Digging In: Non-native teachers and learner language analysis

Presented at KOTESOL 2013, Sookmyung Women's 
University, Seoul, Korea

Digging In: Non-native Teachers and Learner Language Analysis

Most MA TESOL and TESOL certificate programs include courses on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), but many students finish the course without knowing how to apply what they have learned to their classrooms. The knowledge of how languages are acquired seems irrelevant to many prospective classroom teachers because they will work with a pre-established curriculum. SLA theories are simply learned because they have always been part of the TESOL curriculum.  One solution to this problem is learner language analysis. Language learner analysis tasks that get students out of the classroom and in front of learners add life to theory. Students can discover tendencies and stages in learner language all by themselves. While unmatched in its effectiveness, learner language analysis is difficult and time consuming, maybe even to the point that it is inaccessible to non-native English teachers. In this session we share responses from 56 of our students, who completed several learner language analyses in the first five weeks of the Spring 2013 SMU TESOL semester. We briefly outline the assignments and then share the feedback, which suggests that learner language analyses are not only accessible, but also have noticeable classroom applications for non-native English teachers.

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