Carol Goldfus Abstract

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Journal of NELTA, Vol. 16 No. 1-2, December 2011 
1
The Challenges Facing the Foreign Language 
Teacher Educator: A Proposed Teacher 
Education Model for EFL
Carol Goldfus
 
Abstract 
As a result of the multi-cultural classroom in the 21st century, language teacher educators face new challenges; 
for example, young learners and those with language-based difficulties. In order to respond to these evolving 
needs, a new professional approach that combines theoretical knowledge with practical application is 
proposed. This approach targets what it is that teachers should know about literacy acquisition in at least two 
languages - a mother tongue and, in this case, English. The contribution of this proposed model to language 
education is to produce a teacher with declarative knowledge and research tools on the one hand, as well as 
the ability to cope with a heterogeneous classroom in a multicultural society on the other. This paper also 
intends to show how pre-service teacher education would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach with 
a combination of declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge with all teaching being ‘science-based 
practice’.
Key words: Foreign language teacher education, Young learners, Pupils with dyslexia, Bilingual literacy, 
English as a Foreign Language
Introduction
E
nglish is currently the language of 
worldwide communication. Thus, the 
work of teachers of English as a second/
foreign language is increasingly visible and the 
education of teachers for English as a Second/
Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) learners has 
gained prominence. This article describes the 
development of an interdisciplinary model of 
foreign language teacher education. This new 
approach to language education aims at producing 
teachers with declarative knowledge and research 
tools on the one hand and the ability to cope with 
a heterogeneous classroom in a multicultural 
society on the other.
Two distinct specific driving forces were behind 
the formation of this new model: The recognition 
of the place of foreign languages within a changing 
world (Costa, McPhail, Smith, & Brisk, 2005), and 
the teaching implications derived from greater 
understanding of the brain and how it functions 
(Berninger, 2004). With the inclusion of learners 
with language-related disabilities, specifically, 
dyslexia, in both general education and foreign 
language classrooms, it has become clear 
that teacher education must embrace the new 
discipline of pedagogical neuroscience (Fawcett 
& Nicolson, 2007) as well as the fundamentals 
of foreign language learning and teaching. 
Therefore, the emphasis in the model presented 
here is on incorporating current research in 
the area of language processing by the second 
language learner, what Nicol (2001) describes as 
“one mind- two languages.”
The ultimate goal of foreign language teacher 
education lies in providing teacher education 
graduates with training in approaches to teaching 
literacy that they can use successfully with their 
© 2011, Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association
(NELTA), ISSN: 2091-0487

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Journal of NELTA, Vol. 16 No. 1-2, December 2011 
2
students for the rest of their teaching life. Drawing 
on current research in the cognitive sciences, 
foreign language educators are beginning to see 
that the foreign language teacher must address 
the acquisition of literacy within the framework 
of both the learner’s native language and the new 
language to be acquired. In essence, this could be 
called “bilingual literacy” in that it assumes that 
the underlying cognitive processes in one language 
are the same for others. Such an approach to 
foreign language learning and teaching has the 
potential to help language teachers proceed with 
a deep awareness and understanding of literacy 
development in both languages as well as the 
knowledge that the pupils’ comprehension and 
verbal production is likely to be at a higher level 
in the mother tongue than in the foreign language. 
Thus, teaching would be targeted at the level of 
the foreign language acquisition displayed by the 
learner and take into account the fact that though it 
is not the learner’s first language, many cognitive 
processes are already in place. Considered in this 
way, each language can be seen to contribute to the 
other language thus leading ultimately to a higher 
level of proficiency in both languages. 
Inspired by the words of Vartan Gregorian (2001), 
who has argued that higher education’s greatest 
challenge is to develop a new model for teacher 
education for the new century, I have focused on 
developing a new model which applies research 
from across the disciplines (de León, 2001 cited by 
Cohen and Horowitz, 2002). As Lawes (2003:22) 
writes, theory is often described as “nothing more 
than talking about practice. To re-establish the 
real unity of theory and practice, …. it is necessary 
to reverse contemporary fashion and emphasize 
theory over practice.” Building on McCutchen 
and Berninger’s (1999) dictum that “Those who 
know, teach well,” I argue for a combination of 
theory and practice. As Cochran-Smith (2005) has 
proposed, this melding of theory with practice is 
a prerequisite for the teacher in “the new teacher 
education.” In this article, the focus is on the 
foreign language teacher educator and the changes 
effected in the English department specifically.
In developing the proposed model, we posed many 
questions, the most important being: What does 
the foreign language teacher need in order to be 
an effective teacher in a world of globalization 
and multilingualism? Other questions addressed 
were: What should teachers know about the 
learning processes in literacy acquisition? What 
should teachers know about bilingual/foreign/
multilingual learners and language acquisition?
In what follows, I first present the challenges that 
need to be addressed in foreign language teaching 
and literacy acquisition. Then I move on to 
illustrate how these issues have been addressed in 
the proposed model by way of a description of five 
projects which illustrate the implementation of 
the model. The background, therefore, is extensive 
thereby flagging up the complexity of foreign 
language teacher education. 
Challenges in foreign language 
teaching and understandings of 
Literacy
New perceptions of foreign language 
teacher education 
Foreign language teaching, which has often 
been placed on the backburner as the ‘stepchild’ 
of education (Swaffar, 2003), can no longer be 
regarded as a peripheral department but, as 
English is the lingua franca and fluency is the key 
to success, the teaching of English as a foreign 
language has taken its place at centre stage. 
Around the world, monolingualism seems to be 
the exception rather than the rule. Countries 
such as England, Luxembourg and Canada have 
become multilingual, and, of course, multiple 
languages can also be heard in the schools of these 
countries. Geva (2005) notes that cities like New 
York, London, and Toronto, now provide services 
to children from as many as twenty-seven different 
language groups.
The increasing number of English Language 
Learners (ELL) (Klinger, 2006) in the schools as 
a result of migration has created a new group 
of learners whose presence in turn requires 
rethinking aspects of teacher education (Costa, 
McPhail, Smith & Brisk, 2005). In the European 
Union, for example, some countries have made 
provision for the teaching of a foreign language 
at the primary school level, while others are 
in the process of making important decisions 
regarding the introduction of foreign languages 
into the curriculum (Raya, Faber, Gewehr, Peck, 
Goldfus

