Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know

Conclusion

The research reviewed in this chapter shows knowledge of applied linguistics can have a positive impact on language teachers and has potential for a much greater impact if problems of transfer can be addressed. Therefore, when designing applied linguistics courses for language teacher education programs, it is not enough to simply provide a short apprenticeship in applied linguistics and hope for the best because the knowledge that teachers use in their practice is more complicated that just knowing facts and general conceptions of language and language learning. In order to produce better learning experiences for novice teachers we need to move more away from folk psychology conceptions of the mind (Strauss, 2001) to a more sophisticated and complex view of language teachers’ knowledge, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge use which takes into account the insights from research in these areas. We need to take into account what kind of knowledge language teachers need (as opposed using what knowledge we can offer as a starting point) and what kinds of learning experiences will help them acquire such knowledge. We also need to have a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of how our course designs, materials and activities effect teachers’ knowledge growth, which provides a whole series of research questions which need to be investigated in the coming decade.