ENS E APR ING LINGESTRAN AULA 01 A 10

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AULA 01 – INTRODUCTION
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH TEACHING IN BRAZIL
While Brazil is now over 500 years old, we English teachers have about 200 years of teaching English in Brazil to celebrate.
In an age where you can find so many English schools in almost every city in Brazil, it makes you stop and wonder how all that came about.
Although the many reasons that brought about the current state of affairs are well documented, it is less known that many of 
the same forces were at work in the beginning of the nineteenth century.
We know, for example, that widespread interest in the English language appeared only when England became a major trading partner of Brazil in 1808. This was the year that brought Dom João VI to Brazil along with the entire royal entourage in his
flight from Napoleon. And England had long been a trading partner of Portugal´s.
It didn´t take  long, therefore, for people to start being interested in learning English. We have this documented in the newspapers of the era. As it still is today, newspaper ads for English teachers were common. One such ad appeared in 1809, 
and this is the first document that gives us a glimpse of English teaching outside the regular school system. 
This is the advertisement that appeared in the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro on February 8  : “Na Rua dos Ourives, nº 27, mora uma Ingleza com casa de educação para meninas que queiram aprender a  ler, escrever, contar, e falar Inglez e Portuguez, cozer e bordar, etc”.
The first North Americans to come to Brazil were probably missionaries who arrived in the 1830s. But it was only in the 1860s that a moderate number of Americans emigrated to Brazil. Most of these were farmers fleeing from the destruction of the South during the Civil War. Some of them were merchants or English teachers, as well as missionaries. The old newspapers give us some details. From the Jornal Correio Paulistano, the following ad appeared on January 1  , 1862: “H. Lane, natural EUA prof. inglês aprovado pelo conselho de instrução publica suprema conselho de instrução publica do município do RJ onde há 3 anos exerce sua profissão com os melhores resultados em convergência do mau estado de sua saúde vem estabelecer se neste capital e abrirá nova aula de Inglês no principio do novo anno na rua do Imperador n.40. O annunciante se prontifica para dar as pessoas que frequentam sua aula no conhecimento teórico e pratico da língua inglesa isto é ensinará a traduzir e escrever e fallar corretamente.
This H.M Lane is almost certainly the Horace Manley Lane that later was Dean of Mackenzie College for many years at the end of the century. He was also the merchant who brought Kerosene to Ouro Preto. Some time after 1862 he rented a warehouse in São Paulo where he stored his merchandise and where he rented out space on the upper floor for religious services (Prebysterian) and English classes. And things continued along these lines for almost a hundred years. But there were two moments in our history which changed things irrevocably.
The first occurred in the 1930s when Brazil was viewed as a strategic point with regard to a possible war in Europe. With the growth of the Nazi regime the United States and Great Britain scrambled to insure that Brazil aligned with them against Germany.
Spreading the English language was seen by the governments of the U.S and Great Britain as a strategic necessity. So, the first binational school appeared in 1935. It was the result of a deal between a private English school called Escola Paulista de Letras Inglesas and the British Consulate. The name was changed to Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Inglesa which is still Cultura Inglesa today. 
The second binational school dates from 1938, through the efforts of a medical student named Domingo Machado, along with the American Consulate, the Instituto Universitário Brasil-Estados Unidos was created. 
The other date is 1966. This is the year that Yazigi, led by Fernando Silva, decided to pioneer the franchising technique heer in Brazil.
AULA 02 SOME APPROACHES ABOUT THE TEACHING OF A SECOND LANGUAGE
We will limit ourselves to the post-war period, which has seen the development of theorizing about second language learning from an adjunct to language pedagogy, to an autonomous field of research. The period since the 1950s can itself be divided into three main phases.
LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE
If we are going to teach other people to understand and to speak a second or third language, we should start by asking ourselves what language really is. We have all been speaking our native language since we were between the ages of one or two, but we have done so with little or no conscious thought on our part. Many of us would find it difficult or even impossible to explain what we do when we speak our language. Fortunately, the last several decades have witnessed a tremendous upsurge of activity by scholars in this field. Definitions of language and language descriptions abound. Every few years one finds new and often contradictory theories of ways of describing language. There have been numerous books and articles about the advantages of describing language in traditional terms , in structural terms, in tagmemic terms, in generative-transformational terms to name only a few.
WHAT IS BEHAVIOURISM?
Behaviouristic view of language acquisition simply claims that languge development is the result of set of habits. This view has normally been influenced by the general theory of learning describing by the psychologist John B. Watson in 1923, and termed behaviorism.
Behaviourism denies nativist accounts of innate knowledge as they are viewed as inherently irrational and thus unscientific. Knowledge is the product of interaction with the environment through stimulus-response conditioning. Broadly speaking, stimulus (ST) – response (RE) learning works as follows.
THE STRENGTHS OF BEHAVIOURISM (olhar anotações de linguistic)
Against behaviourism (olhar anotações de linguistic)
BEHAVIOURISM UNDER ATTACK
Starting the 1950’s and continuing in the 1960’s, both the fields of linguistics and psychology witnessed major developments. Linguistics saw a shift from structural linguistics, which was based on the description of the surface structure of a large corpus of language, to generative linguistics which emphasized the rule-governed and creative nature of human language.
This shift had been initiated by the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures, the first of many influential books by Noam Chomsky. In the field of psychology, the pre-eminent role for the environment which was argued by Skinner in shaping the child’s learning and behavior was losing ground in favor of more developmentalist views of learning, such as Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory, in which inner forces drive the child, in interaction with the environment.
The clash of views about the way in which we learn language came to a head at the end of 1950’s with two publications. These were Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1957, which outlined in detail his behaviourist view of learning as applied to language, and Chomsky’s view of Skinner’s book, published in 1959, which was a fierce critique of Skinner’s views. 
Chomsky’s criticisms centered on a number of issues:
THE CREATIVITY OF LANGUAGE: Children do not learn and reproduce a large set of sentences, but they routinely create new sentences that they have never learnt before. This is only possible because they internalize rules rather than strings of words: extremely common examples of utterances such as “it breaked” or “mummy goed” show clearly that children are not copying the language around them but applying rules. Chomsky was incensed by the idea that you could compare the behaviour of rats in a laboratory, learning to perform simple tasks, to the behavior of children learning language without direct teaching, a fundamentally different task because of its sheer complexity and abstractness.
GIVEN THE COMPLEXITY AND ABSTRACNESS OF LINGUISTIC
RULES: For example, the rules underlying the formation of questions in many languages, or the rules underlying the use of reflexive pronouns in English. It is amazing that children are able to master them so quickly and efficiently, especially given the limited input they receive. This has been named “Plato’s problem”, and refers specifically to the fact that some of the structural properties of language, given their complexity, could not possibly be expected to be learned on the basis of the samples of language around them. Furthermore, children have been shown not to be usually corrected on the form of their utterances but rather on their truth values. When correction does take place, it seems to have very little effect on the development of language structure. For the explained reasons, Chomsky claimed that children have an innate faculty which guides them in their learning of language. Given a body of speech, children are programmed to discover its rules, and are guided in doing that by an innate knowledge of what the rules should look like.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE 1970’S?
Researchers such as Klima and Bellugi (1966), Dan Slobin (1970) or Roger Brown (1973) found striking similarities in the language learning behavior of young children, whatever the language they were learning. It seems that children all over the world go through similar stages, use similar constructions in order to express similar meanings, and make the same kind of errors. The stages can be summarized as follows: 
SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: THE BIRTH OF ERROR ANALYSIS?
Teachers found out in the classroom that constructions that were different in pairs of languages were not necessarily difficult, and that constructions that were similar in two languages were not necessarily easy either. Moreover, difficulty sometimes occurred in one direction but not the other. For example, the placement of unstressed object pronouns in English and French differs: whereas English says I like them, French says Je les aime (“I them like”). Contrastive analysis would therefore predict that object pronoun placement would be difficult for both English learners of French and French learners of English. This is not the case, however; whereas English learners of French do have problems with this construction and produce errors such as “J’aime les” in initial stages, French learners of English do not produce error of the type I them like, as would be predicted by CA.
The task of comparing pairs of languages in order to design efficient language teaching programmes now seemed disproportionately huge in relation to its predictive powers: if it could not adequately predict areas of difficulty, then the whole enterprise seemed to be pointless. These two factors combined - developments in first language acquisition and disillusionment with CA – meant that researchers and teachers became increasingly interested in the language produced by learners, rather than the target language or the mother tongue. This was the origin of Error Analysis, the systematic investigation of second language learner’s errors. The language produced by learners began to be seen as a linguistic system in its own right, worthy of description. In a review of studies looking at the proportion of error that can be traced back to the first language, Error Analysis showed clearly that the majority of the errors made by second language learners do not come from their first language. 
