The Relevance of a Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in Language Teacher Education

A CORE REQUIREMENT OF MOST language teacher education programs is a course on second language acquisition (SLA). Teacher educators, many of whom are also SLA researchers, believe that in order to teach additional languages, teachers must develop a deep conceptual understanding of the complexities of SLA. Language teachers, from novice to expert, look to SLA research for answers about how best to teach the language learners who enter their classrooms. Despite the good will on everyone's part, there has long been a disconnect between what SLA research has to offer, what teacher educators expect an SLA course can/will do for their teachers, and what teachers want and need to be effective language teachers. While language teachers most certainly value what they learn in their SLA courses, they often fail to see the relevance for the day-to-day activities of language teaching. This theory–practice gap has been promulgated by the assumption that one can simply take the findings of SLA research and apply them directly to the language classroom. While some SLA researchers caution against attempts to bridge the theory–practice gap on the grounds that the activities, interests, and goals of SLA researchers are simply incompatible with those of teachers as they operate in different discursive worlds (Gass & Mackey, 2007; Hatch, 1978; Long, 2009), others have argued that theory and practice are simply two sides of the same coin, that educational practice is a form of scientific research, and theory is not for mere observation but an instrument for educational innovation and change (Lantolf & Poehner, 2014; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004). The article, “A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world” by a group of scholars collaborating under the name The Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016) has the potential to rectify this long-standing theory–practice divide. The transdisciplinary framework reflects the collective insights of 15 SLA researchers, working from 10 distinctive yet compatible theoretical perspectives operating from the premise that language and language use are inseparable. To understand language, one must interrogate language use, and, as the DFG proposes, to interrogate language use, one must look at language use at the micro (human social interaction), meso (sociocultural institutional/communities), and macro (ideological) levels. The DFG conceptualizes language as a semiotic system through which humans construct and enact meaning as they engage in social actions. The DFG defines additional language learning as building capacity to function in relevant sociocultural contexts; as positioning speakers in relation to others; as invoking particular cultural schema; as being fluid, dynamic, and ultimately unstable; and as accessing resources and making choices about how to be in a multilingual world. While the transdisciplinary framework proposed by the DFG offers a compelling account of SLA in an increasingly mobile, globalized, and multilingual world, it did not, admittedly, address the relevance for language teachers, language teaching, or language teacher education (see p. 22). In this commentary, I wish to pursue the issue of relevance by posing the following question: If language teachers are exposed to and engage with a transdisciplinary framework for SLA, presumably as a core feature of their language teacher education program and/or professional development opportunities, will this fundamentally change how they conceptualize and enact additional language teaching? As a seasoned teacher educator and language teacher cognition scholar, my answer to this question is yes and no. I believe the transdisciplinary framework for SLA has the potential to fundamentally change the way language teachers think about language and SLA. However, to create conditions for fundamental changes in how teachers conceptualize and enact language teaching, the transdisciplinary framework must be positioned in conjunction with a comprehensive, theoretically grounded understanding of teachers’ cognitive development; in other words, how teachers learn to teach. I contend that a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), representing a coherent theory of mind, can inform language teacher education pedagogy in ways that systematically and intentionally construct opportunities for language teachers to engage with the DFG's transdisciplinary framework for SLA: (a) by reconceptualizing and reimaging how language teachers interpret their lived experience, (b) by offering conceptual tools for thinking about the activities of language teaching/learning, and (c) by enabling the desired engagement with the DFG framework through diverse mediated learning-to-teach activities. After a brief overview of a sociocultural theoretical perspective on language teacher education, I address each of these interconnected sociocultural theoretically informed principles. I conclude with a few cautionary implications for language teachers and language teacher education pedagogy. A Vygotskian sociocultural perspective on language teacher education is grounded in the notion that teacher cognition originates in and is fundamentally shaped by engagement in the social practices of learning and teaching in historically and culturally situated instructional settings (Johnson, 2009). While it recognizes the inherent interconnectedness of the cognitive and the social, it seeks to change, not simply reproduce, language teachers and their instructional activities. Moreover, since cognition cannot be removed from activity, what is learned is fundamentally shaped by how it is learned. Relevant to my argument here, what language teachers learn from reading an introductory SLA course book will be fundamentally different from what they learn if they are meaningfully engaging with SLA concepts while they are learning to teach or in the actual activities of teaching. Additionally, a sociocultural theoretical perspective highlights the assumption that educational consequences and outcomes may be explained by the quality and character of expert mediation, educational dialogue, and interactional engagement, rather than simply in terms of the capability of individual students or the skill of their teachers. For Vygotsky, formal schooling represents an ideal venue for high quality teacher–learner dialectics in which learners interact with experts who offer pedagogically designed psychological tools and semantic-pragmatic explanations of those tools to promote conscious awareness and a functional understanding of relevant scientific concepts in ways that facilitate the reorganization of the learner's mental structures while being directed, all the while, at concrete practical activities that have relevance in the material world. Instead of promulgating a theory–practice divide, a sociocultural theoretical perspective emphasizes the importance of praxis in a dialectical unity of theory and practice. For language teacher education, this means transforming the processes of making sense of language teaching/learning through the theoretical constructs of the theory while also using the principles of the theory to intentionally promote language teacher professional development through systematically and intentionally organized instruction. It therefore becomes the