Is Language Teaching a Profession?

achers, and using illegally

copied materials. I am familiar with one such school that doesn’t even pay its teachers.

Native speakers of English hired as “teachers” are sent on to the streets to recruit their own students to the school. Their “salary” takes the form of a percentage of the students’ fees.

So, who has the right to grant or withhold a ‘license’ to practise to any individual or group of individuals. The danger is that if power is vested in a particular group, it may lead to a ‘closed shop’. So the question here is ‘Who has the right to set standards and to certify?’

What gives the professional associations within the field the right to say who should or should not be allowed to teach English to speakers of other languages? In other words, to what extent does the field itself, and professional associations such as TESOL and ATESOL,

have the right to act as custodians of the field?

A disciplinary base

The third criterion, the existence of a disciplinary base or shared principles of procedure, is also problematic. According to Donald Freeman, teaching doesn’t constitute a discipline because it “does not have unified or commonly held “ground rules for creating and testing knowledge”. (Freeman 1998: 10) He goes on to state that “Teachers are seen – and principally see themselves - as consumers rather than producers of knowledge. Other people write curricula, develop teaching methodologies, create published materials, and make policies and procedures about education that teachers are called upon to implement.” (Freeman 1998: 10)

As with the second criterion, we are entitled to ask Who decides the rules of the game? Who decides ‘this is the way it should be’? In all professions, these questions are posed by those who challenge the traditional order of things. When they succeed, and force acceptance of an alternative vision of the way things should be, there is a paradigm shift. In terms of Western medical practice, it wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of curing headaches by stick

ing needles into the sufferer’s foot was held up to ridicule, and those who advocated such practices were pilloried. These days, acupuncture is commonplace. In language teaching the so-called ‘communicative’ revolution that began in the 1970s has led to changing practices.

Many classroom procedures that are now widely embraced were branded as heretical not all that long ago.

There is clearly a role for research in determining ‘the way it should be’, although the exact nature of this research, and the shape and form it should take are hotly contested within the profession.

Advocacy

The fourth and final defining criteria is that of advocacy / influence. Within the United States, TESOL has had some successes, stemming at least in part from its employment of a professional in the area of advocacy, Marlyn McAdam, to lobby on our behalf.

Internationally, however, it has had less success. The question or caveat in relation to this criterion is: Is it possible for any profession to act as an ‘international’ advocate? Potentially, the work of intividuals such as Francisco Gomes in Brazil, who has argued vigorously for an international declaration of language rights, shows some promise.

Now, I want to go back to the story that I told at the beginning of the presentation. The person who made the scathing attack on language educators, and who argued that the politicians were right and the educators were wrong was not an educator himself, but a politicial – none other than Caspar Weinberger, who those of you who remember Ronald Regan (who doesn’t remember you) will be familiar with.

But is Weinberger correct, when he argues that English-only, not bilingual schools, lead to more effective English language development? His source, was, after all, The New York Times. I decided to find out what the researchers themselves had to say. Here is what I found out:

A study released today found that sixty-three schools with bilingual education programs [they had been exempted from the English-only requirement DN] did better on tests of academic achievement in English than over 1,000 similar schools providing instruction to most students only in English. (Arevalo, 2000)

So what is the point? The point is that we as language educators are not yet very good at advocating for our profession and the clients it exists to serve. I look forward to the when where it is the President of ATESOL whose voice is heard, not some superannuated politician.

To summarize what I have said in this section:

?Individuals are able to practise as TESOL teachers with minimal or no training whatsoever