Preparing for the Complexities of Teaching: Modeling Conceptual Thinking in Post-Observation Conferences

Abstract

In order for teacher educators to prepare teachers for complexities of language teaching, their nature needs to be understood. Vygotskian sociocultural theory ofers a useful framework for construing such complexities. Vygotsky distinguished between everyday and scientiic concepts, and saw the interaction of the two as conceptual thinking, the basis for higher order cognitive skills. Johnson (2009) frames learning to teach as the development of conceptual thinking and considers the nature of the dialogue in teacher education activities as crucial to this development. Drawing on longitudinal data from a semester-long case study of the dialogic interactions between a teacher and teacher educator, this study illustrates how the teacher educator modeled conceptual thinking in her language. We propose a taxonomy of conceptualizations about language teaching that may help teacher educators be more purposeful in designing activities for and interacting with novice teachers. Keywords: sociocultural theory, conceptual thinking, post-observation conferences.* Jane Harvey has been an English language teacher and teacher educator for over thirty years in the UK, Turkey, Italy, and the USA. She received her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from the University of South Florida, where she works as an ESL program coordinator. Her research interests include the application of sociocultural theory to language and language teacher education. Email:jkharvey@usf.edu ** Camilla Vásquez is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the department of World Languages at the University of South Florida. Her discourse analytic research examines interactions from many diferent contexts, including those of language teacher education and mentoring. E-mail: cvasquez@usf.edu Preparing For the Complexities of Teaching: Modeling Conceptual hinking in PostObservation ConferencesAs the title of this issue suggests, teaching is a complex activity, and second language teaching has been considered as yet especially complex. Drawing on Schulman's concept of pedagogical content knowledge, developed in relation to general teacher knowledge, Freeman (2002) argues that pedagogical content knowledge becomes "a messy and possibly unworkable concept" (p. 6) when applied to language as subjectmatter. Similarly Borg (2006) has identiied what diferentiates language teaching from the teaching of other subjects: that is, the subject matter-language-the range of materials, methods, and activities available to language teachers, and the especially close relationships between language teachers and learners, among other issues. With language as both medium and content of instruction, the teaching of language becomes distinct from the teaching of other content areas.Not only is language teaching complex, but, as Johnson and Golombek (2011) point out, teacher professional development is "a complicated, prolonged, highly situated, and deeply personal process that has no start or end point" (p. xi). As Johnson (2009) claims, Vygotskian sociocultural theo...