Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 12 (2021) Issue 1, pp. 39-58
The Role of the Teacher in the Foreign Language Classroom – Past, Recent and Modern Developments
Thomas Tinnefeld (Saarbrücken, Germany)
Abstract
In the present article, the teacher‘s role in the foreign general language and the LSP classroom is analysed with reference to the past seventy years, and modern developments, which cover the period from March 2020 to the near future, are taken into account. In retrospect, a glace is cast on the grammar-translation method and the audio-lingual method. The recent developments dealt with cover the communicative approach and the constructivist approach, both of which are still widely used nowadays. The modern developments described refer to the virtual classroom and online teaching. In the article, it is shown that the teacher‘s role in the foreign language classroom from the 1950s to the present day (and certainly further into the future) has changed drastically: whereas up to the late 1970s, the teacher lived a relatively calm and steady life, with his or her role in the classroom being well-defined and stable, his or her role has undergone rapid changes ever since, with the latest developments speeding up this process even more. In accordance with this development, the teacher‘s importance has shown a certain volatility, starting from a relatively high level, then going down and now rising again. Inversely proportional, the complexity of his or her work has constantly increased and will continue doing so. This implies that the teaching profession has become a highly complex, dynamic and future-oriented field of activity.
Keywords: Teacher, teacher‘s role, foreign languages, languages for specific purposes grammar-translation method, audio-lingual method, communicative approach, constructivist approach, virtual classroom, job complexity
1 Introduction
The role of the teacher has changed drastically in the past seventy years. This is what is shown in the present paper.
From a macro-structural perspective, the teacher has the following functions and roles:
● Mediator of learning
● Disciplinarian or controller of student behaviour
● Parent substitute
● Confidant to students
● Judge of achievement
● Organizer of curriculum
● Bureaucrat
● Scholar and research specialist
● Member of teachers’ organization
● Roles in the community
● Public servant
● Surrogate of middle-class morality
● Expert in some area of knowledge or skills
● Community leader
● Agent of social change
(Havighurst 2021)
In the following, the focus will be on the micro-structural perspective. On this level, the teacher’s role has constantly been questioned or redefined through time (e.g. Edwards 2005, Block 2015 or Johnson 2019 for the 21st century). It is not our purpose to “rewrite” the history of recent language methodology. This is why many aspects of what is dealt with in the following is common methodological knowledge. Instead, our purpose is to show how drastically the role of the teacher in the foreign language classroom has changed over time.
Whereas he or she used to be the only source of knowledge in the foreign-language classroom, nowadays, his role has been reduced to that of a language advisor and learning facilitator.
We will take a closer look at this development and analyse the question of whether there has really been such a drastic reduction in his role (and also in his importance), and what the situation is like inclusive of the latest developments, i.e. virtual teaching.
The focus of the reflections to be made here is on the general language. The teaching of languages for specific purposes (LSP) is, however, dealt with as well, especially in those cases where the teacher's role differs from that of teaching general English, French, German, etc.
In doing so, we start from the situation that presented itself in Germany in the different periods that will be taken into consideration. In many respects, however, this situation was and is not limited to this country only; in other respects, it was and may have been.
2 The Teacher's Role in the Past
The teacher’s role in the past concerns the two approaches which were widely used between the 1950s and the 1970s, i.e. the grammar-translation approach and the audio-lingual approach. These two approaches will be dealt with first.
2.1 Grammar-Translation Method
The grammar-translation method (Weihua 2004: 250ff) was based on the teaching of the ancient languages Latin and Greek and consisted in students learning the underlying grammatical rules and applying them by translating sentences from their mother tongue into the foreign language and vice versa. This method was and has been criticized for its downsides (Zhou & Niu 2015: 798). In the framework of the grammar-translation method (e.g. Howatt 204: 151ff), which was predominantly in use from the 1840s to the 1940s and is still not out of use today (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 6), the teacher was the only expert in class. He incited learners to speak, giving them clear guidelines of what they had to say. The focus was on the training of the respective grammar chapter to be learnt. After the presentation of the rules and relevant features of a given construction, which was, of course, done by the teacher himself, that construction needed to be further practised, and there again, the teacher was in the "limelight", closely guiding students in how they had to organise the sentences they produced.
Instructions like the following one are an example of the teachers role and behaviour back then:
Imagine you are at a German train station and you would like to buy a ticket to Frankfurt. What would you say?
The learners were expected to come up with the respective German sentence and were either praised or corrected. As the very sentence was in the centre of interest, and not the situation – neither the general nor the learner's one – every single mistake made by learners was corrected by the teacher immediately. The teacher was the only authority to decide what was right and what was wrong. The pupils’ role was only a passive one; they did nothing but respond to their teacher.
The interaction that took place in the classroom was authority-oriented, the teacher being in a situation of “absolute power”. Communication did not take place and was not even desirable. In the grammar-translation method, the teacher’s role was well-defined. He
● was the authority in terms of his position, being “the boss in the classroom”,
● determined what was being done and, even more precisely, what was being said,
● was uncontested in his position,
● decided what was right and what was wrong,
● was the only person to give input,
● was the only active part, the learners being the passive ones.