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Journal of NELTA, Vol. 16 No. 1-2, December 2011 
3
2001). However, most teachers are not adequately 
prepared to teach students where English is the 
language of the country but not the mother tongue 
of the pupils. In addition, there is a problem 
where the mother tongue of the pupils differs from 
English in both orthography and directionality. 
As a result of these international issues, it seems 
essential that determining ways of addressing 
the problems of (1) diverse populations and (2) 
multilingual and multicultural settings become 
integral to curriculum and instruction in teacher 
education. 
Theory versus practice
As in so many fields, developing a bridge between 
theory and practice is a persistent problem. In the 
field of foreign language teaching, Swaffar (2003) 
suggests that practice has substituted for theory 
and the result is a resounding emptiness and a 
discipline in crisis. It has become clear that we 
need something other than a recipe approach 
to teaching skills, grammar, and vocabulary; 
we must acknowledge that teaching language 
teaching cannot be effective without content: “If 
language teachers do not even begin to have some 
understanding of educational and applied subject 
theory, they will be mere technicians and feel 
themselves to be such” (Lawes, 2003:27). Thus, 
there is a need to re-define professional practice in 
light of a new type of teacher education (Cochran-
Smith, 2005). The ‘scientist-practioner approach’
(Berninger et al. 2004), in which teachers study 
their own practice against a backdrop of relevant 
research represents one way in which teacher 
education might evolve.
Teaching Reading Proficiency 
Another important issue that needs to be 
addressed relates to fluency and proficiency in 
reading. Teaching reading has become the focus of 
teacher education in recent years as increasingly 
research is being carried out on effective 
instructional practices. In the area of bilingual 
education, Cohen and Horowitz (2002) suggest 
that knowing how bilingual learners acquire 
literacy in two languages will influence the field 
of reading comprehension instruction. They ask 
the question, “what should teachers know about 
bilingual learners and the reading process in order 
to prepare effective teachers for the new century?” 
A similar question is being asked regarding the 
foreign language situation. What is it that teachers 
need to know and do in order to succeed in teaching 
reading processes that consist of both decoding 
and comprehension? Now that second language 
reading instruction has gained in impetus, a 
research base must be established “that can 
facilitate productive innovations in second [and/
or foreign] language reading instruction”(Koda, 
2005:3). Of primary concern are issues such as the 
place of memory in learning to read and write and 
in the enrichment of vocabulary, the complexity 
of reading comprehension and writing, and 
the storage and retrieval of facts. Thus, it has 
become evident that language teaching should 
now be geared to understanding how language 
is processed in the brain (Schumann et al. 2004; 
Berninger & Richards, 2002).
New perceptions of literacy
Over the past ten to fifteen years, the meaning of the 
term “literacy” has shifted from basic reading and 
writing skills to the acquisition and manipulation 
of knowledge. The concept of literacy, defined 
as the ability to create and interpret meaning 
through texts (Chafe, 1994; Chafe & Danielewicz, 
1987; Kern, 2002), and characterized by the 
availability of multiple linguistic resources, by the 
ability to consciously access one’s own linguistic 
knowledge and to view language from various 
perspectives (Goody & Watt, 1968; Olson, 1991; Ong, 
1992; Ravid and Tolchinsky, 2002), has become 
an international issue and lies at the core of ‘any 
curriculum designed to teach a foreign language’ 
(Swaffar, 2004).
Theories of cutting-edge research on literacy 
acquisition present a framework for understanding 
the nature of language processing and include 
more than just learning to decode but demands 
complex reading and writing skills in order to 
function in today’s information age. Furthermore, 
the term ‘literacy’ has been extended to include 
electronic texts that focus primarily on written 
texts and on the processes involved in reading and 
writing (Sullivan, 2002). Simultaneously, there 
has been a significant shift in understandings 
of reading proficiency, particularly in research 
into how readers of languages employing non-
alphabetic writing systems develop reading 
A Proposed Teacher Education Model for EFL 