If so, where do such errors come from? They are not target-like, and they are not L-1 like; they must be learner-internal in origin.Researchers started trying to classify these errors in order to understand them, and to compare them with errors made by children learning their mother tongue. This was happening at the same time as the developments in first language acquisition which we mentioned above, whereby child language was now seen as an object of study of its own right, rather than an approximation of adult language. In second language learning research, coupled with the interest in understanding learner-internal errors, interest in the overall character of the L2 system was also growing.
The term interlanguage was coined in 1972 by Selinker to refer to the language produced by learners, both as a system which can be described at any one point as resulting from systematic rules, and as the series of interlocking systems that characterize learner progression. Interlanguage studies moves one step beyond Error Analysis, by focusing on the learner system as a whole, rather than only on what can go wrong with it.
CONCEITOS INICIAIS
As far as second language acquisition research is concerned, the most importa empirical findings of the period were probably the results of the so called morpheme studies, and at a conceptual level, Krashen’s Monitor Model, which was a logical theoretical development arising from such studies.
Morpheme acquisition studies attracted criticism, both at thetime and consequently; this critique is reviewed for example by Gass and Selinker. However, the basic argument that both child and adult learners of English as an L2 developed accurancy in a number of grammatical morphemes in a set order, no matter what the context of leaning (classroom, naturalistic mixed), survived the critique.
Now we are going to discuss about Krashen’s Monitor Model. Krashen’s theory evolved in the late 1970s as a result of the findings outlined above. The author thereafter refined and expanded his ideas in the early 1980s in a series of books. He based his general theory on a set of five basic hypotheses:
1. The Acquisition-Learning distinction is the most fundamental of all the hypotheses in Krashen’s theory and the most widely known among linguists and language practitioners.
2. According to Krashen, there are two independent systems of second language performance: “the acquired system” and “the learned system”.
3. The “acquired system” or “acquisition” is the product of a subconscious process very similar to the process children undergo when they acquire their first language.
4. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concentrated not in the form of their utterances, but in the communicative act.
5. The “learned system” or “learning” is the product of formal instruction and it comprises a conscious process which results in conscious knowledge “about” the language, for example knowledge of grammar rules.
According to Krashen, “learning” is less important than “acquisition”. What is problematic about Krashen’s claim that learning cannot turn into acquisition, i.e. that language knowledge acquired/ learned by these different routes cannot eventually become integrated into a unified whole.
Other researchers disagree and the debate about whether different kinds of knowledge interact or remain separate, is still alive today, even though the terms used might differ.
HOW DOES THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS WORK?
The monitor hypothesis explains the relationship between acquisition and learning and defines the influence of the latter on the former. The monitoring function is the practical result of the learned grammar. According to Krashen, the acquisition system is the utterance initiator, while the learning system performs the role of the “monitor” or the “editor”. The “monitor” acts in a planning, editing and correcting function when three specific conditions are met: that is, the second language learner has sufficient time at his/her disposal, he/she focuses on form or thinks about correctness, and he/she knows the rule. It appears that the role of conscious learning is somewhat limited in second language performance. According to Krashen, the role of the monitor is - or should be - minor, being used only to correct deviations from “normal” speech and to give speech a more “polished” appearance. Krashen also suggests that there is individual variation among language learners with regard to “monitor” use. He distinguishes those learners
that use the “monitor” all the time (over-users); those learners who have not learned or who prefer not to use their conscious knowledge (under-users); and those learners that use the “monitor'” appropriately (optimal users).
An evaluation of the person’s psychological profile can help to determine to what group they belong. Usually extroverts are under-users, while introverts and perfectionists are over-users. Lack of self-confidence is frequently related to the over-use of the “monitor”.
VYGOTSKY’S CONTRIBUTION TO SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
Other theorists (Piaget, 1952; Vygotsky, 1962) viewed the development of language as a complex interaction between the child and the environment, which is influenced by both social and cognitive development. Both Piaget and Vygotsky believed that as children develop language, they actively build a symbol system, which helps them to understand the world. They differed in the way in which they viewed how language and thought interact with one another. 
Piaget believed that cognitive development led to the growth of language whereas Vygotsky viewed language as developing thought.
A child’s external speech is the first step in the development of thinking. Vygotsky’s theory stresses the importance of communication with others as a major factor in the development of a child’s language, which stimulates the development of thought. Vygotsky’s theory views the important effect that an adult has on the development of language. His theory describes the importance of the zone of proximal development, which is present in interactions children have with adults. 
This zone is described as the "distance between the child’s actual developmental level determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance”.
This adult guidance is referred to as scaffolding. In order for the scaffolding to be effective, it must match the child's developmental level so the child is comfortable enough to use the guidance, which may present enough of a challenge to reach the next level in a particular area. For example, an adult whose goal is to provide an appropriate amount of scaffolding may engage in a conversation with a young child using various strategies. If the child asks a question about a particular topic, the adult may first ask a child, “Well, what do you think about that?”. Once the adult knows what the child thinks, he can decide which ideas to confirm and which ones to extend and determine just how much information the child can assimilate during one conversation.
Adults who do not typically provide scaffolding will not ask the child's thoughts on the matter, but will answer the question directly. In doing this, they have not figured out exactly what the child is asking, nor do they know what the child already knows about the particular topic. Even though the child in this situation may be satisfied with the answer, he has not had the opportunity to actively discuss and manipulate ideas in order to construct knowledge. Sometimes adults can ask young children open-ended questions. The children's responses are often filled with information, which adults in the scaffolding role can extend.
Consider the various answers these 3- and 4-year-old children gave to a teacher's question,:
“What do you know about leaves?”:
“The leaves fall from the trees and they always roll away”;
“They do their jobs. They grow”;
“They fall on the ground”;
“The wind comes and blows them very fast and they roll across the grass. I can catch one of the leaves”;
“Sometimes the leaves get into beautiful colors like a rainbow. They fall to the ground and I catch them, 
and when they stay up in the tree and they do their jobs and keep growing and growing and growing”.
Clearly, these children already have a vast knowledge about leaves. The teacher can then take this information, which is meaningful to the children, and weave it into discussions about seasons, the life cycle of plants, weather, and an appreciation of the beauty of nature. A teacher can say, “You were talking about how the leaves get into beautiful colors like a rainbow. Let's find a book about leaves and find out how they do this”.
AULA 03 METHODOLOGY IN THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGE
In language teaching, methodology is the study of the practices and procedures used in teaching, and the principles and beliefs that underlie them. This way methodology includes: The study of the nature of language skills (eg. reading, writing, speaking, listening) and procedures for teaching them; The study of the preparation of lesson plans, materials and textbooks for teaching language skills; The evaluation and comparison of language teaching methods (eg. the audiovisual method).
APPROACH,METHOD, TECHNIQUE
Language teaching is sometimes discussed in terms of three related aspects: approach, method, and technique. Different theories about the nature of language and how languages are learned (the approach) imply different ways of teaching language (the method), and different methods make use of different kinds of classroom activity (the technique). Examples of different approaches are the aural-oral approach (used in the audiolingual method), the cognitive code approach, the communicative approach etc.
Examples of different methods, which are based on a particular approach, are the audiolingual method, the direct method etc. Examples of techniques used in particular methods are drills, dialogues, role plays, sentence completion etc.In language teaching, method stands for a way of teaching a language which is based on systematic principles and procedures, i.e., which is an application of views on how a language is best taught and learned. Different methods of language teaching such as the direct method, the audiolingual method, the grammar translation method, the silent way and communicative approach result from different views of:
The nature of language; The nature of language learning;
Objectives in teaching; The type of syllabus to use;
The role of teachers, learners, and instructional materials;
The techniques and procedures to use.
SYLLABUS
Syllabus (also curriculum) stands for a description of the contents of a course of instruction and the order in which they are to be taught. Language teaching syllabuses may be based on:
GRAMMATICAL ITEMS AND VOCABULARY
THE LANGUAGE NEEDED FOR DIFFERENT TYPES OF SITUATIONS
THE MEANINGS AND COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS, WHICH THE LEARNER NEEDS TO EXPRESS IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE.
WHAT HAVE TEACHERS THOUGHT ABOUT THE “RIGHT” METHOD?
For much of its history, language teaching has been obsessed with a search for the ‘right’ method. It was felt that somewhere or other there was a method which would work for all learners in all contexts, and that once such a method had been found the language teaching ‘problem’ would be solved once and for all. More recently, it has been realized that there never was and probably never will be a method for all. The focus in recent years has been on the development of classroom tasks and activities which are consonant with what we know about processes of second language acquisition, and which are also in keeping with the dynamics of the classroom itself.
I have chosen to assign methods to three categories: the psychological tradition, the humanistic tradition and the second language acquisition tradition. I believe that the groupings highlight essential similarities between the different methods in each category. From now on we are going to discuss methods in relation to the categories mentioned before. Which methods were considered by the psychological tradition? Audio-lingualism has probably had a greater impact on second and foreign language teaching than any other method. It consists of a highly coherent and well developed classroom pedagogy, with clear links between theory and practice. It was, in fact, the first approach which could be said to have developed a ‘technology’ of teaching,