This role of his, then, may have been the strongest one in the language classroom ever. Since then, it has never been as authoritative as that.
In the grammar-translation era, the teaching of LSP was only a marginal phenomenon and was limited to people who needed some additional qualification or skills for their jobs.
2.2 The Teacher's Role in the Audio-Lingual Method
As there are several realisations of what is generally called the ‘audio-lingual method’, developed after World War II by Charles Fries (e.g. Richards & Rogers 2001: 58f, Mukalel 1998: 78ff, Larsen-Freeman 2000: 35ff) and which was based on the behaviourist principle of stimulus, response and reinforcement (Reimann 2018), and which focused on imitation and repetition, one specific aspect will be used as an example here: pattern drill.
Pattern drill consists in modifying a given grammatical or sentence structure according to an underlying example (‘pattern’). Its immediate effects can be described as follows. Pattern drill:
● represents a (mechanical) training of a given linguistic structure which remains the same within one and the same exercise,
● resides in intended repetition, which is to lead to learning,
● follows a learning style which is more or less equivalent to rote learning,
● gives learners the feeling of ‘producing’ correct sentences, as the variations they are expected to perform remain within a well-defined linguistic range,
● can – in optimal cases – enable learners to acquire grammar without learning any explicit rules,
● may – although this has not really been acknowledged in the literature – incite learners to form their own grammar, by (explicitly or implicitly) making their own rules on the basis of the sentences they transform.
The following example may illustrate this:
Peter will go to London in June. (be) – He has never been to London.
Make sentences, starting from this example:
Jane will buy a car soon. (have)
Mary is looking forward to wearing her new mini-dress. (wear)
Paul will certainly enjoy the late night show. (watch)
This example can be a written one, figuring in a textbook, or a spoken one, constituting the so-called four-phase drill.
In the context of the audio-lingual method, the role of the teacher was rather limited as well. Unlike the audio-lingual method, he would not even set the thematic frame of what was said, as this frame was given by the learning material. What was important for him to do, however, was to supervise learners and give them feedback with respect to the “guided” sentences they made. In this vein, he was the ‘corrector’ in a way rather similar to what he did in the context of the grammar-translation method. In detail, the teachers’ role consisted in:
● supervising the learners’ sentence(s);
● providing correction feedback to learners, however, within very narrow, well-defined margins;
● giving students information about grammar (written) or pronunciation (oral) , which does, however, not necessarily have to be as deep as it is the case in the realm of the audiolingual approach;
● being a learning guide rather than an “omniscient” expert;
● still being the expert in the room, who can, however, show off his expertise within a relatively small range only.
With regards to the language variety taught, LSP then became more important and was taught in Business English, commercial correspondence or technical English courses, for example. The teacher's role was more or less the same as in the general foreign language classroom.
What was taught in LSP was the specific language variety in question, i.e. predominantly vocabulary. Other linguistic levels like syntax were also taken into consideration, but they were of secondary importance only.
Content was taught by defining the respective technical terms. Sound background knowledge was not considered highly necessary as long as students roughly knew what these technical terms meant. Students working in the field could bring in their professional knowledge, but did not have to, and teachers oftentimes could not check anyway because they were not experts in that field. The teacher's expertise, then, predominantly was on language as was the case in the general language classroom, the specific field just representing the "background" against which language was taught.
It is obvious, then, that the teacher’s role was more limited in the audio-lingual approach as compared to the grammar-translation method. He was still the expert in the classroom, but no longer the authoritative master whom learners totally depended on. Yet, he was still far away from being a learning partner.
It is clear, then, that in these stages of language teaching, the role of the teacher was rather simple and easy to perform.
3 The Teacher's Role in Recent Language Teaching
The role of the teacher in recent developments, i.e. in modern language instruction, concerns the communicative approach and the constructivist approach. These two appraches represent the most important currents which were widely employed in foreign language teaching and had the biggest impact in this phase which covers the period up to 2020. In comparison with the grammar translation method and the audio-lingual method, the teacher’s role was gradually becoming more complex.
3.1 The Communicative Approach
The most prevalent aspect within the communicative approach (e.g. Larsen-Freeman 2000: 121ff, Richards 2006, Richards & Rogers 2001: 83ff, Farrell & Jacobs 2020: 1ff), which emphasises interaction, is the fact that it is no longer the correctness of what learners say or write, but the content they utter and the interaction this content triggers which are of importance. In the 1970s in Germany, for example, the so-called “communicative change” (e.g. Piepho 1974) revolutionized the whole paradigm of language methodology and teaching, shifting the focus away from language towards communication and interaction. One of the consequences of this shift was that learners, who had up to then been afraid of uttering sentences or even longer statements because of the sanctions they had to endure for mistakes they made (e.g. immediate correction and loss of face), then interacted a lot more in class and felt a lot more freedom, knowing that there would not be any sanctions for errors, but their utterances became extremely faulty at times and the number of the mistakes they made doubled or even tripled. Whereas there had been relative silence in the classroom before, with this shift, there was liveliness but learners’ mistakes oftentimes represented considerable obstacles for communication.
