Chapter 1: Central issues in the field of second language teacher education (SLTE) rest on conceptions of human cognition: what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is used. However, human cognition is not a focus of the academic disciplines which usually are in charge of SLTE programs; research and theory on the nature of human cognition is usually not included in debates on SLTE. The purpose of this dissertation is to use a wide range of work on human cognition to address and evaluate fundamental issues in SLTE.
Chapter 2: This chapter examines the professional conceptions of SLTE that have been proposed throughout the years in order to understand the conceptions of cognition that they assume. There were four main issues found: (1) the assumption that explicit knowledge guides teachers practice, (2) that general knowledge (i.e., knowledge which academics produce) is more useful than specific, context-bound information, (3) that teachers practice is guided by general principles and if these principles are changed, teachers practice will change, and (4) if teachers recognize problems in their practice, they will be able to solve them.
Chapter 3: Studies show that knowledge transfer from SLTE programs to L2 teaching is very difficult and problematic. Language teachers find it very difficult to use academic information or theoretical principles in their practice. Humans in general are not very good at taking knowledge gained from one activity and using it in another and will even resist knowledge which contradicts knowledge they already possess.
Chapter 4: Human cognition is not unlimited; there are some important constraints on the kinds of cognitive operations we can engage in. A central constraint is the limited amount of information that can be explicitly processed at any one time in working memory; because of this, knowledge which needs to be explicitly processed, such as declarative knowledge, is very inefficient. On the other hand, implicit knowledge, which is largely processed outside of working memory, is cognitively efficient. Studies of experts have shown that they are able to perform better than others because they use their implicit knowledge to recognize important cues as well as actions which have good chances of achieving their objectives in that specific situation.
Chapter 5: SLTE programs typically focus on general knowledge about language, language learning and language teaching. However, in this chapter a wide range of evidence is presented which indicates that teachers need and use knowledge specific to the practice of teaching, not general knowledge from academic fields related to language.
Chapter 6: How teachers knowledge is organized is just as important as the amount of knowledge a teacher possesses. A well organized knowledge base helps teachers match student cues or their instructional agenda with options for action automatically without demanding much of their scarce explicit processing capacity. However, teachers knowledge organization is different from the organization of explicit, academic knowledge. Instead of general conceptions which account for all relevant factors, teachers rely on a dynamic network of practice-specific knowledge, which allows teachers to continually construct interpretations of student behavior, instructional goals and other classroom issues as activities unfold in the classroom.
Chapter 7: Research indicates that for teachers to acquire the kind of knowledge they need within SLTE programs, they need to have explicit cognitive processing capacity available for learning during SLTE activities. If teachers need to pay attention to too many factors, they will suffer from cognitive overload and will not be able to learn much. Therefore, one of the central responsibilities of SLTE teachers is to manage the cognitive load of their students.
Chapter 8: It is possible, however, that, over time, teachers use explicit, academic knowledge to generate implicit, specific knowledge organized around L2 teaching. This chapter presents the results of three empirical studies undertaken to test this hypothesis using three separate tasks selected because they are the prototypical tasks used to investigate expertise and knowledge organization: a memory task, a sorting task, and a performance task. The results of these studies suggest that even over a lengthy period of time these teachers (n=19) had not used explicit knowledge about language to create deliberate practice activities which result in implicit, specific, and dynamically-organized practitioner knowledge.
Chapter 9: This chapter begins by evaluating the hypotheses underlying traditional conceptions of SLTE which were presented in the second chapter. The evidence does not support these hypotheses, but does support the position of others who have argued that (a) SLTE needs to focus on the activity of teaching and the contexts of teaching and (b) that developing expertise requires reinvestment of cognitive resources into deliberate practice. A model of teacher knowledge use and acquisition is presented and discussed.
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