developing in the 1940s and 1950s as a reaction against more traditional methods, and purporting to be based on ‘scientific’ principles.
BEHAVIORISM
In the case of audio-lingualism, a principal rationale was provided by behaviorists. Moulton (1963) suggests that  behaviorism and structuralism provide us with five key characteristics which need to be taken into consideration in designing language programmes:
LANGUAGE IS SPEECH;
A LANGUAGE IS A SET OF HABITS;
TEACH THE LANGUAGE, NOT ABOUT THE LANGUAGE;
A ALANGUAGE IS WHAT NATIVE SPEAKERS SAY, NOT WHAT SOMEONE THINKS THEY OUGHT TO SAY;
LANGUAGES ARE DIFFERENT.
TRANSFORMATIONALISTS
-------PESQUISAR ISSO DEPOIS------
WHAT CAN BE SAID ABOUT THE COGNITIVE CODE LEARNING? 
Transformational grammar and cognitive psychology gave rise to their own method–cognitive code learning, although this never attained the prominence or pervasiveness of audio-lingualism. If the high priests of behaviourism and structural linguistics were Skinner and Bloomfield, their transformational and cognitive counterparts were Chomsky and Ausubel.
The major departure of cognitive psychology from behaviourism was that cognitivism viewed the learning process as a two-way process between the organism and its environment. The ability of the organism action the environments contrasts with the behaviorist view that the organism is basically the passive recipient of outside stimuli. 
Linguists working within the framework provided by cognitive psychology were able to demonstrate that there were aspects of a child´s emerging linguistic system which simply could not be accounted for in terms of the reaction of an organism (the learner) to its environment. Rather, it was believed that language development could be characterized by rule governed creativity. With a finite number of grammatical rules and a limited vocabulary, we can create an infinite number of sentences, many of which may never have been uttered before. This incidentally is another argument against behaviourism- it would take thousands of lifetimes to learn all the sentences of a language through a process of stimulus-response. There are numerous points of contact between audio-lingualism and cognitivism. For example, the cognitivists are much more sanguine about mistakes, rejecting the behavioristic notion that if learners make mistakes they will learn these deviant forms which will have to be ‘unlearned’ later. Cognitivists believe that making mistakes is an important part of the learning process, that such mistakes provide disconfirming instances which are important in learning a new concept or rule.
HOW DO METHODS BEAHVE UNDER THE HUMANISTIC TRADITION?
Proponents of these methods believe that if learners can be encouraged to adopt the right attitudes, interests and motivation in the target language and culture, as well as in the learning environment in which they find themselves. Then successful learning will occur, and that if these affective factors are not right, then no set of techniques is likely to succeed, regardless of how carefully they have been devised or how solidly based on the latest theory and research. As you read of the classroom techniques proposed by methods derived from humanistic psychology, you might like to note just how inhumane some of these appear to be.
Perhaps the best known proponent of humanism in language learning is Earl Stevick who, while he has not developed his own method, has been an enthusiastic champion and interpreter of humanistic methods in language teaching. Others include Curran, who developed Community Language Learning, Gattegno who created the Silent Way, and Lozanov who produced the approach known as Suggestopedia.
Stevik, who has taken up and extended the work of Curran, Gattegno and Lozanov, became interested in applying principles of humanistic psychology to language learning and teaching after he became dissatisfied with both audio-lingual habit theory and cognitive code learning. Why is it, he asked, that both of these methods were capable of working extremely well (or extremely badly), when both were the logical antithesis of each other and therefore mutually incompatible? He came to the conclusion that success or failure in language teaching depends not so much on whether one adopts inductive or deductive techniques for teaching grammar, nor whether one engages in meaningful practice rather than in pattern drills. It does depend in the extent to which one caters to the learner´s affective domain. 
In other words, the actual classroom techniques, the bases on which we select materials, and the sorts of activities in which we have our learners engage, matter less than certain other basic principles which could be used in audio-lingualism, cognitive code learning, or any other number of approaches.
Perhaps the most important article of faith is that the learner´s emotional attitude towards the teacher, towards fellow learners, and towards the target language and culture, is the single most important variable in language learning. It is crucial, not only to take account of this factor, but to give it a central place in the selection of content, materials and learning activities. The other principle shared by these diverse methods is that teaching should be made subservient to learning. In this learner-centered view of language development, the emphasis at all times should be on the learners, not the teacher. 
In fact, the most extreme proponents of this view argue that it is not really possible to teach anybody anything, except in a superficial sense- all that the teacher can do is to attempt to establish the optimal conditions whereby learning can come about through the learner’s own efforts. Stevick points out that learner-centerdness does not imply that teachers should abandon the classroom to the learners, that there are a number of legitimate teacher functions in learner- as well teacher-centered classrooms.
WHAT ARE THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTIONS OF THE TEACHER?
1. The cognitive function. The teacher possesses knowledge desired by the student about the target language and culture. We, the teachers, have this knowledge, which the students expect us to impart to them;
2. The classroom management function. Our students and the society in which we work expect us to take responsibility for how the student´s time is used in class. The students rely on our training and experience with materials, schedules and techniques;
3. Practical goals. Here Stevick is referring to the goals which students and society have for language courses. The teacher is expected to take these vaguely thought out or articulated goals and give them practical expression in language teaching syllabuses;
4. The personal or interpersonal function. As teachers with the desired skills, knowledge and expertise, we have a great deal of power in the classroom and it is our responsibility to set the tone or interpersonal classroom climate. The atmosphere we set will determine  whether the students’ non-linguistic emotional needs are met in the classroom;
5. The final function is closely related to the fourth, but is more subtle. It has to do with the warmth and enthusiasm that the teacher radiates - the ‘vibes’ that he or she puts out. According to Stevick, this is the most important function of all.
WHAT’S THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SECOND LANGUAGE TRADITION?
The third methodological tradition I have identified encompasses methods which draw directly on research and theory into first and second language acquisition, and attempt to apply this theory and research to the second language classroom. 
While earlier methods such as audio-lingualism and cognitive code learning also relied heavily on what were seen as the conditions underlying first language development, the more recent methods are different in that they claim to be based on substantial empirical research into language development.
The most persuasive advocate of the acquisitionist tradition is Krashen. Of the various principles
set out by Krashen, the best known and most controversial is the suggestion that there are two distinct mental processes operating in second language development. According to this author, several essential characteristics or conditions exist in first language acquisition.
The first of these is the ‘here and now’ principle which suggests that whenever language is directed to the child it is used to refer to some action, entity or event that is occurring in the immediate environment.The child is enabled to comprehend the language through the non-verbal clues with which the language is associated. Secondly, language directed to young children is simplified, carefully structured and contains many repetitions.The third characteristic is that the focus of the language is firmly on meaning rather than form. The child acquires the forms through subconscious acquisition.In addition, children comprehend new language forms long before they produce them.
THE NATURAL APPROACJ AND THE TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE
(VER NAS ANOTAÇÕES ANTIGAS)
AULA 04 WHAT EXISTIS BEYOND METHOD?
Teaching is a complex process which can be conceptualized in a number of different ways. Traditionally, language teaching has been described in terms of what teachers do: that is, in terms of the actions and behaviors which teachers carry out in the classroom and the effects of these on learners.
No matter what kind of class a teacher teaches, he or she is typically confronted with the following kinds of tasks: 
Selecting learning activities;
Preparing students for new learning;
Presenting learning activities;
Asking questions;
Conducting drills;
Checking students’ understanding;
Providing opportunities for practice of new items;
Monitoring students’ learning;
Giving feedback on student learning;
Reviewing and reteaching when necessary.
WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF TEACHER’S BELIEFS?
Teacher’s belief systems are founded on the goals, values, and beliefs teachers hold in relation to the content and process of teaching, and their understanding of the systems in which they work and their roles within it. These beliefs and values serve as the Background to much of the teachers’ decision making and action, and hence constitute what has been termed the ‘culture of teaching’.
HOW ARE TEACHER’S BELIEF SYSTEM BUIILT UP?
Teacher’s belief systems are built up gradually over time and consist of both subjective and objective dimensions. Some may be fairly simple – for example, the opinion that grammar errors should be corrected immediately. Others may be more complex – for example, the belief that learning is more effective when it involves collaboration rather than competition. Research on teachers’ belief systems suggests that they are derived from a number of different sources.
Their own experience as language learners - All teachers were once students, and their beliefs about teaching are often a reflection of how they themselves were taught. For example, one teacher reports, “I remember when I was a student and I wanted to learn new vocabulary, it always helped to write down the words”.
Experience of what works best - For many teachers experience is the primary source of beliefs about teaching. A teacher may have found that some teaching strategies work well and some do not. For example, a teacher comments, “I find that when checking answers in a whole-class situation, students respond better if given the opportunity to first review their answers with a partner”. 
Established practice - Within a school, an institution, or a school district, certain teaching styles and practices may be preferred.A high school teacher reports, “In our school, we do a lot of small group learning. We’re encouraged not to stand in front of the class and teach whenever it can be avoided”.