The teacher’s role changed in accordance with these modifications. He was the very person in class to elicit learner's utterances and discussions, but his linguistic expertise was no longer in the foreground. In detail, the teacher’s role was to:
● generally elicit student interaction and discussions,
● generally elicit student interaction and discussions,
● have a concrete idea about the content to be taught so as to elicit and maintain classroom discussions,
● constantly motivate students to be active in class,
● praise them for their contributions to interaction and discussions,
● correct their mistakes, but only those which really would represent obstacles to communication and even make fruitful interaction impossible, with smaller mistakes remaining uncorrected and even unnoticed,
● disguise his own language expertise and only have it show when this would be really necessary, thus seeing his role of an expert reduced to a minimum,
● play a interactive role comparable to that of a “show host” on TV, and
● to “endure” the fact that nonlinguistic factors like students’ ability to communicate and their interaction capacity were much more important than linguistic factors like students’ mastery of grammar and vocabulary and their systematic understanding of the language.
The role of the teacher in the LSP classroom was exactly the same. Whereas the general language teacher needed to have rather a concrete idea about the content of the extralinguistic topics he dealt with in class, the LSP teacher had to master his subject (e.g. business, law or engineering) much better than had been the case in the contexts of the previous two methods. Yet, he remained a pure language teacher, his subject expertise not in the least being comparable to that of a content teacher.
Within this approach, the LSP teacher took the role of a content-course teacher as much as that of a language teacher, integrating both language and content, thus following CLIL, to a certain extent. Within this approach, he was much more of a subject expert than he had ever been before. His foreign language expertise was functionally complemented by his, mostly self-taught, content knowledge. In some cases where schools or universities were financially well-equipped, the option of team teaching was put into practice, with the language teacher and a content course teacher acting in the classroom together or taking turns, sharing half of the teaching hours in a given class or university course each.
This phase can be seen in parallel and in accordance with the question of whether it should be the language teacher or the content-course teacher who should be the instructor in LSP classes, which was asked as a logical consequence of the fact that there was an increasing demand of expert knowledge in terms of the content to be taught. Back then, the answer given to this question was that this work should be done by the language teacher. Thus, language and linguistic expertise were valued higher than expertise in content.
Clearly, within this new method, the teacher’s role changed drastically, his 'importance' in class war belittled and he was a kind of primus inter pares, the first among his peers, but no longer the expert, the 'administrator of knowledge' who determined students’ behaviour and the interaction taking place in the classroom.
3.2 The Constructivist Approach
“Constructivism represents the shift from education based on behaviorism, to education based on cognitive theory” (Aljonahi 2017: 97). As there are several types of constructivist approaches and, inside them, different settings of classroom activities, it is necessary to narrow these down. Constructivist classroom activities (e.g. Kaufman 2004: 303ff, Roberts 2016: 25ff) are action-oriented, one of the prominent examples being projects and tasks to be performed by students. Thus, a highly important activity type which will be considered in the following is task-based learning. The stress on learning is intentionally put because it is learning which is in the focus of this approach, not so much teaching. Students are expected to work on projects or tasks which are characterised by a certain complexity. Language production is of high importance, but on the surface level only; the problems posed or the project to be realised are in the foreground. Thus, as was the case in the communicative approach, language correctness is not the most important factor and only gains importance when communication might be hindered.
In this approach again, the teacher’s role has changed:
The day-to-day job of a teacher, rather than broadcasting content, is becoming one of designing and guiding students through engaging learning opportunities. An educator's most important responsibility is to search out and construct meaningful educational experiences that allow students to solve real-world problems and show they have learned the big ideas, powerful skills, and habits of mind and heart that meet agreed-on educational standards. The result is that the abstract, inert knowledge that students used to memorize from dusty textbooks comes alive as they participate in the creation and extension of new knowledge. (Taack Lanier 1997)
The teacher, then, is no longer the moderator or 'show host', but performs a function in class which is that of enabling students to learn or facilitating their learning. In this approach, the teacher's role is to,
● find and define tasks or projects that students have to work on;
● set the rules to be followed so as to reach the target set by the teacher;
● supervise students’ interaction, mostly in group work and hopefully performed using the foreign language;
● judge their project- or task-based performance and decides when working on it is completed;
● comment on students’ presentations in which they report their findings to the class;
● have a precise idea about the extra-linguistic content to be taught – not really expert knowledge, but close to it;
● possibly correct linguistic errors, but predominantly only those which may lead to confusion or misunderstandings;
● work in a content- rather than a language based context;
● no longer be the authority or the expert in the classroom but a learning partner who suggests guidelines which can or need not be followed, and hierarchically act sightly above students, with not much of a difference existing between them and himself
As far as the LSP teacher is concerned, the constructivist approach can be seen in connection with a relatively new development, which consists in CLIL, i.e. Content and Language Integrated Learning (2) (Richards & Rogers 2001: 116ff). Although there are different subtypes of CLIL, the its feature is the fact that the respective language for specific purposes is no longer the very centre of interest, but has become no more than a side product of teaching, the main focus now residing on the content itself. Accordingly, the LSP teacher has lost much of his importance because the very LSP ‘teaching’ has been taken over by the content instructor. This shift from the language teacher to the content-course instructor represents an unprecedented paradigm change. It implies a re-orientation away from linguistic competence towards the nearly exclusively important, factual competence which can be situated in the logics of the constructivist approach. In reality, this often means that the linguistically competent LSP teacher has been replaced by the content-oriented expert whose foreign language competence is oftentimes more than limited – a statement which is even more true at universities than at grammar schools, where it is more often than not the content-course teacher who, for example, also is a biologist, who teaches biology through English.