responsibility of language teacher education to engage teachers with a transdisciplinary framework for SLA in ways that bring this framework to bear on the concrete practical activity of becoming a language teacher. To accomplish this, language teacher education must examine its own pedagogy. With “pedagogy” I refer not only to disciplinary content and programmatic goals and objectives but include as well the interactional and mediational nature of the full range of practices embedded in language teacher education. Language teacher education pedagogy must make explicit what is being accomplished in these practices, determine the quality and character of the expert assistance provided, and evaluate how engagement in these practices supports and enhances the development of the language teacher (the person) and language teaching (the activity) expertise (see Johnson & Golombek, 2016). Such an endeavor must occur in all manifestations of language teacher education pedagogy as this will shed light on the mediational means (cultural artifacts and activities, concepts, and social relations) that will ultimately become internalized psychological tools that enable language teachers to enact instructional practices that are consistent with the theoretical principles that inform a transdisciplinary framework for SLA. However, accomplishing this will be no easy task. It will require that language teacher education not only take up and materialize a radical re-envisioning of how people learn additional languages but also a radical re-envisioning of how language teachers are to conceptualize and enact additional language teaching. For language teachers to begin to take up and, more importantly, to enact a transdisciplinary framework for SLA, they will need multiple, mediated, and sustained opportunities to reconceptualize and reimagine their lived experiences, to internalize the fundamental concepts of the transdisciplinary framework as tools for thinking about teaching/learning, and to experience these concepts and processes through, and made relevant for, the activities of both becoming and being a language teacher. It has long been argued that teachers enter language teacher education programs with a lengthy apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975), and because they have largely experienced teaching from ‘the other side of the desk,’ what they know about teaching is “intuitive and imitative rather than explicit and analytical” (p. 62). Vygotsky (1935/1994) characterized this process of socialization as resulting in everyday concepts since these emerge during concrete everyday activity and are less open to critical inspection. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, “represent the generalizations of the experience of humankind that is fixed in science, understood in the broadest sense of the term, to include both natural and social science as well as the humanities” (Karpov, 2003, p. 66). Vygotsky argued that school learning provides an ideal setting to scrutinize and unite everyday concepts through and with scientific concepts. Yet, he cautioned against the futility of the direct teaching of scientific concepts: “A teacher who tries to do this usually accomplishes nothing but empty verbalism, a parrot-like repetition of words by the child, simulating a knowledge of the corresponding concepts but actually covering up a vacuum” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 150). In transmission-based educational settings, the theory–practice gap remains largely because language teachers are typically not given sufficient opportunities, appropriate mediational means, or pedagogically relevant reasons to engage with and internalize the scientific concepts that constitute SLA theory and research. More often than not, they see what they learn in SLA courses as inert knowledge—or what Whitehead (1929) defined as knowledge that can be recalled when one is explicitly asked to do so, but that is not used spontaneously in problem solving even though it is relevant. For language teachers to embrace a transdisciplinary framework for SLA, they need to reinterpret and reimagine their everyday concepts so that scientific concepts and everyday concepts become united into true concepts; a scientific concept “gradually comes down to concrete phenomena” and an everyday concept “goes from the phenomenon upward toward generalizations” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 148). For true concepts to emerge, language teachers need opportunities to externalize their everyday understandings of language, language learning, and language teaching. For most, these understandings are grounded in some combination of their formal (classroom) and informal (real world) language learning/teaching experiences. Given the history of SLA theory and research as well as trends in language teaching methods, most teachers enter language teacher education programs with the mentalist–individualist view of language that dominated much of the traditional research in theoretical linguistics and SLA (see Firth & Wagner, 1997). From a transdisciplinary framework, however, meaning does not reside in the grammar of the language, or in its vocabulary, or in the head of the individual, but in the everyday activities or social actions that individuals engage in. Likewise, meanings are not stable, generic, or value-free but are situated and dependent on contexts of use. The contrasting utterances, Oh, she spilled the coffee, I'll get a mop and Oh, she spilled the coffee, I'll get a broom have different meaning potentials: They are not only conventionalized form–meaning combinations that developed from their past uses but offer different construal(s) of experience. Additionally, language users employ very different semiotic resources when, for example, retelling a series of events to a close family member (I freaked, oh my gosh! He's running, I hear pop, pop, pop) than those used on the witness stand in a courtroom (The robber was running away from the scene when a gun went off three times). In both examples, meaning is not a matter of decoding the grammar or the vocabulary; it is a matter of knowing which of the many inferences that can be drawn from an utterance are relevant. And relevance, according to Gee (1999), is a matter of context, point of view, and culture. As language teachers are exposed to and engage with a transdisciplinary framework for SLA they need to reconceptualize and reimage their lived experiences by becoming of and have direct experiences with how language use meaning as situated in social and cultural understand language as dynamic, and and unstable; and conceptualize language as making choices about how to be in a multilingual world. 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If language teachers are to conceptualize language as dynamic, and if they are to language learning as semiotic learning, mediated, and if they are to language learning as and all fundamental concepts of a transdisciplinary framework for SLA, they need to and with the that this framework for them and their language language teachers and language learners will need to with the that there are no only appropriate choices given contexts of use. They will need to learn to to interrogate the in order to the meaning of the semiotic resources that language users use to different social actions in different contexts of use. 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