Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

410 APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND TEACHER EDUCATIONthese concepts could be used to design and teach elementary math lessons (Carpenter,Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989). Thus one possible reason why teachers havedifficulties transferring their KAL may be that their instruction focused primarily on theKAL and devoted very little time to understanding what that knowledge could mean inspecific teaching contexts.Teachers of applied linguistics also need to be aware that language teachers use avariety of ways to learn the KAL in their classes. The four teachers in Popko’s study(chapter 22) had four very distinct styles of learning KAL. Perhaps more important,some teachers, Joyce (Popko, chapter 22) and Zsanna (Borg, chapter 19) actively seekout KAL and are constantly working on integrating their KAL with their knowledge ofteaching, while other teachers do not. This is similar to Tsui’s longitudinal study of fourESL teachers of varying degrees of expertise. She found that it was not it was notteaching experience that had the most important impact on the development of teacherexpertise, but the willingness and ability of the teachers to consistently reinvest theirtime in learning more and more about their teaching (Tsui, 2003). This is interestingbecause it has also been shown that air force technicians who actively try to improvetheir mental models of the technical systems they use are able to use this knowledgewhen transferred to another system. However, technician who do not actively seek toenrich their understandings of the systems they work with are not able to use theirknowledge of the previous system to understand the new one (Gott, Hall, Pokorny,Dibble, & Glaser, 1993). Furthermore, in the field of education, Franke and hercolleagues showed that it was generally the teachers who continually sought to expandtheir understanding and facility with Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) in the 10years after an intensive workshop that continued to use and expand their usage of CGI intheir teaching practice (Franke, Carpenter, Levi & Fennema, 2001).Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993) refer to this as “deliberate practice” anddefine it as activities where (a) learners (even very advanced learners!) are motivated toconcentrate on the task and exert effort to improve their performance, (b) the practicetask is beyond the learner’s present ability, but close enough that mastery can beobtained after short periods of sustained practice, (c) immediate informative feedback isprovided, and (d) the learners repeatedly perform the same or similar activities, and (e)while this practice is guided by others at beginning levels, to achieve expertise learnershave to develop their own tasks and provide their own feedback. Interestingly enough,this is in many ways similar to sociocultural views of learning, where (a) participation inan activity, (b) working in the zone of proximal development (ZDP) which consists oftasks beyond the competence of the learner alone but achievable with the help of others,(c) feedback on the situated appropriacy of the learners activities, and (e) moving fromobject-regulated participation, where learners receive help and feedback from otherpeople or cultural objects, to self-regulated participation, where the learner is in controlof this process, are all seen as crucial for learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985;Lantolf, 2000).