Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BARTELS 13TASKSObservation classroom teaching and asking teachers about their thoughts and reasonsbehind their actions can provide a solid overall picture of the general types of knowledgeteachers have acquired and use. However‚ if very specific questions are beinginvestigated‚ these methods might not provide specific data on the topic beinginvestigated. In this case‚ it is a good idea to triangulate these methods with some sort oftask which is specifically designed to gather data on look at the type of knowledge youare looking for. While it is important to remember that these tasks are often somewhatartificial and may not represent exactly what someone would do when teaching‚ they doprovide evidence for the existence of specific kinds of knowledge.Problem Solving TasksThe most common type of task is problem solving tasks‚ in which participants arepresented with a problem and their solutions serve as data. Those interested in use ofKAL in planning‚ can have participants do a lesson planning task (Palfreyman‚ 1993;Richards et at‚ 1995) and those interested in teachers’ skill in writing instructions forTable 16: Sample studies of teachers’ knowledge and learning using data fromperformance tasks.