Is Language Teaching a Profession?

f study offering both undergraduate and graduate-level education and training to potential and practicing ESOL teachers, and thousands of individuals have completed these courses. Training people to teach English as a foreign/second/additional language has become a huge industry.

Standards of Practice and Certification

Another defining characteristic of a profession is a set of standards of practice developed and promulgated by the profession. The

se standards are usually tied to some form of certification or license to practice. In some cases, this licensing is under the direct control of the profession. In other cases, in which governments determine who should have a license to practice, the profession has a significant influence over the process, usually through a professional association. For example, in the United States, the American Medical Association has an important say in who should be allowed to work as medical practitioners.

In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Society of Accountants creates and administers the examination that decides who is allowed to practice as an accountant.

A Disciplinary base

A third defining characteristic of a profession is the existence of a disciplinary base. This theoretical and empirical basis is what distinguishes some professions from trades and crafts.

Educator Lee Shulman (1988) suggests that what distinguishes disciplines from one another “is the manner in which they formulate their questions, how they define the content of their domains and organize that content conceptually, and the principles of discovery and verification that constitute the ground rules for creating and testing knowledge in their fields” (p.5)

Freeman (1988), in commenting on Shulman’s characterization, has this to say:

Each discipline has its community, the group of practitioners who accept the rules of the game. What makes a person a chemist or a literary critic is the fact that he or she plays by the rules – what Shulman calls “the principles of regularity and canons of evidence,” – of the community such that his or her ideas fit within the discipline of that field of inquiry. These paradigms, which Shulman refers to as “principles of regularity and canons of evidence” and I call the rules of the game of particular disciplines, are not static. They, too, shift with time, according to dominant meanings and values. (p.9)

A challenge for education in general, and TESOL in particular, is to define, refine, and

articulate its disciplinary basis. Education is a hybrid, drawing on a range of disciplines such as psychology and sociology. In addition to these, TESOL is influenced by linguistics (both theoretical and applied), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive science, and numerous other disciplines. Partly because of this, we don’t have a shared set of rules of the game. In fact, we don’t even come close.

Advocacy/Influence

The fourth and final criterion is that of advocacy. Most professions have professional

associations, and a key function of such associations is to act as advocates for the profession.

They do this by attempting to influence legislators, either to create legislation that is seen to be advantageous to the profession or to oppose legislation that is seen as inimical to the profession. In the United States, the various health professions played an important role in blocking the passage of President Bill Clinton’s health care reform bills. In California, a wide range of educational associations, including TESOL and the National Association for Bilingual Education, had less success in opposing the discriminatory Unz Initiative, an initiative designed to severely limit the provision of bilingual education in that state.

So far, I have looked at four key criteria for determining whether an occupation or area of work qualifies as a profession.

These are:

?the existence of advanced education and training;

?the establishment of ‘standards of practice and certification’;

?an agreed theoretical and empirical base; and

?the work of individuals within the field to act as advocates for the profession.

3. Yes, but!

What I want to do now is examine some of the problematic aspects of these criteria as well as look more specifically at how the criteria for TESOL as a profession can help shape the work of associations such as ATESOL.