Featured Speakers

Language-teacher education in Japan has gone through a number of changes over the years in order to keep up with current theories and pedagogies. Not surprisingly, the pull towards communicative language teaching (CLT) has been met with confusion and resistance in Japan, where it is regarded as an “American Import” and perhaps less applicable here than it is in other countries. With the Ministry of Education (MEXT) now actively promoting CLT, Japanese teachers of English are feeling the pressure to adapt to an approach they know little about, let alone how to apply it in their classrooms. The gap between “traditional” and “progressive” approaches to education has led many teachers to feel trapped between two pedagogical worlds: The progressive one in which they have come to believe in through their American teacher-education, and the reality of the traditional one in which they live and work. This presentation will first outline the presenter’s own journey to becoming a teacher educator, then explore the experiences of in-service teachers enrolled in an American MA TESOL program and how they find ways to “negotiate” between these two worlds.

This plenary will address the conference theme that recognizes ongoing professional teacher development as an embodiment of a teacher’s journey. The talk will emphasize personal, practical and theoretical influences on my own professional development. Relative to the talk is Gee’s theory of a secondary discourse (in the case of teachers, an acquired professional discourse), which has a personal and social identity dimension; a way of being, thinking, talking and acting appropriately within the communities of which one is a member. Donald Freeman, a major scholar in the field of TESOL, claims that by acquiring a secondary discourse through professional development, such as in postgraduate programs, teacher development or change occurs as teachers are “renaming experience/reconstructing practice”, which leads to conceptualizations of teaching that better inform practice. Outcomes of research that I carried out in a high school English class reveal how reconceptualizations of instruction grounded in thirty years of personal pedagogical knowledge were further enriched through professional knowledge gained in postgraduate study. Results from student feedback show the success of the lesson to support the direction I am now taking in my self-directed professional development. At university, I am now applying my reconceptualizations of practice in courses to help pre-service teachers to begin to develop their professional secondary discourse to better inform their teaching approaches.