Personality factors - Some teachers have a personal preference for a particular teaching pattern, arrangement, or activity because it matches their personality. An extroverted teacher, for example, reports, “I love to do a lot of drama in my conversation classes, because I’m an outgoing kind of person and it suits the way I teach”.
Educationally based or research-based principles - Teachers may draw  on their understanding of a learning principle in psychology, second language acquisition, or education and try to apply it in the classroom. A teacher in a private language institute, for example, reports, “I took a course on cooperative learning recently. I really believe in it and I’m trying to apply it to my teaching.” Another teacher at the same institute comments, “I believe that second language acquisition research supports a task-based approach to language teaching”.
Principles derived from an approach or method - Teachers may believe in the effectiveness of a particular 
approach or method of teaching and consistently try to implement it in the classroom.For example, one teacher comments, “I believe in communicative language teaching. I try to make communicative use of the language the focus of every class I teach”.Another teacher reports, “I use the process approach in
teaching writing and I make a lot of use of peer feedback rather than teacher feedback in students’ writing”. From now on we are going to discuss teacher’s beliefs concerning language, learning, teaching, the curriculum, and the teaching profession are examined, as well as links between these beliefs and teachers’ classroom practices.
WHAT BELIEFS DO PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT ENGLISH?
People’s view of English, or of any language, are influenced by contacts they have had with the language and its speakers. In the case of English, or the language you teach, these contacts vary significantly from one individual to another. It is therefore instructive to examine the underlying beliefs teachers hold about English and how these influence attitudes towards teaching it.
HOW ARE BELIEFS ABOUT LEARNING DEALT WITH?
When learners and teachers meet for the first time, they may bring with them different expectations concerning not only the learning process in general, but also concerning what will be learned in a particular course and how it will be learned. The observation above draws our attention to the fact that both teachers and learners bring experience to the classroom that influences their perceptions in subtle ways. Teachers’ beliefs about learning may be based on their training, their teaching experience, or may go back to their own experience as language learners. 
LEARNER-CENTERED VIEW OF LEARNING
What assumptions would teachers who favor a learner-centered view of learning probably describe? Teachers who favor a learner-centered view of learning, such as that which underlies many current methodologies in language teaching, would probably describe their assumptions in terms such as the following:
1.  Learning consists of acquiring organizing principles through encountering experience;
2.  The teacher is a resource person who provides language input for the learner to work on;
3.  Language data is to be found everywhere – in the community and in the media as well as in textbooks;
4.  It is the role of the teacher to assist learners to become self-directed by providing access to  language data through such activities as active listening, role play and interaction with native speakers;
For learners, learning a language consists of forming hypotheses about the language input to which they will be exposed, these hypotheses being constantly modified in the direction of the target model. 
Learning consists of acquiring a body of knowledge.
The teacher has this knowledge and the learner does not;
It is the role of the teacher to impart this knowledge to the learner through such activities as explanation, writing and example. The learner will be given a program in advance.
Learning a language consists of learning the structural rules of the language and the vocabulary through such activities as memorization, reading and writing.
WHAT ARE THE BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING?
Teaching is a very personal activity,
and it is not surprising that individual teachers bring to teaching very different beliefs and assumptions about what constitutes effective teaching.
PROGRAM AND THE CURRICULUM
Any language teaching program reflects both the culture of the institution, as well as collective decisions and beliefs of individual teachers. Some programs may have a distinctive philosophy, such as the Australian Migrant Education Program which has been described as aiming to implement the following beliefs about curriculum processes:
Descentralized curriculum planning;
A needs-based curriculum;
A range of teaching methodologies;
Lerner-based classrooms;
Authentic learning;
Authentic materials;
Multiculturalism.
WHAT HAPPENS DURING THE PROCESS OF TEACHING?
During the process of teaching, the teacher fills out and adapts the lesson outline based on how the students respond to the lesson. While the teacher’s planning decisions provide a framework for approaching a lesson, in the course of teaching the lesson that framework may be substantially revised as the teacher responds to students’ understanding and participation and redirects the lesson in midstream.
HOW DOES THIS RESHAPING AND REDIRECTION COME ABOUT?
Teachers monitor instruction by looking for cues that the students are following the lesson satisfactorily. They teach using well-established routines. These routines are the shared, scripted, virtually automated pieces of action that constitute so much of our daily lives as teachers. In classrooms, routines often allow students and teachers to devote their attention to other, perhaps more important matters inherent in the lesson. In a study of how an opening homework review is conducted, an expert teacher was found to be brief, taking about one-third less time than a novice.
She was able to pick up information about attendance, and about who did or did not do the homework, and identified who was going to get help in the subsequent lesson. She was able to get all the homework corrected, and elicited mostly correct answers throughout the activity. And she did so at a brisk pace and without ever losing control of the lesson.
Routines were used to record attendance, to handle choral responding during the homework checks, and for hand raising to get attention. The expert used clear signals to start and finish lesson segments. Interviews with the expert revealed how the goals for the lesson, the time constraints, and the curriculum itself were blended to direct the activity. The expert appeared to have a script in mind throughout the lesson, and followed that script very closely. How can we describe the decision-making models of teaching?
Focusing on teachers — their beliefs about teaching, learning, or classroom interaction — can help balance more top-down, product-oriented conceptions of language teaching, with more nuanced, bottom-up, process-oriented descriptions of specific language teaching events. Studies of teachers, either undertaken by teachers themselves or in collaboration with researchers (Shulman, 1992), can help illuminate the processes by which language teachers plan and make decisions about their teaching (Woods, 1996). Central to these studies is the need to examine underlying teacher beliefs and teacher thinking.
Studies of teachers and teaching reveal the number of decisions which teachers make, often with competing demands and not much time to think back to principles or applications derived from teacher education programs (Burns, 1995; Freeman and Richards, 1996; Kleinfield, 1992).
 Woods (1996), in the first major study of teacher cognition in language teaching, describes how teachers rely upon experience and call into play their beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge in that decision-making. Richards (1991) identifies eight maxims or principles derived from experience which teachers use to explain the decisions they make during teaching. Often tacit, these maxims need to be made explicit if teachers are to consider new techniques or changes in practices.
2. The role of reflection
What is often missing from traditional language teacher education is recognition of the role that the teacher plays in generating knowledge through teaching experience and reflection (conscious recollection and evaluation of that experience; Bartlett, 1990; Freeman and Richards, 1993; Wallace, 1991). 
As Bruner (1986; 1990) explains, universities have traditionally focused on scientific knowledge which is abstract, decontextualized, and impersonal, but teachers also need access to narrative ways of knowing which relate theory to specific practices in concrete, contextualized, and personal ways. In focusing on “how,” language teacher education has ignored the important “what” and “why” questions which only be answered by teacher reflection and research.
3. Teacher narratives and case studies
Teacher narratives or “stories” that teachers tell about their classroom experiences, convey the daily experiences of teachers and the ways in which they try to make sense of these experiences through talking or writing about them. Teachers avoid abstract theoretical statements in talking with each other about their work because these lack connection to classroom experience. Stories help teachers understand students; they address the dilemmas of teaching and the competing roles that teachers carry out; and they provide professional development through reflection on practice. Narratives represent a primary way in which teachers organize and understand the complexities of their profession, involving competing demands, constraints, policies, and power relations. In working with case studies, prospective and experienced teachers become actively involved in the kinds of decision-making they face in their language teaching (Plaister, 1993). Case studies also offer a way to help teacher educators avoid the imposition of culturally inappropriate teaching philosophies.
4. The role of practical experience
Some questions have led to a call for teacher preparation programs to create opportunities for prospective teachers to access this knowledge and test theories and principles with actual practice:
The growing respect for the situated knowledge of the teacher;
The recognition of the teacher as central in the teaching and learning process;
The crucial roles of the teacher as program and materials developer, needs analyst decision-maker, problem-solver, and researcher of his or her own classroom (Richards, 1990).
Observation of mentor teachers or peers and self-observation through video recordings, accompanied by reflective activities such as journal writing and feedback or discussion sessions, are especially important for language teacher preparation and continuing teacher development (Crandall, 1994; Fanselow, 1987). Unfortunately, because observation is characteristically used in teacher supervision and evaluation, the self-knowledge it can provide has too often been ignored. A number of observation schemes and instruments have been developed that enable teachers and researchers to focus attention on specific aspects of classroom interaction, management, or instruction, and construct or reconstruct understandings of language teaching and learning.
5. The role of research
Classroom research, research that is carried out in the second or foreign language classroom to answer questions about teaching and learning, plays an increasingly important role in both initial teacher preparation and ongoing teacher development.
AULA 05 ON REFLECTIVE TEACHING
WHAT ARE THE FOUR-LENSES WHICH FAVORS CRITICAL REFLECTIVE TEACHING?
OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AS LEARNERS AND TEACHERS (SELF-REVIEW)
OUR STUDENT’S EYES (STUDENT VIEW)
