Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

264 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN PRAGMATICSmitigation pragmatics, and of harnessing their pedagogical expertise to developappropriate materials to address these areas in the classroom.Thus we had three broad aims: firstly, to enable a small group of teachers to helpdevelop a description of the verbal mitigation behaviour used by native speakers in theperformance of oral request tasks which could be compared to non-native speakerperformances from the earlier project. Secondly, to develop with the teachers materialsdrawing attention to mitigation pragmatics, which could be transmitted to other teachersthrough workshops and other professional development exercises. Thirdly, to investigatethe impact of the project on both the language awareness and the teaching practice of theteachers involved, i.e. to research our own practice as applied linguists offeringprofessional development to teachers. It is this final aim that is the focus of this paper.The project was designed in two phases. In the first phase, a small group of fiveteachers were engaged in the empirical investigation of both native and non-nativerequest task performance data. They then developed and trialled teaching materials basedon the findings. In the second phase, we used these materials to conduct workshopsdesigned to raise awareness among larger groups of teachers, and to offer them teachingstrategies they could use in the classroom. The project was designed to enhance the areasof teacher knowledge proposed by Shulman (1986) as shown in Figure 1.Figure 1: Dimensions of teacher knowledge addressed in the projectIn order to identify and evaluate teacher reactions to the project, we encouraged teachersto reflect on their learning. We did this through a focus group discussion and anindividual interview with each teacher. These allowed us to probe in depth how they feltabout their involvement in the project how it had influenced their teaching, and how they