Transforming Practices for the English as a Foreign Language Classroom

Discover ways in which teachers interpret and innovate research findings into actual classroom practice to create positive classroom transformations. Given the diversity of the contexts explored in this volume, the chapters are divided into three main sections with lessons taking place at the primary and middle school level, the lower- and upper-secondary school level, and the tertiary and university level. Discover new linguistic landscapes where English has been modified by societal changes and new technologies. Understand the emerging role of English as an international language and the importance of diverse perspectives in English teaching. Learn about research-based practices covering topics such as intercultural awareness, pragmatics, literature study, conceptual metaphors, and utilizing visual aids. Identify ways to prepare students in non-English-dominant contexts to meet their learning objectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TESOL Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781942799559

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Series Editor’s Preface

As TESOL educators, we value research that provides evidence-based knowledge in our understanding of how English as a second language or English as a foreign language (EFL) is learned (or acquired) by our students. Research also provides insights into best practices for teaching. But such research is only useful insofar as it is practical for teachers with boots on the ground. It is necessary to translate, and indeed transform, theoretical and empirical research into practical and applicable information that can be used to evoke positive changes for teachers and learners. Engaging with research is critical for practicing teachers.

TESOL International Association’s current research agenda (2014) promotes one issue that is relevant to putting research into practice: One of its six bullet points states that the agenda intends to promote dialog between doers and users of research (p. 1). Furthermore, the agenda maintains that because research is sometimes viewed as activity that generates knowledge but which has little relevance to everyday practice, [it] calls for more attention on how practitioners can use research (p. 2). This statement serves as the objective for the Engaging Research series.

The main goal of the Engaging Research series is to create new spaces for practitioners to learn about and engage with TESOL research. As a professional community, we are interested in highlighting how TESOL practitioners direct their own learning through reading, questioning, interpreting, and adapting research findings to and in their own contexts. While understanding and accessing original research in the field is critically important for teachers at all levels, busy TESOL professionals may not always have the opportunity or inclination to spend time reading and digesting academic journals or theory-based texts. As such, this series serves TESOL practitioners by providing nuggets of original research from TESOL publications in the form of rich and detailed synopses. Each chapter makes it possible to put the original research into practice by providing a replicable lesson plan and a reflection on its implementation so teachers will have an idea of how such a lesson plays out in certain contexts. The result is an accessible and rich collection that adds to the overall knowledge base while also validating the critical role teachers play in TESOL’s mission to improve learning and teaching. The series makes use of the range of TESOL materials in TESOL Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Essential Teacher, and other TESOL Press publications, such as the English Language Teaching in Context series.

There are four books in the series, with each following a similar format. The books have chapters dedicated to the content areas of mathematics, science, social studies, and English language arts at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. One volume is devoted to English as a foreign language and is divided into three parts: primary, secondary, and higher education. The first three books in the series are published in print, while the EFL-focused book is available as an e-book; however, resources, interactive links, and supplementary materials are available for download on a website dedicated to the series. The variety of formats give teachers access to multiple resources that are ready for classroom use.

A benefit of the series stems from the diversity of classrooms and teachers represented in each volume. The individual chapters speak to the various educational profiles of students in diverse regions. As a result, the chapters highlight English learners hailing from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds throughout the United States and beyond, as well as teachers with varying backgrounds with regard to preparation in content and second or foreign language training. Accordingly, academic and language standards for lesson plans are aligned to those used or required in the location in which that particular chapter is set. Readers see Common Core State Standards for content and standards specific to particular states, as well as language standards (e.g., WIDA). This array of standards makes for a comprehensive and wide-ranging collection of classroom lessons.

The chapters follow a similar format for ease of use. Each chapter includes a brief introduction that highlights the focal topic of the original research and the lesson plan in addition to providing background on the context of the school, student demographics, content area, students’ language and grade levels, and other relevant details. Next, the authors provide a synopsis of the original research article or chapter, then share their rationale for choosing that research as the basis for a lesson. Each chapter then offers a clearly written lesson plan that allows readers to see, hear, be in context and follow the development of the lesson as it unfolds. Each lesson includes similar components, such as the grade and subject area, content and language objectives, connections to appropriate standards, desired outcomes, students’ proficiency levels, materials needed to carry out the lesson, duration of the lesson, and highlighted strategies that can facilitate learning. Lessons follow a similar format with procedures or the specific details regarding what students will do during the lesson (these might also be called the practice or application section); closing; assessment and evaluation of the lesson; any extensions; and caveats for teachers based on the authors’ success in carrying out the lesson. Each chapter closes with a reflection that summarizes how the original TESOL research informs teachers’ practices and raises valuable questions for further research.