In courses in which the language expert still teaches LSP, his importance corresponds exactly to what was said about the general-language teacher. In (CLIL) contexts, however, in which it is the content-course instructor who teaches LSP ‘in passing’, the language teacher has lost his function. In many cases, this constellation means the end of (fruitful LSP) teaching. If this counterproductive paradigm change is not corrected soon by defining clear guidelines, this loss in LSP teaching will be perpetuated. The only way of getting back to the right path would be to define clear guidelines between the (factual and administrative) competence of the language teacher and the content teacher, and to employ both in terms of their respective forte.
It is obvious, then, that in the framework of this approach, the teacher’s role has continued changing and that his 'importance' in class has been reduced even more. Yet, the complexity of his role has increased considerably, which is also due to the reduction of his (authoritative) importance in class: he has to be very cautious with his pupils or students, even walking on his tiptoes at times. This means that his reduced importance and the complexity of his task are inversely proportional.
4 The Teacher’s Role Today
4.1 The Virtual Classroom
With the pandemic that began taking effect on all our lives in March 2020 and which is still going on, (language) instructors have faced and – in more positive words – experienced dramatic changes in our daily teaching practices. From one week to the next, numerous instructors switched from traditional on-site teaching to on-line teaching. In some cases, this process was rather smooth, in others it represented a considerable challenge. This means that the modern era of foreign language teaching began in 2020.
Never mind the individual problems they had, never mind the potential advantages they saw, the role of instructors has changed drastically ever since, and it may never be back to its former status quo. With this new phase, the importance of the complexity of the teacher’s role has seen a boost.
Obviously, the 'virtual teacher' can act within all the four methods dealt with before. As, however, only the communicative and the constructivist approach are based on interaction, we will only consider those two as far as on-line teaching is concerned. Due to this highly important common basis, they can be dealt with together here, as the differences which exist between them and which affect on-line instruction are minimal.
The teacher's role as described for both of them beforehand can certainly be transferred to on-line instruction. In this context, however, the question of what comes extra needs to be clarified. This question will be the object of our upcoming reflections.
Being 'together' in a virtual room in Zoom, Teams or any comparable video-conferencing of educational platform obviously is not the same as genuinely being together in a 'real' classroom. Whereas in this on-site setting, togetherness can be physically felt, making the group that interacts into an undeniable entity, in a virtual classroom, the students appear to be a loose group, i.e. clearly separated individuals, who are not only geographically apart from each other, but who can evade the situation at any time by muting their cameras and / or microphones. This chance of getting out of the situation and still appearing to 'be there', just because their names are still on the list of participants who, presumably, are present, may constitute a comfortable situation for students – for teachers, however, it is a most unpleasant and even problematic one. The same is true when students claim they are having bandwidth or any other kind of technical problems and, thus, may just be 'gone'. Be it that such problems are real, be it that they are invented or faked, they do not make the teacher's life easier.
The only way teachers can master problems of this type, which are not caused by technology, is to make their instruction as interesting and as attractive as possible. The only remaining question is: how?
More than ever before, the virtual teacher ideally is a rapport-builder. Using his own personality, the teacher has to do his utmost to establish a constructive relationship with his students. He has to try to bridge the geographical gap between himself and his students, and among students themselves. For doing so, there are several options which can possibly be combined and then reinforce each other's effect.
One of these options for teachers is to start their classes informally, asking students to bring in some general ideas or questions that are not related to the very class. Those may be personal anecdotes, which the teacher himself can, of course, also come up with, student's feelings about the general (on-line or Corona) situation, or any positive or negative experience gained since the previous session. The effect of such a beginning can be to give students the idea that they are taken seriously as individuals. Of course, the same beginning of a given class was and hopefully will be possible again in the traditional classroom (though presumably put into practice rather rarely). In the virtual classroom, however, it is more relevant, more of a necessity than ever before. The virtual teacher's role, then, is that of being the integrative person in the (virtual) room, with the teacher's personality gaining weight as compared to former times.
