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Is Language Teaching a Profession?
Sydney January, 2001
David Nunan. The English Centre, University of Hong Kong
1. Introduction
On a recent flight to the United States, I was leafing through a magazine with a wide circulation, when my eye was arrested by the following headline:
“Abolishing bilingual education: a good idea”.
I read on:
Another of the myths propagated by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association is being exploded. Many will recall the prophesies of doom circulated two years ago, when California voters approved Proposition 227.
That measure ended bilingual education, requiring the state’s more than 1 million Spanish-speaking pupils to learn and be taught in English.
“What happened in the wake of this revolutionary vote?” the article asks, and goes on to provide the following answer,
”Those students are improving in reading and in other subjects at often striking rates, according to standardized test scores,” reports the New York Times. Second-graders classified as limited in English have posted major gains in both reading and mathematics. In one California school district, Oceanside, where 25% of students (or more than 5,000) have “limited English proficiency,” average reading scores in the second grade have gone up by 20 percentage points. But in a nearby district, many of hose students were granted waivers and allowed to continue in bilingual classes, increased proficiency was less than half that of Oceanside. … Bilingual education became entrenched in poor Southwestern schools because states could use federal funds to pay for thousands of bilingual teachers and administrators. Ending what has been, in effect, a deprivation of the right of immigrant children to be educated in English, the language the will need, is a real triumph for parents over the public school bureaucracies.” (Weinberger, 2000)
So, what’s the point of this anecdote? How does it connect with the theme of my talk this morning, in which I want to explore the question of whether or not language teaching constitutes a profession? I’d like to put the anecdote to one side for a while and come back to it later.
2. Defining professionalism
In order to deal with the question of whether or not our field constitutes a profession, we need to establish what we mean when we use the term ‘profession’ itself.
Whenever I attend a regional, national, or international TESOL meeting I am struck by the use of the words profession, professional, and professionalism. Participants make constant references to the teaching profession, I attend professional development sessions, and the events themselves are imbued with the spirit of professionalism. When using the ambiguous term TESOL, it’s common to hear people drawing a distinction between TESOL the association and TESOL the profession. However, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone spelling out what they mean when they use the term.
What is a profession, and what is meant by professionalism? According to the Cobuild Dictionary, “a profession is a type of job that requires advanced education and training.” The Newbury House Dictionary defines professionalism as “the qualities of competence and integrity demonstrated by the best people in the field.” In this presentation, I would like to explore these questions in relation to education in general and TESOL in particular.
I think that we need to take at least four criteria into account in determining whether or not a particular form of paid (or under-paid) employment constitutes a profession. There are:
1. the existence of advanced education and training,
2. the establishment of standards of practice and certification,
3. an agreed theoretical and empirical base, and
4. the work of individuals within the field to act as advocates for the profession. In the rest of this piece, I elaborate on each of these criteria.
vAdvanced Education and Training
The most tangible characteristic of occupations that are traditionally thought of as professions, from medicine to law, from engineering to architecture, is that they require many years of education and training. In addition, this education and training does not end on graduation but is career long. Few of us would willingly put ourselves in the hands of an untrained airline pilot. Only desperation would drive us to seek a tooth extraction from someone who has had not updated his or her dental training for twenty years.
So, what about the field of language education? In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in formal programs of 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
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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.
Advanced education and training
Despite the growing availability of opportunities for education and training, however, thousands of individuals around the world who have no formal education and training in TESOL practice as ESOL teachers. In fact, at some language schools in different parts of the world, the only employment criterion is fluency in English. Not only do their employees lack TESOL qualifications, they have no teaching qualifications at all.
In addition, qualifications are considered irrelevant in many countries. In some countries,
unless you are a citizen of that country, you cannot gain permanent employment. In others, you cannot gain employment unless you are a native speaker of English. Here is a letter that was recently published in TESOL Matters from a teacher in Italy.
I am an Italian EFL teacher, hold a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics, and am working towards a doctorate in TESOL. I have been involved with English language teaching methodology ever since I was fifteen and managed to pursue my chosen career in the face of my parents’ opposition. … I know scores of native English teachers with no teaching or postgraduate qualifications under their belt who work as tutors throughout Italy. [However] as a non-native English teacher, I am barred from teach
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ing in state universities. … Is a British (or American) graduate in psychology a better teacher of English than a non-native (highly) qualified instructor? Isn’t that discrimination? (A Nava, Milan, Italy. TESOL Matters)
So, is education and training even necessary? As we see from the letter above, many people who teach English around the world have no specific training as language educators. In fact, there are many who have no training whatsoever. Does this matter? At some time or other, you’ve probably heard comments such as the following:
“Some of my best teachers had no formal qualifications.”