This series can be used by a range of participants in the TESOL community, including English language teachers, mainstream content-area teachers who work with students, program administrators, coaches, and trainers. The books are appropriate for use as course readings for preservice and in-service teacher education programs, as well as professional development of teachers of English language, due to their teacher-friendly format and ancillary online resources. Because the classroom contexts are set in schools throughout the United States and around the world, readers gain a breadth of understanding regarding standards, demographics, grade levels, and English language programs.

In this book, lessons focus on the EFL context, with student activities appropriate for all levels of English language teaching. The chapters are divided into three sections: EFL at the primary and middle school levels, EFL in lower and upper secondary school, and EFL at the tertiary and university levels. What is truly exciting about this volume is that the teaching contexts, and indeed the authors themselves, come from a broad range of geographical locations across multiple countries and continents. The research covered is cutting edge, insightful, and applicable to a broad range of TESOL contexts at various levels.

We intended to publish this final book much sooner after the previous ones, but a global pandemic got in the way of this goal, so the decision was made to publish this final volume in an electronic format. We hope this format will enable more educators to access and benefit from the content.

The contributors to this volume represent a mix of teacher educators and researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, and primary and secondary teachers, and many chapters are written in collaboration with various constituents. In this way, the chapters truly put research into practice in a clear, hands-on, accessible, and digestible way. I hope you will benefit from—and enjoy—this compilation as much as I do!

Holly Hansen-Thomas

Texas Woman’s University

Reference

TESOL International Association. (2014, November). TESOL Research Agenda 2014. http://www.tesol.org/docs/default-source/pdf/2014_tesol-research-agenda.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Introduction

Lucilla Lopriore

The main focus of the Engaging Research series is research and its role in practitioners’ English classrooms, as stated in the preface of a previous volume (Hansen-Thomas, 2018, p. v):

The main goal of this series is to create new spaces for practitioner knowledge and engagement with English language teaching research. As a professional community, we are interested in highlighting how ELT practitioners direct their own learning through reading, questioning, interpreting, and adapting research findings to and in their own contexts.

In her preface to the series, series editor Holly Hansen-Thomas underlines the added value of research, which is transforming "conceptual and empirical research into practical and applicable information so that it can be used to evoke positive change for teachers and learners" (Hansen-Thomas, 2018, p. v).

In this volume, connecting research to classroom practice with the intention of transforming practices offers a unique view of non-English-dominant contexts in which English is still taught as a foreign language and most teachers are nonnative speakers who were themselves learners of English before becoming English language (EL) teachers.

This volume offers eight chapters with lessons in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts; the lessons were inspired by research studies published in TESOL Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Essential Teacher, and other TESOL Press publications, such as the English Language Teaching in Context series. This book is divided into three main sections that are devoted to examples of lessons taking place at the primary and middle school level, the lower and upper secondary school level, and the tertiary and university level. The chapters were written by 13 authors, the majority of whom live and work in different EFL contexts in Brazil, Greece, Italy, Macau, and Spain.

All of these contexts are representative of new linguistic landscapes where English has been modified by societal changes, new technologies, and migration flows in which EFL has become an acronym that no longer represents what was originally meant.

The sociopolitical setting is changing, and so is the position of English in the world. Positions of language-teaching institutions and teachers are changing as well, as are perceptions of what constitutes learning. The first issue concerns the position of English in the world. There seems to be no limit to the growth of English as a lingua franca in the near future (De Bot, 2007, p. 274).

