Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BIGELOW AND RANNEY 189either by asking for more discussion of teaching suggestions and looking at grammar incontext. Some asked for a new project that involves analysis of the grammar needs of theESL students in their student teaching placements. These expressions of appreciation forthe links between KAL and its applications to teaching, as well as the desire for evenmore of that instruction, tell us that participants wanted practice applying theirdeveloping KAL.In conclusion, the journals suggest that participants face many challenges whenlearning to use their KAL to integrate language and content. The first obstacles includedovercoming anxiety and learning the technical grammar terminology. Given that thisgroup of participants had extensive language-learning experiences, we had not expectedthese problems. Prior experience with language learning often reinforces traditionalviews of grammar and does not prepare participants for the view of grammar asstructures whose meaning varies according to context. As they grew more comfortablewith their KAL and this new view of grammar, participants expressed some anxietyabout how to adapt this knowledge to instruction for young, beginning-level ESLstudents. The applied features of the course seemed to play an important role in buildingparticipants’ confidence in learning the material as well as using it in teaching. Overall,the progression shown in the journals indicates that by the end of the course participantsfelt much better equipped to analyze grammatical structures and to teach them inmeaningful contexts.3.2 Reflections from the Thematic UnitsThematic units were written toward the end of the program in the second semester of thepedagogy courses. The units were created with the participants’ secondary ESL contextsin mind. In this analysis, we were able to examine only a subset (13) of the thematicunits because not all participants chose to contribute them to our study. Nine of the 13thematic units we examined included discussions about integrating content and languagein their reflections, suggesting that this issue was still on their minds. For two (K. N. andM. L.), language included use of one or more of the four modalities. For the remainingseven, language meant linguistic forms. Four participants voiced specific challenges toteaching language through content. One participant (S. J., reflection, 4/02) expressed thedifficulty of separating content objectives from language objectives conceptually in theplanning phase. She went on to say that CBI is “exciting and fun when it all doesactually come together – I only wish it didn’t have to be so time-consuming!” Anotherparticipant explains the archetypal challenge of CBI:My main difficulty was incorporating language into the lessons. I found myselfcontinually so wound up on the idea of poetry that focusing on a grammar form was asort of barbed wire fencing me in. In reality, of course, structures can be highlighted andincorporated into nearly any lesson, but for me it was a struggle to lone down the poetrycontent and focus on language skill development necessary for my students. (G. K.,reflection, 4/02)