And “I once had a teacher with a Ph.D. in education. He was hopeless as a teacher.”
The fact that some individuals without formal training happen to be ‘natural’ teachers, and the fact that some highly trained people aren’t particularly good in the classroom isn’t a good enough reason to argue that education and training aren’t necessary. Requiring someone with a natural gift or talent to undergo training is not going to turn them into ‘bad’ teachers. Not so long ago, a top surgeon, who performed some of the most delicate operations possible under current medical technology, was found to be a fraud, with no medical training or qualifications whatsoever. He is currently serving a prison term.
Given the imperative for education and training, the question arises - What types of knowledge and skill are relevant for language educators? In considering this question, we can draw a broad distinction between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge.
Procedural knowledge can be subdivided into discipline-specific and general knowledge. For language teachers, declarative knowledge includes all of the things we know about language. The following are examples of declarative knowledge.
“When making the 3rd person declarative statements in the simple present, put an ‘s’ on the end of regular verbs.”
or
“The passive voice is used when we want to emphasise a process rather than the performer of an action”.
Discipline specific procedural knowledge refers to skills that are specific to language
teaching, for example, how to introduce new grammatical items such as how to teach gerunds and infinitives. General procedural knowledge refers to skills that all teachers should possess regardless of the subject they teach. Such skills would include how to manage group work, how to deal with discipline problems, and how to improve the motivation of students. (The procedural / declarative distinction also hold for students. Last semester, I had a student who performed flawlessly in a lesson reviewing the use of adjectives ending in ‘ing’ to describe persons, actions and things, and the used of adjectives ending in ‘-ed’ to describe feelings and attitudes. At the end of the lesson, I asked him how he liked the class. “Oh,” he replied, “I am boring when we practice this -ing stuff!)
Standards of practice and certification
The second defining characteristic of a profession has to do with standards of practice and certification. In TESOL, standards of practice and certification vary widely. Most countries have some form of certification for teachers, although this is rarely TESOL specific. Further, in most countries where some form of teaching certification is required, this process is controlled by governments and educational bureaucracies, not by professional teaching associations.
In terms of institutional accreditation, the situation also varies widely. In numerous countries, there is no professional or governmental control over language schools. In such countries, nothing can stop individuals who see language as a marketable commodity from opening their own schools, hiring and underpaying unqualified teachers, 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
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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
?There is no agreed on disciplinary base or ‘rules of the game’
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?Individuals whose ignorance of our field is cosmic are able to make headline pronouncements on issues to do with language education ?In contrast, we have very little power or influence over public opinion
4. Looking to the future
So, to return to the question with which I started this paper. Does language teaching constitute a profession? The answer is: it depends where you look.
Advocacy
Jack Longmate, chair of TESOL’s Caucus on Part-time Teacher Concerns has argued that “The widespread reliance on part-time faculty to lower costs tends to degrade the enthusiasm, quality and professionalism of the field and creates a downward pull on the salaries of all.”
Partly as a result of Longmate’s efforts, TESOL recently joined 15 other associations and unions to endorse the Coalition on the Academic Workforce to oppose the over-reliance on parttimers.
Is TESOL a profession? The answer to this question is: It depends where you look! It is possible to find language teaching institutions in different parts of the world which fit none of the criteria set out in this paper. However, it is also possible to find institutions and associations that are actively committed to advancing education and training, to developing standards and certification, to supporting the development of theory and research so that a disciplinary based can be established, and working as advocates to influence broader communities in ways that are positive for second language learners. It is up to us who ARE committed to the notion of TESOL as a profession to identify and promote those practices around the world that are consistent with this goal.
In conclusion, I would like to invite you to think about the stance that ATESOL takes towards advanced education and training, standards of practice, an agreed upon theoretical and empirical basis, and advocacy for the language teaching profession. If you were to rank these four criteria, what would be their order of importance for you in defining a profession?
Are there other characteristics that you feel are critical in defining a profession? (For a discussion of these issues and questions, see Bailey, Curtis and Nunan, 2001.)
5. References
Bailey, K., A. Curtis & D. Nunan. 2001. Pursuing professional development: The self as source. Boston MA: Heinle & Heinle / Thomson Learning.
Shulman, L. (1988). The disciplines of inquiry in education: An overview. In R. Jager (Ed.),
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Complementary methods of research in education. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Freeman, D. (1998). Doing teacher-research: From inquiry to understanding. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle / Thomson Learning.
Weinberger, C. 2000. Abolishing bilingual education: A very good idea. Forbes, October,2000.
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