Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks

Daniel O. Jackson

• Éditeur: Multilingual Matters
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800411258
• Sujet: Lingue e linguistica
• Sous-sujet: Didattica nell'ambito linguistico e artistico

This book provides an accessible, evidence-based account of how teacher noticing, the process of attending to, interpreting and acting on events which occur during engagement with learners, can be examined in contexts of language teacher education and highlights the importance of reflective practice for professional development. Central to the work is an innovative mixed-methods study of task-based interaction which was undertaken with pre-service English language teachers in Japan. Through close analyses of task interaction coupled with recall data, it illustrates the ways in which pre-service teachers noticed their student partners' use of embodied and linguistic resources. This focus on what teachers attend to, how they interpret it, and their subsequent decisions has multiple implications for language learning and teacher development. It demonstrates the value of teacher noticing for developing rapport, supporting pupils' language acquisition, enhancing participation, fostering reflection and guiding observation, a central feature of language teachers' career advancement.

Part 1

Situating Noticing among Teachers

1Introduction and Overview

Introduction

This book seeks to describe what pre-service English teachers notice as they guide a partner through a series of communicative tasks varying in complexity. Books like this one are commonly introduced with language such as ‘this topic is gaining popularity worldwide’. In the present case, such a statement would be partly true. Teacher noticing in mathematics education does indeed seem to be growing in popularity. Many research articles in journals such as the Journal of Teacher Education and Teaching and Teacher Education have addressed it, as have edited volumes (Schack et al., 2017; Sherin et al., 2011; Simpson et al., 2020). It is not the case that teacher noticing applies solely to math teaching; the construct has been used to explore the thinking of teachers of biology (Russ & Luna, 2013) and jazz (Ankney, 2016) as well. Yet, for some reason, teacher noticing has not appeared often in the literature on second language (L2) teaching. This book is intended to change that situation by providing an accessible, evidence-based account of how teacher noticing can be examined in contexts of language teacher education.

Based on a review of the literature in mathematics education and language teacher cognition, I define language teacher noticing as ‘a form of reflection entailing processes of attending to events, interpreting them, and deciding how to act on them, which occurs during engagement with learners’. Therefore, it can be classified under the larger umbrella of language teacher psychology and it more specifically focuses on teachers’ interactive thinking (Borg, 2019). Later, I expand on this definition using models of joint attention, and suggest the mnemonic AIDE for the key components of attention, interpretation, decision-making and engagement. I also situate pre-service teacher (PST) noticing within an ecological perspective that acknowledges the potential influences of institution, program and task. One of the main findings of the study reported in this book is that PSTs encounter particular challenges and solutions while implementing tasks. Their raw insights can be useful to language teachers and teacher educators, perhaps as much as theoretical constructs.

What these insights reflect is the nature of language teacher noticing in actual practice, or ‘dynamic interactions among cognition, context and experience’ (Borg, 2015: 324). The primary source of data here was stimulated recall interviews conducted with PSTs enrolled in an undergraduate teacher training course at the university where I teach. Assigned to teacher and student roles, they interacted in pairs to complete a series of four map gap tasks, and those in the teacher role reflected aloud while watching a video of their teaching immediately after completing each task.

Based on these interview data, the study drew upon 64 transcripts containing PSTs’ thoughts about what they noticed. These transcripts were translated, then coded for noticing instances by two experienced teachers. The study then tested relevant hypotheses regarding the effects of task complexity and perspectival memory on teacher noticing. However, these teachers’ comments are even more informative when seen as offering an emic perspective on the dynamic act of thinking-for-teaching. Thus, conversation analysis was also used to explore the particular interactions that gave rise to teacher noticing, with reference to the resources used by the teacher and student participants.

To be clear, this book makes the case that teacher noticing is distinct from broader notions already used to describe language teachers’ innermost thoughts, such as reflective teaching or teacher cognition. This case partly rests on the use of research methods designed to elicit PSTs’ relevant thoughts during engagement with learners in the act of teaching. This study adopted task-based language teaching (TBLT) as a framework representing particular challenges and options for engaging with learners that PSTs may potentially encounter in their future careers in the Japanese educational context (Butler, 2011; Fukuta et al., 2017). Within and beyond Japan, the use of tasks in a wide range of language classrooms is growing in popularity (Jackson & Burch, 2017; Samuda et al., 2018; Shintani, 2016). Readers of this book, I hope, will come to appreciate how novice educators might implement tasks and, more importantly, better understand the struggles they face in doing so.

How might studying language teacher noticing make a difference? More than in the past, we are witnessing an expansion of the language teaching field in terms of types of instruction, types of learners and types of outcomes sought and, along with all of these changes, increasing professionalism. This post-methods era of language education emphasizes context sensitivity, practitioner theories and learner identities (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). Teachers, using tasks, are seen as active agents who spontaneously shape the classroom environment in response to diverse student needs (Samuda, 2015; Van den Branden, 2016). The importance of reflective practice for professional development (Crookes, 2003; Farrell, 2015; Mann & Walsh, 2017) has also been emphasized. In general, the pendulum has gravitated toward humanistic, critical accounts of the teacher with the learners (Freire, 2007). Increasingly, we find more and more attention paid to learner and teacher psychology (Mercer & Kostoulas, 2018a; Williams et al., 2016).