OUR COLLEGUES EXPERIENCES (PEER REVIEW)
THEORETICAL LITERATURE (BENCHMARKING)
HOW DOES RICHARDS SEE REFLECTIVE TEACHING?
Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom and giving it a meaning by attaching the why question to what you go through. You also empower your students to ask these why
questions to their classroom experiences. You start by recognizing that you and your students are key persons in learning environment. Your being in the classroom must make sense to you and your environment. Your relived/ recalled experiences as a teacher and those of your students are explored and evaluated to let you fulfill your mission and vision in the teaching profession.
Richards (1990) argues that reflective teaching is a move beyond the ordinary to a higher level of awareness of how teaching and take place. This demands that you and your students be involved in a process of self-observation and self-evaluation. Thus you and your students must gather information on your practices and experiences. This information is organized, analyzed and interpreted to identify what beliefs, assumptions and values are attached to your practices and experiences. You and your students end up recognizing, examining and ruminating what you do as a teacher and students, respectively.
Reflective teaching informs you that you are in charge of your teaching/ learning and that you have a major contribution to make towards its success. This is why your behavior must not be taken for granted as it needs to be continuously evaluated to let your practices and experiences be meaningful. To you the teacher, reflective teacher is a deliberate move to allow you thinking critically of your teaching practice so that your students can maximize their learning. Thus, through a change oriented activity, you contribute highly to your professional development. Richards (1990) argues that experience alone is insufficient for professional growth, but experience coupled with reflection is a powerful impetus for teacher development. Reflective teaching is a mark of a concerned teacher who is skilled enough to examine his/her beliefs, values and assumptions behind the teaching practice. The insights derived from this exercise are used to improve your practice. According to Bailey (1997), reflective teaching is about a skilled teaching of knowing what to do. You examine your work so that you consider alternative ways of ascertaining that your students learn. This takes place through searching for deeper understanding of your teaching. So, you are able to monitor, critique and defend that which you implement and how you implement it.
CAN A REFLECTIVE TEACHER BECOME A RESEARCHER?
It is possible that reflective teaching may turn you to be a researcher because of its dimension of self-inquiry. Through self-inquiry, much of what is unknown  becomes clear so that you end up improving your practice and planning. Thus, your personal experiences are turned into stories which can be shared with your peers. In this manner, reflective teaching is a professional alternative to action research. It is a personal means of conducting your own ongoing professional life by solving problems in a systematic manner.
Reflective teaching is seen as a process that can facilitate teaching, learning and understanding, and that plays a central role in teacher professional development. The significance of reflective teaching is well expounded by many scholars. Dewey was among the first to promote reflection as a means of professional development in teaching. He believes that “critical reflection” is the most important quality a teacher may have and adds that “when teachers speculate, reason, and contemplate using open- mindedness, wholeheartedness, and responsibility, they will act with foresight and planning  rather than basing their actions on tradition, authority, or impulse. The significance of reflective teaching on professional development can be shown as follows.
First, reflective teaching increases the degree of “professionalism”. Teachers who are better informed as to the nature of their teaching are able to evaluate their stage of professional growth and what aspects of their teaching they need to change. Reflective practice offers practical options to address professional development issues. Secondly, it can help young teachers achieve a better understanding of their own assumptions about teaching as well as their own teaching practices; it can lead to a richer conceptualization of teaching and a better understanding of teaching and learning processes; it can serve as a basis of self-evaluation and is therefore an important component of professional development. Lastly, as young teachers gain experience in a community of professional educators, they feel the need to grow beyond the initial stages of survival in the classroom to reconstructing their own particular theory from their practice.
HOW DOES SCHÖN DESCRIBE REFLECTION-IN-ACTION AND RECLECTION-ON-ACTION?
Reflection-in-action helps us as we complete a task. It is that process that allows us to reshape what we are working on, while we are working on it. It is that on-going experimentation that helps us find a viable solution. In this, we do not use a “trial-and-error” method. Rather, our actions are much more reasoned and purposeful than that.
Reflecting-in-action is generally called forth when a surprise appears in the process of accomplishing the task. And that surprise causes one to question how the surprise occurred given our usual thinking process.
Reflection-on-action in our design projects is provided by final reflection papers, portions of design documents titled “lessons learned,” and also any time (written or otherwise) in which you evaluate your own process (this is actually a critical part of the design process and should well be incorporated into your design documents).
ARE THERE CRITICISM OF SCHÖN’S CONCEPTION?
Although Schön had a great impact on efforts to develop reflective teaching practice throughout the world, his ideas have been criticized on several grounds. First, Schön has been criticized for his lack of attention to the discursive or dialogical dimension of teacher learning. Although he emphasizes the reflective conversations that teachers have with the situations in which they practice, and the conversations of mentors and novice practitioners as the mentors attempt to coach the novices.
Schön does not discuss how teachers and other professionals can and do reflect together on a regular basis about their work. Apart from the context of mentoring, reflection is portrayed by Schön as largely a solitary process involving a teacher and his or her situation, and not as a social process taking place within a learning community. Much recent work on reflective teaching, on the other hand, stresses the idea of reflection as a social process and makes the argument that without a social forum for the discussion of their ideas, teacher development is inhibited because our ideas become more real and clearer to us when we can speak about them to others.
Developing a critical perspective on our own behavior requires the dispositions of open-mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness that Dewey highlighted a long time ago. Implicit in the type of collaborative and cooperative environment is the element of trust. Teaching, when approached in the reflective manner that Dewey recommended and Schön described, can be an intensely personal and challenging endeavor. To be open to questioning long-held beliefs, to be willing to examine the consequences of our actions and, to be engaged fully in the teaching endeavor is certainly a rewarding but also a very demanding effort. To be engaged in this sort of examination with others requires that trust becomes a prominent feature of these conversations among  practitioners. Without those companions and without that trust, our reflection on our teaching will be severely limited.
Another criticism of Schön’s work is that he focuses on teaching practice at the level of the individual without sufficient attention to the social conditions that frame and influence that practice. Here, the argument is that by focusing teacher’s attention only inwardly at their own practice, Schön is encouraging a submissive response to the institutional
conditions and roles in which teachers find themselves.
Critics argue, and we would agree, that teachers should be encouraged to focus both internally on their own practices, and externally on the social conditions of their practice, and that their action plans for change should involve efforts to improve both individual practice and their situations. If teachers want to avoid the bureaucratic and technical conception of their role that has historically been given to them, and if they are going to become reflective teachers and not technical teachers, then they must seek to maintain a broad vision about their work and not just look inwardly at their own practices.
WHAT ARE THE BASIC CONCEPTS IN SOCIAL-CULTURAL THEORY?
One of the fundamental concepts of sociocultural theory, according to Lantolf (2000), is its claim that the human mind is mediated. Lantolf claims that Vygotsky finds a significant role for what he calls “tools” in humans’ understanding of the world and of themselves. According to him, Vygotsky advocates that humans do not act directly on the physical world without the intermediary of tools. Whether symbolic or signs, tools according to Vygotsky are artifacts created by humans under specific cultural (culture specific) and historical conditions, and as such they carry with them the characteristics of the culture in question.
They are used as aids in solving problems that cannot be solved in the same way in their absence. In turn, they also exert an influence on the individuals who use them in that they give rise to previously unknown activities and previously unknown ways of conceptualizing phenomena in the world. Therefore, they are subject to modification as they are passed from one generation to the next, and each generation reworks them in order to meet the needs and aspirations of its individuals and communities. Vygotsky advocates that the role of a psychologist should be to understand how human social and mental activity is organized through culturally constructed artifacts.
HAS RECLECTIVE TEACHER EDUCATION SUPPORTED GENUINE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT?
According to Handal and Lauvas, the first is question of the degree to which reflective teacher education has supported genuine teacher development. Here, despite all of the rhetoric surrounding efforts to prepare teachers who are more reflective and analytic about their work, in reality, reflective teacher education has done very little to foster genuine teacher development and to enhance teachers' roles in educational reform. 
Instead an illusion of teacher development has often been created which has maintained in more subtle ways the subservient position of the teacher. There are several ways in which reflective teacher education has undermined the frequently expressed emancipatory intent of teacher educators.
First, one of the most common uses of the concept of reflection has involved helping teachers reflect about their teaching with the primary aim of better replicating a curriculum or teaching method that research has allegedly found to be effective in raising students' standardized test scores. Here the question in the reflection is how well does my practice conform to what someone wants me to be doing? Sometimes the creative intelligence of the teacher is permitted to intervene to determine the situational appropriateness of employing particular teaching strategies and materials, but often it is not. 
There are a number of things missing from this popular kind of reflection about teaching including any sense of how the practical theories of teachers (their knowledge-in action in Schon's language) are to contribute to the process of teacher development.
 