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Journal of NELTA, Vol. 16 No. 1-2, December 2011 
4
proficiency (Everson, 2002).
Recent research has shown that sound theoretical 
knowledge is essential to the foreign language 
teacher (Moats, 2009) and the development of this 
knowledge must begin at the start of the initial 
teacher training (ITT) (Lawes, 2003). Hence, 
proficiency in a foreign language can no longer be 
restricted to the ability to speak. On the contrary, 
literacy and proficiency in a language demands 
the ability to read and write fluently in the mother 
tongue and in at least one other language. This, 
in turn, relates to new knowledge about how the 
brain works.
The brain and language learning
The last decade of the twentieth century 
has been called the ‘decade of the brain’—a 
period during which, with the participation 
of healthy individuals of all ages and with the 
benefit of sophisticated equipment such as the 
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 
and magnetoencephalography (MEG), rigorous 
scientific research began to unveil the complex 
workings of the brain. Using these sophisticated 
imaging techniques to monitor the brain activity 
of children and adolescents while they are 
reading, writing and speaking has provided 
exciting opportunities to learn about the learning 
processes and has brought brain research into the 
educational setting.
Frith (1997, 2002) theorizes that there are three 
underlying processes involved in learning, 
namely, the biological level, the cognitive level 
and the behavioural level. The latter level is the 
one that most teachers are familiar with. It is here 
that progress is assessed by classroom testing as 
well as those high stakes testing situations where 
results demonstrate whether something has been 
learned and whether the required standard has 
been attained. According to Frith’s basic causal 
modeling (1997), cognitive abilities underlie 
observable behaviour and these are based on 
neural systems in the brain. The chain of causal 
links from the brain, to the cognitive abilities 
to behaviour has to relate to the context of the 
environment thereby addressing the nature/
nurture interactions.
This current research and theory on the way the 
brain works and the implications of this work for 
teaching learning has the potential to significantly 
impact teacher education in ways that could 
lead to an “evolution” of the field—an evolution 
that acknowledges that preparing teachers for a 
changing context has to include an understanding 
of brain research and its implications for teaching 
and learning. Such change could result in the 
development of a generation of new teachers who 
are scientist-practitioner educators able to create 
optimal learning environments for all students 
(Berninger, Dunn, Lin, & Shimada, 2004). 
Learning disabilities and foreign language 
acquisition
As early as the early 1970 seventies, Dinklage, 
(1971) pointed out that the foreign language 
problem was as much a problem of pedagogy 
as it was a learning difficulty. In recent years, 
teaching a foreign language to students with 
language learning disabilities has been called the 
“ultimate foreign language challenge” (DiFino 
and Lombardino, 2004; Sparks, Schneider and 
Ganschow, 2002). The reason has to do with the 
ways in which instruction of second language 
learners and of children with language learning 
difficulties are handled in schools.
Although alternative multi-sensory approaches 
such as the Orton Gillingham method, from Alpha 
to Omega, the Hickey method, and the LCDH all 
relate to teaching learning-disabled students how 
to decode, and research has shown that students 
with learning disabilities learn how to decode 
by using a multi-sensory approaches (Ganschow 
and Meyer, 1988; Goulandris, 2003), learning 
disability experts are rarely prepared to teach 
foreign language and foreign language instructors 
are rarely prepared to address the problems that 
are associated with learning disabilities. Hence, 
foreign language instructors often have difficulty 
teaching those learning-disabled students who are 
in their classrooms. As DiFino and Lombardino, 
(2004:391) write, “an enormous void exists in this 
area particularly with respect to the development 
of alternative methodologies for facilitating the 
success of students with learning disabilities in 
learning an L2.”
Goldfus

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Journal of NELTA, Vol. 16 No. 1-2, December 2011 
5
Responding to the challenges of 
education today: towards a new 
professional model
A new model – bilingual literacy
The proposed model, “One brain – two languages: