By Jonathan Tang

 “Teachers who insist that they are simply practitioners, workers at the chalkface, not interested in theory, in effect conspire against their own authority, and against their own profession” (Widdowson, 2003, p.2).

Widdowson’s quote is a strongly worded one. But it is also instructive for teachers who aspire to professionalize their teaching and grow into scholarship. The idea of scholarly teaching is not new to me. Before it became faddish in the higher education scene, I was already a (developing) scholarly teacher, because my professors were scholarly teachers in their own right. I have not practised teaching any other way. This post is my coming-to-be story as a scholarly English language teacher, and a tribute to my teachers. Through it, I hope to make a case for teachers’ engagement with theory – not just any theory but that which makes our teaching language teaching (Freeman & Johnson, 1998, p.413; emphasis added) – for developing their practice and coming to be scholarly teachers of the subject.

I hadn’t always been an English language teacher (at least not intentionally), let alone a scholarly one. English language teaching has in fact been quite an accident that occurred to me. I joined teaching because I wanted to teach math. I signed up for “English Language” because the then-new undergraduate programme I had enrolled in required two content majors. I had gone for Chemistry, but the interview panel laughed at my subpar results. I blamed it on my A-level teacher, and argued that it was his negative example that caused me to want to become one to negate it. Apparently that didn’t go down well with the interviewers. So. they assigned me English Language as my second teaching subject instead. Oh well, I was just proficient in the language, but teaching it was a different matter altogether. Anyhow, I said yes, English Language then it shall be.

The first-year linguistics curriculum was uninspired. I just drifted through the nuts and bolts of the English language — those staple courses on the grammar and sounds of English – as I was required to. Then, one day in my second year, I was sold. A Harvard fellow in developmental psycholinguistics visited the department and taught the Language Use and Language Learning module that semester. In one memorable lecture, using only one slide (OHT in those days), of a human brain, she took us through a journey of linguistic processing in the brain. In closing she not only remarked that the brain was the sexiest of all organs, she also said that the key to learning (anything, not just language) well was to make active connections between new and old knowledge, as that’s what we were wired for. Now that’s my understanding of an excellent teacher – one who succeeds in converting the uninitiated, and whose teaching stays with one for a very long time. That sowed the seeds of my development as an intentional English language teacher and subsequently, a scholarly one. Intentions are after all the cornerstones of philosophies.

Truscott (1996) sowed the seeds of a beginning teaching philosophy for me. If grammar correction is not the way to teach/learn grammar, then what works? Pardon my parochialism – you must understand that grammar teaching preoccupied the world of a beginning teacher who had yet to acquire a metalanguage for talking about language teaching. I soon found an “answer” in Flower and Hayes’ (1981) cognitive process theory of writing, which suggested to me that the key to improving students’ grammar had to be found outside of grammar itself. After all, my students then were upper secondary school learners who had gone through numerous years of grammar correction and grammar training in their previous years of schooling but not seemed to have benefitted much from all that grammar instruction. What difference would another year or two make (if that’s what you call immersion)? What then is the key? It’s the high-level thinking operations that drive composing. If students can be helped to form personal and meaningful goals that motivate language production, their language will make meaning even if it may not be grammatically perfect. Teachers may then work on correctness incrementally. But if the appropriate writer intentions are not there, grammar instruction is likely to be an exercise in futility for students like mine. Helping students form high level, authentic goals for language production therefore became one of my first teaching philosophies, which was publicized in a book chapter (Tang, 2008).

But this philosophy could not last for long as I grew to discover the limitations of personally meaningful rhetorical goals. Such goals increased students’ motivation to make meaning, but did not necessarily lead to better ‘results’ in terms of the quality of written compositions. Being acquainted with Lillis’ (2001) perspective of academic writing as an institutional practice of mystery then gave me a renewed sense of my role as a language teacher – to demystify the culture and conventions of school-based writing by deconstructing such elusive notions as “an interesting story” and “a balanced argument” through guided, close-range observations of how these notions operate in authentic texts. To give an example, a balanced argument in the genres of schooling does not mean a 50-50 presentation of pros and cons, but a clear overall stance supported in part by a “ritualized adversativeness” (Tannen, 2002). Helping students demystify the secrecy surrounding academic writing as an institutional practice of mystery then became the philosophy I would live by for the next few years, which also led me to revise my understanding of ‘high level’ composing goals as individual goals coloured by social understandings. I later came to know this outlook as a socio-cognitive approach to teaching writing (Chandrasegaran, 2008), and also co-authored a book on it for English language teacher development (Chandrasegaran & Tang, 2008).

A few years later as I progressed to teaching the argumentative genre to high ability students in a premier high school in Singapore, it became increasingly difficult for me to make progress in my teaching practice. Not only was this because my students were highly driven and academically inclined, I’ve also begun to contemplate the harder questions about demystifying norms and conventions. What comes after all that demystification? Imitation and reproduction? Would I be doing a disservice to my highly able students by facilitating a demystification process, only to teach for imitation and reproduction of rhetorical norms? Why was I reading essays that seemed to be factory manufactured and printed off a mould? This question bugged me for a good number of years. What use was there in a teaching philosophy that replicated experience without inspiring growth? I returned to my knowledge base to look for answers.

