QUARTERLY

Founded 1966

VOLUMES MENU

CONTENTS

ARTICLES
The Quality of Language Learning Opportunities
9
David Crabbe
Reading in Two Languages: How Attitudes Toward Home Language and
Beliefs About Reading Affect the Behaviors of Underprepared
L2 College Readers
35
La D. Kamhi-Stein
Fine Brush and Freehand: The Vocabulary-Learning Art of
Two Successful Chinese EFL Learners
73
Peter Yongqi Gu
Dueling Philosophies: Inclusion or Separation for Floridas
English Language Learners?
105
Elizabeth Platt, Candace Harper, and Maria Beatriz Mendoza

FORUM
On Reconceptualizing Teacher Education
135
Robert Yates and Dennis Muchisky
Comments on Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen, Pat Byrd, and
Marie Helts Speaking and Writing in the University:
A Multidimensional Comparison
A Reader Reacts . . .
147
Mohsen Ghadessy
The Authors Respond: Strengths and Goals of
Multidimensional Analysis
151
Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen, Pat Byrd, and Marie Helt

RESEARCH ISSUES
Some Guidelines for Conducting Quantitative and
Qualitative Research in TESOL
157
Quantitative Research Guidelines
159
Qualitative Research Guidelines
163

ii

TESOL QUARTERLY

Volume 37, Number 1 Spring 2003

REVIEWS
The Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd ed.)
179
Jeremy Harmer
Reviewed by Robert Weissberg
Teachers Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development
181
Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek (Eds.)
Reviewed by an Cheng
Continuing Cooperative Development: A Discourse Framework for
Individuals as Colleagues
182
Julian Edge
Reviewed by Timothy Stewart
Second Language Writers Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features
184
Eli Hinkel
Reviewed by Mary J. Schleppegrell
Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives
186
Ann M. Johns (Ed.)
Reviewed by Peter Clements
Literature-Based Instruction With English Language Learners
187
Nancy L. Hadaway, Sylvia M. Vardell, and Terrell A. Young
Reviewed by David Johnson
The Power of Tests: A Critical Perspective on the Uses of Language Tests
189
Elana Shohamy
Reviewed by Arieh Sherris
Doing and Writing Qualitative Research
190
Adrian Holliday
Reviewed by Anne Feryok
Language as Cultural Practice: Mexicanos en el Norte
192
Sandra R. Schecter and Robert Bayley
Reviewed by Martin Guardado

BOOK NOTICES

195
Information for Contributors
197
Editorial Policy
General Information for Authors
TESOL Order Form
TESOL Membership Application

REVIEWS

iii

QUARTERLY
Founded 1966

Volume 37, Number 1 Spring 2003

A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

and of Standard English as a Second Dialect

Editor
CAROL A. CHAPELLE, Iowa State University

Research Issues Editor

PATRICIA A. DUFF, University of British Columbia

Reviews Editor
ROBERTA J. VANN, Iowa State University

Assistant Editor
ELLEN GARSHICK, TESOL Central Office

Assistant to the Editor

LILY COMPTON, Iowa State University

Editorial Advisory Board

Dwight Atkinson,
Temple University Japan
J. D. Brown,
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Suresh Canagarajah,
Baruch College, City University
of New York
Micheline Chalhoub-Deville,
University of Iowa
John Flowerdew,
City University of Hong Kong
Carol Fraser,
Glendon College, York University
Linda Harklau,
University of Georgia
Ryuko Kubota,
The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill

John Levis,
Iowa State University
Lourdes Ortega,
Northern Arizona University
James E. Purpura,
Teachers College, Columbia University
Steven Ross,
Kwansei Gakuin University
Miyuki Sasaki,
Nagoya Gakuin University
Kelleen Toohey,
Simon Fraser University
Jessica Williams,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Devon Woods,
Carleton University

Additional Readers

Jane Arnold, Paul Bruthiaux, Richard Donato, Gene Halleck, Rene Jourdenais, Elliot Judd,
La Kamhi-Stein, Dorit A. Kaufman, Joan Hall Kelly, Janette Klingner, Sandra Kouritzin,
B. Kumaravadivelu, Batia Laufer, Patsy Lightbown, Mary H. Maguire, Nancy Niedzielski, Deborah Poole,
Ben Rampton, Terry Royce, Maria Thomas-Ruzic, Keiko K. Samimy, Mack Shelley, Rita Simpson,
Janet Swaffar, James Tollefson, Dolly Young

Credits

Advertising arranged by Suzanne Levine, TESOL Central Office, Alexandria, Virginia U.S.A.
Typesetting by Capitol Communication Systems, Inc., Crofton, Maryland U.S.A.
Printing and binding by Pantagraph Printing, Bloomington, Illinois U.S.A.
Copies of articles that appear in the TESOL Quarterly are available through ISI Document Solution, 3501 Market Street,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 U.S.A.
Copyright 2003
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.
US ISSN 0039-8322

REVIEWS

is an international professional organization for those concerned

with the teaching of English as a second or foreign language and of
standard English as a second dialect. TESOLs mission is to develop
the expertise of its members and others involved in teaching English to speakers of
other languages to help them foster effective communication in diverse settings
while respecting individuals language rights. To this end, TESOL articulates and
advances standards for professional preparation and employment, continuing education, and student programs; links groups worldwide to enhance communication
among language specialists; produces high-quality programs, services, and products;
and promotes advocacy to further the profession.
Information about membership and other TESOL services is available from TESOL
Central Office at the address below.
TESOL Quarterly is published in Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Contributions should
be sent to the Editor or the appropriate Section Editors at the addresses listed in the
Information for Contributors section. Publishers representative is Helen Kornblum, Director
of Communications & Marketing. All material in TESOL Quarterly is copyrighted. Copying
without the permission of TESOL, beyond the exemptions specified by law, is an infringement
involving liability for damages.
Reader Response You can respond to the ideas expressed in TESOL Quarterly by writing directly
to editors and staff at tq@tesol.org. This will be a read-only service, but your opinions and ideas
will be read regularly. You may comment on the topics raised in The Forum on an interactive
bulletin board at http://communities.tesol.org/tq.
TESOL Home Page You can find out more about TESOL services and publications by accessing
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Fax 703-836-7864. E-mail tesol@tesol.org.

OFFICERS AND BOARD OF DIRECTORS 20022003

President
AMY SCHLESSMAN
Evaluation, Instruction, Design
Tucson, AZ USA
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ USA

Mark Algren
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS USA

President-elect
MICHELE SABINO
University of Houston
Downtown
Houston, TX USA

Mary Ann Boyd

Illinois State University
(Emerita)
Towanda, IL USA

Past President
MARY LOU McCLOSKEY
Atlanta, GA USA
Secretary
CHARLES S.
AMOROSINO, JR.
Alexandria, VA USA
Treasurer
MARTHA EDMONDSON
Washington, DC USA
iv

Neil J. Anderson
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT USA

Aysegul Daloglu
Middle East Technical
University
Ankara, Turkey
Eric Dwyer
Florida International
University
Miami, FL USA
Bill Eggington
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT USA

Mabel Gallo
Instituto Cultural Argentino
Norteamericano
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Aileen Gum
City College
San Diego, CA USA
Jun Liu
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ USA
Lucilla LoPriore
Italian Ministry of Education
Rome, Italy
Anne V. Martin
ESL Consultant/Instructor
Syracuse, NY USA
Jo Ann Miller
Universidad del Valle de
Mexico
Col. Copilco el Bajo
Mexico DF, Mexico
Betty Ansin Smallwood
Center for Applied Linguistics
Washington,
DC QUARTERLY
USA
TESOL

QUARTERLY
Founded 1966

Editors Note

In this issue, the Research Issues section of the Forum introduces new
guidelines for research that reflect the diverse approaches taken by researchers in our interdisciplinary profession. Having been introduced in this issue,
these guidelines will be available on TESOLs Web site (at http://www
.tesol.org/pubs/author/serials/tqguides.html) rather than published in each
issue of TESOL Quarterly. I would like to remind readers of the call for
special-topic issues of TESOL Quarterly that can be found in Information for
Contributors in the back of this issue and on TESOLs Web site.

In This Issue

The articles cover a range of issues of critical concern to TESOL

professionals, from the learners individual learning and reading processes
to the classroom and policy issues intended to promote quality instruction
for ESOL learners.
David Crabbe argues that the concept of quality in language education
needs to be reconceptualized in view of the weakening of the concept
of a method and the globalisation of education, which has emphasized benchmarking and evaluation to achieve international recognition of quality. Suggesting that current approaches to setting standards
fail to provide a framework for dialogue concerning how quality can
best be achieved in a particular setting, he proposes a reconceptualization centered around the idea of learning opportunity, which refers to
access to favorable conditions for learning, and he describes how
actions working toward quality might be considered within a learning
opportunity framework.
La D. Kamhi-Stein reports the results of her research investigating the
reading strategies of four college nonnative speakers of English who

IN
THIS
ISSUE Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003
TESOL
QUARTERLY

were considered underprepared for academic study at a U.S. university. Through analysis of think-aloud protocols, questionnaire responses, and indicators of comprehension, she identifies strategies that
learners use in their L1, Spanish, and in English. Within this small
group of seemingly similar ESL learners, she identifies individual
differences that she attributes to the learners different attitudes
toward the use of Spanish for their reading in English. She suggests the
need for further research in the connections between learners beliefs
about the use of their L1 and their reading processes.
Peter Yongqi Gus study describes the vocabulary-learning strategies of
two successful language learners in the input-poor environment of
the Chinese classroom, where the majority of language learning comes
from intensive reading of English texts. Participants were chosen from
a group of successful learners on the basis of responses to a strategy
questionnaire indicating that they took different approaches to vocabulary learning. Results showed that, contrary to popular ideas about
vocabulary learning in the West, the Chinese learners succeed in part
through intensive, explicit study of lists of vocabulary words. The
results demonstrate the value in examining individual learning strategies in view of language learning tasks, individual beliefs, and the
cultural context of language learning.
Elizabeth Platt, Candace Harper, and Maria Beatriz Mendoza present
results of their survey of administrators in Floridas public schools who
oversee the implementation of ESL teaching. The authors review the
origins and philosophies of inclusion and separation approaches to
ESL in the public schools. They report widely varying opinions held by
administrators concerning approaches to ESL, with some arguing for
bilingual education, some for separate ESL classes, and others for
inclusion of ESL learners in mainstream classrooms. Participants
reasons for supporting one approach over another demonstrate the
range of issues that come into play in decisions about ESL programs.
The authors argue that prevailing treatment of these issues in U.S.
public schools and in some other countries fails to take into account
the specialized needs of ESL learners or the potential contributions of
the TESOL profession.
Also in this issue:
The Forum: Based on their experience teaching graduate courses in
TESOL, Robert Yates and Dennis Muchisky raise questions about what
has been called a reconceptualization of teacher education, which advocates
that teacher education in TESOL focus more on the act of teaching
and learning to teach. They argue that this perspective threatens to
deemphasize what they believe language teachers need to know about
language and language acquisition. Mohsen Ghadessy comments on
Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen, Pat Byrd, and Marie
Helts Speaking and Writing in the University: A Multidimensional

TESOL QUARTERLY

Comparison, which appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of TESOL

Quarterly. Ghadessy questions their definition of register and the scope
of their study, and the authors respond.
Research Issues: The result of input from many TESOL professionals
on the Editorial Advisory Board and beyond, new guidelines for
research are introduced to replace the Statistical Guidelines and
Qualitative Guidelines that have served authors and reviewers in the
past.
Reviews and Book Notices: The following books are reviewed: The
Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd ed., Jeremy Harmer), Teachers
Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development (Karen E. Johnson and
Paula R. Golombek, Eds.), Continuing Cooperative Development: A Discourse Framework for Individuals as Colleagues ( Julian Edge), Second
Language Writers Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features (Eli Hinkel),
Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives (Ann M. Johns, Ed.), Literature-Based Instruction With English Language Learners (Nancy L. Hadaway,
Sylvia M. Vardell, and Terrell A. Young), The Power of Tests: A Critical
Perspective on the Uses of Language Tests (Elana Shohamy), Doing and
Writing Qualitative Research (Adrian Holliday), and Language as Cultural
Practice: Mexicanos en el Norte (Sandra R. Schecter and Robert Bayley).
Notices are provided for another four books.
Carol A. Chapelle

IN THIS ISSUE

The Quality of Language

Learning Opportunities
DAVID CRABBE
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand

The notion of quality in language education, as in other areas of human

activity, is increasingly common yet is elusive in its practical meaning.
The international trend has been to focus on quality by specifying clear
outcome standards that describe the performance expected of learners
at particular levels. Far less attention has been paid to systematically
managing the quality of the learning opportunities that learners need
to exploit in order to achieve the desired outcomes. One can assume
that an understanding of the quality of learning opportunity is central
to the process of learning. The challenge for teaching institutions is to
develop a frame of action through which current understanding of L2
learning and teaching can be applied and developed. This article
proposes a learning opportunity framework on which to base a dialogue
about the opportunities that are needed and available in any one
context. It proposes three domains of enquiry: theoretical, cultural, and
management, and puts forward arguments in favour of learning opportunity standards as the basis for institutional dialogue about quality in
language education.

certain degree of cynicism in reaction to the hype that surrounds

the notion of quality in language education is understandable. Yet
serious work on what is called quality is undoubtedly associated with
genuine concern to ensure good practice. One hears the term used
more frequently as English language teaching becomes more business
oriented and more accountable to funding agencies. Although the
systematic management of learning opportunities might not be a strong
feature in all language teaching organisations, the language teaching
profession is nonetheless committed to the quality of what it does.
Conferences, special interest groups, teaching syndicates, and much of
the literature on language learning and teaching are directly associated
with an intention to improve teaching. Quality is important, not only for
those who are paying for instruction, an issue of value for money, but also
for those undertaking the task of designing and implementing a curriculum, an issue of professional achievement.

