Although untrained volunteers represent a substantial portion of the English language teaching force within community-based adult education contexts in the U.S., these teachers and tutors have often been “overlooked and understudied” (Matthews-Aydinli, 2008, p.198) in much of the research within the fields of TESOL and applied linguistics. Given that many volunteers are assigned teaching responsibilities despite having little to no prior training or experience teaching language or teaching adults, the preparation of these teachers is of critical importance. However, researchers and practitioners alike continue to face the challenge of helping volunteers develop more pedagogically-sound language teaching practices with limited budgets and limited resources for providing professional development. In this article, I propose and share how a Vygotskian concept-based model of professional development can help promote the development of pedagogically sound, adaptive, and agentive language teaching practices among adult ESL volunteers by orienting our focus toward conceptual development. After briefly outlining concept-based instruction (CBI), I provide one example from a CBI-informed volunteer training program that was implemented in a community-based adult ESL site.

Concept-based instruction and volunteer development

CBI is a pedagogical approach derived from Vygotsky’s (1986) sociocultural theory of mind. At its core, a CBI approach to teacher preparation is concerned with helping teachers reshape their understandings of and engagement in the activity of teaching by promoting their internalization of and intentional control over the conceptual and pedagogical reasoning that underlies pedagogically sound teaching practices. CBI emphasizes instruction that promotes conceptual development and psychological transformation as opposed to the sole adoption of specific teaching practices and techniques because teaching practices that are guided by systematically developed conceptual knowledge are more easily accessible to conscious inspection, intentional control, and adaptability to new contexts. However, it is important to note that CBI does not advocate for conceptual knowledge that is disconnected from activity, as this often results in what Vygotsky (1986) referred as empty verbalism. Rather, in the case of volunteer professional development, conceptual knowledge must be developed in and through participation in the goal-directed activities of teaching.

Illustrating CBI

To illustrate how a CBI approach orients the focus of volunteer training toward conceptual development, I will provide a brief example from a pilot training program that I developed in collaboration with a non-profit adult ESL literacy program located in Pennsylvania, USA. The overall goal of the training was for volunteers to learn how to teach language situated within real-world contexts of use as opposed to de-contextualized or purely skill-based language instruction. While previous training approaches attempted to prescribe specific practices for teaching/tutoring, many volunteers did not adopt these practices, instead opting to follow prescribed instructional materials despite being unable to articulate a clear theoretical or pedagogical rationale for doing so. In response to this concern, the CBI approach shifted the focus of our training from prescribing strategies to developing an underlying understanding of the concept of language as social practice (Gee, 2012) to inform their teaching practices.

A cohort of eight new volunteers and one volunteer who had been tutoring in the program for several months self-selected to participate in the new CBI-informed version of training. By chance, all nine volunteers happened to be placed into the program’s one-on-one tutoring program and did not teach group classes. The training itself was divided into three 90-minute workshops distributed over a three-week period. Within each workshop, volunteers were introduced to the concept through a combination of readings, group discussions, and practice designing and engaging in micro-teaching activities aligned with the concept of language as social practice. Throughout all of these activities, volunteers were provided with guidance and assistance to help them think through and internalize the concept.

The basic premise was that if volunteers could develop a conceptual understanding of language as social practice and its relevance to teaching, then we would not need to spend as much time explicitly trying to give them specific techniques to connect their language instruction to social context. Instead, by developing their understanding of language as social practice, we could create opportunities for them to reason through their own teaching using this concept, which would then lead to their ability to deploy this concept intentionally and generate their own teaching practices and techniques aligned with the concept. For instance, when asked if or how this training influenced her language tutoring, one volunteer reported “Training really helped me feel more comfortable diving into what I think the student needs versus just blindly using the grammar books, health packets, and reading books.” Another volunteer reported that she had found it “easy” to teach language as social practice and provided examples of activities in which she collaboratively explored contexts of language use with her learner, such as navigating conversation with fellow parents at school events and volunteering in the community.

Though brief, the responses provided above highlight the central claim of this article that CBI offers volunteer teacher educators a promising approach to helping volunteers develop pedagogically sound, agentive, and adaptive language teaching practices. Through participation in a series of three workshops organized through CBI, these volunteers began to develop conceptual and pedagogical reasoning through the concept of language as social practice and were thus able to develop their own agentive teaching practices. For further reading about CBI-informed language teacher education practices, I recommend readers to Esteve Ruesca’s (2018) model of concept-based teacher development.

References

Esteve Ruesca, O. (2018). Concept-based instruction in teacher education programs in Spain as illustrated by the SCOBA-mediated Barcelona formative model. In J.P. Lantolf, M.E. Poehner, & M. Swain (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of sociocultural theory and second language development. Routledge.

Gee, J. (2012). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (4th edn). Taylor & Francis.

Mathews-Aydinli, J. (2008). Overlooked and understudied? A survey of current trends in research on adult English language learners. Adult Education Quarterly, 58(3), 198-213. doi:10.1177/0741713608314089

Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language (Translation newly revised and edited by A. Kozulin). MIT Press.