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Walters Et Al-2008-Tesol Quarterly
Walters Et Al-2008-Tesol Quarterly
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dural knowledge, such as basic grammatical development and reading
and writing processes, is inevitably backgrounded. Wiggins and McTighe
compound this problem by discussing reading as an issue and enabling
skills in general, but they mention English language learners only inci-
dentally. Examples consequently focus almost entirely on concepts, and
when skills and strategies are discussed, the result is sometimes uncon-
vincing and rarely focused on language. We chose UbD for our student-
teaching seminars because of the difficulties our pre and in-service
teacher candidates had with curricular and unit planning, particularly
integrating language teaching with content and themes. Some of our
students took to the book instantly, but it took considerable work and
supplementation to get others to see the relevance.
Our suggestion is therefore that ESOL teacher educators, particularly
those with a K–12 or academic focus, seriously consider adopting UbD
because the the text is excellent at addressing the issues of curriculum
and unit planning. However, if they do so, they must take special care in
addressing both sides of the language-content equation. On the one
hand, teacher educators will need to emphasize the role of content in
developing language and literacy skills; that is, they need to emphasize
that achieving understandings is necessary for linguistic growth. Of
course, the advantages of doing this go beyond motivating reluctant
ESOL teachers to take an assigned text seriously; such an effort should
help them reconceive their roles. In particular, the goal should be to
combat the inertia in academic ESOL teaching that permits language
instruction isolated from content (e.g., the widespread practice of using
grammar-in-situation type textbooks).
On the other hand, teacher educators using UbD should make ex-
plicit the various language and literacy skills that learners need for con-
tent-area learning and particularly how they can fit those skills into the
UbD framework. We suggest the following (nonexhaustive) list of skills
that could be incorporated into stage one of backward-designed, English
language teaching curricula: metacognitive, cognitive, socioaffective,
and communication strategies; reading and listening skills; the writing
process; phonetic–phonemic discrimination; attention to lexical and
grammatical form; and note-taking. Such areas need not be covered
exhaustively, as in a methods class; however, mentioning them in their
role in accessing content knowledge allows present and future English
language teachers to make the connection to classroom practice.
A lesser problem that needs addressing is that Wiggins and McTighe
sometimes assume knowledge that is not widespread, always a danger in
a multidisciplinary resource. For instance, a discussion of non-Euclidean
geometry used to exemplify the recursive nature of scientific knowledge
confused our teacher candidates. Thus, we recommend that teacher
educators explain such examples.
REFERENCES
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (2006). Understanding by
design: Resources. Retrieved July 14, 2006, from http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/
ascd/menuitem.6a270a3015fcac8d0987af19e3108a0c/
Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the poli-
tics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 589–618.
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