REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). London, England: Verso. Dörnyei, Z. (2009). The L2 motivational self system. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.), Motivation, language identity and the L2 self (pp. 9–42). Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters. Farrell, T. S. C. (2009). The novice teacher experience. In A. Burns & J. C. Richards (Eds.), The Cambridge guide to second language teacher education (pp. 182– 189). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Gao, X. (2010). Strategic language learning: The roles of agency and context. Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations: Explorations in social psychology. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. London, England: Longman. Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities, and the language classroom. In M. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 159–171). Harlow, England: Pearson Education. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. M. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Veenman, S. (1984). Perceived problems of beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 54, 143–178. doi:10.3102/00346543054002143 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Feedback From the Field: What Novice PreK–12 ESL Teachers Want to Tell TESOL Teacher Educators LAURA BAECHER Hunter College, City University of New York New York, New York, United States doi: 10.1002/tesq.43 Programs in the United States that certify PreK–12 teachers in English as a second language (ESL) must meet high and consistent standards in their preservice preparation. However, there is little empirical evidence & 578 TESOL QUARTERLY on the degree to which such preparation actually meets the needs of teachers once they begin their careers. Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) programs that do not collect data on graduates have limited information about how graduates are faring in their induction years. This lack of data may prevent TESOL programs from effectively preparing teacher candidates to work with English language learners. Knowledge of actual working conditions and challenges faced by practicing teachers is essential to program self-study and appropriate teacher preparation. This article reports on 77 graduates of one MA TESOL program offering PreK–12 state certification in ESL who have taught in public schools for 1–4 years. Using online surveys, interviews, site visits, questionnaires, and a focus group, this research investigated the work these teachers engaged in, the challenges they encountered, and how the MA TESOL program did or did not support the demands of their work. The purpose was to identify areas of mismatch between program preparation and current workplace demands, both to provide immediate feedback to the program and to generalize about the need for MA TESOL programs to identify the types of demands their graduates may be encountering in U.S. schools. LINKING ESOL TEACHER PREPARATION AND ESL TEACHING Teacher education plays a powerful role in changing and shaping teacher cognition about the practice of teaching ESL (Borg, 2005; Peacock, 2001; Richards, Ho, & Giblin, 1996; Urmston, 2003). However, subsequent implementation of these beliefs and knowledge is inconsistent due to the lack of coherence between preparation and the classroom environment. Researchers examining both preservice (Johnson, 1996; Numrich, 1996) and in-service (Farrell, 2003; Pennington & Richards, 1997) ESL teachers have suggested that the struggles faced by novice teachers arise in part from the disconnect between school contexts and the preparation program, an experience that Johnson (1996) refers to as “hazing” (p. 48). Pennington and Richards (1997) and Urmston and Pennington (2008) found novice teachers unable to implement practices promoted in their teacher education program as they struggled to face local conditions such as large class size, numerous responsibilities, unmotivated students, and pressure to prepare students for examinations—realities that could have been anticipated in the preparation program. In his series of case studies, Farrell (2008) illustrates the personal, social, and psychological demands faced by novice ESL teachers as they struggle to adapt to the BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 579 realities of their work and calls for the use of their feedback in designing teacher education programs. These stories and their results can be fed back into the language teacher education programme curriculum so that language teacher educators can think more carefully about the consequences of the curriculum they have in place and if this curriculum is really preparing teachers for their first year as a teacher. (p. 54) When teacher preparation course content fails to connect with the real-world knowledge that new ESL teachers need to succeed on the job, a chasm develops “that cannot be bridged by beginning teacher learners” (Tarone & Allwright, 2005, p. 12). Teacher educators wishing to ease ESL teachers into their induction years must first clearly identify the challenges these teachers are likely to