In his book English Next, David Graddol (2006) describes the changes English has gone through as a global language, as well as the need to reconsider teaching traditions and the current use of English in multilingual societies:

EFL, as we know it today, is a largely 19th-century creation, though drawing on centuries of experience in teaching the classical languages. EFL tends to highlight the importance of learning about the culture and society of native speakers; it stresses the centrality of methodology in discussions of effective learning; and emphasises the importance of emulating native speaker language behaviour. EFL approaches, like all foreign languages teaching, position the learner as an outsider, as a foreigner; one who struggles to attain acceptance by the target community … In recent years, several developments in the practice of ELT [English language teaching] have started to take ELT in new directions. … In contrast to EFL, one of the defining features of teaching English as a second language is that it recognises the role of English in the society in which it is taught. EFL and ESL represent the twin traditions in ELT, both with roots in the 19th century. It seems to me that in the last few years pedagogic practices have rapidly evolved to meet the needs of the rather different world in which global English is learned and used. (Graddol, 2006, pp. 82–85)

The chapters that compose the first section of this book provide meaningful examples of contexts in which English teaching is being taught by including diverse perspectives. Such perspectives take into consideration how English teaching now requires more attention to issues such as the role of the learners’ mother tongue; the use of mediation; the emerging role of English as an international language (EIL); and the relevance of authenticity, nonnative Englishes, and language and intercultural awareness.

In Chapter 1, based on Pauline Gibbons’s 2003 TESOL Quarterly article, Francesca Costa analyzes a fourth-year primary school geography class in a bilingual public school in Italy by using the conceptual framework of mediation and the mode continuum. Her goal is to investigate student-teacher interactions and reveal how these interactions sustain learners’ language and the co-constructing of content knowledge. The scenario in which the analysis takes place has three relevant aspects to consider: the children’s bilingualism, their age, and the content of that lesson (geography). If children’s bilingualism highlights a context that is emerging as a common feature in several European countries where English is the foreign language mostly taught and used, children’s ages mark a turning point in their cognitive development, while a subject such as geography is taught in English within a Content and Language Integrated Learning approach.

Natasha Tsantila’s and Anastasia Georgountzou base their work in Chapter 2 on Nicos S. Sifakis and Areti-Maria Sougari’s 2005 TESOL Quarterly article on pronunciation and EIL pedagogy, as well as on the results of their large-scale survey on teachers’ beliefs. Following Sifakis and Sougari’s recommendations for raising English teachers’ awareness of EIL by also comparing other studies in the same field, Tsantila and Georgountzou brought the 2005 research findings a step further. They described the changes currently occurring in the Greek context and the new role of English now spoken by a growing number of nonnative speakers, then developed a lesson based on diverse forms of intercultural awareness and provided exposure to nonnative Englishes. This novel approach was welcomed by the teachers and the learners, based on their responses to the survey.

The contributions in the second section offer three different perspectives on the use of research in English language teaching at the lower and upper secondary school levels; the lessons described are intended to be used in EFL contexts, such as in secondary schools in Brazil, Italy, and Spain. In Chapter 3, Luciana Pedrazzini and Andrea Nava used Shinichi Izumi and Martha Bigelow’s 2000 TESOL Quarterly article, Does Output Promote Noticing and Second Language Acquisition? to explore the role of output in eliciting students’ noticing during a dictogloss task within a collaborative output activity. During this activity, learners are asked to write a text in small groups based on an input text that the teacher has read to them. The authors proposed the activity to a group of in-service teachers and observed their responses. Some of the suggestions from the original article were modified for the proposed lesson as the authors tried to overcome some of the shortcomings related to Izumi and Bigelow’s study.

In Chapter 4, Kai-Alexander Voltmer and Holly Hansen-Thomas offer an innovative lesson plan on teaching pragmatics in a multilingual EFL class in a Spanish school. Their contribution is based on Kathleen Barlovi-Harlig, Sabrina Mossman, and Heidi E. Vellega’s 2015 TESOL Journal article, whose theme is closely related to the need to introduce pragmatics—an area of linguistic competence that has not reached the status it deserves in language teaching, as Voltmer and Hansen-Thomas write in their chapter—in a context in which learners are either Catalan or Spanish speakers, have an intermediate level of competence in English, and study in a multilingual context. The proposed lesson plan gives an accurate description of the lesson implementation procedures; it offers a new perspective on raising learners’ awareness of authentic language use by incorporating corpora and authentic videos and encouraging students to pay attention to those varieties of English (American English and British English) via television series and movies. The lesson introduces pragmatics by eliciting learners’ noticing of forms of politeness to which they had not previously been exposed. The learners’ positive feedback reinforces the original plan to use Barlovi-Harlig’s approach to pragmatics by resorting to a variety of inputs and widening the original teaching implications.

In Chapter 5, Vander Viana and Sonia Zyngier introduce a theme that has new perspectives in EFL environments: developing literary