Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

COTS AND ARNÓ 61(John, 2000). It is from this point of view that teacher competence becomes a relevantnotion for our analysis of the discourse of university instructors and students.The hypotheses that underlie the present study are the following:The dual definition of language courses in the ES curriculum in Spain, withelements of both analyst and user competence, is implemented in somewhatcontradictory ways by different instructors.In spite of the initial dual definition of language courses in ES programmes, theacademic context of the university will influence the discourse of bothinstructors and students towards a more analyst-oriented rather than userapproach.Language courses provide an implicit (and, on occasions, explicit) model oflanguage teaching and learning, based on a traditional view of language learning,which is transmitted from instructors to students and may thus become part ofthe ideology of future EFL teachers.This study, thus, sets out to explore how the notion of language teacher competence isdiscursively constructed by instructors both in their classroom practices and in aninterview. The ultimate goal of the study is to deepen our understanding of foreignlanguage teaching as it is done in Spain by delving into the linguistic and pedagogicideological basis underlying teacher-training practices.2. METHODOLOGYWith the three types of competence in mind (user, analyst and teacher) we decided tocarry out an ethnographic study concentrating on one of the compulsory first-yearlanguage development modules in a Spanish university. The participants in this studywere two instructors (whom we will refer as Lisa and Monica, respectively), who taughttwo groups of the module “English Language 2”, a language development courseaddressed to ES students. One of the researchers attended classes regularly during afifteen-week term—every week or every two weeks—with either group, observing,taking notes and recording them. The data for the study reported in this article includetranscripts of one class session for each of the two groups and a semi-structuredinterview with each instructor.Using an analytical framework which combines ethnography and discourse analysis,our research is intended to explore from a qualitative point of view the cognitive andinteractional processes that are reflected in the classroom data and, more specifically, thepresence and function of the different types of competence in the discursive practices ofinstructors inside and outside the classroom. For the purpose of this study, our analysiscentres on two classes (one per group) and an interview with each group’s instructor.