Ironically, despite Schon’s (1983) very articulate rejection of this technical rationality in his book The reflective practitioner, "theory" is still seen by those who use this approach to reside only within universities, and practice to reside only within schools. The problem is framed as merely transferring or applying theories from the university to classroom practice (eg. Zeichner, 1995).
The reality that theories are always produced through practices and that practices always reflect particular theoretical commitments is ignored. There are still many instances of this technical rationality approach to reflective practice in teacher education programs around the world today.
Closely related to this persistence of technical rationality under the banner of reflective teaching, is the limitation of the reflective process to consideration of teaching skills and strategies (the means of instruction) and exclusion of reflection upon the ends of education and the moral and ethical aspects of teaching from the teacher's purview. 
Teachers are denied the opportunity to do anything but fine tune and adjust the means for accomplishing ends determined by others. Teaching becomes merely a technical activity.
 Teachers cannot restrict their attention to the classroom alone, leaving the larger setting and purposes of schooling to be determined by others. They must take active responsibility for the goals to which they are committed and for the social setting in which these goals may prosper. 
If they are not to be mere agents of the state, of the military, of the media, of the experts and bureaucrats, they need to determine their own agency through a critical and continual evaluation of the purposes, the consequences, and the social context of their calling (p. 11).
We must be careful here that teachers' involvement in matters beyond the boundaries of their classrooms does not make excessive demands on their time, energy and expertise, diverting their attention from their core mission with students.
In some circumstances, creating more opportunities for teachers to participate in school-wide decisions about curriculum, staffing, instruction and so on, can intensify their work beyond the bounds of reasonableness and make it more difficult for them to accomplish their primary task of educating students. It does not have to be this way, but care needs to be taken that teacher empowerment does not undermine teachers' capacities. 
A third aspect of the failure of reflective teacher education to promote genuine teacher development is the clear emphasis on focusing teachers' reflections inwardly at their own teaching and students, to the neglect of consideration of the social conditions of schooling that influence the teacher's work within the classroom. 
This individualist bias makes it less likely that teachers will be able to confront and transform those structural aspects of their work that undermine their accomplishment of their educational goals. The context of teachers' work is to be taken as given.
While teachers' primary concerns understandably lie within the classroom and with their students, it is unwise to restrict teachers' attention to these concerns alone.
As U.S. philosopher Israel Scheffler has argued:
Teachers cannot restrict their attention to the classroom alone, leaving the larger setting and purposes of schooling to be determined by others. They must take active responsibility for the goals to which they are committed and for the social setting in which these goals may prosper. 
If they are not to be mere agents of the state, of the military, of the media, of the experts and bureaucrats, they need to determine their own agency through a critical and continual evaluation of the purposes, the consequences, and the social context of their calling (p. 11).
We must be careful here that teachers' involvement in matters beyond the boundaries of their classrooms does not make excessive demands on their time, energy and expertise, diverting their attention from their core mission with students.
In some circumstances, creating more opportunities for teachers to participate in school-wide decisions about curriculum, staffing, instruction and so on, can intensify their work beyond the bounds of reasonableness and make it more difficult
for them to accomplish their primary task of educating students. It does not have to be this way, but care needs to be taken that teacher empowerment does not undermine teachers' capacities. 
A fourth and closely related aspect of much of the work on reflective teaching is the focus on facilitating reflection by individual teachers who are to think by themselves about their work. There is still very little emphasis on reflection as a social practice that takes place within communities of teachers who support and sustain each other's growth.
 