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

It is unlikely that applied linguistics can provide a common notion of

quality for the language teaching profession as a whole. It is probably
also undesirable. There will always be more to understand about the
social and cognitive processes of language learning, and the issue of what
counts as quality should therefore always be open. Nonetheless, a
general curricular framework, within which to discuss and dene the
quality of a language learning program in a particular context, would
have obvious value.
I consider a curriculum an organisation of learning opportunities, or
means, for achieving certain outcomes, or ends. This is intended to cover
curricula that are organised around detailed objectives1 as well as
curricula that are entirely process oriented, with no prespecied goals
other than increased communicative competence. In such an ends-means
formulation, quality can be sought both in the productthe achievement of specic objectivesand in the processthe availability and use
of learning opportunities. Objectives have been a concern of agencies
that want to ensure quality from the outside (e.g., ministries of education), whereas process has received more attention from those who want
to ensure quality from the inside (e.g., teachers). The curriculum is
brought to life by the main actors (the learners and the teachers) and is
governed therefore by their own beliefs and values, which themselves are
subject to inuences from the broader social contextfrom parents,
sponsors, institutional management, and professional communities. Talking about quality of outcomes and processes, therefore, means talking
more about people and context and less about universal principles of
learning.
This article is concerned with how to conceptualise quality of the
process in a way that makes it an integral part of the discourse about
learning in any one community of practicetypically a teaching institution (see Wenger, 1998, for an explanation of the concept of community
of practice). How does one raise awareness of quality learning opportunity among teachers and learners so that the parties can hold productive
dialogue? Can institutions set standards of learning opportunity that
then become a reference point for developing a learning program? I
begin to consider the more complex means-focussed questions by rst
examining how quality has been aimed at through the specication of
ends-focussed outcomes.
1
The terms objective, outcome, and goal are used variably in the literature. In this article, goal
is used generically to mean any learning target, while objective and outcome are used to refer to a
goal that is specically dened, usually so that its attainment can be measured in some way. The
term outcome is particularly associated with the concept of standard outcomeselements of target
communicative performance that are measured in a standard way across large numbers of
students.

10

TESOL QUARTERLY

QUALITY THROUGH OUTCOMES

The idea of quality in education has been central to the reform of
curricula at the national level. This emphasis has undoubtedly been
inuenced by business concepts of quality (McKay, 1998). In almost all
cases, the attention has been on specifying educational objectives or
outcomes: the ends of learning. The general acceptance of outcomes
specication as a desirable mechanism for ensuring quality internationally is captured by one of the recent Council of Europe recommendations concerning modern languages:
For all European national and regional languages, develop realistic and valid
learning objectivessuch as are to be found in threshold level type
specications developed by the Council of Europeso as to ensure quality in
language learning and teaching through coherence and transparency of
objectives. (cited in Trim, 1998, p. 213)

The emphasis on outcomes or objectives has been a central feature of

curriculum development for most of the 20th century. Stenhouse (1975,
p. 52) traces it back to a U.S. educationist, Franklin Bobbit, writing just
after World War I, and reviews the objectives movement as it developed
strength, particularly after World War II with curriculum developers such
as Tyler (1949), Taba (1962), and Mager (1962, 1991).
In the past two decades particularly, outcomes-based assessment has
become well established in national curricula. Such curricula consist of
statements of target student performance, usually within a framework of
levels. At each level, learners performance is described as a series of
tasks that they should be able to perform or competencies that they
should be able to demonstrate. (See Brindley, 1998 for an overview of
outcome assessment.) Examples abound on the Internet. TESOLs
(1997) ESL Standards for Pre-K12 Students is perhaps the most well
known, providing a specication of three goals and three standards for
each goal. The rst goal and its three standards are listed below:
Goal 1: To use English to communicate in social settings
Standards for Goal 1
Students will:
1. use English to participate in social interaction
2. interact in, through, and with spoken and written English for personal
expression and enjoyment
3. use learning strategies to extend their communicative competence (p. 9)

Each standard has a set of descriptors and a set of sample progress

indicators at different levels. The descriptors for Standard 1 above are
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

11

sharing and requesting information

expressing needs, feelings, and ideas
using nonverbal communication in social interactions
getting personal needs met
engaging in conversations
conducting transactions (p. 31)

Such a specication provides a general target for teachers to develop

more specic objectives and lesson plans that provide opportunities to
develop the performance specied. Some national systems prefer a more
closely specied and more assessable set of specications, particularly if
they are the basis for assessment and award. The one below for EFL is
from the Scottish Qualications Authority (1994/1995). It species one
discrete bit of performance: a component of the overall prociency
target at that level.
OUTCOME
Exchange personal information with speakers of the target language
PERFORMANCE CRITERIA
(a) Appropriate forms of address, greeting and leave taking are used clearly
and accurately.
(b) Comments and information requested and provided are relevant and
clear.
(c) Language is sufciently clear and accurate to be understood by a
sympathetic speaker of the target language despite inaccuracies, faults in
intonation, hesitation and possible mother tongue interference.
EVIDENCE REQUIREMENTS
Evidence of oral work in the target language which indicates that the
candidate can full all of the performance criteria for the above context. All
items listed above under type of information to be exchanged must be
covered. Evidence may be derived from simulation and role play exercises,
conversation with the tutor/trainer/language assistant or naturally occurring
situations. (n.p.)

The rest of the specication gives further detail on the purpose of the
standard and the type of information that the learner should be able to
communicate, and on suggested learning and teaching approaches.
How do such outcome statements contribute to quality? A dominant
claim is that educational objectives guide teachers and learners in
developing an effective process to achieve the learning specied. This
point is expressed clearly by Mager (1991) in relation to curriculum
designers:

12

TESOL QUARTERLY

When clearly dened objectives are lacking, there is no sound basis for the
selection or designing of instructional materials, content, or methods. If you
dont know where you are going, it is difcult to select a suitable means for
getting there. (p. 5)

and in relation to learners:

They provide students with the means to organise their own efforts toward
accomplishment of those objectives. Experience has shown that with clear
objectives in view, students at all levels are better able to decide what activities
on their part will help them get to where it is important for them to go. (p. 6)

The advantages of goal setting for individual motivation have been

reviewed by Drnyei (1998). He refers to a paper by Locke and Kristof
(1996) that itself refers to earlier research (Locke & Latham, 1990)
revealing evidence that learners work best toward specic but challenging goals.
In the case of long-lasting, continuous education such as language learning
where there is a rather distal goal of task completion (i.e. mastering the L2),
the setting of proximal subgoals (e.g. taking tests, passing exams, satisfying
learning contracts) may have a powerful motivating function in that they
mark progress and provide immediate incentive and feedback. (Drnyei,
1998, pp. 120121)

Central to the claim that outcomes thus promote quality by channelling effort in a specic direction is the assessment of how well the learner
has achieved the outcomes specied. At one level, the benet of
assessment is for those directly involved:
[A further] important reason for stating objectives sharply has to do with
nding out whether the objective has, in fact, been accomplished. Tests or
examinations are the mileposts along the road of learning and are supposed
to tell instructors and students alike whether they have been successful in
achieving the course objectives. (Mager, 1991, pp. 56)

At another level, the benet is for those who pay for the education,
whether the individual learner or a sponsor. At this level, there is an
inevitable link between outcomes and accountability. Because outcomes
provide a standard basis for measuring achievement (e.g., against
established norms of achievement in a given period of time), they can be
used as the basis for accountability of the individual and even the
teaching institution, although the extent to which an institution can be
held responsible for the outcomes achieved by a cohort of students is
limited by such factors as initial competence, general motivation, attitude, and ability.
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

13

The role of outcomes in relation to quality and accountability is

summarised in Table 1. The actual contribution of outcomes to quality
and accountability depends crucially on the quality of the outcome
statements themselves, a quality for which the outcome setters are
accountable through public scrutiny and educational research. The
criteria for valid outcomes might include that they are
based on a valid construct of prociency (on this point, see Brindley,
1998; Cumming, 2001)
relevant to the needs of learners
specic enough to guide learner effort
a challenge to the learners, leading to motivation and effort
measurable
Outcomes, then, are a way of representing performance goals that can
be used to compile a standard expectation of a learner for a particular
purpose. The achievement of outcomes requires good process. Good
process requires good learning opportunities and good exploitation of
those opportunities by individual learners, by individual teachers, and by
multiple groups of teachers and learners working together in an institutional context. The focus in the rest of this article is on dening the value
of the opportunities that are provided and taken up. In this regard there
are, so far, few benchmarks and little standardisation, apart from
whatever is considered good professional practice in the teaching/
learning context.

TABLE 1
Quality and Accountability in Outcomes
Outcome

Criteria for quality

Type of accountability

Individual
performance

Individual achieves
against age-group norms
against own previous
achievement
within normal time
expectations

Aggregated
performance of a
cohort of
individuals

Cohorts of students achieve

Accountability of institution for
against similar cohorts in terms of provision of quality learning
spread of levels of
conditions through comparison of
achievement
results with other institutions,
time taken to achieve levels
other factors being equal

14

Accountability of individual to self,

parents, employers, and other
sponsors for skills and knowledge
development through individual
certication

TESOL QUARTERLY

QUALITY IN THE PROCESS

With or without detailed outcome specication, a teachers job
remains, by denition, means focussed, and effort goes into doing
whatever is needed to achieve that target. This orientation to the means
is evident in the professional literature, which emphasizes classroom
procedures and the interpretation of research for classroom practice,
but what processes are in place to provide for the quality of the means?
The traditional framework for quality of the means is the method and its
prescribed procedures. Numerous methods have claimed to provide the
best opportunity for learning a language. In contrast to the fairly
prescriptive methods (e.g., the silent way) is the looser, but now
mainstream, communicative approach, which encourages extensive involvement in simulated or real communication as the basis for learning.
The literature reports on numerous task types and procedures within
this approach that claim to promote communication and learning.
As the professional journals burgeon with new crops of articles, the
English language teaching materials industry produces textbooks, readers, and other resource books that attempt to attract the interest of
teachers and learners through quality of content and presentation.
Moreover, models are available for encouraging improvement in teaching practice: reection on practice, action research, peer observation,
and so on. The quality of learning opportunity is therefore well looked
after by the profession and, to the extent to which it can be built into
textbooks, by materials writers and publishers. Or is it?

The Need to Reconsider Quality

Plenty of dialogue about good practice is evident in journals, conferences, and staff rooms, but a collective and systematic commitment to
improving practice in any one context is, in my experience, relatively
rare. The quality of the instruction offered in the majority of institutions
is dependent solely on the training and experience of the teachers they
employ, rather than on a managed procedure for dening and monitoring that quality. One might think that in some ways the status quo will
sufce. Learners will learn; teachers will continue to individually improve their practice to a variable extent. Two changes in the latter half of
the 20th century, however, might challenge the status quo on achieving
quality.
One is the weakening of the concept of a method. Kumaravadivelu
(1994) suggests that L2 teaching is in a postmethod condition because of
the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional concept of method

THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

15

(p. 43). He characterises the postmethod as a search for an alternative

to method rather than an alternative method (p. 29), autonomy for
teachers in reecting on the best way to teach in their own context, and
principled pragmatism, which he suggests is a perspective that focusses
on how classroom learning can be shaped and managed by teachers as
a result of informed teaching and critical appraisal (p. 31). In a later
article, Kumaravadivelu (2001) develops the concept and practicalities of
a postmethod pedagogy, emphasising the centrality of local context in
generating theory and practice, and allowing for the inuence of
broader sociopolitical realities on the community of the classroom.
Postmethod pedagogy is a compelling idea that emphasises greater
judgment from teachers in each context and a better match between the
means and the ends.
The second change is the globalisation of education, leading to
processes of benchmarking and evaluation to achieve international
recognition of quality, whether for purposes of accountability or commerce. In the education world there has been a large growth in
international movement by students through educational exchanges or
privately funded tuition. In L2 education the work of the Council of
Europe (2001) has been the most prominent so far in setting common
standards, with the main emphasis being on setting goals that serve the
broader needs of language learners, particularly with reference to future
employment through the portability of qualications.

Three Domains of Quality

The profession needs to take a new look at quality in a way that creates
a stronger framework for teachers to work withina framework that was
once provided through method but is now likely to be a exible
framework assembled to meet the needs and constraints of a particular
learning-teaching context. This is not to say that one standard would be
developed, so much as a common language for talking about standards.
I would suggest that three parallel domains of enquiry need to be
undertaken in order to fully understand the issue of quality in any one
context. The rst is theoretical enquirya universally oriented enquiry
into what conditions need to be met in order for language learning to
occur. What does the literature have to say about motivation, input,
interaction, feedback effects, and other ingredients of language learning? Second, there is cultural enquirya context-oriented enquiry into
current teaching practice in any one context, what practice is valued in
any one context and what effect it appears to have, and what the
established roles of teachers and learners are. Rote learning, for example, so eschewed in Western approaches, may have a positive effect in
16

TESOL QUARTERLY

certain contexts. Third is management enquiryhow can good practice

be established and fostered in a particular context so that there is a
constant search for improvement in the teaching and learning that takes
place? What is feasible in a given situation taking account of resource
constraints and human limitations?2
These dimensions of enquiry have resonances with elements used in
soft systems methodology. Checkland and Scholes (1990) propose a
cultural stream of enquiry, a logical stream of enquiry, and then a reality
check between what is constructed to represent reality and the impact of
that representation on reality itself. It is beyond the scope of this article
to explore a soft systems approach in relation to standards setting in
order to change behaviour, but the model Checkland and Scholes
propose is a potentially productive one in this context.

