Reading Reflections~ Week 8

Critical Issues:
Professional Development
(article by Philip Hubbard)

For the language teacher, regular professional development is necessary if he or she is to stay current in the field of computer assisted language learning (CALL). Hubbard gives three reasons for this:

1) Teachers were insufficiently trained in this area when they were first trained (presumably at the university level).
2) Both software and hardware are changing so quickly that if you don’t keep up, quickly your knowledge is out-of-date.
3) Both technology and support can be quite varied between schools (and school districts,states, and in our cases, countries!)

All of this to say, if a teacher wants to stay current in the field of CALL, it will take effort, essentially on the part of the individual teacher to find the appropriate professional development.

I found two things mentioned by Hubbard to be quite ironic. First of all, he stated that in a directory of job listings for ESOL teachers on a TESOL website, the majority of listings either specified a requirement of CALL proficiency or at least mentioned it. Obviously, it is becoming increasingly important for the ESOL teacher to have some expertise in computer assisted language learning. The irony followed on the next page when he stated that “for many teacher preparation programs the position seems to be that a teacher does not need to know anything about computers” (p.279). This astounded me. I graduated from university, in a teacher preparation program, twelve years ago. As a student in the early 90’s, we were given virtually no training on computer use as a student or as a teacher. Since over a decade has passed, I would have assumed that much had changed in this area of teacher training. Since it is important to those who are hiring ESOL teachers that the teachers be capable in the area of CALL, it needs to be a priority at the collegiate level to provide appropriate pre-service training.

The good news for me, and my fellow classmates of L530 CALL, is that we are doing the necessary professional development to help us be knowledgeable and marketable. But the rest of the story I believe, is that if we want to remain competent in this area, it will take a conscious and consistent effort on our part to remain so.

Hubbard stated that “motivation will perhaps best emerge from engaging in a project relevant to your local teaching context.” I heartily agree with this. Anything that is learned and then applied and used in the classroom immediately will be much more useful, and in the end, of greater value.