Evaluating and Improving Teacher Educators’ Language-Oriented Performance in Content-Based Teaching

In general, teacher educators are considered to be educational specialists whose main task is to communicate content-based concepts to prospective teachers. However, unfortunately, most studies of teacher professional development overlook the specific language-oriented aspect in content-based teaching. Therefore, we address the aforementioned research gap and argue that teacher educators’ evaluation of their language-oriented performance in educational communication enhances the quality of their content-based teaching. Accordingly, we examine how the language-oriented performance of teacher educators is evaluated by both individual teacher educators (sample size, N=3) and their students (N=32) in a small-scale intervention study. The findings of the study reveal that there is a relationship between the order of application of five language focus areas; i.e. language awareness, active listening, formalizing interaction, language support, and language and learning development, as noticed by the students, and teacher educators’ ability to apply these areas in accordance with their objectives related to content-based teaching

Teacher Educators’ Understanding of Their Language-Oriented Development in Content-Based Classroom Interaction

Many studies have suggested that personal practical knowledge is essential for professional development. Recently, there has been growing recognition of the importance of teacher educators’ personal practical knowledge of ‘language’ for student learning development. However, the need for teacher educators to first understand their own language-oriented development in content-based classroom interaction has not received as much emphasis. The current intervention study investigates how eleven experienced teacher educators understand their language-oriented development through the control of task difficulty, small-group instruction and directed response questioning. Data were examined by conducting content and constant comparison analyses. The results showed that the intervention affected the educators’ language-oriented development, which in turn affected their awareness and decisions made to improve their methods of initiation and response during classroom interaction. The results call for more concrete ways to expend teacher educators’ practical knowledge of language to further develop and enhance their language-oriented teaching performance in content-based classroom interaction

De abstracte auteur als spoor: Narratologie en poststructuralisme

Classical narratology is based on a model of hierarchically ordered and strictly distinguished narrative layers. In that model, the ‘abstract author’ (or ‘implied author’) is the overarching entity, securing the overall meaning of the text. Even in its postclassical guise, narratology has never known how to cope with poststructuralism, precisely because the latter questions hierarchies and the fixation of meaning. In this paper we want to open a new perspective on the concept of the abstract author, taking into account the findings of poststructuralism. We give a short history of the concept of the abstract author, and review some persistent problems with the notion, referring to Wolf Schmid’s Narratology. As a concrete demonstration, we read Willem Elsschot’s ‘Achter de schermen’, a paratext of his novel Tsjip, showing how an abstract author willy-nilly deconstructs itself. Finally, we put forward a poststructuralist interpretation of the concept, connecting it with the notion of singularity