PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS
By: Zulhidah (www.zulhiddahpbiuin.webs.com)
A. Introduction
English is one of the international foreign languages formally and non-formally learned by most of Indonesian people. It is a compulsory subject, which is taught from Elementary School up to Universities. It seems that everybody who wants to continue his/her studies in his/her country or abroad, have a good job position in a prestigious company with higher salary, and participate effectively in global community and maintain standard of living in the context of increasing global competition and cooperation needs English.
As the twentieth-century draws to a close, more and more Indonesian people especially young professionals are starting to understand that a new, highly interdependent global marketplace of producers and consumers has emerged. Leaders in many professions now realize that fluency in English and multicultural sensitivity is essential in their fields.
As we know that
On the other hand, to have a good proficiency in foreign languages in particular English is not easy. It is influenced by a number of factors such as the language learner’s qualification, interest, and efforts, the English learning facilities they have, and qualified teachers. Nowadays, in many third countries in the world including
Curtain and Pesola suggest that foreign language teachers today “require a combination of competencies and background that may be unprecedented in the preparation of language teachers” and that professional development is critical one. Clearly one of the goals of teaching English is to make the students able to communicate, to understand and be understood by native speakers and nonnative speakers of the language. In order to help the students reach this goal, the teacher should be able to apply effective teaching in the process of teaching and learning English that has relationship with their professional development.
This paper tries to describe the challenges for English language teachers, skills and knowledge needed by them, and opportunities for professional development of the English teachers.
B. Challenges for English Language Teachers
Teaching English as a foreign language is not an easy job especially for nonnative speaker teachers of the language. There are many factors that make the teaching of foreign languages in particular English challenging for teachers’ professional development. Pertaining to the issues, Curtain and Pesola (1994) and Tedick and
1. The cultural, socioeconomic, linguistic, and academic diversity typical in today’s student population requires foreign language teachers to work with students whose needs, educational experiences, and native language skills are very different from those of students they have typically taught.
2. The variety of reasons students have for learning foreign languages and the different ways they approach this learning require that foreign language curricula and instruction address a range of student goals and learning styles.
3. The current emphasis on exclusive use of the target language in the classroom requires that teachers have strong language skills.
4. The emphasis on thematic learning demands that teachers have to be skilled in thematic areas explored, competent in the vocabulary related to these areas, responsive to student interests in various topics, and able to work in teams with content-area teachers.
5. The emphasis on collaborative learning and student self-directed learning requires that teachers be able to act as facilitators, guides, counselors, and resources, not just as language experts.
6. The increase in foreign language enrollments and the shortage of qualified teachers may require foreign language teachers to teach at more grade levels than they have in the past.
7. The emphasis on technology for language learning and teaching requires teachers to keep informed about new technologies and their instructional uses.
The previous challenging factors absolutely emphasize the need for strong professional development of the English language teachers. English language teachers should be able to cope with the seventh challenges above in order to fulfill strong professional development needed by them to help the students able to accelerate the reaching of English teaching goals. To face that challenges is not easy for English teachers. They need to improve their language skills in modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing and their general knowledge.
In accordance with the statement above, Met says that good foreign language teachers need the following skills and knowledge:
1. A high level of language proficiency in all of the modalities of the target language; speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
2. The ability to use the language in real-life contexts, for both social and professional purposes.
3. The ability to comprehend contemporary media in the foreign language, both oral and written, and interact successfully with native speakers in the
4. A strong background in the liberal arts and the content areas.
5. Understanding of the social, political, historical, and economic realities of the regions where the language they teach is spoken.
6. Pedagogical knowledge and skills, including knowledge about human growth and development, learning theory and second language acquisition theory, and a repertoire of strategies for developing proficiency and cultural understanding in all students(Guntermann, 1992).
7. Knowledge of the various technologies and how to integrate them into their instruction.
In
English language teachers must maintain their proficiency in the target language taught and stay up to date on current issues related to the English language teaching and the target culture. So, they have to study cross-cultural understanding to make them easy to teach the language.
In recent years, various Universities in many countries in the world have developed many programs for professional development in the teaching of foreign languages and cultures for specific purposes. In addition to this condition, language teachers also try to seek training needed in the application of foreign language and cultural instruction.
Language proficiency in all four-language skills is key to academic achievement for both teachers and students. Regardless of the skills and knowledge that foreign language teachers possess when they commence teaching, maintenance and improvement must be an ongoing process. We know that most teachers must continue to accumulate academic credits while teaching, in order to keep their teaching license current. These can be done through seminars, lectures, workshops, on higher education training and researches offered by governance, professional associations or universities.
