From autopsy to biopsy: A metacognitive view of lesson planning and teacher trainees in ELT

Lesson planning and implementation of those plans are complex and cognitively demanding for English Language Teacher trainees preparing for the profession. Many find it difficult to develop a lesson holistically and to maintain alignment across aims, procedural steps, and evaluation when planning and implementing a lesson. We attempted to address this problem by establishing a model of trainees’ action that included their deliberate metacognitive structuring of a lesson both in planning and review phases. Data from a first exploration of student thinking elicited by the model indicate positive shifts in trainees’ holistic thinking and a student-centeredness in the critical perspectives they took in both planning and review.     

TESOL professional standards in the “Asian century”: dilemmas facing Australian TESOL teacher education

Australian teacher education programmes that prepare teachers of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) are confronting the nexus of two facets of globalization: transformations in the Asian region, captured in the notion of the “Asian century”, and shifting conceptions of professionalism in TESOL in non-compulsory education. In booming Asian economies, English language learning is integral to the demand for high-quality education. This has produced increases in TESOL Teacher Education Programme (TTEP) enrolments of both domestic Australian students and international students from Asia. Growth in demand for TTEPs has necessitated that they cater to student diversity, and the intended contexts of practice. This demand has coincided with a concurrent movement towards professional standards for TESOL that, we argue, confronts complexities around quality, accountability, and professional identity and achieving conceptual and contextual coherence. Drawing on discourses of managerialism and performativity, this paper explores tensions between increased student demands for TTEPs, professional standards discourses which are part of the global policy discourses on teacher quality, and the achievement of programmatic conceptual and contextual coherence from the perspective of Australian TTEPs.