Integrating CL-Orientated Practices into a Postgraduate TESOL Programme: Challenges and Opportunities to Move Beyond the GRAMMAR IS A RULEBOOK Construal

Zacharias, S. (2023) Integrating CL-Orientated Practices into a Postgraduate TESOL Programme: Challenges and Opportunities to Move Beyond the GRAMMAR IS A RULEBOOK Construal. 16th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, 28-30 June 2023.

Abstract

The integration of CL-orientated practices to develop learners’ metaphoric competence has been slow to reach mainstream L2 textbooks and classroom practices (Piquer-Pirez & Alejo-Gonzalez, 2020). Proposed reasons for this include strong commercial interests of textbook publishers, lack of coverage of CL principles in teacher development sessions, and the predominance of grammar being construed in educational contexts and public discourse debates as a model of rules and constraints: GRAMMAR IS A RULEBOOK (Cushing, 2019). In this talk I will outline how over the course of a year I introduced and integrated aspects of CL into two knowledge about language courses (‘Description of Language’ and ‘Language Learning for Children with an Additional Language’) of a large postgraduate TESOL programme with over 180 students at a university in Scotland. I will show how I worked with this group of international student-teachers using an embodied, multimodal approach, supported with digital technology, to help develop the student-teachers' own metaphoric competence and metalinguistic understanding, a prerequisite for developing the metalinguistic competence in their own learners. To illustrate this, examples of the student-teachers’ work on prepositions, phrasal verbs and modality will be shown. To explore the effectiveness of this approach to enhance student-teachers’ metalinguistic understanding I will also present the perspectives of the student-teachers as they co- developed these resources. The findings from a survey and group interview show that although the student-teachers responded positively to the approach and reported they would apply the approach to their own teaching, challenges with regards to its applicability and compatibility with the student-teachers' own construals of grammar as a system of rules and constraints remain.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Zacharias, Dr Sally
• Authors: Zacharias, S.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Education > Culture, Literacies, Inclusion & Pedagogy

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