Mercer and Kostoulas (2018b) recently made the rationale for studying language teacher psychology explicit:

Teachers are absolutely defining in terms of a person’s educational experience as well as often in terms of their life trajectories after school. Surely these people, who have the privilege and considerable responsibility of crafting learning experiences, are so important that understanding their characteristics, personalities, needs, motivations and well-being should be a priority. And yet, in second language acquisition (SLA) to date, this has not been the case. (Mercer & Kostoulas, 2018b: 1)

This book attempts to integrate related lines of scholarship by focusing on what language teachers see, think and do, the study of which is neither new (Fanselow, 1988) nor specific to language teaching professionals (Goodwin, 1994). Nonetheless, teacher noticing and the resulting conversations about what they see in their work remain underspecified, despite their enormous significance.

Later in the book, I propose that the value of teacher noticing for language education resides in how it is used to:

(1)Develop rapport. Teachers who notice their students will have more opportunities to establish rapport. This in turn creates a positive dynamic in the classroom and better experiences, with deeper engagement, throughout the period of instruction (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003). There is consequently more student engagement for the teacher to notice, so that a virtuous cycle is created.

(2)Support acquisition. Teachers must notice and act upon learners’ use of language to be able to support their linguistic development. A major tenet of contemporary language teaching is that instructors should, during communication, notice learners’ production and guide them toward more effective usage, through focus on form (Long & Robinson, 1998).

Yet, acquisition is not the only thing that matters; as Ortega (2011) reminded us, participation is another powerful metaphor for learning.

(3)Enhance participation. Participation, if understood as engagement during lessons, drives learners’ educational experiences. Teachers who notice various dimensions of student engagement, including cognitive, affective, behavioral and social engagement (Philp & Duchesne, 2016), can better assist students in terms of fostering active participation in learner-centered classrooms.

I also suggest that teacher noticing can be applied to professional development to:

(4)Foster reflection. Pre-service and novice teachers need meaningful opportunities to use an array of tools to reflect with others, and these should be data led, as argued by Mann and Walsh (2017). These authors also claimed that confusing terminology relating to reflective practice is one reason for the lack of data-based accounts. This book seeks to offer terminological clarity and to illustrate the operationalization of language teacher noticing, also elaborating on the use of stimulated recall interviews, which Mann and Walsh regard as a valuable means of reflection.

(5)Guide observation. Post-observation feedback to support development or evaluation (Copland & Donaghue, 2019) is a central feature of language teachers’ career advancement. One possibility for focusing such observations, described later, is for observers to pay attention to how the teacher ‘does noticing’ during classroom interaction, which can be regarded as one part of their embodied and jointly accomplished management of classroom practices (Hall & Looney, 2019). Language teachers display their attention to learners in myriad ways, including pointing to nominate speakers, scowling at disruptions and using recasts to correct pronunciation. These displays are all social acts of doing noticing, which are obviously less appropriate outside the classroom context!

The Path to this Book

At this point, a few words about how I became interested in the topic of teacher noticing may be in order. The turn of this century marked the start of my teaching career, as that is when I received my MS in TESOL/Education from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, I became familiar with the cognitive-interactionist approach (Pica, 1994; for book-length accounts, see Long, 2015; Mackey, 2012). Over a number of years circulating around classrooms to listen, ask questions and offer language support – and reflecting on my practice – I felt that my teaching was gradually accompanied by a heightened sense of awareness, including a better idea of when and how to pay attention, a finer understanding of my students’ thinking and an intuitive grasp of what knowledge might be needed in a given context. At best, I would have described these moments as ‘acts of cognition’ (Freire, 2007), liberating me from teaching only syllabus or textbook content, because they initiated communication to resolve students’ concerns at the point of need. Yet I felt I lacked precise terms to describe this subjective impression, even though I had read up on language teacher cognition (Borg, 2015). So, it was a pleasant epiphany when I first encountered Miriam Sherin and Elizabeth van Es’ work on teacher noticing (Sherin & van Es, 2003, is a highly accessible introduction).

I then joined the Second Language Studies Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where I completed a dissertation on artificial language learning under the supervision of the late Richard Schmidt, whose noticing hypothesis I came to understand better through my studies. Fully aware of its importance and deeply appreciative of the insights it brings though I am, at some point it struck me as slightly incongruous that SLA deals much more with learner noticing than with teacher noticing. One could easily counter that learner noticing applies to all adult language learning, whether inside or outside the classroom, and teacher noticing only to instructed language learning, so an imbalance is understandable. However, there was still no research seeking to connect teacher noticing and language teaching after I completed my dissertation in 2014. Nor do language teacher trainers mention it in their numerous how-to books, which might surprise no one. In hindsight, I was no longer satisfied with waiting for someone else to do a study of language teachers’ noticing, more familiar with the caveats such a study would involve and somehow undeterred by the fact that the only available liter...

Table des matières

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in the Book
• Part 1: Situating Noticing among Teachers
• Part 2: A Study of Pre-Service Teachers
• Part 3: Conclusion
• Appendices
• References
• Index