THEORETICAL ENQUIRY: LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

In order to address the issue of quality of the means, one needs a
common descriptive unit of means that can apply across many different
teaching contexts. I would argue that the most generic and useful term is
learning opportunity. This term is commonly found in educational literature, typically without comment or explicit denition, although in some
instances authors adopt it to represent a key concept.

Definitions of Opportunity
Kumaravadivelu (1994) sets out a list of macrostrategies to guide
teachers in developing specic classroom practice. His rst macrostrategy
is maximize learning opportunities.
It is customary to distinguish teaching acts from learning acts, to view
teaching as an activity that creates learning opportunities and learning as an
activity that utilises those opportunities. If we, as we must, treat classroom
activity as a social event jointly constructed by teachers and learners (Breen,
1985) then teachers ought to be both creators of learning opportunities and
utilizers of learning opportunities created by learners. (Kumaravadivelu,
1994, p. 33)

2
The order in which theoretical enquiry and cultural enquiry are addressed is not at issue in
this article (they are seen as parallel enquiries), but Freeman and Johnson (1998) suggest that
the contextual element, an understanding of belief and practice, is the primary driver of what
happens in classrooms, with SLA research playing a secondary role.

THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

17

The term is also used by Spolsky (1989), who proposes 74 conditions that
are relevant to second language learning (p. 16). Seventeen of these
conditions involve the provision of learning opportunities, for example,
No. 57: Opportunity for analysis: learning a language involves an
opportunity to analyse it, consciously or unconsciously, into its constituent parts (p. 23).
Pearson (1993) explicitly talks about opportunity standards, which, he
says,
provide an answer to the question, What evidence is there that you have the
opportunity to participate in a curriculum that would help develop the skills,
understandings, and dispositions that would enable you (to) meet the
standards to which you are being held accountable? (p. 66)

I address the issue of opportunity standards under the discussion of

management enquiry, but the point for the moment is that the term
learning opportunity is used to refer to access to favourable learning
conditions, whether access to learning in general (as in educational
opportunity) or, in the sense adopted here, access to specic conditions,
such as those required for language learning.
An opportunity for L2 learning, then, might be dened as access to
any activity that is likely to lead to an increase in language knowledge or
skill. It may be the opportunity to negotiate meaning in a discussion, to
read and derive meaning from a printed text, to explore a pattern in
language usage, or to get direct feedback on ones own use of language.
Such opportunities are normally available in classrooms in varying
quality and quantity. Outside the classroom, more opportunities to
practise and use a foreign language are available to more people than
ever beforethrough print, lm, satellite television, the Internet, and
CD-ROMs. The development of multilingual communities through
extensive migration, together with affordable travel to other countries,
makes real interaction more accessible.
Opportunity is very far from accomplishment, however. Spolsky (1989)
suggests that the social context, attitudes, and motivation combine with
personal factors such as age and personality to explain the uptake of
opportunities. Only the most independent of learners nds it easy to
take up and make effective use of language learning opportunities
without some guidance. A language curriculum provides such guidance
by organising learning opportunities into a controlled exposure to the
language. A slightly modied version of the earlier denition of a
curriculum might thus be the organisation and facilitation of learning
opportunities (the means) to achieve particular learning outcomes (the ends). The
professional task of language teachers is to manage the curriculum and,
in particular, to mediate the access to language and language in use by
18

TESOL QUARTERLY

organising individual and collaborative learning activities, by scaffolding

activities, by providing positive feedback and information about language and language learning, and by bridging the gap between publicand private-domain learning (Crabbe, 1993) so that the take-up of the
opportunity can be maximised.

An Opportunity Framework
A schematic view of opportunity and opportunity take-up is presented
in Table 2. In the column labeled opportunity categories are types of
opportunities based on current views of second language acquisition
(SLA). In order to develop full competence in an L2, learners are likely
to need to receive extensive input, participate in interaction, produce
extensive output, rehearse language forms and communicative routines,
get direct or indirect feedback on performance, and have access to
knowledge about language and about language learning. Although this
list of ingredients for language learning is unlikely to be denitive, each
ingredient is well supported by surveys of SLA research (Ellis, 1990, 1994;
Lightbown & Spada, 1999).
An indication of the intended coverage of each of these terms is
provided in Table 3. The ingredients or opportunities are likely to be
accessed by individual learners in various combinations but also to be
mediated through collaborative work, as promoted by studies within a
sociocultural framework (Swain, 1999; Swain & Lapkin, 1998).
Columns 2, 3, and 4 in Table 2 refer to key factors that might affect the
take-up of the opportunities. Whereas the provision of opportunities is a
relatively straightforward matter, the greater challenge for teachers is to
manage groups of learners in ways that take account of how these factors
might be inuencing opportunity take-up. The three broad and interrelated factors identied here are ones that are well supported by SLA
research: affect (Arnold, 1999: Macintyre & Charos, 1996; Schumann,
1997), style and prior experience of learning (Reid, 1995, 1998; Willing,
1988) and motive (Drnyei, 2001).
The two nal columns represent the action of taking up opportunities
on a routine basis and the immediate perceived result of take-up. The
perceived result for a learner will range from positive to negative and
may encourage learners to seek further opportunities and to use them in
the same or different ways. In some cases it may lead them to avoid
further opportunities altogether. The bottom row of the table summarises
in broad terms the responsibility of the teacher.

THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

19

20

TESOL QUARTERLY

Providing and
raising awareness
of opportunities
in and outside the
classroom

Working individually or collaboratively, what range

of formal and
informal opportunities, can you
get to
receive input?
produce
output?
participate in
interaction?
get feedback?
rehearse?
understand
about
language?
understand
about
learning?
Modelling and
discussion of
diverse learning
approaches

Do you take the

opportunities?
With what
frequency?
Collaboratively
or individually?
In class or out
of class?

Action

Providing informed
feedback and encouraging self-assessment

What is the result?

Did it give personal
satisfaction?
Did it demonstrate
success?
Was it highly
regarded by
someone?

Perceived result

Individual progress dependent on

Providing incentives Helping establish

routine learning
to perform, goal
behaviour
structure, positive
feedback, awareness
of ends-and-means
relationships

Do you want to take

up the opportunity?
For example,
Do you have a
good reason to
take this
opportunity?
Are you working
towards attainable goals?
Do you see a
connection
between the
opportunity and
your goal?
Is the effort
required likely
to have a
positive effect?

Are you easily able

to take up the
opportunities? For
example,
Do you nd
some activities
more useful
than others?
Do you have a
preference for
speaking,
listening, reading, or writing?
Do you have a
habit of reading in your
rst language?

Are you feeling

positive about
your language
learning? For
example,
Do you feel
anxious or
relaxed?
Do you believe
you are likely
to be
successful?
Do you have
high selfesteem?

Contributing to a
positive classroom
and sociocultural
environment

Motive

Style/experience

Affect

Take-up of opportunity affected by personal factors such as

Note. An earlier version of this schematic framework was developed jointly with Jim Dickie. The components of the diagram are similar to the model
proposed by Spolsky (1989) but are not derived from it.

Teacher
responsibility

Learning
opportunity access
and use by
language learners

Opportunity
categories

TABLE 2
The Opportunity Framework

TABLE 3
Coverage of the Opportunity Categories
Ingredient

Activity covered by the concept

Example

Input

Listening to and reading monologue or dialogue that

can be understood with limited difculty

Output

Producing meaningful utterances in written or spoken Swain (1995), Swain

form, either as a monologue or in the context of
& Lapkin (1995)
interaction

Interaction

Speaking and writing with one or more interlocutors

in real or simulated communicative situations

Gass (1997); Swain

(1999)

Feedback

Receiving information relating to ones own

performance as a second language user, which may
include indirect feedback (e.g., that one has not
been understood) or direct feedback (e.g., that one
has made a specic error)

Hyland (2000); Lyster

(1998); Mackey &
Philp (1998)

Rehearsal

Any activity designed to improve through deliberate

Nation (2001);
repetition specic aspects of performance, including
Ortega (1999); Willis
experimentation with pronunciation, memorisation of & Willis (1987)
words or word patterns, and repeated role play of a
piece of communication

Language
Any conscious attention to language that is intended
understanding to lead to an ability to explain or describe or gloss an
aspect of grammar or sociolinguistic conventions

Elley (1991); Gass

(1997)

Doughty & Williams

(1998); Long &
Robinson (1998);
Spada (1997)

Learning
Any conscious attention to ones own language
Benson (2001);
understanding learning that is intended to lead to a better
Wenden (1998)
metacognitive control over that learning, which would
include a detailed representation of the task of
language learning, an analysis of the difculties
encountered and an awareness of strategies to
overcome the difculties and achieve the task

Advantages of Learning Opportunity as a Unit

Overall, I would suggest that the effectiveness of a program lies in the
quality of the process represented by this opportunity framework. In
discussing quality of the means, the concept of learning opportunity is
attractive for several reasons. First, as suggested above, it ts well with an
ends-means view of language learning. Of course, this may not be a
strong recommendation in the eyes of some because of an association
between ends-means and the objectives model of teaching (see Stenhouse,
1975), here referring particularly to a reductionist specication of
outcomes as discrete chunks of performance. However, an ends-means
view of language learning is not restricted to the objectives model. It
applies equally when the end is specied simply as increased language
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

21

competence the aim of the Bangalore project, for example (Prabhu,

1987). The concept of learning opportunity enables course designers to
think and talk more generically about the means of reaching selected
outcomes. Course designers can, for example, ask what input opportunities or interaction opportunities learners are likely to need and how
feedback opportunities will be built in, rather than locking in too early
instructional categories such as task or group work or some favourite
classroom activity that has always worked well. This would seem to
suggest a more creative, problem-solving approach to course design,
working from principles. Moreover, an ends-means frame that explores
learning opportunities to achieve established goals facilitates learner
engagement in the process, principally through a dialogue about language learning as a personal problem-solving activity.
A second advantage of the term opportunity is that it embraces all types
of learning activity. It does not favour one approach or method over
another, thus allowing common ground for discussion about choices
made and an exploration of the relationships between opportunity
categories. For example, different teachers will place a different value on
opportunities to develop an explicit understanding of grammar in
contrast to opportunities to actually deploy grammatical patterns in
communication. Using the term learning opportunity allows the options to
be discussed without predetermining their value in the local context.
Third, the term enables the easy separation of the availability of the
opportunities from the take-up of the opportunities. This is, of course, a
crucial difference that emphasises the personal and strategic variability
of language learning. Providing or seeking out highly regarded opportunities is a public and easily reportable thing; the use of those opportunities tends to be private and less easily reported. One cannot assume that
specic opportunities will elicit the same response from all learners.
Finally, learning opportunity is a term that is neutral as to who seeks or
provides the opportunities, unlike terms such as instruction or delivery,
and as to where those opportunities might be available (outside and
inside the classroom). This aspect of the concept allows a teacher to
consider the learners role in seeking opportunities and the teachers
role in encouraging that opportunity seeking. In short, the notion of
opportunity is compatible with the goal of supporting and fostering
learner autonomy within institutional curricula (Benson, 2001; Crabbe,
1993).
The concept of learning opportunity is based on a view of language
learning as universal, recognising individual differences in the take-up of
the opportunities available. However, the presentation and mediation of
the opportunity is likely to be heavily inuenced by the local context of
learning. Different opportunities are likely to be valued according to
individual and group beliefs about language learning and the expecta22

TESOL QUARTERLY

tions of classroom activity. We are not, therefore, in a position to assign

universal value to all opportunities. Course designers can call on
research to show positive indications for particular opportunities and the
ways in which they are used, but beyond this, they have to rely on local
practitioners to search for quality through evaluation and through
professional dialogue about learning quality. This point brings me to the
cultural enquiry.

CULTURAL ENQUIRY: VALUES AND ROLES

The cultural enquiry seeks to understand the specic contexts in
which language learning and teaching are taking place. The understanding may stretch from an understanding of large-scale cultural differences
in the ways in which people are personally motivated (Munro, Schumaker,
& Carr, 1997) to an understanding of cultural differences in the roles
and values that are dominant in particular institutions. The concept of
values in culture is expressed by Schwartz (1997):
Aspects of culture can be seen by an outside observer, but their meaning
remains unclear until the observer comes to understand how the members of
a group evaluate particular practices, symbols, rituals and gures. That is, the
heart of culture is formed by valueswhat people believe is good or bad, what
they think should or should not be done, what they hold as desirable or
undesirable.

Schwartz is writing about culture in general, but it is not difcult to apply

his construction of culture to language classrooms, which are specic
domains in which behaviour can be described with reference not only to
local cultural patterns (Coleman, 1996) but also to international educational patterns (Holliday, 1999). Each teaching/learning community has
its own practice, ritualistic or otherwise, and forces for and against
change. Within each community there will be majority value holders and
dissenters and an interplay between the local practice and practice that is
promoted on the international circuit. Moreover, the dynamic nature of
individual and community practice and beliefs means that both values
and practice will be subject to change.
What does this apparent complexity mean for dening quality in
concrete terms and for promoting change toward better practice? It is
clear that a one-off outsider ethnographic account of a teaching/
learning culture is less useful than an insider engagement with the
culture through continual negotiation of what a common perspective of
quality is. It is for this reason perhaps that stakeholder participation and
continuous improvement are key elements of the management system
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

23

known as Total Quality Management3 and can be found in such language

program evaluation models as that proposed by Mackay, Wellesley,
Tasman, and Bazergan (1998).
The principal task of cultural enquiry, then, is to understand current
language learning and teaching practices and the values and beliefs that
underlie those practices. There are a number of ways to undertake such
enquiry. An opportunity framework, such as that provided in Table 2
above, is one starting point in exploring perceptions of best practice. It
has the advantage of starting from a theoretical view of language
learning and eliciting teacher perceptions about extensive reading,
interaction, the roles and types of feedback, and so on. Another starting
point might be elements of current classroom practice, including
teaching materials and teacher tasks like marking assignments, setting
homework, and introducing new tasks. These familiar elements can be
explored in order to establish common perceptions of good practice,
which are then measured against theoretical conditions for learning.
Whatever the starting point, the product will be an initial list of best
practices as agreed by a group of teachers and referred as far as possible
to authoritative research.
There is still some way to go from such an aggregated description of
individual good practice to collective good practice in action. Teachers
perceptions of quality of opportunity are input into a process that needs
to
take account of such values and beliefs
develop some consensus through negotiation and reference to
theoretical and empirical enquiry
establish a means to operationalise the resulting accepted view of
quality and evaluate it in an institutional context
The process is essentially one of management.

