Literacy-oriented pedagogy in the advice of experienced language teachers as prospective practicum assessors

Abstract

This study reports the impact of a professional development course on experienced, highly qualified secondary school teachers of English as a foreign language in preparation for their becoming paid assessors of student teachers on practicum. The course concerned a literacy-oriented pedagogy informed by literacy pedagogical content knowledge (LPCK). The course view of LPCK was contested disciplinary change from traditional sentence-based pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) about language to a genre-based view of both language learning and intellectual development as literacy development. The course providers were teacher educators committed to the new pedagogy because of its perceived relevance to social justice, that is, equal opportunity for students' development of academic English for tertiary English-medium study necessitated largely by the globalization of education. The course outcomes, in the form of the participants' spoken feedback to student teachers on practicum about 4 months after the course, were examined for evidence of teachers' course-compatible LPCK. The feedback was found to exhibit rather minimal evidence of the LPCK introduced in the course. Significantly, these findings were in contrast to those of Love's working with first language novice teachers. Personal, pedagogical and contextual reasons are proposed for the difficulties arising when experienced language teachers are faced with new roles and pedagogical orientation.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the Context of Foreign and Second Language Teaching: A Review of the Research Literature

“…Not all intervention studies showed positive results. In Walker (2012) only two out of six participants showed gains in LPCK after an intervention, consisting of a three-day course on practicum assessment. The results might be caused by, amongst others, the participants adhering to their own paradigm of language learning, the high intellectual demand of the performance tasks in the intervention, and the many weaknesses of the course with regard to its nature, pedagogy and content.…”

“…Two articles with the same authors (Meijer, Verloop & Beijaard, 1999;Meijer, Verloop & Beijaard, 2002) used the definition of van Driel, Verloop and De Vos (1998), stating that PCK is a specific type of practical knowledge, built by teachers through their experiences in teaching practice and their reflections on these experiences (Fenstermacher, 1994). Walker (2012) used the concept "literacy pedagogical content knowledge" (LPCK), defined as "knowledge about how spoken and written language are structured for learning; recognition that subject areas have their own literacy practices; and capacity to design learning and teaching strategies that take account of subject-specific literacy practices" (Love, 2010: 342). She stated that in language teaching, LPCK and PCK have the same meaning as in this case the subject matter is language.…”

Effectiveness of My Alazka Application Learning Media in Improving Student’ Chemistry Learning Outcomes

“…In addition, according to Erickson & Sammons-Lohse (2021), learning outcomes consist of skills, knowledge, comprehension, and attitudes. As for learning outcomes, according to Walker (2012), learning outcomes are the result of an assessment of the abilities possessed by students after engaging in learning experiences or participating in the learning process on materials in the cognitive domain, which include six components: knowledge or memory, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.…”