Because established practitioners are like skilled players who succeed by their manipulation and exploitation of, rather than a skilled compliance with, the rules of the game (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 1993), the development of writing competence, from the vantage point of social practice, is more than the straightforward matter of helping writers learn the rules of the game; in other words, knowing the rules of the game does not make one a winner as issues of power, structure and agency come into play as well (Shove, Pantzar & Watson, 2012). Such is the broader socio-political reality that situates language and literacy education and presents English teachers with a choice, “either to cooperate in their own marginalization by seeing themselves as ‘language teachers’ with no connection to such social and political issues or to accept that they are involved in a crucial domain of political work: like it or not, English teachers stand at the very heart of the most crucial educational, cultural and political issues of our time” (Pennycook, 2001, p.19). I therefore found refuge in critical studies of education for guidance on deepening my practice.

By the time I joined NUS, I had known I wanted to instil in my students a sensitivity to the role that language plays in structuring human experience and creating opportunities for change. The axioms of critical language awareness (Fairclough, 2013) thus underpinned my instructorship at CELC. One educational innovation that came out of this teaching philosophy was a metalinguistic reflection assignment I devised to encourage student-writers’ conscious attention to linguistic features and strategies for creating desired reader effects (Tang & Sawatdeenarunat, 2017). This critical stance on language would later extend to my reflections on the intricacies of teacher-student interactional discourse and how it works to optimize or limit student engagement and opportunities for participation (Kramer-Dahl, Teo, Chia, & Churchill, 2005; Teo, 2014), and further extend to my current interest in the politics of curriculum (e.g., Heimans, 2012). My previous post on the practice of reflection (Tang, 2019) illustrates such a stance.

The foregoing analysis is an example of how my practice has been interactionally sustained and deepened by my engagement with the theories of language and literacy education, and attests importantly to Trowler and Knight’s (2000) observation that practice benefits from theory for without theory, experience has no meaning. But the influence is not always one way, as can be seen from how each step of my practice also led me back to theory in search of the way forward, or with revised understanding or renewed appreciation. Perhaps it was a dialectical relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and experience that led Widdowson to the strongly worded statement quoted in the opening of this post. Theory and practice are inextricably tied in a relationship of interaction and mutual production, like a generative dance (Nicolini, 2011) and some scholars have even gone further to argue that they are ontologically equivalent. If theory and practice are interdependent phenomena, then teaching philosophies are (and ought to be) attuned to change as English language teachers develop their scholarly teaching, deepen their practice, and professionalize their identities.

References

Berkenkotter, C. & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: cognition/ culture/ power. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bhatia, V. J. (1993). Analysing genre: language use in professional settings. London: Longman.

Chandrasegaran, A. (2008). What does teaching writing as a process really mean? Paper presented at the 13^th International Conference on English in Southeast Asia, Singapore.

Chandrasegaran, A. & J. Tang (2008). Teaching expository writing: genre practices and thinking skills. Singapore: McGraw Hill.

Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical language awareness (3^rd ed.). London: Routledge.

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 365-387.

Freeman, D., & Johnson, K. E. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 32(3), 397-417.

Heimans, S. (2012). Education policy, practice and power. Education Policy, 26(3), 369-393.

Kramer-Dahl, A., Teo, P., Chia, A., & Churchill, K. (2005). Three dimensions of effective pedagogy: preliminary findings, codings and vignettes from a study of literacy practices in Singapore middle schools (observation phase). Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Lillis, T. (2001). Student writing: access, regulation, desire. London: Routledge.

Nicolini, D. (2011). Practice as the site of knowing: insights from the field of telemedicine. Organization Science, 22(3), 602-620.

Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: a critical introduction. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum

Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage.

Tang, J. (2008). Engaging students to argue. In M.Y. Tay, C. Ho, & P. Teo (Eds.), Teaching reading and writing: supporting learners in the English classroom. Singapore: Pearson.

Tang, J. (2019, February 26). The practice of reflection [blog post]. SoTL Matters. Available at https://blog.nus.edu.sg/macadresources/2019/02/26/the-practice-of-reflection/

Tang, J. & Sawatdeenarunat, S. (2017). Assessing metalinguistic reflection: a case study of a science communication module in Singapore. Paper presented at the 16^th Symposium on Second Language Writing. Bangkok, Thailand.

Tannen, D. (2001). Agonism in academic discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(10), 1651-1669.

Teo. P. (2014). Encouraging student talk as a 21^st century competency. Asian Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching, 4(4), 204-216.

Trowler, P., & Knight, P. T. (2000). Coming to know in higher education: theorising faculty entry to new work contexts. Higher Education Research & Development, 19(1), 27-42.

Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 1467-1770.

Widdowson, H. G. (2003). Defining issues in English language teaching. Oxford: OUP.