MANAGEMENT ENQUIRY
Dening quality requires an initial understanding of theoretical
perspectives on language learning and the cultural context in which
language teaching and learning are taking place. Operationalising and
3
Quality has long been a concern in the business world, represented best by the quality
management standards dened by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). An ISO
denition of Total Quality Management is reported by Dale (1999) as a management
approach of an organisation, centred on quality, based on the participation of all its members
and aiming at long term success through customer satisfaction, and benets to all members of
the organisation and to society (p. 3).

24

TESOL QUARTERLY

achieving quality is by far the most demanding part of the endeavour and
is considered a task of management. The term management here is used
in a broad sense to mean the organisation of collective activity (although
it could also include individual activity) directed toward specic goals
and outcomes.
The aim is to set up a common set of expectations as to what
constitutes quality in any one teaching context and to explore ways of
meeting those expectations. In doing this, one does not want to
discourage new directions or open-ended experimentation by individual
teachers and learners. Divergence can be professionally engaging and
productive, and is a characteristic that is valued highly in many contexts.
Rather, what is sought is a statement on what colleagues can all agree
constitutes good practice in providing learning opportunities and facilitating their take-up. Such a statement in written form would provide a
common reference point both for practice and for debate about
practice.

An Example: TESOL Standards Framework

A dominant framework for describing such expectations is a standards
framework. A recent example of this work can be found in a TESOL
publication (2000) in which a set of quality indicators are proposed. The
indicators cover a number of dimensions of program design and
management: planning; curriculum (in the sense of course specications); instruction (learning activities); recruitment, intake, and orientation; retention and transition; assessment and learner gains; stafng,
professional development, and staff evaluation; and support services. An
example of a standard under the instruction category is presented in
Figure 1, with the indicator being the desirable practice, the measure
being the way in which the practice can be observed, and the standard
being the measurable degree to which the indicator should be present.
The authors emphasise that these standards are not meant to be
prescriptive for all classrooms and recommend a select-and-adapt approach rather than simple adoption.
Standards such as these identify received wisdom about the quality of
language programs. They attempt to move from the individual items of
advice on good practice to a generic statement of quality with a means of
measuring whether or not the specied practice (the indicator) has been
achieved. At this point some educators are likely to throw up their hands
in horror at the idea of capturing, guiding, or evaluating professional
behaviour in this apparently constrained way.

THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

25

FIGURE 1
Sample TESOL Adult Education Program Standard
Indicator

Measure

Performance standard

III. INSTRUCTION
G. Instructional activities
incorporate grouping
strategies and interactive tasks
that facilitate the development
of authentic communication
skills. Techniques that
facilitate this development
include cooperative learning,
information gap, role play,
simulations, problem solving,
and problem posing.

Interactive tasks or a
variety of grouping
strategies are evidenced by
classroom observation,
teacher logs, written lesson
plans, student journals,
and/or directions related
to the use of classroom
materials.

During classroom
observations, the majority of
the students are actively
engaged in a task that cannot
be completed without
appropriate communication.
A teachers log or lesson plans
show evidence of
communicative pair work or
small group work for %
of class time each day.

Source: TESOL (2000, p. 26).

Why Quality Standards?

Why might a set of such standards be considered useful? First, from a
teachers point of view, standards can provide a common reference point
that enables teaching teams to clarify and reconcile their beliefs about
language learning and teaching and to discuss the conditions under
which their learners are most likely to achieve the goals. The goal of the
professional discussion would be to adopt, modify, or add standards that
would be the basis for the course design and would be owned by
everyone concerned. As such, they are not so much constraints on new
practice as they are a potential catalyst for change.
Second, a statement of standards would provide a basis for internal
and external evaluation that would represent what the institution
intended to provide. It is common practice for internal evaluation to be
based on customer satisfaction and for external evaluation to be based
on the results achieved, with variable attention to the process. Working
from a set of explicit opportunity standards seems to attend to the
process side of the picture in a transparent way.
The third advantage of opportunity standards is that they would
provide the basis for international dialogue about what constitutes a
desirable program. They would be the basis, for example, for comparing
programs internationally when student exchanges are being discussed
and for advertising what is on offer in an attempt to set up realistic
expectations. They would also provide the basis for problem solving in
international teacher education programs.

26

TESOL QUARTERLY

Problems With Quality Standards

A number of objections might be raised about the prospect of setting
such standards. The rst is the danger of oversimplifying the conditions
required for language learning by reducing them to a set of discrete
points. The opportunities and the take-up of opportunities are a
undoubtedly complex affair, yet it is not clear that a reductionist
approach to learning opportunities is counterproductive to promoting
good practice. The evidence either way is more likely to come from an
actual implementation than from logical argument. The whole is indeed
more than the sum of the parts, but the specication of some of the parts
does not necessarily mean a loss of the whole picture.
Secondly, setting standards might be realized as a prescriptive and
conning exercise rather than as encouraging, creative, and problem
solving. This objection is particularly salient in the evaluation of courses
if standards become a tool for evaluating, then this may encourage a
trivialisation of the value of the teaching/learning process by only
quantifying the provision of predetermined opportunities. Such a reductionism would indeed be a problem because it would fail to take account
of the dynamics of running programs.
A third objection to setting opportunity standards is that it may bypass
the students preferences with regard to the means by which they learn
the language. Standards could be written in this way, but there is no
reason why they should be. Even if a set of standards were to be selected
before a particular cohort of students joined a program, that does not
preclude negotiation about learning opportunities. On the contrary, a
list of opportunities would seem to be a very good basis from which to
start negotiation. The issue of learner participation in the problem-solving
process of learning is a question of willingness rather than something
that is precluded by documentation.

Sample Opportunity Standards

What would a set of standards based on the opportunity framework
look like? Table 4 provides a set of illustrative standards relating to
potential learning opportunities for developing an understanding about
language learning (one of the categories of opportunities listed in
Table 2), and in particular an understanding of how to diagnose
difculties in learning and communication and make a strategic response to them. A set of standards of this kind is of interest to those
programs that aim at fostering learner autonomy.
Table 4 provides a sample standard for each of the broad teacher

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27

28

TESOL QUARTERLY

For each task that

is undertaken in
the class, ways of
enhancing learning from the task
will be modelled,
with input from
students and
teachers.

Variable responses
to the challenges
of learning and
communication
encourage
learners to
evaluate and
experiment with
solutions.

Learners will be
positively
encouraged to
reect with one
another and the
teacher on taskrelated difculties
that they experience in learning
and communicating.
The sharing of
problem solving
about learning
leads to reassurance that
problems are
often shared by
others. Collective
problem solving is
a productive
process.

Learners will be
provided with at
least 10 different
case studies of
learning or communication difculties experienced by learners
together with
potential strategies to deal with
those difculties.

Exploring the
dimensions of
learning and
communication
difculties leads
to better problem
representation
and better solutions and a better
understanding of
exploiting learning opportunities.

Example of standard (developed

through professional discussion,
taking into
account international and local
research, values,
and beliefs)

Rationale
(representing a
contestable claim
about language
learning
opportunities)

Modelling and
discussing diverse
learning
approaches

Contributing to
positive classroom
and sociocultural
environment

Providing and
raising awareness
of opportunities
in classroom and
outside

Teacher
responsibility

Understanding the
goals of tasks and
how they might be
achieved leads to a
greater motivation
and ability to
undertake the tasks
both in class and
out of class.

The goals of all

language learning
tasks will be made
clear with a link
between the activity
and the goal and
how in-class activities might be replicated or extended
out of class.

Regularly asking
the question
What is the
purpose and
potential of this
activity? will
encourage a habit
of reecting on
learning and
evaluating its
effectiveness.

Regular reection
on the purpose
and potential of
different learning
activities will be
encouraged.

Providing incentives Helping establish

routine learning
to perform, goal
behaviour
structure, positive
feedback, awareness
of ends-and-means
relationships

Opportunity Category: Opportunities to develop understanding about language learning by

diagnosing learning and communication difculties experienced
experimenting with a strategic learning response to the difculty experienced

TABLE 4
Sample Opportunity Standards for Raising Awareness About Language Learning

Self-evaluation of
strategic behaviour
encourages more
effective strategic
planning for continued
language learning.

Learners will be
encouraged to provide
their own evaluation of
how well specic
strategies worked.

Providing informed
feedback and
encouraging
self-assessment

responsibilities in Table 2. The stated rationale for each standard

effectively constitutes a claim about language learninga claim that is
open to investigation through action research or with reference to the
research literature. The rationale is an important component in the
standard because it represents a claim and adds an element of enquiry
that might be met in the form of action research. For example, the
rationale for the rst standard, on case studies of difculties, claims a
causal link between the ability to represent a problem or difculty in
learning and communication and the ability to nd a solution. This
rationale is based on general problem-solving theory (e.g., Anderson,
1995, chapter 8; Newell & Simon, 1972). The fact of stating it in this way
raises a claim that can be discussed and investigated by teachers through
classroom observation.

Standards-Setting Issues
The sample standards in Table 4 raise several issues about setting
opportunity standards. Obviously, a number of standards such as these
cannot capture every possible learning opportunity. Opportunity standards cannot, therefore, be seen as limiting. What they do is capture
opportunity targets agreed by an institution or a group of teachers and
the learners, together with an agreed minimum strategy for achieving
those targets. Stating expectations in this way seems a good starting point
in establishing the nature of the program without preempting further
creative ways of providing learning opportunities. New targets and new
ways of achieving targets would in time also be incorporated as standards
into a bank of standards that would be available to select from and work
with for a particular course. Moreover, each set of standards would be the
basis for discussion and reection, when appropriate, by the students,
thus adding further value to their understanding of language learning.
A second point is that drawing up such standards requires a construction of the teaching/learning process that will not be universally shared.
There is likely to be dissonance in views of what it takes to learn a
languagedissonance between local practice and the international
literature, for example, or dissonance within groups of teachers or
between learners and teachers. A degree of dissonance is almost always
present in a teaching/learning situation. A reasonable claim for the
process of dening opportunity standards is that any dissonance between
the practice valued by individual teachers and that valued by others is
more likely to be brought into the open and negotiated to a satisfactory
conclusion than if the dissonance is simply ignored.
A third question is how specic one would want to be in setting up
such standards. I think the answer is, as specic as one needs to be in any
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

29

one context. In an institution that wants only to draw up the broadest

parameters and leave the rest to the creativity of the teachers, the
opportunity standards may be rather loosely specied (e.g., regular
discussion of communication difculties experienced). In a context
where those with responsibility for the curriculum want greater control
over specifying what counts as quality, one would expect greater specicity (e.g., 10 different case studies of communication difculties of the
following types will be provided . . .). The effect of greater or lesser
specication can be monitored.
Finally, standards are, by their nature, measurable. Without a measure
that reasonably reliably shows that a standard has been met, there is no
point in drawing up standards. The simplest way to measure is to count.
The TESOL examples in Figure 1 have a quantitative measure, as does
the rst standard in Table 4. The obvious danger in this, particularly if
the standards are being used for course evaluation, is that the numbers
may receive greater attention than the qualitative intention behind the
standard. A learning opportunity standard is a statement of valued
practice and of a collegial expectation that teachers will attempt to
provide that opportunity for their learners. A qualitative measure is
therefore more likely to take account of the essential intention of the
standard and, in addition, address the issue of whether the opportunity
is being taken up. For example, in the discussion of the 10 case studies of
communication difculty in Table 4, one might want to add that the case
studies should be relevant and that the learners should be engaged in
the case studies. Again, such measurement links well with action research, peer observation, and other means of professional development.

Evaluation of Standards
The use of standards as a program management tool will raise the
question of how to evaluate whether or not the use of opportunity
standards is effective in bringing about a change in quality. On the basis
of the arguments put forward above, one would want to see evidence of
some or all of the following when a program adopts a set of such
standards:
participation by teachers in negotiating what counts as good practice, selecting standards and committing to them, a criterion that
draws on the cultural element that is essential in setting the standards in the rst place
evidence of meaningfulness of standards for learners, thus facilitating negotiation of opportunities between teachers and learners and
enhanced learner understanding of language learning
30

TESOL QUARTERLY

evidence of the standards being realised in classroom practice over a

given period of time
institutional dialogue about the quality of teaching and learning
support for processes of peer review, action research, and so on to
evaluate the standards themselves
Such criteria would form a basis for evaluating how effective the use of
opportunity standards has been in specic teaching contexts.

FINAL COMMENT
This article has attempted to frame language teaching in a way that is
intended to enhance the quality of learning opportunity in a program in
several ways. First, a framework of learning opportunity standards links
practice and understanding (theoretical or otherwise) by encouraging
teachers and learners to work from basic principles rather than xed
routines as provided by materials or unanalysed tasks. Fixed routines
have their value, but a thinking teacher or learner is primarily a problem
solver following a heuristic path to identify the appropriate learning
opportunities to reach the intended learning goals.
Second, such a framework is intended to foster discussion about
quality. The very fact that a group of teachers sets about selecting a
number of opportunity standards for their program raises the questions
of how they dene and implement good learning opportunities and
what the literature has to say about learning. In this way, standards
emphasise the institutional role in promoting quality beyond the individual teachers role. At the same time, they can be an instrument for
developing the learners role by providing a reference point for learners
to talk about learning. Dialogue about learning works toward the
capacity to self-direct. A framework of opportunities demysties language learning by exposing the underlying processes aimed at by tasks
and materials. Opportunity standards as goals are as relevant to the
learners as they are to teachers.
Third, an opportunity framework provides a proactive basis for
evaluation by stating the salient features of program quality from the
beginning. It does not claim that all quality features of a program can be
describedan unobtainable and undesirable goalbut it provides a
frame of action that is at least a safety net and at best a productive tool for
program development.
Quality is comparative by its nature. Working with quality targets that
have been adopted by a teaching team implies that current practice is
being critically evaluated and compared with a notion of improved
practice. Improved practice may be derived from creative thinking, or it
THE QUALITY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

31

may be founded on exposure to ideas from other programs, other

institutions, or other countries. This view of quality as something that is
dened, owned, and developed locally, with input from research on
teaching and learning, is to be distinguished from a view of quality that
is dened and managed entirely through external specication. Accountability can nevertheless be achieved through a combination of
student achievement, student satisfaction, and evidence of a strong
quality management and evaluation system in place. Internally set
opportunity standards provide a partial basis for this system. Moreover,
they allow for some degree of common currency for any comparative
processes, such as benchmarking, that might be deemed useful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Jim Dickie for an early and, as always, thought-provoking discussion
on opportunity standards, and to Janet Holmes and the TESOL reviewers for their
helpful responses.

THE AUTHOR
David Crabbe is currently the head of the School of Linguistics and Applied
Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His interests lie in language
curriculum development and learner autonomy as means to fostering effective
language learning.

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Reading in Two Languages:

How Attitudes Toward Home Language
and Beliefs About Reading Affect the
Behaviors of Underprepared
L2 College Readers*
LA D. KAMHI-STEIN
California State University
Los Angeles, California, United States

This study explores the relationship between L1 and L2 reading

strategy use and affective factors, including readers views of their home
language and their beliefs about reading. The study participants were
four L2 college readers of Spanish and English, all from an immigrant
background and all considered academically underprepared for college. Data were collected through think-aloud protocols, open-ended
interviews, self-assessment inventories, and reading comprehension
measures in Spanish and English. Qualitative data analyses showed that
readers attitudes toward their home language inuenced reading
behavior. Specically, in contrast to the two readers who viewed their L1
as a problem, the readers who viewed their L1 as a resource chose to
purposefully translate mentally into their home language when reading
in the L2, regardless of their level of L2 reading prociency or length of
English study. Qualitative data analysis also showed that, at least to some
extent, the readers beliefs about reading inuenced reading behavior,
which was multistrategic and exible for the two readers who viewed
reading as a process of meaning construction and logocentric for the
two who viewed reading as a word-centered process. These ndings call
for further research examining the connections between learners
beliefs about reading and their reading processes.

ffective reading in English is essential for learners academic success,

and therefore teachers and researchers continually attempt to
understand the factors affecting success in reading comprehension.
Research on L1 reading investigates the role that readers beliefs play in
* An earlier version of this article was presented at the 17th Annual Reading Research
Colloquium at the 32nd Annual TESOL Convention in Seattle, Washington, March 1998.
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

35

the reading comprehension process. As noted by Horowitz (1994),

beliefs, understood as personal convictions reecting social and cultural
truths to which people adhere in daily living, can deeply inuence
readers understanding of textual meaning. In L2 reading, one might
expect that readers would develop such beliefs based on L1 reading
experience, but within the extensive literature on L2 reading, comparatively little research has focused on the relationship between home
language and L2 reading, or what Bernhardt (2000) calls cross-lingual
processing strategies (pp. 801802). Even less research has dealt with
how bilingual readers beliefs about reading and attitudes toward their
L1 and L2 inuence the cross-lingual reading process. This investigation
is grounded on the premise that affective factors, including readers
attitudes toward their L1 and L2 and their beliefs about reading, may
inuence the cross-lingual reading process, and it examines links among
L1 and L2 reading behaviors, readers beliefs about reading, and their
attitudes toward their L1 and L2.

BACKGROUND
Research on Cross-Lingual Reading Strategies
The past decade has witnessed growing interest in the cross-lingual
use of reading strategies. Research in this area has relied on the use of
the think-aloud technique, in which readers verbalize their thought
processes while reading a text (Wade, 1990). Cross-lingual reading
strategy research has shown that Mandarin-English bilinguals use similar
strategies when reading in their L1 and L2 (Tang, 1997) and that use of
background knowledge can compensate for low foreign language
prociency (Davis & Bistodeau, 1993).
More revealing is research designed to identify and compare the
metacognitive strategy use of immigrant bilingual middle school readersconsidered successful or less successful as determined by test scores
and teachersfrom a Spanish-speaking background. Comparisons of
such readers have shown that successful readers articulate a multistrategic
approach to reading, focus on unknown vocabulary (although this
attention does not interfere with overall comprehension), and monitor
their reading process. Less successful bilingual readers have been found
to implement counterproductive reading behavior and exhibit a lack of
coordinated strategy use ( Jimnez, Garca, & Pearson, 1995). The results
of research by Blonski Hardin (2001), focusing on elementary school
Spanish-dominant readers considered to be able, average, or less able
readers as determined by the Aprenda test, were consistent with Jimnez
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TESOL QUARTERLY

et al.s ndings. Specically, Blonski Hardin found that, compared with

less able readers, able and average readers were more strategic English
and Spanish readers and exhibited similar strategic behaviors when
reading in Spanish and in English.
At present, research focusing on readers use of bilingual strategies,
that is, strategies drawing on the readers bilingual status, is still very
scarce. An investigation by Jimnez, Garca, and Pearson (1996) has
shown that successful bilingual (Spanish-English) middle school readers
use three strategies particular to their bilingual status: (a) relying on
their knowledge of cognate words (words that are similar in orthography
and meaning in the two languages); (b) transferring information learned
in one language to the other language; and (c) mentally translating from
one language to the other, involving the mental reprocessing of L2
words, phrases, or sentences into the L1 while reading texts written in
the L2. Much like the middle school readers in this study, elementary
school Mexican American students who were bilingual readers were
found to rely on code mixing (using two languages within the same
sentence) and code switching (switching between languages at sentence
boundaries; Garca, 1998, p. 254). These readers also relied on three
types of translation (using one language to explain what was read in the
other; Garca, 1998, p. 254): word-for-word, paraphrased, and summary.
Further research into the use of mental translation has shown its
multidimensional role in L2 readers comprehension process. Specically, mental translation has been found to facilitate readers semantic
processing; to be used in response to specic obstacles to comprehension; and to allow readers to consolidate meaning, retain information,
clarify syntactic difculties, verify information, and check comprehension (Kern, 1994).

Beliefs About Reading

Readers beliefs play an important role in the reading process; they
can deeply inuence readers by inuencing their attention and affecting
comprehension of a reading passage (Garner & Alexander, 1994), as
Garner and Hansis (1994) found in a study of adults responses to iers
(street texts; p. 57) aimed at persuading readers. The results of the
study showed that, although the participants understood the facts about
the events described in the street texts, their understanding of one text
focusing on a riot was affected by stereotypes about African Americans
that could not be traced back to the text. Garner and Hansis concluded
that researchers need to acknowledge the important role of belief
structures in the construction of text. Their nding could also be
explained by the literature on belief change, which suggests that people,
READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

37

including trained scientists, may not carefully consider evidence when

reading text (Chambliss, 1994). Instead, they usually search for evidence
that supports what they already believe. Chambliss and Garner (1996)
further argue that a number of conditions need to exist for readers
beliefs to change after reading a persuasive text: (a) The text must be
carefully written to counter the readers original beliefs and present a
coherent and comprehensible argument, (b) the readers original
beliefs must not be too extreme, and (c) the readers must be motivated
to consider and evaluate the evidence presented.
In investigating the likelihood that individuals will be persuaded by
text, Alexander, Murphy, Bueh, and Sperl (1998) found that the most
likely candidates to change their beliefs were readers exhibiting moderate but favorable positions on the topic, moderate to high interest in the
topic, and moderate levels of knowledge on the topicwhether or not
readers perceived or demonstrated the knowledge. In another study
focusing on beliefs, Borko, Davinroy, Flory, and Hiebert (1994) hypothesized that, to change classroom practices, teachers need to have the
knowledge necessary to make changes and the beliefs that support such
changes. In their study, third-grade teachers instruction in summary
writing did not change dramatically as a result of their participation in a
set of workshops; instead, instruction reected elaborations of their
classroom practices before the training.
Readers beliefs about reading have also been found to inuence the
reading process. An investigation by Devine (1984, as cited in Devine,
1988) found that L2 readers exhibited three different sets of beliefs
about reading (i.e., reading as a sound-centered, word-centered, and
meaning-centered process), which were reected in reading behaviors.
For example, sound-centered readers focused on the graphic information in the text, and meaning-centered readers, on understanding what
the author wanted to say. Devine concluded that readers theoretical
orientation to reading may determine, to some extent, the degree to
which low prociency in the language restricts L2 reading ability.
Another investigation (Blonski Hardin, 2001) showed that able bilingual
readers viewed reading as gathering meaning whereas less able bilingual
readers viewed reading as focusing on words.
In an investigation on bilingual readers beliefs about reading, Jimnez
(1997) found that low-literacy Latino/Latina middle school readers
seemed to understand that learning to read requires effort but viewed
reading as an almost complete mystery (p. 235). These ndings
contrast with others ( Jimnez et al., 1995, 1996) showing that successful
bilingual Latino/Latina readers of English viewed reading as a pleasurable activity and as a means to learn new information.

38

TESOL QUARTERLY

Attitudes Toward the Home Language

Ruz (1984) identied three orientations toward language planning:
language as problem, language as right, and language as resource. The
rst orientation views minority languages as problems and associates
language issues with problems identied within language minority
groups (e.g., poverty, low educational achievement). According to this
orientation, teaching the majority language, even at the expense of the
L1, is the solution to social problems. A language-as-right orientation
views minority languages as a basic human right and seeks afrmation of
the speakers language rights. The third orientation views minority
languages as a resource for their speakers and the community at large.
According to Ruz, the implementation of a language-as-resource orientation to language planning can improve the status of minority languages and ease tensions between majority and minority communities.
Although the three orientations have been used to describe macrolevel
language planning issues (e.g., Ruz, 1984; Wiley, 1996), they also appear
in research studies dealing with local settings, including but not limited
to studies focusing on individual communities, homes, schools, and
classrooms. Several studies have shown that the perceptions of the home
language as a problem or as a resource lead to the use of the majority or
the minority language, respectively. In an ethnographic investigation of a
New York Puerto Rican community, Zentella (1997) described the case
of Mara, a child whose doctors attributed her seemingly slow rate of
English language acquisition to the confusion caused by her familys
code switching. In contrast, other children in the community whose
parents engaged in code switching did not exhibit signs of confusion and
acquired both English and Spanish faster than Mara did.
The notion of home language as problem or as resource was also
investigated by Jimnez et al. (1995, 1996) in their studies on the reading
strategies of successful and less successful readers. The successful bilingual readers were found to view their home language as a resource and
rely on its use for understanding written text. In contrast, less successful
bilingual readers were found to view their home language as a problem
and avoid using it because, according to the readers, the home language
caused confusion. In a related study, Hakuta and DAndrea (1992) found
that attitudinal orientation was effective in predicting the language
chosen for use in contexts other than the home.
In supporting the notion of home language as resource, Freeman
(1996) concluded that equal distribution of the minority and majority
languages elevated the status of the minority language. Specically, in a
school that implemented a two-way Spanish-English bilingual program
designed for limited English procient and limited Spanish procient

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

39

students, the Spanish language played an ofcial educational function.

Students therefore saw Spanish as a resource and Spanish speakers as
legitimate participants in the educational discourse. Smith (1999) showed
that the perception of a home language as lacking in prestige can lead to
language shift. In the bilingual classroom investigated, Spanish-dominant
children avoided using their home language because they perceived that
it was not as prestigious as English and wanted to escape the negative
behaviors associated with the use of Spanish in school.

The Current Study

To meet the needs of L2 readers, TESOL professionals need information on learners internal reading processes (Block, 1986). Moreover,
affective factors, including readers attitudes toward their home language and the L2, and readers beliefs about text and reading, may
inuence the cross-lingual reading process. Think-aloud research methods provide a means of revealing evidence about readers mental
processes. The use of think-aloud data in L2 reading research dates to
the late 1970s (e.g., Hosenfeld, 1977, 1984), and the think-aloud
technique became widely used in the 1990s (Anderson, 1991; Block,
1992; Davis & Bistodeau, 1993; Jimnez et al., 1995, 1996; Kern, 1994).
Concerns about think-aloud methods have included their unfamiliarity to readers (Olson, Duffy, & Mack, 1984), their interference with the
readers cognitive processes (Aferbach & Johnston, 1984), and the
difculty of reporting automated processes (Olson et al., 1984). L2
reading researchers have also raised concerns regarding the added
cognitive demands such methods place on L2 readers and the limitations
encountered when readers are asked to think aloud in their L2 (Cohen,
1996), although allowing L2 readers to choose the language of verbal
report is a solution to this problem (Cohen, 1996). Despite these
limitations, L1 and L2 reading researchers agree that the use of the
think-aloud technique allows researchers and practitioners to form a
good understanding of the readers mental processes, which otherwise
would be impossible to access (Aferbach & Johnston, 1984; Block, 1986;
Cohen, 1996; Ericsson & Simon, 1984; Jimnez et al., 1995).
This study, descriptive in nature, focuses on four university-level native
Spanish speakers from an immigrant backgrounda population whose
achievement is below that of their native-English-speaking peers. All four
were considered underprepared for the academic demands of college.
The following research questions guided the study:
1. What is the relationship between the reading behavior of the four
underprepared readers when reading in English and in Spanish and

40

TESOL QUARTERLY

affective factors, including the readers (a) attitudes toward their

home language and (b) beliefs about reading in English and in
Spanish?
2. What is the relationship between the four underprepared readers
use of L1 and L2 reading strategies?