encounter. WHAT CHALLENGES ARE ESL TEACHERS LIKELY TO FACE? One of the few studies to examine ESL teachers’ opinions of how their teacher education programs prepared them for the challenges of their work was conducted by Fradd and Lee (1997). As part of their evaluation of their TESOL teacher preparation program, Fradd and Lee engaged graduates in providing feedback about how the program had or had not meet their needs. Their investigation resulted in the authors making significant reforms to their TESOL preparation program. In particular, informants from the study noted that the program had failed to prepare them to work with English language learners (ELLs) in special education and that they needed more extensive field and hands-on teaching experiences, repeated opportunities to develop understanding of literacy, and instruction on teaching with technology. A broader study of the gap between training and classroom reality is the survey conducted by Gándara, Maxwell-Jolly, and Driscoll (2005) of 5,000 California ESL teachers. Their aim was to identify the “most difficult challenges teachers face in EL [English learner] classrooms every day [and] how teachers themselves view their knowledge and preparation for meeting the needs of these students” (p. 3). The top challenges cited among elementary ESL teachers were teacher–parent communication, lack of instructional time with ELLs, and wide variability in academic and English needs and levels. Among secondary ESL teachers, in addition to those of elementary teachers, top challenges were teacher–ESL student communication about social and personal issues, and encouraging and motivating 580 TESOL QUARTERLY students (p. 10). Both this study and Fradd and Lee’s (1997) documented the types of demands ESL teachers face, but the extent to which these inform the design of teacher preparation in TESOL is not clear. THE STUDY Participants Graduates of an MA TESOL program housed in a large, urban, northeastern U.S. university were recruited as participants for the present study via email and were asked to reach out to peers in their cohort. This recruitment process resulted in 77 teachers completing a questionnaire, 10 individual interviews, a focus group interview with 8 participants, and three full-day site visits. It should be noted that I had been in contact with many of the study participants on a regular basis over time as a clinical supervisor. Data Sources and Analysis The self-study of teacher educators’ practice (SSTEP; Loughran, 2007) was employed as a guiding framework for this inquiry. SSTEP has developed as a methodology uniting the roles of researcher and teacher educator, and it shows promise as a means to expose the connections between the preparation program and the needs of graduates. Initial data sources included transcriptions of the individual and focus group interviews as well as field notes. Dominant themes from these sources were used to develop a draft questionnaire that was piloted with 20 ESL teachers, who provided feedback as to its format, content, and length. The questionnaire was then reviewed and a revised instrument was created, with special consideration given to issues of item design, following guidelines by Dörnyei and Taguchi (2010). The questionnaire (which may be viewed at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19873389/ BaecherTQProgramSurvey.pdf) included quantitative (forced-choice) and qualitative (open-ended) questions based on issues related to K–12 ESL teaching that had surfaced as salient categories in the interviews. It was then administered through SurveyMonkey as an anonymous questionnaire placed on the MA TESOL program’s Listserv and forwarded to program graduates from the previous 5 years. Qualitative responses were coded, categorized, and connected to emerging theory based on the principles of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 581 Pattern matching, frequency tabulations, and category aggregation were all used as means to interpret the data. FINDINGS This section briefly outlines three main categories of findings from the data related to participants’ (1) teaching context (grade level, ESL program type, daily activities); (2) beliefs about the greatest challenges they faced in their work, and what the TESOL program should do a better job of addressing; and (3) reflections on how the design of the TESOL preparation program supported the demands of their work. Themes presented here are those ranked in the top five concerns discussed across all of the participants’ responses. K–12 ESL Teaching Contexts Participants reported on the grade levels and program models in which they currently taught, as seen in Table 1. At the elementary level, approximately 65% of the participants taught PreK–Grade 2 and 35% taught Grades 3–5; at the secondary level, 24% taught Grades 6–8 and 36% taught Grades 9–12. In terms of program model, secondary teachers were most likely to teach in a self-contained classroom (68%), whereas at the elementary level teachers were most likely to provide ESL instruction in a pull-out model (53%). Participants were asked to rate the frequency with which they conducted a