To fulfill both of them is not easy for most of English teachers in
To make these five standards run well needs hard work of the teachers. These standards emerge from five principles of practice that have proven successful with majority and minority at-risk students in numerous classrooms in many countries. They incorporate the broadest base of knowledge available and reflect the emerging professional consensus about the most effective ways to educate linguistically, intelligently, and culturally diverse students. For many years, researchers have attempted to integrate studies of diverse students into literature reviews encompassing thousands of studies carried out worldwide.
First, teachers should facilitate learning for the students through joint productive activities among teachers and students. Learning takes place best through joint activity – when experts and novices work together for a common product or goal, and during the activity have opportunities to converse about it. In many schools, however, opportunities for this kind of shared experience are rare, which in turn limits students’ opportunities to develop common systems of understanding with their teachers and with their peers. Discourse, which builds basic schooled competencies, can take place only if the teacher shares in these experiences. Joint productive activity between teacher and students helps to create a common context of experience within the school itself.
Second, teachers should develop students’ competence in the English language and literacy of instruction throughout all instructional activities. Language and literacy development should be fostered through meaningful use and purposive conversation between teacher and students, not through drills and decontextualized rules. The ways of using language that prevail in school discourse are frequently unfamiliar to English language learners and other at risk students. Third, teacher should contextualize teaching and curriculum in the experiences and skills of home and community. The teachers should provide the following indicators:
1. Listen to students talk about familiar topic
2. Respond to students’ talk and questions, making on the spot changes that directly relate to their comments.
3. Assist language development through modeling, eliciting, probing, restating, clarifying, questioning, and praising, as appropriate in purposeful conversation.
4. Interact with students in ways that respect their speaking style, which may be different from the teacher’s, such as paying attention to wait-time, eye contact, turn taking, and spotlighting.
5. Connect student language with literacy and content area knowledge through speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities.
6. Encourage students to use content vocabulary to express their understanding.
7. Provide frequent opportunities for students to interact with each other and with the teacher during instructional activities.
8. Encourage students to use their first and second languages in instructional activities.
To increase student language development and promote student understanding, the teachers should use the following strategies:
1. Presenting information in known contexts.
2. Modeling appropriate language and vocabulary.
3. Providing visuals and other materials that display language.
4. Using familiar language from students’ funds of knowledge.
5. Using sentence patterns and routines frequently.
6. Adjusting questioning to meet students needs.
7. Asking students to explain their reasoning.
8. Inviting students to paraphrase often.
9. Simplifying sentences and syntax.
10. Playing with words.
Students can develop their language skills if the teacher can create an environment that provides a variety of social contexts to emphasize the explicit connections among the students’ experience, language, literacy, and academic knowledge. There are three levels of contextualization that must be addressed. They are as follows:
1. At the level of instruction, teachers should try to establish patterns of classroom participation and speech that are drawn from conversational styles of family and community yet help students develop the academic style of talk suited for schools.
2. At the curriculum level, cultural materials and skills are the media by which the goals of literacy, numeracy, and science are contextualized. The use of personal, community-based experiences as the foundation for developing school skills.
3. At the policy level, the school itself is contextualized. Effective school-based learning is a social process that affects and is affected by the entire community. Longer-lasting progress has been achieved with children whose learning has been explored, modified, and shaped in collaboration with their parents and communities.
In connecting teaching and curriculum by using experiences and skills from students’ home and community, the teachers can provide the following indicators:
1. Begin with what students already know from home, community, and school.
2. Design instructional activities that are meaningful to students in terms of local community norms and knowledge.
3. Learn about local norms and knowledge by talking to students, parents, and community members and by reading pertinent documents.
4. Assist students to connect and apply their learning to home and community.
5. Plan jointly with students to design community-based learning activities.
6. Provide opportunities for parents to participate in classroom instructional activities.
7. Vary activities to include students’ preferences, from collective and cooperative activities to individual and competitive ones.
8. Vary styles of conversation and participation to include students’ cultural preferences, such as co-narration, call-and-response, and choral.
Fourth, teachers should challenge students toward cognitive complexity. There is a clear consensus among researchers that at-risk students require instruction that is cognitively challenging, that is, instruction that requires thinking and analysis, not only rote, repetitive, detail-level drills. This does not mean ignoring phonics rules or not memorizing the multiplication tables, but it does mean going beyond that level of curriculum into the deep exploration of interesting and meaningful materials. There are many ways in which cognitive complexity has been introduced into the teaching of at-risk students.