METHOD
Participants
Four bilingual, native-Spanish-speaking female college freshmen participated in this study (see Table 1). All were considered underprepared
to meet the academic language demands of college-level courses, as
indicated by their scores on (a) the reading skills section of the
California State University (CSU) English Placement Test, (b) the verbal
skills section of the Scholastic Assessment Test, and (c) the English skills
section of the American College Testing examination. Therefore, they
were required to enroll in a series of prebaccalaureate courses, including
TABLE 1
Participants Background
Language used
Partici- Birthpant
place

Years
U.S.
in U.S. schooling

Lupita

Mexico

Grade 5
college

Edith

Mexico

Grade 10
college

Albita

Mexico

17

K
college

Beatriz

El
Salvador

Grade 2,
3, 6, 11
college

At
school
Spanish
in Mexico;
English in
U.S.
Spanish
in Mexico;
English in
U.S.
Bilingual
programs
in K4;
English
starting in
Grade 5
Spanish
in El
Salvador;
English in
U.S.

Test scores

At
home

Placementa

Read- Grade point

ingb
average

Spanish

139

49

1.50

Spanish

124

23

Spanish

131

37

2.00

Spanish

139

29

2.00

California State University English Placement Test. bGates MacGinitie Reading Test.

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

41

an English language development class for L2 speakers and two writing

courses, prior to taking the required Freshmen English Composition
class.
The study participants were solicited according to four criteria: (a)
prior participation in the Summer Bridge Program (which provides the
lowest one-fourth quartile of graduating high school students enrolling
in the CSU system with 68 weeks of instruction in mathematics, English
for academic purposes, and a content area); (b) representation of the
population of freshmen at CSU, Los Angeles, where 75% of the entering
freshmen are language minority students and 82% of these are required
to enroll in prebaccalaureate reading and writing courses; (c) ability to
speak uent Spanish and English and self-reported ability to read well in
Spanish; and (d) willingness to participate in the study in exchange for
assistance with their reading.

Materials
The think-aloud texts (see Appendix A) were two excerpts, one each
in Spanish and English, that presented information about minority
women in the United States, a topic that had been addressed in the
Summer Bridge Program. The Spanish text (655 words; Madrigal, 1998),
available in a popular Spanish language magazine published in the
United States, presented a chronological sequence of events. The
English text, published in a book used in the Summer Bridge Program
(850 words; Anzalda, 1995), had features of a comparison-and-contrast
and a descriptive text (Meyer, 1981).
Before each think-aloud task, I assessed the readers prior knowledge
of the topics in the texts by asking them to (a) answer questions about
the topics and (b) dene key vocabulary terms from the two texts
( Jimnez et al., 1995) (see Appendix B). In addition, in an interview
conducted in their language of choice, the readers answered 13 openended questions (adapted from Jimnez et al., 1995) on their views on
reading in Spanish and in English (see Appendix C). The readers also
completed an inventory designed to provide information on their
perceptions regarding their L1 and L2 reading skills as well as their
perceived problems when reading in English (see Appendix D).
Comprehension measures included the readers (a) retelling of the
texts and (b) answers to multiple-choice, true-false, and ll-in-the-blank
questions (see Appendix E). In the retelling task, readers looked over
the text for 12 minutes, turned it face down, and recounted everything
they remembered about the text. The participants were allowed to look
at the text as they answered the questions.

42

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Procedures
Data Collection
After completing the self-assessment inventory in a reading class in
which they were enrolled, each participant met privately with me. The
meetings, which were audio- and videotaped, started with an interview
about the readers views of reading. Then I modeled the think-aloud
technique, and the participant practiced using a passage different from
those used for data collection. The actual think-aloud task began when
the students indicated that they were comfortable with the technique.
In completing the think-aloud task, participants were instructed to use
Spanish, English, or both languages as they wished. Readers were
reminded to use whichever language they normally used when reading at
home and to read silently or out loud, as they usually did, and to say
everything that they were thinking when they read (Kamhi-Stein, 1998,
p. 612). Although the texts included red dots after each sentence (Block,
1986), the readers were not required to think aloud after each sentence.
Three dictionaries were readily available during the think-aloud task: (a)
a Spanish-Spanish dictionary (Diccionario de la Lengua Espaola; Real
Academia Espaola, 1970), (b) an English-English dictionary (The New
Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language; Kellerman,
1976), and (3) a Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionary (Nuevo
Diccionario General Ingls-Espaol, New Comprehensive English-Spanish Dictionary EDAF; Di Benedetto, Nicholson, OKelly, Huerta Tejadas, & Quintela
Ferreiro, 1975). The readers were instructed to refer to the dictionaries
as much or as little as they normally would when reading at home.
Finally, before engaging in the think-aloud task, the participants were
told that, after reading each of the texts, they would perform several
exercises focusing on the texts.

Data Analysis
The analysis involved two phases. First, I calculated comprehension
scores by counting the number and percentage of correct answers on the
multiple-choice, true-false, and ll-in-the-blank questions in English and
in Spanish. Two bilingual readers analyzed the recall tasks in both
languages by reading the recall protocols, determining whether or not
the participants had identied the theses of the texts, and tallying the
number of main ideas present in the recall protocols.
The second phase of the study involved analyzing the four participants reading behaviors and attitudes toward reading. This analysis
involved the following steps:
READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

43

1. The results of the self-assessment inventory were recorded.

2. Think-aloud data were transcribed, and two raters jointly identied
categories of individual reading strategies adapted from Block (1986)
through a process of recursive reading.
3. The reading strategies were grouped under three major categories
(adapted from Jimnez et al., 1996; see Table 2): (a) comprehensionmonitoring strategies (designed to help readers evaluate the comprehension process, e.g., detecting comprehension problems, attempting to solve the problems), (b) text-based strategies (designed
to help readers understand text at the word, phrase, and sentence
level, e.g., paraphrasing, using the dictionary, using context), and (c)

TABLE 2
Classification of Reading Strategies
Not drawing on the readers bilingual status
Drawing on the
readers bilingual
status
Mentally translating: mentally
reprocessing L2
words, phrases,
or sentences in
L1 forms while
reading L2 texts
(Kern, 1994,
p. 442)

44

Comprehensionmonitoring
Detecting comprehension
problems: expressing lack of
understanding
Attempting to solve
comprehension
problems: taking
action to correct
comprehension
problems

Text-based

High-level

Paraphrasing: rephrasing
individual words and
phrases using different
wording
Using the dictionary:
looking up words in the
dictionary
Using context: guessing
the meaning of
unknown words or
difcult text from
nearby information
Recognizing text structure:
identifying important
information, supporting
facts by relying on the
structure of the text, or
both
Rereading: rereading a
portion of the text
Recognizing important
information: identifying
important information
Summarizing important
information: constructing
an oral summary that
integrates information
from different sections
of the text

Integrating information: nding

connections
between new
information and
ideas previously
stated in the text
Making inferences
about the text:
hypothesizing
about or interpreting the text
Questioning the
text: questioning
the signicance
of the content
Making predictions: anticipating what the text
will be about
Reacting affectively: responding to the text
with affective
comments

TESOL QUARTERLY

high-level strategies (designed to activate the world knowledge

readers bring to the text, e.g., integrating information, making
inferences about the text, questioning the text). Within these three
categories, the strategies were classied as drawing or not drawing on
the participants status as bilingual readers.
4. Data from the open-ended interviews were transcribed and analyzed.
5. Individual case studies were created by combining the information
gathered on each participant in Steps 1, 3, and 4.
The use of the various data-gathering techniques, including the selfassessment inventory, the think-aloud task, and the open-ended interviews, allowed for triangulation of the data collected. This process
contributed to the creation of reliable and detailed case studies.

FINDINGS
This section presents detailed case studies for the four L2 readers.
Each case study includes the results of the comprehension measures (see
Table 3), information on the readers beliefs about reading in English
and in Spanish, and patterns of L1 and L2 reading behaviors uncovered
for each reader

Lupita
Comprehension Measures
Lupita answered correctly all ve multiple-choice, true-false, and llin-the-blank questions for the Spanish text (see Table 3). Additionally,
TABLE 3
Results of the Comprehension Measures for the Spanish and English Texts
Recall task
Comprehension measure
(n correct/total)

Participant
Lupita
Edith
Albita
Beatriz

Spanish
text

English
text

5/5
5/5
5/5
5/5

3/4
3/4
1/4
1/4

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

Spanish article

English article

Main ideas
Thesis (n correct/total)

Main ideas
Thesis (n correct/total)

+
+
+
+

5/12
5/12
4/12
5/12

+
+
+

4/8
3/8
4/8
0/8

45

she identied the thesis of the text and recalled 5 of the 12 main ideas
contained in the Spanish text. Lupita also answered correctly three of
the four questions on the English text, recalled the thesis of the text, and
recalled 4 of the 8 main ideas contained in the text.

View of L1 as a Resource
During the interview, Lupita explained that she viewed her home
language as a resource. She added that mentally translating into Spanish
when reading in English was a strategy that facilitated the construction of
meaning, involving building a coherent representation of the text:
Leo en ingls y pienso en espaol. Trato de ponerlo en mis propias palabras.
Puedo escoger ms palabras en mi idioma. Puedo ponerme un ejemplo a m
misma; entonces con una palabra saco ms de todo. (I read in English and
think in Spanish. I can put it [the reading] into my own words. I can choose
more words in my language. I can give my own examples; therefore, with one
word, I can understand more.)

Lupitas view of mental translation into Spanish as a resource was

conrmed in the think-aloud task, during which she chose to think aloud
in Spanish continuously. As shown in the quotation above, the use of
mental translation seemed to facilitate semantic processing because it
allowed her to represent the English text successfully in Spanish.
Following is an example of how Lupita mentally translated into Spanish
after reading the English text:
(printed text) The rst time I drove from El Paso to San Diego, I saw a sign
that read Watch for Falling Rocks. And though I watched and waited for rocks to
roll down the steep cliff walls and attack my car and me, I never saw any falling
rocks. Today, one of the things Im most afraid of are the rocks we throw at
each other.
(Lupitas response) Yo creo que lo que est tratando de decir es que ella
pensaba que como ella pas por El Paso le iban a caer rocas encima y tena
miedo. Estaba esperando que le cayeran pero nunca le cayeron y ahora no le
dan miedo esas rocas. Le dan miedo las rocas que le puede tirar la gente. No
rerindose a rocas rocas, sino a las palabras, insultos, todo eso que la gente
puede tener contra ella. (I think that what she [the author] is trying to say is
that she thought that since she went through El Paso rocks were going to roll
down and she was afraid. She was waiting for the rocks to roll down, but they
never did, and now she is not afraid of those rocks. She is afraid of the rocks
people can throw at her. She is not referring to rock rocks, but to words,
insults, all that people may throw at her.)

46

TESOL QUARTERLY

Reading Behavior as Meaning Construction

In her interview, Lupita expressed the idea that good readers read for
meaning:
Un buen lector es una persona que entiende. Un mal lector lee por leer y no
se da cuenta si eso lo benecia o es algo til. Un buen lector hace un repaso
de lo que est leyendo tanto en espaol como en ingls, es lo mismo. (Good
readers understand what they read. Poor readers read for the sake of reading
and do not understand whether they are getting any benets or if what they
are reading is useful. Good readers review what they are reading, whether
they are reading in Spanish or in English; its the same thing.)

Lupitas approach to reading in English conrmed her statements in

the interview. The think-aloud protocols showed that, when reading in
English, she focused on the construction of meaning, which she understood as reading for the purpose of building a coherent representation
of the text. In this process of meaning construction, she employed a
multistrategic approach that integrated a variety of comprehensionmonitoring, text-based, and high-level strategies.
Lupita used two comprehension-monitoring strategies to read the
English text: She detected comprehension problems at the level of words
and sentences, and she attempted to solve the comprehension problems
by rereading the text, as shown below:
(printed text) That is, isolating them, pushing them out of the herd,
ostracizing them.
(Lupitas response: detecting comprehension problems; attempting to solve
comprehension problems) La verdad esto [ostracizing] no lo entiendo muy
bien [She rereads.]. (The truth is that I dont understand this [ostracizing]
well [She rereads.].)

Two high-level strategies Lupita used as she read the English text were
making inferences about the text and questioning what the text had to
say, as shown respectively below:
(printed text) We shun the white-looking Indian, the high yellow Black
woman, the Asian with the white lover, the Native woman who brings her
white girl friend to the Pow Wow, the Chicana who doesnt speak Spanish, the
academic, the uneducated.
(Lupitas response: making inferences about the text) Trata de decir que
rechazamos a la gente de otras razas, como las mujeres chicanas que no
hablan espaol y an as traen sangre de hispano, traen sangre latina y no
hablan espaol. Por qu razn? Por qu motivo? Porque no se les ense?