variety of activities, from daily to never. Of the 35 activities they were asked to evaluate, the most frequent activities were planning content-based ESL lessons, planning reading skill lessons, planning writing skill lessons, developing language objectives, and teaching literature. The least frequent activities were conducting action research TABLE 1 Grade and ESL Program Taught by Participants ESL instructional program Grades taught Self-contained (all ELLs taught by ESL teacher) Pull-out (small group of ELLs taken out of mainstream classroom) Push-in (small group of ELLs taught within mainstream classroom) Cotaught with content-area teacher 582 Elementary (PreK–5) Secondary (6–12) 39.7% 3.1% 52.8% 60.3% 68.4% 19% 44.1% 0% 0% 12.6% TESOL QUARTERLY in a professional learning community, participating in Individualized Educational Plan meetings, providing outreach to parents, teaching science, and teaching mathematics. Challenges of the Work Participants also ranked the extent to which they believed certain activities should be better emphasized in a TESOL preparation program. The highest priorities were instructing ELLs with learning disabilities, reviewing compliance and testing mandates for ELLs, addressing the needs of low-literacy students, and planning or co-planning content-based ESL lessons. Among elementary and secondary teachers, addressing the needs of ELLs in special education was the single most commonly discussed item across the data collection (75% of participants referenced it). One respondent expressed this common concern in this way: At least half of my students are not ELLs in the traditional sense. They have learning disabilities, which makes them fall behind in terms of reading and writing. I do not feel knowledgeable to help them bridge the gap. The majority of participants (64.5%) reported that, in addition to teaching, they were also responsible for placement, testing, and compliance of their school’s ESL program with local, state, and federal mandates. The following statement is typical of participants’ responses: Definitely one major area the TESOL program completely failed to address was a course on one of the biggest jobs an ESL teacher is responsible for: the legislation on screening ELLs, assessing newcomers, placing newcomers, administering the LAB-R [state assessment for ELLs], becoming knowledgeable as to the lengthy ins and outs of Part 154 [the local school system’s legal process]. Among the high school ESL teacher participants (60%), concerns about their ability to meet the literacy needs of students who are also long-term ELLs was a dominant theme, as illustrated here: I really feel that even though I have graduated from the program, I am not completely confident that I can teach a very low-literacy student to read. The classes in the TESOL program did not prepare me to deal with students with literacy/SIFE [students with interrupted formal education] issues. . . . More and more students have arrived at my high school with very low literacy skills. Some, with very limited phonics background even though they have been in the U.S. public school BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 583 system for 2 years. . . . My colleagues and I feel so inadequate and unprepared to deal with these students. In particular, high school ESL teachers reported being overwhelmed by the low levels of literacy and the high academic demands of their settings, with little building-level support such as physical space, materials, or administrator-allocated time for collaboration. Additionally, high school teachers identified the lack of focus in the preparation program on the effects of undocumented immigration status and poverty on their ELLs. This example illustrates these concerns: I am supposed to be “prepping” the kids for the exams and their motivation is so low. . . . The strong students ask, “Why pass if I can’t even go to college?” and the other students cut or are sleeping because they are working jobs all afternoon and night. We can’t even talk about classroom instruction until we talk about where these kids are really at. The program just ignores these realities. I wanted [the program] to show examples of what you can really do for these kids. Don’t hide the reality of the school system from us. Elementary school ESL teachers (50%) commonly discussed the need to be better prepared for the collaborative ESL program models prevalent in these settings, with many participants reporting on the move toward more push-in over pull-out in their schools and the need to be effective using this model: I find that it has been very challenging to get push-in to work in a way that I’m best meeting the needs of my students. I would have felt better prepared knowing that this is a common model and would have appreciated learning how to collaborate with colleagues. Design of the TESOL Preparation Program Overall, a combined total of 76.6% of participants agreed (62.3%) or strongly agreed (14.3%) that their TESOL program “prepared them well for their current teaching job,” whereas 23.4% strongly disagreed (3.9%) or disagreed (19.5%), and 70% stated that there was more emphasis on theory