Fifth, teachers should engage students through dialogue, especially the instructional conversation. Basic thinking skills are most effectively developed through dialogue, that is, through the process of questioning, answering, and sharing ideas and knowledge. Language development, both oral and written, is best acquired through interaction with more linguistically proficient users.
The instructional conversation is the means by which teachers and students relate formal, schooled knowledge to the student’s individual, community, and family knowledge. This concept may appear to be a paradox; instruction implies authority and planning, while conversation implies equality and responsiveness. True dialogue teaching transforms classroom and schools into “the community of learners” they can become” when teachers reduce the distance between themselves and their students by constructing lessons from common understandings of each others’ experience and ideas and make teaching a warm, interpersonal and collaborative activity.
C. Opportunities for Professional Development
Indonesian government has offered many programs for development of English teachers to continue education, have broad insight of English teaching methodology and strategies by joining seminars, workshops, and projects in curriculum and material development in particular since Competency-Based Curriculum has to be implemented in the process of teaching and learning in every school in
Most of language centers and professional organization like Linguistic Society in
Nowadays, in many countries in the world, there is a phenomenon where there is a variety of training opportunities exists for language teachers has increased especially for the language teachers who want to teach English for a Specific Purposes, such as English for Secretary, English for business, English for Hotel, English for Tourism, and so on. Many young professional businessmen need English for development of their future career in their business world. English becomes a vehicle for them to run their business well in particular when they want to have joint-venture with foreign investors that can invest much money to their companies.
In colleges and universities, internationally focused courses have been created, and interdisciplinary programs of study requiring foreign language proficiency and cultural knowledge have been developed. The application of foreign language and cultural studies to the field of business has emerged as a prominent component in these recent reforms. Besides, many of the new interdisciplinary business and foreign language programs encourage students to spend some time acquiring practical experiences by working for a company in their country and even abroad. Some institutions in
Relating to the issues, in fact, foreign locations offer many advantages of total immersion, direct contact with foreign business people in a variety of economic sectors, and personal observation of foreign business operations. To combine foreign language and cultural studies with business is access to examinations leading to certificates and diplomas in business foreign languages offered by foreign educational, business, and governmental organizations.
Language teachers seeking training in the application of foreign language and cultural instruction to business, as well as business educators wanting to internationalize their courses and programs can also draw on a significant body of published information. Hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books covering these new academic fields have been published in the past decade. A bibliography listing over 200 such publications was printed in the Modern Language Journal in 1991.
Teaching English as a foreign language in
Pertaining to the problem faced by the English teachers, here are the recommendations for teacher education that will give benefits for their professional development in the future:
1. Teacher education must shift from a focus on pre-service training alone to lifelong professional development.
2. Rather than separating language teacher preparation into different departments-English as a second language, foreign language, bilingual, and immersion-teachers should be prepared to teach in more than one second language context. For example, in both English as a second language and foreign language classes, or both the intermediate level and advanced level.
3. Rather than beginning with academic coursework and educational theory and moving later to classroom practice, theory and practice must be integrated from the very start.
4. Teacher preparation programs need to expand their criteria for graduation beyond language proficiency and academic achievement alone, to include experience with different cultures, ability to work with diverse learners from many educational backgrounds and in many different educational settings, and ability to use the state of the art technologies in their instruction.
5. In response to widespread teacher shortages due to high enrollments, teacher retirement, and teacher attrition, many countries are granting emergency certification to individuals who meet certain criteria such as a college degree, proficiency in the language, teaching experience, and pedagogy coursework.
6. Teachers in English as a foreign language and second language classrooms need to form strong partnerships that allow for the sharing of information, curricula, strategies in teaching, and support across disciplines, departments, schools, and levels. Partnerships also need to be formed across Institutions, Schools, Professional Organizations, Universities and Community Colleges, and local and country leaders all need to collaborate to enhance the quality of foreign language education.
C. Conclusion
Foreign language teachers especially teachers of English as a foreign language are encountering educational reform, a rapidly changing student clientele, technological development, and new views on assessment. So, High priority should be given to English teachers in accordance with how to provide first class instruction for the students, keep up with a growing list of demands, support for high quality teacher preparation, and continue their professional development. Without giving those priorities, it is impossible for the English language teachers to have good professional development.
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