Expert Teacher: Objective Determinants of Developing and Maintaining Expertise (in FLT perspective)

Abstract

The study focuses on foreign language teachers' immediate and broader environment and its influence on their professional development towards expertise from their own perspectives. The study was conducted within a research project dealing with the nature of expertise of foreign language teachers. Its last, third, phase, which we are to present in this study was diachronically oriented and aimed to explore the determinants of the development of foreign language teachers' expertise. The data were collected in biographic interviews with 8 teachers at Czech lower secondary schools. Content analyses of verbal protocols based on theory-driven system of categories was used bringing some interesting results. Key words teacher expertise, foreign language teacher, professional development, objective determinants, biographic interview IntroductionOutstanding performances in various domains of human endeavor have always attracted attention. Serious scientific attempts to capture the nature of expertise, however, began only in the last century, and the last four or five decades have witnessed a dynamic development in research into expertise, primarily in order to explain the prerequisites for expert performance (Ericsson, 2006).Research in teacher expertise was launched in the 1980s. In addition to its empirical and theoretical goals, study of expertise in teaching aims to raise the status of teachers by demonstrating that like experts in other professions, expert teachers possess knowledge and skills which are equally sophisticated. Research on expertise, its identification, development and assessment also helps to set the horizons towards which the members of the profession may aspire (Tsui, 2005: 184-185). Last but not least, learning about expertise and its acquisition may provide information critical for reshaping and transforming initial as well as in-service teacher education.Building on the perception of expertise as a dynamic and unstable phenomenon set within a particular time and context (Glaser, Chi, 1988), attention must also be paid to the examination of the factors that determine its development and maintenance. This study focuses on teacher immediate and broader environment and its influence on teacher professional development towards expertise from their own perspectives, i.e. on expert teachers´ subjective perceptions of external or objective determinants of their professional growth.With regard to the above characteristics of expertise as a situated phenomenon, the study needs to be contextualized in two aspects: the specifics of the teachers' subject subculture -foreign language teaching (FLT), and the specifics of the broader cultural framework within which the expert teachers under investigation operate, i.e. the social and political environment of the Czech Republic and its influence on foreign language teaching.Both research and policy all over the world have treated teaching as a generic activity. However, it is gradually more and more obvious that the view of content as context (Grossman, St...