than on practice. In terms of which courses best prepared them for their current work, the top-ranked course was Theories of Second Language Acquisition, followed by K–12 Teaching Methods and the Practicum, both ranked second. The courses First and Second Language Literacy and Curriculum and Materials took third place. In addition to coursework, students in the program were required to engage in 100 hours of field work prior to the practicum, 584 TESOL QUARTERLY which then consisted of two semesters of teaching (one term each in PreK–Grade 5 and Grades 6–12 settings). The majority of participants (72%) agreed or strongly agreed that field experiences greatly enriched their courses. However, in terms of their field (clinical) experiences, several participants mentioned the need for greater structure and rigor in selecting and supervising the school placements, as is demonstrated by this statement: I often found myself being taught one thing by the student teaching professor and something utterly different from the cooperating teacher! In both schools (high school and elementary) I was paired with average teachers at best and didn’t gain nearly what I could have, had [the program] taken more extraordinary efforts to pair me with extraordinary teachers. In regard to the content of courses, a number of participants commented that they had experienced both redundancy of information being presented across classes and significant gaps in the application of theory: As a largely bilingual, diverse student body of professionals who were accepted into the TESOL MA program with an interest in teaching people from other countries, much of the time spent “overselling” ideals of inclusion and diversity was really “preaching to the choir” and was time poorly spent. I would have liked to have spent more time on learning how to plan a lesson that celebrates diversity and less time being told how I need to celebrate diversity! These comments were connected to others stating the desire to have more instructors with recent or current K–12 teaching experience: Although the TESOL program meets the needs of today’s K–12 ESL teachers, I think that more can be added to ensure that all the graduates meet the needs of the ELL students. At times, the discussions or assignments were not authentic and in tune with what we really face in the field. . . . They related more to teaching adults or teaching in other settings. IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION The data presented here are naturally tied to one context, but the research methodology is easily replicable by programs seeking to understand more about the working lives of their recent graduates. Additionally, although this program, like perhaps many others, may have been designed to address ESL teachers’ major concerns in its coursework, recurrent themes from this data may point to a need to BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 585 redesign MA TESOL program coursework for greater focus on elements such as the following: • • • • • • • • meeting the needs of ELLs who may struggle in ESL: those with learning disabilities, long-term ELLs, and students with interrupted formal education providing models and guidance for teaching in collaborative models: push-in, pull-out, and co-teaching deepening preparation for teaching literature and in English language arts classrooms developing better understanding of the testing, compliance, and reporting regulations and mandates for ESL services ensuring adequate focus on early childhood education (PreK–2) teaching going beyond culture and addressing the role of living conditions, poverty, family life, and legal status seeking faculty with extensive and/or current PreK–12 ESL teaching experience to serve as instructors maintaining strong partnership schools and better selection and provision of professional learning opportunities for cooperating teachers The results presented here suggest that in order for TESOL teacher preparation to better meet the needs of ESL teachers in the workplace, two conditions must be met. First, an authentic commitment in TESOL to self-evaluation must occur—not just a superficial one for external agencies. This necessitates time being dedicated to, and institutional value being placed on, program evaluation and structures that will bring together teacher candidates, graduates, and faculty willing to invest in the feedback process and use it to redesign and reconceptualize courses. Actively soliciting this feedback involves teacher educators in the challenging work of selfstudy, which Loughran (2007) acknowledges is likely to cause discomfort and which many may avoid. Wright (2010), in synthesizing the literature since 1985, points to the surprisingly “little discussion and debate about how teacher educators learn and develop” (p. 287) in second language teacher education. Second, there must be movement on the part of university-based teacher educators away from conducting studies on teachers, to collaborative inquiry with teachers. Researchers have found ESL teachers abandoning the practices that were advanced in their preparation and may assume that implementation failure