Xuesong (Andy) GAO
Xuesong (Andy) GAO is Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. His research interests are wide-ranging and include strategic learning and interdisciplinary approaches to language teaching and learning as well as identity and agency.
In this talk, I review initiatives to improve language teachers’ professional practice and, in particular, problematize teacher research as a means of teachers’ professional development. I draw on the recently published Douglas Fir Framework to develop a roadmap for language teachers to see how their professional learning might unfold in the specific contexts where they learn and teach. Specifically, language teacher educators need to help language teachers address at least four challenges in the process: (a) tackling the deficit discourses about language learners associated with the monolingual bias in SLA research, (b) integrating a broadened theorization of cognition in teaching, (c) taking a usage‐based approach to linguistics to inform pedagogical decisions, and (d) becoming fully empowered agents in the pedagogical process. Teacher educators need to work with language teachers to ask anew why we teach languages, what languages we teach, and how we teach languages. By doing so, we will develop language teachers who are committed to social justice and equity in teaching, who are critically aware of the significant impact that inequitable contextual conditions may have on language learners’ learning, and who can help language learners develop semiotic resources to assert themselves in challenging contexts.