In a situation which can dysfunctionally be dominated by audio rather than video participation (both by teachers and students), it is of great importance for the teacher to show presence. This can be done in several ways, of which making himself visible is the most important one. A teacher who can only be heard but not seen is of limited impact and of limited ‘physical’ presence (Pearson 2021). And a teacher who cannot be seen is oftentimes not taken seriously. Students can then get out of the situation much more easily than is the case when they see and ‘feel’ their teacher’s presence. In turn, they will find it more difficult to evade the situation, for example by doing something else or by only pretending to be there although, in fact, they are not. Making himself visible, whether he likes the camera to be on all the time or not, is therefore of utmost importance for the virtual teacher. In turn, the instructor should invite students to make themselves visible as well, if not all the time, then whenever they make contributions to classroom interaction. It needs to be kept in mind that mere audio presence kills the atmosphere in class. Students’ being visible makes it nearly impossible for them to be absent for some time here and then, and they will feel the necessity to also be mentally present. Increasing each other's visibillity, then, is the utmost prerequisite for a good virtual teacher to make his lessons a success.
In order to ensure students’ active participation in class in view of the former’s chances to just ‘be away’ physically or mentally, virtual teachers will find that they have to call on them more frequently than is the case in the traditional classroom. As via the screen, it is impossible to look at one student individually, which is good pedagogical practice in class where teachers can educate or discipline students by merely looking at them, visual communication is rather limited on-line. Students, in turn, might not see the necessity to always respond to their teacher and his demands in the same way as they would in the on-site classroom, where it can be very embarrassing not to answer once a certain question has been raised. In such situations, the teacher has to be very precise: as asking general questions like “Who would like to start?” of “Who knows what is meant by this phrase?” is very likely not to have the desired effect, i.e. may not elicit any responses, a more direct strategy will have to be applied. The teacher therefore has to call on students much more frequently than will ever be necessary in an on-site classroom. Students, in fear of losing face if they do not answer, will then react fruitfully and make their contributions to classroom interaction. This combination of the teacher’s precision (by asking concrete and informed questions) and his authoritative behaviour (by calling on students) represents promising interaction which is goal-oriented.
Another important aspect of a virtual teacher’s role is to be well informed, methodologically flexible, and versatile. There are various points to this aspect, three of which will be highlighted here. The first point is to change classroom activities more frequently than in the on-site classroom. As experience shows that anyone’s attention span is reduced in comparison with ‘real’ situations, more variation is needed when on-line teaching is concerned. Many instructores may have noticed that the same lapse of time, e.g. five minutes, appears to be much longer on-line than on-site. If this different perception of time is true both for teachers and students, students may feel this even more as they do not need to always be active in class (the teacher has to!). So they may perceive one and the same activity as more 'boring' when seated in front of the screen than when sitting at their classroom desk. Therefore, tasks and activities provided by the teacher should change more quickly to give students the impression of a frequent ‘change of air’. Only then will they not drift away mentally and remain active in their on-line behaviour.
An easy possibility to make this frequent change happen is to provide different forms of action at shorter intervals. Frequent task distribution in the form of teacher-centred instruction now, followed by pair work, individual work, and group work afterwards will keep students tuned and give them the impression that time ‘flies’. What is attractive in the real classroom therefore becomes an urgent necessity in the on-line classroom. Just pursuing one single activity in an on-line class or language course, however, means that students’ boredom is guaranteed.
Another way to ensure students' active participation, which can, of course, be combined with the former point, is to work on the four basic language skills differently as compared to the ‘normal’ classroom. In traditional classroom teaching, writing activities, especially those that involve several students working on one and the same text, may not be made frequent use of. In the virtual classroom, however, they should be used frequently. If the class is run using computers anyway, using Google Docs, for example, is only one tiny step further to allow writing activities and written group work to happen. Of course, this option is also possible in the on-site classroom, but there, it would represent a paradigm change from the on-site to the virtual world. Such an activity integrates harmoniously, into the virtual world and can thus be employed fruitfully. The same goes for listening comprehension activities that include YouTube, which also integrate perfectly into virtual teaching and may give students more of a feeling of change than is the case in the traditional classroom. We see, then, that the teacher’s flexibility and versatility can make a positive change and do not need a miracle to be made happen.
The virtual teacher is the conductor of his own orchestra, organising his own learning environment (Weinberger & Kolling 2018). This aspect refers to the ultimate need for the teacher to know the technical gadgets and the potential of the conferencing platform he works with. Be it Zoom, Teams, Webex or any other platform, the prerequisite of any online instruction is the mastery of this tool.
The virtual teacher is a realistically ambitious instructor. If he, in an informed way, never does group work in his classes, to give a (doubtful) example, he will not need any knowledge about channels or breakout rooms. This means that he has to know those settings and gadgets he needs to practice the methodology he thinks fits. In this vein, a methodologically ambitious teacher may also be more ambitious technically. A teacher should therefore do regular introspection regularly, reflecting on whether and how he can methodologically achieve his teaching goals and with the help of what technology he will get there. If one and the same desirable result can be achieved in a highbrow or in a down-to-earth way, the latter may do just as well as the former.
