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.

Keywords:

• academic literacy development
• literacy pedagogical content knowledge
• practicum feedback by experienced teachers

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by an Internal Research Grant from the Hong Kong Institute of Education. The author thanks Dr Annie Tong for her contribution to the research.