The challenge and support gained through social interaction is important in helping us clarify what we believe and in gaining the courage to pursue our beliefs. More research in the last decade using a socio-cultural lens has focused on the importance of communities of practice in teacher learning (eg. Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Little, 2002; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006), but the emphasis is still on individual teacher reflection in many places.
One consequence of the focus on individual teacher reflection and the lack of attention by many to the social context of teaching in teacher development has been that teachers come to see their problems as their own, unrelated to those of other teachers or to the structures of schooling. Thus we saw the widespread use of such terms as "teacher burnout" which directed the attention of teachers away from a critical analysis of schools and the structures of teachers' work to a preoccupation with their own individual failures.
A group of activist teachers in the Boston area argued some time ago that:
 
Teachers must begin to turn the investigation of schools away from scapegoating individual teachers, students, parents, and administrators, toward a system-wide approach. Teachers must recognize how the structure of schools controls their work and deeply affects their relationships with their fellow teachers, their students, and their student' families… Only with this knowledge can they grow into wisdom and help others to grow.
In summary, when we examine the ways in which the concept of reflection has been used in teacher education we find four themes that undermine the potential for genuine teacher development:
(1) A focus on helping teachers to better replicate practices suggested by research conducted by others and a neglect of preparing teachers to exercise their judgment with regard to the use of these practices;
(2) A means-end thinking which limits the substance of teachers' reflections to technical questions of teaching techniques and ignores analysis of the ends toward which they are directed;
(3) An emphasis on facilitating teachers' reflections about their own teaching while ignoring the social and institutional context in which teaching takes place;
(4) An emphasis on helping teachers' to reflect individually. All of these things create a situation where there is merely the illusion of teacher development of teacher empowerment.
HOW IS THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT (ZPD) DESCRIBED?
Lantolf (2002), Wertsch (1985) and Shayer (2002) claim that Vygotsky’s introduction of the notion of the ZPD was due to his dissatisfaction with two practical issues in educational psychology: the first is the assessment of a child’s intellectual abilities and the second is the evaluation of the instructional practices.
With respect to the first issue, Vygotsky believes that the established techniques of testing only determine the actual level of development, but do not measure the potential ability of the child. In his view, Psychology should address the issue of predicting a child’s future growth, “what he/she not yet is”.
 
Because of the value Vygotsky attached to the importance of predicting a child’s future capabilities, he formulated the concept of ZPD which he defines as:
The distance between a child’s actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving, and the higher level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. 
According to him, ZPD helps in determining a child’s mental functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that are currently in an embryonic state, but will mature tomorrow.
 
Moreover, he claims that the study of ZPD is also important, because it is the dynamic region of sensitivity in which the transition from interpsychological to intrapsychological functioning takes place.
Vygotsky’s ideas have been widely applied in the field of education. The implications of these ideas in the field of L2 teaching therefore, are well founded and can be summarized as follow: The traces of Vygotsky’s ideas can be seen in the process approaches, which appeared as a reaction against the dominant product approaches in the 1960s and 1970s. The product approaches are grounded on behaviorist principles and relate language teaching to linguistic form, discrete linguistics skills and habit formation.
 
They claim that language consists of parts, which should be learned and mastered separately in a graded manner.
The learner’s role is to receive and follow the teacher’s instructions; an example of these approaches is the audio-lingual approach. However, process approaches came up with views emphasizing the cognitive aspect of learning and acknowledge the contributions that the learner brings to the learning context.
According to these approaches, students should be taught what Horrowtiz (1986) terms as “systematic thinking skills”. As a result, planning, setting goals, drafting and generating ideas became part of teaching strategies in L2 classroom, particularly in the field of writing. Approach believes that language should be made accessible and accepted as a practical tool for teachers to use in their teaching.
 
