People working within TBLT rarely come up with limitations on the use
of tasks in the classroom, or on the use of different types of task. To
some extent those working within the cognition hypothesis have found
negative results, but some seem rarely to seek out negative results,
and where they have occurred, have often seemed to prefer to explain
them away.According to Johannes Wagner“TBLT has been very influential, partly
because it picked up some formats which L2 learners already used before
they could give it a name.”
7.3.3 Teacher education
According to Karen Johnson, teacher trainers are typically seen as respon-
sible for the transfer offindings from AL research into classrooms. Many
informants notice that so many useful ideas andfindings are left untouched
by language teachers, and they blame it on the teacher trainers who seem to
be more concerned about adolescent psychology and classroom manage-
ment than with innovating language teaching. According to Jim Lantolf,
many teachers lack a fundamental and deep understanding of the language
they are teaching. The focus is primarily onfluency. There is generally little
concern for the beginning teacher who has to survive in her classroom and
who is typically domesticated by the older teachers in the team, and who
then has to improve language teaching according to applied linguists’find-
ings. Donald Freeman sees a“shift from thinking of teaching as a matter of
behavior, and therefore solely as‘trainable’, to thinking of teaching as social
activity, and therefore involving individual and collective sense making”.
This is endorsed by Bernd Rüsschoff, who says:“One might mention the
fact that in FLA the major trend has been a shift from an instructivist,
teacher-controlled classroom towards more cooperative and collaborative
learning arrangements, in which teacher and learners act as partners-in-
learning.”Gabriele Kasper argues that research in AL and other disciplines
has led to the availability of instruments that may improve language teach-
ing. She sees the potential of an approach in teacher education in which
teachers are given the tools to evaluate their own behavior. CA tools could
help teachers in understanding the interactions with their students better.
Teachers should not be told what to do, but made aware of what they do.
Such“teacher empowerment”could be seen as the result of AL research
according to Diane Larsen-Freeman:
There has been a tendency in AL to say to teachers:“Wefigure things
out and you use them”. It is much more effective to do research together
with teachers than to dictate to them, or at least to include teachers’
questions on our research agenda.Trends II 85