The development of L2 writing teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in teaching activity
Open Access
- Author:
- Worden, Dorothy L
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 24, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Athelstan Canagarajah, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Athelstan Canagarajah, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Deryn Phillips Verity, Committee Member
Xiaoye You, Committee Member - Keywords:
- second language writing
teacher cognition
pedagogical content knowledge
sociocultural theory - Abstract:
- In the field of TESOL, research in teacher cognition has contributed to a better understanding of teachers’ mental lives and how they influence their teaching practices (Freeman & Johnson, 1998), yet little of this research has focused on L2 writing teachers (Borg, 2006). As a result, we know relatively little about the mental lives of L2 writing teachers (Hirvela & Belcher, 2007; Lee 2010), including what knowledge they possess and how they draw on and develop this knowledge in teaching practice. Furthermore, though the general education literature has theorized a bi-directional relationship between teacher knowledge and teacher reasoning (Shulman, 1987), this relationship has not been adequately researched (Hashweh, 2005). There is a need, therefore, for research that examines the knowledge of L2 writing teachers and specifically how this knowledge develops in and through the activities of teaching. Operating from a sociocultural theoretical perspective (Vygotsky, 1986; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Johnson, 2009) and using a variety of data including interviews, concept maps, video recordings of classroom instruction, stimulated recalls, and instructional artifacts, this study examines the development of four L2 writing teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) over a semester of teaching. Overall, the findings demonstrate the highly contingent and emergent nature of teachers’ PCK. As the writing teachers planned, taught, and reflected on their teaching, both their underlying content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge developed in overlapping ways. Moreover, this development was mediated by a variety of factors. Among these factors, teachers’ underlying value-laden conceptions of writing and teaching, the required first-year writing curriculum, their students’ emerging understandings of the content they were teaching, and the activities and interactions involved in the research methodology all mediated the teachers’ developing conceptualization of the content of the class and how to teach it to this particular group of students.