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

47

Por qu no se les ensea? Estn avergonzados de eso? (She is trying to say

that we reject other races, like Chicanas who dont speak Spanish and still
have Hispanic blood, they have Latin blood, and they dont speak Spanish.
Why? Whats the reason for this? Because they werent taught Spanish. Why
not? Are they ashamed of that?)
(printed text) In the dominant phase of colonialism, European colonizers
exercise direct control of the colonized, destroy the native legal and cultural
systems, and negate non-European civilizations in order to ruthlessly exploit
the resources of the subjugated with the excuse of attempting to civilize
them.
(Lupitas response: questioning) Pero qu es civilizar realmente? Es hacer
eso. Lo que ellos [los europeos] hicieron es dominar. (But what does civilize
really mean? That is what it means. What they [the Europeans] did was
dominate.)

Lupita interacted with the Spanish text for the purpose of making
meaning, as evidenced in her use of two high-level strategies: making
inferences and reacting affectively to the text:
(printed text) Al poco tiempo de trabajar all, cre nuevos procedimientos de
contratacin y logr una mejor comunicacin con los miembros del sindicato.
La situacin me fue llevando a involucrarme cada vez ms en la ayuda a los
trabajadores. Hoy considero que en aquel momento respond ms a un
llamado que a una decisin personal. (After working there for some time, I
developed new contract procedures, and I developed better communication
with the union members. The situation encouraged me to become more and
more involved in helping workers. Today, I believe that, in those days, rather
than making a personal decision, I was responding to a calling.)
(Lupitas response: making inferences) Es una ventaja que ella tena [hablar
espaol]. Iba subiendo poco a poco. Sufri pero iba subiendo poco a poco
. . . porque ella quera que otra gente no pase tal vez lo que ella mir que su
familia pas . . . por ser gente que el ingls es su segundo idioma. (Speaking
Spanish is an advantage she had. She advanced step by step. She suffered, but
she advanced step by step because she did not want other people to go
through what she saw her family go through . . . because she and her people
speak English as a second language.)
(printed text) Lo que seran sus primeros pasos en las lides sindicales
comenzaron cuando apenas tena 20 anos. (She took what would be her rst
steps in the union arena when she was 20 years old.)
(Lupitas response: reacting affectively) Vaya que no perdi tiempo. (Wow!
She did not waste any time.)

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TESOL QUARTERLY

In the rst quotation, Lupita hypothesized that Linda Chvez did not
want other people to go through what she had experienced to become
successful. At the same time, she attributed some of Linda Chvezs
difculties in life to the fact that she was an immigrant for whom English
was an L2. The second quotation reects one of the affective responses
to the original text that Lupita provided during the Spanish reading task.
When reading the Spanish text, Lupita used three text-based strategies: paraphrasing, using the structure of the text as a comprehension
aid, and summarizing important information from different sections of
the text:
(printed text) Cuando Linda Chvez-Thompson ocup el puesto de vicepresidenta ejecutiva de la AFLCIO (Federacin Americana del Trabajo y
Congreso de las Organizaciones Industriales) en 1995, millones de latinos
residentes en Estados Unidos se sintieron inmensamente orgullosos de que
fuera una mxico-americana quien llegara a esta importante posicin en la
organizacin sindical ms grande del pas. (When Linda Chvez-Thompson
was appointed executive vice president of the AFL-CIO [American Federation
of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations] in 1995, millions of
Hispanics living in the United States felt immensely proud that a Mexican
American had arrived at this important position in the biggest union of the
country.)
(Lupitas response: paraphrasing) Este . . . . Parecera que lo que sucede es
que esta muchacha es hija de inmigrantes . . . de gente mexicana que vino a
este pas y ella es de una generacin que naci en los Estados Unidos.
Entonces ella ha sobresalido a todo lo del racismo y todo lo que ocurre en
este tiempo . . . . Entonces ella ocupa un puesto muy importante aqu y la
gente mexicana, la gente latina, est muy orgullosa de que ella est alcanzando
esta meta. (Eh . . . . It looks like what is happening is that this woman is the
daughter of immigrants . . . of Mexican people who came to this country, and
she is part of a generation that was born in the United States. Then she
overcame everything related to racism and everything that happens in these
times . . . . Therefore, she has a very important position here, and Mexican
people, Hispanics, are very proud of her achievement.)
(printed text) Su sueo se haba tronchado por el trabajo de limpiar casas y
granjas a cambio de un salario nada envidiable: un dlar por hora. (Her
dream had broken because she had to clean houses and farms in exchange
for the unenviable salary of one dollar per hour.)
(Lupitas response: recognizing text structure) Aqu hay otro ejemplo de que
. . . como ella ha sufrido. (Heres another example of . . . how much shes
suffered.)
(Lupitas response: summarizing important information) No importa que
raza seas, si eres mujer o hombre, si eres inteligente, si sabes salir adelante,
READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

49

nada te detiene, es lo que ella trata de decir. (Your race does not matter,
neither does it matter whether you are male or female; if you are smart,
nothing will stop you. That is what she is trying to say.)

Reading Behavior as Linear

Lupita did not construct a goal for reading the text. Absent from her
protocols when reading in both Spanish and English were strategies that
characterize good readers, such as reading the texts titles or subtitles
and looking at pictures and generating a hypothesis about the texts.
Lupitas rst encounter with the Spanish and the English texts consisted
of reading the rst sentence of the texts and then diving in and reading
them through in a linearthat is, nonselectivemanner.

Edith
Comprehension Measures
Edith answered correctly the ve multiple-choice, true-false, and llin-the-blank questions for the Spanish text; additionally, she identied
the thesis of the text and recalled 5 of the 12 main ideas in the text (see
Table 3 above). She answered correctly three of the four questions on
the English text, recalled the thesis of the text, and recalled 3 of the 8
main ideas in the text.

View of L1 as a Resource
During the interview, Edith expressed concern about her lack of
vocabulary in English. She attributed this problem to the fact that, at the
time of the study, she had been in the United States for only 3 years and
had received limited instruction in English. Edith also reported viewing
her home language as a resource. As she explained, mentally translating
into Spanish when reading in English facilitated the construction of
meaning,
Cuando leo en ingls, me pongo a pensar en espaol, si esto, no esto. Al
principio tena que traducir palabra por palabra para entender. Ahora trato
de agarrar el signicado de la lectura en espaol. (When I read in English, I
think in Spanish, Is this right? Is this not right? At the beginning, I had to
translate word for word to understand. Now I try to understand the meaning
of the text in Spanish.)

50

TESOL QUARTERLY

Ediths view of mental translation as a resource was conrmed in the

think-aloud task. She continuously processed the English text in Spanish.
According to Edith, translating into Spanish allowed her to clarify and
consolidate the meaning of the text. However, as shown in the excerpt
below, Ediths mental translation was sometimes unproductive in that it
did not result in accurate comprehension of the text:
(printed text) One of the changes that Ive seen since This Bridge Called My
Back was published is that we no longer allow white women to efface us or
suppress us. Now we do it to each other. We have taken over the missionarys
lets civilize the savage role. Fixating on the wrongness and moral or
political inferiority of some of our sisters, insisting on a profound difference
between oneself and the Other.
(Ediths response: mentally translating) Este es el ttulo de su libro, pero ella
no mira ninguna diferencia entre una mujer blanca y una mujer as como
nosotras. O sea todos somos iguales y todos tenemos los mismos derechos. No
importa si est ms civilizada o es ms salvaje que las dems. (This is the title
of her book, but she does not see any differences between a white woman and
a woman like this, like us. So that means that we are all the same, and we all
have the same rights. It does not matter whether she is more civilized or more
savage than the others.)

Reading Behavior as Meaning Construction

Edith expressed the idea that good readers read for meaning. In her
interview she said,
Un buen lector, como yo en espaol . . . es cuando voy a tomar un artculo
que realmente me interesa y le voy a poner todo el empeo del mundo y
comprender lo que la lectura quiere decirme, lo que el autor trat de decirle
al lector. (A good reader, like I am in Spanish, is when I grab a text Im really
interested in and I do my best and understand what the reading wants to say,
what the author tried to tell the reader.)

Ediths approach to reading in English reected her notion that

reading involves the construction of meaning. In this process, she
employed a multistrategic approach that included comprehensionmonitoring, text-based, and high-level strategies. Her comprehensionmonitoring strategy was to detect comprehension problems and attempt
to solve them through two text-based strategies: rereading and looking
up selected words. Edith resorted to looking up words in the dictionary
only after she had completed reading the English text. As she explained,
the words she chose to look upgeneric and ostracizingprevented her
from understanding ideas in the text:

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

51

(printed text) In the dominant phase of colonialism, European colonizers

exercise direct control of the colonized, destroy the native legal and cultural
systems, and negate non-European civilizations in order to ruthlessly exploit
the resources of the subjugated with the excuse of attempting to civilize
them.
(Ediths response: detecting comprehension problems) Una sentence que no
le agarro; no lo entiendo y lo vuelvo a leer. (A sentence that I dont
understand; I dont understand it, and I read it again.)

Edith employed the high-level strategy of making inferences when

reading in English:
(printed text) We have been indoctrinated into adopting the old imperialist
ways of conquering and dominating, adopting a way of confrontation based
on differences while standing on the ground of ethnic superiority.
(Ediths response: making inferences about the text) Lo que yo entiendo que
quiere decir es que nadie tiene ms por nada ms sino que a ellos les
ensearon a adaptarse a la vieja o al viejo imperio o al viejo imperialismo.
Como nuestra situacin, no? (What I understand that the author is trying to
say is that we dont have things just because, but they were taught to adapt to
the old Empire or to the old imperialism. Like us, right?)

Ediths approach to reading the Spanish text was characterized by

what at rst seemed to be a lack of visible engagement with it until she
had nished reading the passage. She read it rapidly (de corridito).
After reading, she repeated the text to herself following its structure. In
this recall task, Edith summarized important information, a text-based
strategy. As shown in the excerpt below, she incorporated much important information from different sections of the article:
(Ediths response: summarizing important information) Este artculo se trata
de Linda Chvez que es una mxico-americana nacida en Texas y que est en
un sindicato ocupando gentes que eran bilinges y que ella no perdi el
tiempo, no descuid el tiempo y cuando empez le pagaban un sueldo que
no era nada. Y este . . . despus de eso ella estaba trabajando como secretaria
pero antes de eso su padre le pidi que dejara de estudiar para que se fuera
a trabajar a las labores a la recogida de algodn y al cosechamiento y todo
esto, y ya despus cuando se cas . . . . (This article is about Linda Chvez, a
Mexican American born in Texas who works for a union that hires bilingual
people, and she did not waste any time, she did not waste time and when she
began to work she was paid a miserable salary. And . . . after this, she was
working as a secretary, but before working as a secretary, her father asked her
to drop out of school to work in the cotton elds and to pick cotton and all
of that, and then when she married . . . .)

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TESOL QUARTERLY

Reading Behavior as Linear

When reading in either language, Edith did not use strategies that
characterize good readers, such as reading the texts titles or subtitles or
looking at pictures and generating hypotheses about them. For both
texts, she simply read the rst sentence and continued to the end in a
linear, nonselective manner.

Albita
Comprehension Measures
Albita answered correctly only one of four multiple-choice, true-false,
and ll-in-the-blank questions in English (see Table 3 above). She
answered correctly the ve questions on the Spanish text. Additionally,
she identied the theses of the Spanish and the English texts and
recalled 4 of the 12 main ideas in the Spanish text and 4 of the 8 ideas in
the English text.

View of L1 as a Problem and a Resource

During the interview, Albita expressed conicting views of her bilingualism. She explained that knowing both English and Spanish was
useful for doing business in a city like Los Angeles but sometimes
produced confusion:
El saber ingls y espaol ayuda pero hay veces que causa problemas porque
las palabras se miran iguales. Hay veces que miro algo en una pared y despus
me doy cuenta que es en espaol y no en ingls. (Knowing English and
Spanish is helpful, but there are times when it causes problems because the
words look alike. Sometimes I read something on a wall, and then I realize
that it is in Spanish and not in English.)

Reading Behavior as Word-Driven

Albita conceptualized reading as a process of understanding the
meaning of words:
Los buenos lectores saben como entender las palabras, que signican las
palabras. En mi caso, si estoy leyendo un libro y no entiendo la palabra, no
paro de leer en ese mismo instante pero al terminar de leer la oracin. Y
busco la palabra y me hace entender lo que leo. En ingls y en espaol.

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

53

(Good readers know how to understand words, what words mean. In my case,
if I am reading a book and dont understand a word, I dont stop reading at
that very moment, but when I nish reading the sentence. And I look up the
word, and that helps me understand what I read. I do this both in English and
in Spanish.)

Albitas view of reading as word centered was conrmed during the

think-aloud tasks in English and Spanish. While reading the English and
Spanish texts, she looked up nine English words (capitulation, imperialistic, legitimacy, neo-colonialism, ostracizing, othering, scrupulously, subjugate,
subordination) and ve Spanish words (sindicales, sndico, sindicato, faena,
tronchado). In looking up words, Albita did not pay attention to or was
unaware of parts of speech or prexes or sufxes. For example, she rst
looked up the word in the form she had encountered (e.g., scrupulously,
neo-colonialism). She read the rst dictionary entry and, if she did not
understand it, proceeded to look up the words in the entry. Central to
her approach was the fact that, contrary to what she indicated in the
interview, she immediately stopped reading whenever she detected a
comprehension problem in English or in Spanish to look up the word
that prevented her from understanding the text. Because the strategy
was the only one Albita had for solving problems in both languages, her
reading process was very fragmented. Following are two examples of
what Albita said and did when she encountered an unknown word in the
English or Spanish text:
(printed text) We have been indoctrinated into adopting the old imperialist
ways of conquering and dominating, . . . .
(Albitas response) I dont know what imperialist means. Im going to look it
up. [She looks it up and then rereads the sentence.]
(printed text) Eran largas horas de faena. (Those were long days of work.)
(Albitas response) Faena. No se lo que signica faena. [She looks up the word
in the dictionary.] (Work. I dont know what work means. [She looks up the
word in the dictionary.])