Therefore, the theoretical basis of Genre Approach is firmly premised in the systemic functional model that refers to the theory of genre as theory of language use, description of relationship between the context in which language occurs and the actual language being used.
Here, the emphasis is on social uses of language according to context, which tally with Vygotsky’s ideas of the role of language as a social tool for communication.
WHAT’S THE IMPORTANCE OF MEANING CONSTRUCTION IN THE ACT OF LEARNING?
The importance of meaning construction in the act of learning (reflecting Vygotsky’s claims) is a hot topic in L2 classroom interactions. The rise of approaches such as integrative teaching of reading and writing is nothing but a recognition of the importance of meaningful interaction of L2 students with texts in classrooms. 
Zimmerman (1997) argues that enhancing students’ competency in L2 should not be seen to be located in mastering skills. Too much concentration on skills could deprive students from engaging with what he refers to as aspects of literacy such as meaning construction, competency, fluency and flexibility with dealing with texts as readers and writers. 
Marshall (1987) asserts that if these aspects are ignored, teachers will be inculcating in students what Kennedy (1997) and Kubota (1998) term as fixed routines and dogmatic treatment of skills (what Vygotsky calls “fossilization”).They argue that such skills make students develop one-way thinking that rejects whatever does not conform to the existing knowledge.
Students will develop a convergent type of thinking that will hinder their abilities to deal with tasks that require complex thinking. This, in turn, could retard students‟ abilities to develop multiple skills required for their success in their academic life (Spack, 1988).
 
It is advocated that once the focus of teaching is on meaning construction, students would be able to assimilate, internalize and integrate the new information with the information they already possess, and thus understand the new information better and add personal values to it. 
A clear application of sociocultural
theory principles in L2 classroom is obvious in the task-based approach. This approach emphasizes the importance of social and collaborative aspects of learning.
 
Ellis (2000) claims that sociocultural theory focuses on how the learner accomplishes a task and how the interaction between learners can scaffold and assist in the L2 acquisition process.
Shayer (2002) postulated that collaboration and interaction among peers create a collective ZPD from which each learner can draw from as a collective pool. Ellis advises teachers to give more attention to the properties of task that aim to promote communicative efficiency as well as L2 acquisition.
 
Nunan assumes that task-based contexts “stimulate learners to mobilize all their linguistic resources and push their linguistic knowledge to the limit” a point that Seedhouse seems to question. However, a more optimistic view comes from Kumaravadivelu (1993b, cited Kumaravadivelu, 2006), who advocates that task-based activity is not linked to any particular approach, and is therefore a useful method for the teaching of language-centered tasks, learner-centered tasks and learning-centered tasks.
 
He recommends sequencing of tasks in a suitable manner to ensure that the demand on language is compatible with learners‟ levels of proficiency.
The central focus of task-based approach is on the role of interaction and collaboration among peers and how learners scaffold each other through interaction, a point that is essential in Vygotsky''s concept of learning. 
The issue of internalization is crucial in Vygotsky''s theory as well as in L2 classrooms.
 
Vygotsky encourages teachers not to concentrate too much on teaching concrete facts but to also push their students into an abstract world as a means to assisting them to develop multiple skills that will enable them to deal with complex learning tasks. 
Simister (2004) recognizes the importance of the student’s personal voice and claims that emphasis on the regurgitation of facts and repetition of accepted ideas will only produce dull and uninspired students.
This implies that students should be taught how to create, adjust their strategies and assimilate learning activities into their own personal world. As a result of the recognition of the role of abstract thinking in students‟ intellectual development, nowadays there is a call for the introduction of literature in L2 classrooms.
The teaching of literature is believed to enrich students’ vocabularies and support the development of their critical thinking, thus moving them away from the parrot-like types of learning, instead focusing on language structure into abstract thinking, whereby students can have personal appreciation of the language, consequently developing a self-motivated attitude to learning the language.
 
Lack of motivation experienced by some L2 students could be partly attributed to over-emphasis on teaching language structure which is ineffective in setting to motion students’ intellectual abilities.
AULA 06 SELF-MONITORING AND THE STUDIES OF THE SELF
SELF MONITORING
Self monitoring is a theory that deals with the phenomena of expressive controls. People concerned with their expressive self-presentation tend to closely monitor their audience in order to ensure appropriate or desired public appearances.
Self-monitors try to understand how individuals and groups will perceive their actions. Some personality types commonly act spontaneously and others are more apt to purposely control and consciously adjust their behavior. Self-monitoring is defined as a personality trait that refers to an ability to regulate behavior to accommodate social situations.
HOW DOES CHANCE OCCUR IN THE TEACHING A SECOND LANGUAGE?
Change occurs in the field of education, particularly in the domain of English language teaching whenever a new curriculum is framed or when new vision and mission statements are formulated in centers of learning or even when job profiles differ exerting changes in students’ needs.
 
If teachers wish their learners to achieve higher proficiency in their subjects and desire job satisfaction, they need to update their professional knowledge despite academic qualifications and pre-service training.
Developing professional knowledge involves indulging in self-reflection and evaluation, developing subject matter knowledge and skills of teaching, expanding knowledge base about research, teaching theories and principles, taking different roles and responsibilities like supervisor, mentor teacher, teacher researcher, or materials writer.
 WHAT’S THE RIGHT LABEL?TEACHER DEVELOPMENT OR TRAINING?
The research focus in second language teacher education for the last decade has undergone a shift from searching for better ways to train teachers to trying to describe and understand the process of how teachers learn to teach through their self-awareness or reflection.
 
In line with this recent shift of emphasis from the notion of training to that of development, the idea of teacher exploration or an exploratory approach has often been discussed as a sort of “liberating tool” for teachers from the pressure of identifying a best or better way of teaching.
What does teaching involve?
An increasing body of research in the field of teacher education and development over the past decade has challenged the process-product notion of language teaching, in which teaching is seen as the exercise of specific ways of acting or a set of behaviors that need to be taught directly.
 
Such a criticism on the process-product paradigm reflects the recognition that teaching involves both action and the thinking that underlies it and especially the higher-level cognitive processes that are less amendable to direct instruction or training than specific ways of behavioral techniques or skills.
WHAT SHIFTS HAVE TEACHER EDUCATION UNDERGONE?
The research focus in teacher education or development has undergone a shift from searching for better ways to train teachers to trying to describe and understand the process of how teachers learn to teach through their self-awareness or reflection.
When our classroom practice is viewed as a manifestation of our interactive decision making, the process of how teachers learn to make such decisions needs to be examined in relation to what factors or influences underlie their classroom actions.
 
We can discover much by exploring simply to explore, not just to solve a problem and small changes can have big consequences.
 
In other words, when we try new things (something we have never tried before) or try the opposite of what we usually do, we can compare them with what we usually do, and based on this comparison we can see our teaching differently, including our beliefs about teaching and learning.
 The idea is that through exploration, we can learn and discover a lot about our own teaching by changing the way we teach, making small changes to our teaching, or trying new behaviors, just to see what might happen.
 
So in line with the recent shift of emphasis in the field of second language education from the notion of training to that of development, the idea of teacher exploration can be viewed as a sort of “liberating tool” for teachers from the pressure of identifying a best or better way of teaching.
 
We can free ourselves to explore alternative possibilities for change.
WHAT IS TEACHER DEVELOPMENT AND HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM TEACHER TRAINING?
The essential difference between teacher training and development is whether the element of personal growth is involved or not in the teacher learning processes.
 
Some of the defining characteristics of both concepts can be identified in reference to Wallace’s (1991) three models of teacher learning: the applied science, craft and reflective models.
The applied science model suggests that teachers learn to be teachers by drawing on research-based theories and applying that knowledge into their practice. This knowledge is thought to be generalizable.