That said, it may be useful to vary technology-based methods in such a way that they provide a fruitful change for students. When it is about student presentations, for example, it may be nice to realise some of them live and others in a pre-recorded way, depending on the result that needs to be achieved:
● If students may have Internet or bandwidth problems, recorded presentations are the method of choice. If this problem does not exist, the live one should be practised;
● If precious class time is to be saved, recorded presentations can hardly be topped; if presentations are to be used to incite classroom discussion, they will have to be live;
● If presentations include Q&A sessions, they must be live;
● If they are expected to be top-notch technologically, they will have to be thoroughly prepared, i.e. recorded;
● and so forth.
This means that media need to be used functionally, which also implies that if is not always the highest technological standard which automatically is the best. YouTube can be quoted as an example in this context. If the two options are to present a video on a topic dealt with in class, by way of sharing the teacher's screen or by giving students the corresponding link so that they can watch the video on their own, the latter should be the option of choice. There are two important reasons for this suggestion:
● Technically, students can play the video using the most fundamental settings, which can be adapted to their bandwidth. With such small bandwidth, he might not be able to watch the video presented by the teacher, at all;
● Methodologically, students can watch the video at their own speed, thus optimising their reception of it.
In this way, technological and methodological advantages are combined.
From this perspective, the teacher, though being excellently informed, must not be too proud to make use of those technical solutions which are not the most advanced ones, but which respond best to students’ technical surroundings or avoid potential technical problems.
With regards to the LSP teacher, more or less the same developments can be stated as for the general-language teacher. However, there is at least one highly important point which may come to fruition in the virtual classroom even more frequently than in the traditional language classroom, although it is also possible in the former, if this one is well-equipped. This strong point concerns the opportunities the LSP teacher has to visualise complex concepts that are relevant to the respective language for specific purposes. As all the students are online anyway, it is possible without any problems to provide pupils or students with pictures, graphs or even videos which explain the LSP content in question. This is also possible in the traditional classroom, as has just been mentioned, and it is also possible in a general-language online course, but this possibility is of the highest possible relevance in the virtual LSP classroom. It is, then, especially the virtual LSP teacher who is a gap-bridger between the LSP content to be taught and students' prior LSP knowledge.
In the context of the previously discussed LSP teacher's loss of competence and importance, in making the best use of the new media and the nearly unlimited combination of resources they offer, it is possible for the LSP teacher to gain ground and improve his standing as compared to the content-course instructor. If the LSP teacher benefits from this tremendous chance and if, as stipulated above, the competencies between himself and the content-course teacher are clearly delimited, then the LPS teacher will win this 'competition' and simultaneously boost the teaching of LSP. Then, optimism for himself and for LSP teaching in general will again be justified.
4.2 Modern Developments
In view of the speedy development and spread of the virtual classroom with all the changes in the teaching of foreign languages it entailed within a few months, at least much less than a year, it is extremely difficult to predict the changes that might happen even in the next two or three years. Yet, the basis of these developments has already been laid. In order to imagine the teacher’s role in this new world, it is necessary to first describe the developments in the near post-Corona period as we expect them to happen:
● The modern teacher is an expert user of (one of) the most important conferencing platform(s) like Zoom or Teams, being aware of and able to functionally use their most important functions.
One of the important developments of the modern era of (foreign language) teaching will be for teachers to keep themselves updated about the latest developments of the different platforms which offer them the prerequisites for their work or facilitate their job. Platforms like Teams, Zoom, Webex or BigBlueButton, which are in the market already, will continue getting adapted to the new world of education and come up with new features every now and then, not only to improve the general conditions of teachers and students, but also, of course, to be one step ahead of their competitors.
For teachers, this means that they will constantly have to be on the cutting edge of development and try to include the respective new features in their virtual classroom. In Teams, for example, one of these latest developments was the visual representation of participants in the form of the Large-Gallery and the Together Mode. These two modes enable the whole group (teacher and students) to feel a little bit more togetherness and to overcome the feeling of each one of them being isolated in front of their respective screens. A new, playful development is the Bitmoji classroom, which every teacher can design on his own and which is individual (Minero 2020).
Another feature is the option of break-out rooms, which allow teachers to form groups very easily and which complement the opportunities offered by channels, which can also be used in a similar way. Teachers will then have to decide whether they need such new gadgets or not, and whether they find them attractive for their classrooms. What is more (and must be recognised by teachers), these new opportunities may even inspire them and help them to modify their ways of instruction for the best of their students.
● The modern teacher makes the best possible use of social media to keep himself updated on the latest methodological findings and the best practices of experienced teachers presented there.
Unlike the situation in the past, in which he only had his textbook to worry about, the modern teacher has to deal with various platforms and always follows the latest developments discussed there. Thus, he will constantly have to leave his comfort zone and never have the feeling of really mastering his tools to the full, because once he has this feeling, these tools will have made another step forward. More than ever before, then, the modern teacher is a constant learner, which may also give him a feeling of humbleness.
