italian, and I’m learning Spanish at the moment, but you don’t need to speak any other language to be an English teacher’.

Over my first years of teaching English it occasionally occurred to me that some of my languages were slipping away. While I was teaching English in Spain my Spanish flourished of course, although I found, like many, that I had to make a big effort to make friends outside the community of expatriate teachers with whom I worked in order to use the language. Using my developing Spanish in the classroom was unthinkable: the language centre where I worked was strictly English-only. After returning to Australia I lost fluency and vocabulary in all my languages: a common phenomenon when they are not used regularly. I didn’t give it a great deal of thought though, and certainly didn’t make any connections with my new profession.

When I became a teacher trainer in the UCLES system, I participated in selection of candidates for the RSA Certificate course now known as the CELTA. I noticed that applicants who claimed to speak one or more languages as well as English tended to perform much better on the pre-course selection task than those who were monolingual. On this task we were looking for something we called ‘sensitivity to language’ or ‘language awareness’ and this seemed to exist more obviously in the thinking and talk of those who had learned another language. The monolinguals, too, seemed to be over-represented among those who struggled on the course and among those who failed. I had no firm evidence of this, of course, since the frenetic day-to-day running of CELTA courses leaves little time for collecting data or record-keeping of any kind other than that essential for the course.

As I completed further study and began to teach university-based TESOL teacher education courses, I noticed increasingly that those students who had a background which involved language learning seemed to understand more about how language worked and more about the challenges it posed for their learners than those who did not. I completed stints of teaching and teacher training in other countries and learned to various levels Lao, Portuguese and Indonesian. I studied them partly for my own pleasure and survival in those countries, but also because I had a vague feeling that it enhanced my credibility as an English language teacher, even when I was not able to use those languages in the English-medium class. As time wore on, I began to think about my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of tables
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The TESOL profession as monolingual monolith
• 3 Three studies of TESOL teachers’ linguistic identities
• 4 Bilingualism, plurilingualism and TESOL teachers
• 5 Teachers’ identities as learners
• 6 The value of language learning
• 7 Teachers’ knowledge and insights about language and language use
• 8 Teacher cognition: understanding how knowledge and beliefs underpin professional practice
• 9 Applying insights about language learning and language teaching from teachers’ own learning experience
• 10 A survey of the NSW TESOL profession
• 11 Rejecting the monolingual monolith: the way forward
• References
• Appendix A – List of languages in Study 1
• Appendix B – Pre-interview questionnaire from Study 2
• Appendix C – Interview protocol for Studies 1 and 2
• Appendix D – Survey questions used for Study 3
• Appendix E – Summary chart of teachers’ biographies in Study 1
• Index
• Fußnoten