rests with the teacher and the conditions of the school context, rather than 586 TESOL QUARTERLY challenging the relevance of the teacher preparation program. By doing so, university programs unwittingly preserve the hegemony of grand theory (constructed by researchers) over craft theory (constructed by teachers). Without this fundamental reorientation, the disconnect between university preparation programs and teacher readiness for ESL instruction will persist. CONCLUSION TESOL teacher educators who are deeply invested in the preparation of their teacher candidates likely resonate with the questions Tarone (2007) puts forth: All of us must constantly ask ourselves, as part of our own ongoing needs analysis, “How well prepared are the language teachers we educate? Do they have the skills they need to do accurate analyses of the needs of their students, and then to adapt their teaching to address those needs?” (p. 3) Only by engaging gradates in their induction years and taking a careful look at how program design matches their needs can MA TESOL programs begin to answer these questions. THE AUTHOR Laura Baecher is assistant professor of TESOL at Hunter College, City University of New York. Her research interests relate to the connection between teacher preparation and teacher practice, including teacher language awareness, the use of video in clinical supervision, and collaborative teaching of ELLs. REFERENCES Borg, M. (2005). A case study of the development in pedagogic thinking of a preservice teacher. TESL-EJ, 9(2), 1–30. Retrieved from http://www.tesl-ej.org/ Dörnyei, Z., & Taguchi, T. (2010). Questionnaires in second language research: Construction, administration, and processing (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Farrell, T. S. C. (2003). Learning to teach English language during the first year: Personal influences and challenges. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19, 95–111. doi:10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00088-4 Farrell, T. S. C. (Ed.). (2008). Learning to teach language in the first year: A Singapore case study. In T. S. C. Farrell (Ed.), Novice language teachers: Insights and perspectives for the first year. (pp. 43–56). London, England: Continuum. Fradd, S. H., & Lee, O. (1997). Teachers’ voices in program evaluation and improvement: A case study of a TESOL program. Teaching and Teacher Education, 13, 563–577. doi:10.1016/S0742-051X(97)80001-7 BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 587 Gándara, P., Maxwell-Jolly, J., & Driscoll, A. (2005). Listening to teachers of English language learners: A survey of California teachers’ challenges, experiences, and professional development needs. Berkeley, CA: Policy Analysis for California Education. Johnson, K. E. (1996). The vision versus the reality: The tensions of the TESOL practicum. In D. Freeman & J. C. Richards (Eds.), Teacher learning in language teaching (pp. 33–49). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Loughran, J. (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education. In T. Russell & J. Loughran (Eds.), Enacting a pedagogy of teacher education: Values, relationships and practices (pp. 1–16). New York, NY: Routledge. Numrich, C. (1996). On becoming a language teacher: Insights from diary studies. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 131–153. doi:10.2307/3587610 Peacock, M. (2001). Pre-service ESL teachers’ beliefs about second language learning: A longitudinal study. System, 29, 177–195. doi:10.1016/S0346-251X(01) 00010-0 Pennington, M., & Richards, J. C. (1997). Reorienting the teaching universe: The experience of five first-year English teachers in Hong Kong. Language Teaching Research, 1, 149–178. doi:10.1177/136216889700100204 Richards, J. C., Ho, B., & Giblin, K. (1996). Learning how to teach in the RSA cert. In D. Freeman & J. C. Richards (Eds.), Teacher learning in language teaching (pp. 242–259). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Tarone, E. (2007, May–June). Equipping teachers to be language explorers: Exploring language in the classroom. Paper presented at the Language Teacher Education Conference, Minneapolis, MN. Retrieved from https:// apps.cla.umn.edu/directory/items/publication/297452.pdf Tarone, E., & Allwright, D. (2005). Second language teacher learning and student second language learning: Shaping the knowledge base. In D. Tedick (Ed.), Second language teacher education: International perspectives (pp. 5–23). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Urmston, A. (2003). Learning to teach English in Hong Kong: The opinions of teachers in training. Language and Education, 17, 112–137. doi:10.1080/ 09500780308666843 Urmston, A., & Pennington, M. C. (2008). The beliefs and practices of novice teachers in Hong Kong: Change and resistance to change in an Asian teaching context. In T. S. C. Farrell (Ed.), Novice language teachers: Insights and perspectives for the first year (pp. 89–103). London, England: Equinox. Wright, T. (2010). Second language teacher education: Review of recent research on practice. Language Teaching, 43, 259–296. doi:10.1017/S0261444810000030 588 TESOL QUARTERLY