A high level of information will be another important prerequisite for the modern teacher's success. The modern teacher therefore will have to be even more present in social networks than is the case today. Professional groups on Facebook and other social media will help teachers to stay updated in a playful way, i.e. not by reading scientific books or articles but by following other teachers' professional experience. In this vein, the importance of academic literature on language methodology may go down, and that of informal communication based on individual teachers' personal ‘findings’ will go up. The result will be a spread of individual knowledge which will go viral by imitation and adaptation by other teachers. This will be a ‘wikipediasation’ of methodological knowledge and, thus, an unprecedented grass-root movement in this field. This will then lead to a democratisation of foreign language methodology, in which it is not 'the one' approach which will be valid for teaching, but a set of a nearly unlimited number of approaches each of which will work in their own way.
The modern teacher has and will have more chances of finding information about teaching and of pursuing continued education than ever before. The Internet in general, but especially social media like Facebook or LinkedIn already have provided users with methodological materials and tips, and will continue doing so on a much wider scale than ever. Thus, every teacher will have the opportunity – and the obligation – to keep himself continuously updated on the latest developments in teaching. This being true for all subjects, it is especially true for English as a foreign language, as the tips to be found online are legion. This also applies to conferences on language teaching whose number has increased exponentially, with online formats becoming more and more prevalent. This configuration of sources represents a huge chance for any teacher to make teaching attractive, the only real problem being the bombardment of information all this entails. This also means that in the course of an individual teacher's career, the impact of formal teacher training will become less and less. Whereas in former times, many teachers taught their subjects in the same way they had learnt it at university, during their whole professional lives, nowadays, their pedagogy and methods are inclined to change within rather short intervals, which will help them to keep themselves updated. This constant self-(re)education – which has been on for a certain while, but which will be intensified in the modern era of language teaching – represents a considerable progress as far as the practical outcome of (informal) teacher training is concerned. These online opportunities also hint to the fact that life-long teacher education will change more and more from hierarchical communication, i.e. from teacher trainer to teacher trainee, and develop more and more towards democratic, peer-to-peer training, with all the members of social media platforms or all the audience in online conferences hierarchically being on the same level, learning by way of an exchange of opinions and not 'by order'.
● The modern teacher is a highly flexible and internationally oriented instructor.
With information sources being provided by teachers from the whole world through the Internet and social media, as has just been described, informal teacher education will also become more internationalised. It will no longer be the range of a national approach towards teaching, but the whole range of opportunities used in different countries, which can be taken into consideration by instructors. The modern teacher will thus become a more and more international teacher.
● The modern teacher instructs learners in countries that are not his own and in which he does not reside permanently.
Should virtual language teaching at (grammar-)schools and universities continue being prevalent after Corona, which will certainly be the case to this or that extent, teacher recruitment will certainly change as well. In this reinforced trend towards internationalisation and globalisation, the modern teacher will be able (and welcome) to apply for posts in another country, without the urgent necessity to live there for the duration of his post. In turn, university students can be recruited world-wide, being enrolled at universities they have never seen in reality – a development which would create a modern type of multilingual classroom (Lochtman 2018). Should this vision of teaching and learning mobility (Traxler 2018) come true, it will revolutionise the job market for teachers (and not only for them). It is to be expected that this prediction will come true for universities, but not so much for schools.
● The modern teacher is an active and competent agent in the educational village.
With these developments, the world will become an educational village, which will make interculturality in language teaching a very practical matter: what had in former times been taught theoretically only, will then become part of teachers’ and learners’ personal experience.
● The modern teacher constantly keeps himself updated in terms of the latest apps to be used for teaching and his own educational purposes.
What is true for platforms is also true for learning apps. The modern teacher will constantly have to find information about the latest developments of new apps. Be it Cahoot, Edpuzzle or Quizlet, to name just a few, the methodological potential of these apps and the development of new apps of a similar or even more innovative type will need to be taken into consideration by the new teacher who wants to stay competitive. Teaching, which, as mentioned above, formerly was a very static matter, with one and the same textbook being used for quite a number of years, will become a highly dynamic one. This development calls for go-getting teachers and, thus, a drastic shift in their personality.
● The modern teacher is a hybrid or even a hyflex (CTL 2021) instructor who is able to integrate on-site and on-line teaching, knowing about its advantages and inconveniences.
In the post-Corona period, hybrid teaching – i.e. „learning that integrates complementary face-to-face (synchronous) and online learning (asynchronous) experiences“ (ibid.) – or even hyflex learning – with students participating “in face-to-face synchronous class sessions in-person (in a classroom)“, “in face-to-face class sessions via video conference (e.g., Zoom)“ or “fully asynchronously via CourseWorks“ (ibid.) – will be the way, most probably not so much at schools, but definitely at universities. Whereas it may not be much of a problem to give more or less uni-directional content-oriented lectures in a hybrid way, offering language courses in this format is not as evident as that. A problematic aspect certainly is the way the teacher includes the virtual group of students in his on-site classroom, giving these students the feeling that they belong to the group just like the ones who are physically present. Both subgroups will have to get the same chances of interaction and participation in the two (on-site and on-line) classrooms. This danger of a 'two-class audience' represents a considerable problem and will have to be researched upon empirically.
● The modern teacher will be open towards teaching in a setting dominated by virtual reality.
