Edith Esch

Language change : the interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors

This volume focuses on the interface of different motivating factors that contribute to language change. It combines linguistic case studies with current theoretical debate and contains hitherto unpublished data from English, French, Karaim, Modern Greek, Jordanian, Spanish, Latin and Arabic.

Language Awareness in a Bidialectal Setting: The Oral Performance and Language Attitudes of Urban and Rural Students in Cyprus

This study addresses bidialectism in the context of language education by empirically assessing how explicit knowledge about language influences bidialectal students’ linguistic performance and language attitudes. A language-learning programme based on Language Awareness was applied in the bidialectal community of Cyprus with the primary aim of improving oral performance in urban and rural speakers’ second variety, the standard. Improvement was defined as a reduction of Cypriot dialectal interference in students’ Standard Modern Greek speech. A second aim was to document and subsequently identify changes in students’ language attitudes towards their two linguistic varieties. Quantitative analyses of the results reveal that the Language Awareness programme produced a marked improvement in students’ oral production of the standard variety and in their language attitudes.

The contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to language learning environments or the mystery of the secret agent

In this paper, E. Esch and C. Zahner argue that the learners themselves are the key agents in the construction of new language learning environments. Learners differ in their ability to import new elements – such as ICTs – into their model of what constitutes an appropriate language learning environment. It is argued that accessibility, autonomy, ‘reflectivity’ and interactivity are conditions which must be met if ICTs are to become truly relevant to language learners. The way these principles have been guiding the development of the network-based language learning environment installed by the Language Centre of the University of Cambridge is described.

The elusive boundaries of second language teacher professional development

Second language teacher professional development remains, somewhat surprisingly, a relatively under-theorised concept in the field of second language education in comparison with other cognate constructs such as second language teacher education (Johnson 2009; Johnson and Golombek 2011) and second language teacher cognition (Borg 2006; Woods 1996). Partly, this comparative neglect may be due to the blurred perception of the dividing-line between the development of what are categorised as pre-service, novice and experienced teachers. Teacher education, when referring to the preparation of new entrants to school teaching, is conventionally viewed as taking place mostly in universities or training programmes outside the school before appointment, and professional development is seen as a process that mostly occurs in school and involves teachers who are in post. However, in the contemporary context of pre-service teacher education, in many countries where the training is firmly embedded in the school experience and where trainees are largely assessed on action research-type assignments based on their classroom teaching experience, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely at what point a student teacher or trainee becomes a ‘beginning’ or ‘novice teacher’. As Richards and Farrell (2005: 3) have pointed out, teacher education is ‘a process that takes place over time rather than an event that starts and ends with formal training or graduate education’. Professional development, therefore, ought to be viewed not as a one-shot event, or indeed as a series of intermittent shots targeted at gradual attainment of an idealised level of teaching proficiency but as an ongoing and self-renewing process of critical reflection on and in locally defined practice. This shift of perspective also leads to the distinction which Leung (2009: 50–53) has outlined between ‘sponsored professionalism’, driven by central professional or regulatory bodies that define professional standards and frame the content and aims of professional development programmes, and ‘independent professionalism’, consisting of a teacher’s ‘reflexive examination’ of their own beliefs and actions. However, one should perhaps insert a caveat here that there is a limit to the degree to which most teachers can develop a reflective view of their practice which is totally independent of prevailing educational ideologies. The contrast between the mode of professional development which is centralised, programmed and often information-orientated and one which is locally constructed by individual teachers on the basis of local and more pressing need related to their own classroom practice is mirrored by a similar polarity in terms of the relationship between two sources of knowledge: the established canon of disciplinary research (for example, second language acquisition (SLA) or educational research) and the locally produced insights of practitioner research. Ellis (2009: 141) provides a useful way round this tension by arguing that SLA can serve as a source of ‘global principles’ which can be put into practice to generate ‘local understanding’. One might add, however, that in

Epistemic Injustice and the Power to Define: Interviewing Cameroonian Primary School Teachers about Language Education

In educational research, interviewing is a routine research procedure which assumes that the production of knowledge around topics of interest is the result of an interchange of views between individuals. In practice, typically, researchers focus on what their interviewees say rather than on the social significance of their interaction with them. Social scientists often do not even conduct and transcribe the recordings themselves.