The modern teacher will certainly become a virtual-reality (university) language teacher. This will be true for his classes to be constituted on a world-wide basis, with students being based in different countries but taking part in the same course. Against this background, it will no longer be necessary to be in the same on-site classroom, and world-wide teacher and student recruitment will lead to genuinely international classes. On the screen, these classrooms will appear to be like on-site ones – which is the case with Teams, for example, even now -, but this impression of an on-site classroom will be much more realistic than today, with every person in the group wearing VR-headsets.
Virtual reality will also make trips to one of the countries in which the foreign language taught is spoken, more or less unnecessary. Getting to know the culture of this country will be possible on-line. Thus the term language immersion will undergo a redefinition. In the modern era of language teaching, it will be possible to go to other countries for virtual trips to practice the foreign language and to even gain intercultural experience. Going abroad just for this purpose will be luxury, but not really a must. Learners will have the same feelings walking and looking around with their VR headsets on as if they were really in the foreign place. For this purpose, however, the teacher will need to have an excellent knowledge about the foreign country and its culture – much more and much deeper information on it than was necessary in former times – because learners will ask him detailed and informed questions which he can only answer if he is excellently informed. Virtual reality, then, will not replace the teacher’s expert knowledge, but ask for even more of it.
● In the second half of this decade, the modern teacher will be ready to redefine his role in competition with machine translation.
The progressive development of machine translation, as symbolised by Google Translator or DeepL, represents a highly challenging aspect. In this context, the question would be what the modern teacher should teach if it is so easy to produce rather correct texts in any language one can think of. As this question would be the topic of another paper, it will be neglected here. Yet, this is one of the urgent issues to be dealt with in foreign language teaching in the next few years.
For the modern LSP teacher, the new developments will represent a chance rather than an obstacle. If he uses sources like YouTube for the content background of his classes, he can combine the factual background of the LSP he teaches with his own language-oriented approach. This configuration hints to no less than the fact that the conflict and the competition between either CLIL teaching and traditional LSP teaching will be overcome. By using sources like YouTube for the CLIL part and his own approach for the language part, he will integrate both dimensions into his classes and, thus, offer much more attractive instruction than a mere CLIL teacher could ever do. What is more, he could make use of highly reputed content-teachers whose videos are on-line and would then offer his students much more authentic English input (to use English as an example) than the one provided by his German, French, Spanish (etc.) colleagues whose mother tongue is not English. The result of this way of teaching will be inspiring – and highly competitive.
The modern teacher, then, is or will be:
● a technical expert (user),
● a methodologically oriented social media user,
● a flexible instructor,
● an active and competent agent in the educational village (= the world),
● a modernist, open to the latest methodological developments of his time,
● an on-site and an on-line instructor,
● a 'virtual realist', and
● a constant re-definer of his role, i.e. with regards to machine translation.
The role of the modern teacher, then, will be defined by much more complexity than ever before, which comes with a totally different set of challenges.
5 Conclusions
Even if it has only been possible to give a relatively short overview of the evolution of the teacher's role since the middle of the twentieth century up to the present day, and even if this overview is far from being exhaustive, the following developments can be stated from a micro-structural perspective.
The foreign language teacher:
● having seen a development in which he continuously becane less of an authority in the classroom, is presently becoming more and more important and also more dominant again;
● is still his students' learning partner and oftentimes much more than that;
● is expected to organise his virtual lessons in a more stringent and consistent way than he did in traditional on-site teaching. For doing so, he also has to be more efficient time mananger than ever before;
● was, from the 1950s on, oftentimes expected to master the use of the language lab. The upgrade of the traditional language lab to a computer language lab also upgraded his mastery and made it more complex. Nowadays, the teacher is expected to deal with conferencing platforms in an informed way, which lifts his desired technical mastery to an even more complex level;
● has seen a constant modification of his role in the classroom, making him very important first, then less important and, presently, highly important again, but all these developments have not changed the fact that he and his own personality have always been the decisive factor of students' success in learning. Belittling him as the central eminence in class did not work and may never work;
● will face new, major changes in the context of virtual teaching and its new forms to be developed in this decade;
● as an LSP teacher, is widely comparable to a general teacher. Yet, in some respects, such as his increased competition with content-course teachers in the field of CLIL, he faces a number of highly different challenges.
It is obvious, then, that the role of the modern teacher will be characterised by as high a complexity as has never been the case in the teaching profession. This means that the teacher’s job will be as demanding as never before and ask for a personality that is totally different from the one required in large parts of the 20th century. On top of that, the modern teacher will need a huge motivation, a lot of enthusiasm, and a strong feeling of responsibility.
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Author:
Dr. Thomas Tinnefeld
Full Professor of Applied Languages
Saarland University of Applied Sciences
Business School
14, Waldhausweg
66123 Saarbrücken
Germany
E-Mail: thomas.tinnefeld@htwsaar.de
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(1) For reasons of reader friendliness, we will use the masculine form from now on, yet including all the other genders.
(2) To facilitate our approach to CLIL, we treat it as an umbrella term for immersion, content-based instruction (CBI), content-based language teaching (CBLT), and English as a medium of instruction (EMI)