Reading Behavior as Getting Through the Text

Albitas interaction with the English and Spanish texts was limited in
that she employed a small number of reading strategies. Specically,
besides looking up every unknown word she encountered in either text,
the only other text-based strategy she used was paraphrasing, as shown by
these excerpts rom the think-aloud protocols on the English and the
Spanish texts:
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TESOL QUARTERLY

(printed text) The rst time I drove from El Paso to San Diego, I saw a sign
that read Watch for Falling Rocks. And though I watched and waited for rocks
to roll down the steep cliff walls and attack my car and me, I never saw any
falling rocks. Today, one of the things Im most afraid of are the rocks we
throw at each other.
(Albitas response: paraphrasing) In this text, they do not mean literally
falling rocks. They mean the insults and the prejudice against them.
(printed text) Lo que seran sus primeros pasos en las lides sindicales
comenzaron cuando apenas tena 20 aos. Todo empez cuando su to la
recomend al agente del sindicato local de Lubbock, Texas, la ciudad donde
viva. All necesitaban una secretaria bilinge, debido a que mas del 65 por
ciento de los miembros eran mxico-americanos. (What would be her rst
steps in the union arena started when she was 20 years old. Everything started
when her uncle recommended her to a local union agent in Lubbock, Texas,
where she lived. There, they needed a bilingual secretary because over 65% of
the members were Mexican American.)
(Albitas response: paraphrasing) Linda Chvez es importante para los
mexicanos. Empez a trabajar a los 20 de secretaria. (Linda Chvez is
important to Mexicans. She started to work as a secretary when she was 20
years old.)

As shown in the example below, Albita employed inferencing, a highlevel strategy, when reading in Spanish.
(printed text) Para Linda, todo hubiera marchado bien si su padre no le
hubiera pedido que abandonara los estudios. (For Linda, everything would
have gone well if her father had not asked her to give up studying.)
(Albitas response: making inferences about the text) Tuvo que dejar de
estudiar. Se rob parte de sus sueos. (She had to give up studying. It stole
part of her dream.)

Reading Behavior as Linear

Albitas approach to reading in the two languages was linear. She did
not construct a goal for reading either the Spanish or the English text,
reading them from beginning to end in a nonselective manner.

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

55

Beatriz
Comprehension Measures
Beatriz answered correctly the ve multiple-choice, true-false, and llin-the-blank questions for the Spanish text (see Table 3 above). In
contrast, she answered correctly only one of the four questions on the
English text. Although she was able to identify the thesis of the Spanish
text, she did not identify the thesis of the English text. Beatriz recalled 5
of the 12 main ideas in the Spanish text and none of the 8 ideas in the
English text.

View of L1 as a Problem and as a Resource

During the interview, Beatriz expressed conicting views of her
bilingualism. For example, she explained that knowing Spanish was
advantageous because it allowed her to keep in touch with her relatives
in El Salvador but said that she usually avoided mental translation
because it caused confusion. The following excerpt reects Beatrizs
conict regarding her bilingualism:
En mi caso, yo leo en ingls pero no lo leo tan bien. Ingls no lo leo con tanta
facilidad. . . . Lo nico que aprend en espaol es vocabulario, y eso me ayuda.
Pero en espaol lees como lo escribes, las palabras las pronuncias igual. En
ingls los sonidos no son iguales. Un buen lector en espaol tiene que saber
las reglas de la lectura, acentos. En ingls, tiene que estar bien concentrado y
saber pronunciar las palabras. Hay algunas [palabras] que se parecen y tienen
diferente signicado. Por eso, cuando leo en ingls, trato de pensar en ingls.
(In my case, I read in English, but I dont read too well. . . . The only thing I
learned in Spanish is vocabulary and that helps. But in Spanish you read the
way you write, the words are pronounced in the same way. In English, you
dont read the way you write. A good Spanish reader has to know reading
rules, tildes. In English, a reader has to concentrate and know how to
pronounce words. Some words look alike and have different meanings. That
is why, when I read in English, I try to think in English.)

Reading Behavior as Driven by the Pronunciation of Individual Words

Beatriz viewed reading as a process of knowing how to pronounce
words, as conrmed during the think-aloud task in English. Whenever
she encountered a word she had difculty pronouncing in English (e.g.,
cliff, efface, othering, subjugation, and subordination), she immediately used
the text-based strategy of looking up the word in the dictionary. As
Beatriz indicated in her interview, the decision to look up the word was
56

TESOL QUARTERLY

driven by her inability to pronounce it. The following excerpt shows what
Beatriz said when she encountered an unknown word:
(printed text) And though I watched and waited for rocks to roll down the
steep cliff walls and attack my car and me, I never saw any falling rocks
(Beatrizs response) Oh. I dont know what this [cliff ] means. I dont know
how to say it. [She looks it up in the dictionary.]

In contrast, when Beatriz detected a comprehension problem in Spanish, she either kept reading or reread the sentence that she had trouble
understanding:
(printed text) Eran largas horas de faena. (Those were long days of work.)
(Beatrizs response) Faena. Que es faena? (What does faena mean? [She
keeps reading.])
(printed text) Hoy lleva ms de treinta aos hacindolo y, al contrario de lo
que la gente se imagina, Linda no tiene queja alguna de discriminacin en el
cargo que ocupa.
(Beatrizs response) Pero, qu es lo que ella hace? [She rereads.] Oh, que
siempre dicen que las mujeres no pueden hacer nada, ella no se sinti as.
(What does she do? [She rereads.] Oh, they always say that women cant do
anything, but she never felt this.)

Reading Behavior as Dependent on the Language of the Text

Beatrizs approach to reading was dependent on the language of the
text. She read the English text straight through from beginning to end,
but when reading the Spanish text, she exhibited characteristics typical
of strategic readers. For example, she employed the high-level strategy of
reading the title and making a prediction about the topic. In addition,
after reading the text, Beatriz read the title and looked over the pictures
and the captions that accompanied the text as a means to conrm her
understanding of the article.
(printed text) Linda Chvez
(Beatrizs response: making inferences about the text) [She reads the title.]
Esto va a ser sobre Linda Chvez. (This is going to be about Linda Chvez.)
S, est relacionada. (Yes, there is a connection [between the picture and the
text].)

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

57

When reading in Spanish, Beatriz also made inferences and summarized

information from different paragraphs. Following are examples from
Beatrizs think-aloud protocol:
(printed text) Para Linda, todo hubiera marchado bien si su padre no le
hubiera pedido que abandonara los estudios. (Everything would have gone
well if her father had not asked her to give up studying.)
(Beatrizs response: making inferences about the text) Okay. Como todo el
mundo, no? El sueo de todos, de la mayora de las personas, es entrar en la
universidad . . . . Pero a veces los padres tienen la culpa. Eso es lo que le pas
a Linda. (Okay. Like everyone else, right? Everyones dream is to go to
college. . . . But sometimes it is the parents fault. Thats what happened to
Linda.)
(Beatrizs response: summarizing important information) Ella quera mejorar
el trabajo en LA. Quera que los trabajadoresesos son los campesinos de
verdad. . . . Ella quera mejor tratamiento, igual tratamiento para los
trabajadores. (She wanted to improve the working conditions in LA. She
wanted the workersthose are the true eld workers. . . . She wanted better
treatment, equal treatment, for the workers.)

When reading the English text, Beatriz paraphrased the original.

Following is an example from the think-aloud protocol:
(printed text) In the dominant phase of colonialism, European colonizers
exercise direct control of the colonized, destroy the nations legal and
cultural systems, and negate non- European civilizations in order to ruthlessly
exploit the resources of the subjugated with the excuse of attempting to
civilize them.
(Beatrizs response: paraphrasing) In this sentence, she is saying that they
wanted to civilize the people who were already there; civilize them the way
they lived.

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

The results of this study contribute to an in-depth understanding of
the role that affective factors, such as readers views of their home
language and beliefs about reading, may play in L2 reading. As shown by
the results of the qualitative analysis, including the interviews and thinkaloud protocols summarized in Table 4, the reading behaviors exhibited
by the four underprepared readers were inuenced, at least to some
extent, by their attitudes toward their home language as well as by their
beliefs about reading in both languages.

58

TESOL QUARTERLY

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

59

Meaning
centered
Multistrategic
Linear
L1 driven

Meaning
centered
Multistrategic
(when
reading in
English)
Linear
L1 driven

Reading as
meaning
construction
Mental
translation
into L1 as
helpful
reading
strategy

Reading as
meaning
construction
Mental
translation
into L1 as a
helpful
reading
strategy

Edith

Approach
to reading

Lupita

Participant

Views of
reading

Vocabulary
Concentration
Rate

Vocabulary
Comprehension
Concentration
Boredom

Self-perceived
difculties when
reading English

When reading in
English,
Mentally
translates into
Spanish

When reading in
English,
Mentally
translates into
Spanish

Drawing on
readers bilingual
status

When reading in
English,
Detects and
attempts to solve
comprehension
problems

When reading in
English,
Uses background
knowledge
Detects and
attempts to solve
comprehension
problems

When reading in
English,
Rereads
Looks up
selected words
after completing
the reading
passage
When reading in
Spanish,
Summarizes
important
information after
reading the article de corridito

When reading in
English,
Rereads
When reading in
Spanish,
Paraphrases
Recognizes text
structure
Summarizes

Text-based

Continued on p. 60

When reading in
English,
Makes inferences
about the text

When reading in
English,
Makes inferences
about the text
Questions the
text
When reading in
Spanish,
Makes inferences
Reacts affectively
to the text

High-level

Not drawing on readers bilingual status

Reading strategies identied

Comprehensionmonitoring

TABLE 4
Summary of Qualitative Findings

60

TESOL QUARTERLY

Vocabulary
Comprehension
Concentration
Rate
Boredom

Vocabulary
Comprehension
Concentration
Rate
Boredom
Fatigue

Word-bound
Linear
L2 driven
when reading
in L2
Low engagement with the
text

Reading as
word-centered
(meaning of
words)
Bilingualism
as problem
and resource

Reading as
Word-bound
word-centered
(when read(pronunciation
ing in
of words)
English)
Bilingualism
Linear in
as problem
English,
and resource
strategic in
Spanish
L2 driven
when reading
in L2
Low engagement with the
text

Albita

Beatriz

Participant

Approach
to reading

Views of
reading

Self-perceived
difculties when
reading English
Drawing on
readers bilingual
status

When reading in
English,
Detects and
attempts to solve
comprehension
problems
When reading in
Spanish,
Relies on text
structure
Detects and
attempts to solve
comprehension
problems

When reading in
English and
Spanish,
Detects and
attempts to solve
comprehension
problems

When reading in
English,
Looks up all
unknown words
Paraphrases
When reading in
Spanish,
Uses context

When reading in
English and
Spanish,
Looks up every
unknown word
Paraphrases

Text-based

When reading in
Spanish,
Makes a
prediction
Makes inferences
about the text
Summarizes
information

When reading in
Spanish,
Makes inferences
about the text

High-level

Not drawing on readers bilingual status

Reading strategies identied

Comprehensionmonitoring

TABLE 4 continued
Summary of Qualitative Findings

Views and Approaches to Reading

Lupita and Edith viewed their home language as a resource and
believed that mental translation was a helpful strategy. Accordingly, they
chose purposefully to mentally translate into their L1 when reading in
English. For Lupita, mental translation allowed the processing of information at a deep level (Cohen, 1994; Jimnez et al., 1995; Kern, 1994).
As Lupita explained during her interview, mental translation facilitated
the representation of text because it allowed her to expand on the ideas
of the source text by drawing on Spanish, her more familiar language.
In Ediths case, mental translation seemed to play a different function.
According to Edith, when she rst started reading in English, she relied
heavily on the use of word-by-word translation. This practice supports the
notion that Ediths limited English vocabulary controlled her initial
reading process. As a result, her reading was characterized by a lack of
automaticity and a heavy reliance on the text. In contrast, at the time of
the investigation, Edith used mental translation as a means to understand chunks of text, which allowed her to clarify the ideas in the text
and, subsequently, to store information in her short-term memory.
However, mental translation did not always lead to accurate comprehension of the English text, a result supported by prior research ( Jimnez
et al., 1996; Kern, 1994). In Ediths case, lack of vocabulary in English
could have prevented her from accurately comprehending the written
text.
Albita and Beatriz viewed their home language as both a resource and
a problem. In the interview, both said that knowing Spanish was
sometimes helpful. However, they also explained that words that look
alike in Spanish and English caused problems in reading. This view
about their home language led them purposefully to avoid the use of
mental translation. This conicting view of their bilingualism, also
identied by Jimnez et al. (1995) in their study of a successful and a less
successful bilingual reader, suggests that Albita and Beatriz were not
aware of how their home language could be used as an aid in the L2
reading process. The four readers decision to rely or not to rely on the
use of mental translation was dependent on their view about their home
language rather than on their length of residence in the United States or
their length of English study.

Views of and Strategies for Reading

The results suggest that reading strategies in both languages may be
inuenced by readers beliefs about reading, although the extent to

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

61

which reading behavior transfers seems to depend on the texts complexity or readers level of prociency in the language of the text. In the
current study, Albita and Beatrizs approach to reading was inuenced by
their beliefs about reading but also seemed to be affected by the
language of the text. In their interviews, Albita and Beatriz reported
viewing reading as a logocentric process, involving understanding the
meaning of words and the pronunciation of words, respectively. When
reading in English, this logocentric approach was realized in a small
repertoire of strategies, all designed to uncover the meaning of unknown
words rather than to negotiate the meaning of the text. Specically,
when reading in English, Albitas and Beatrizs only strategy was to detect
comprehension problems and attempt to solve them by looking up every
unknown word in the dictionary. In contrast, Beatrizs reading process in
Spanish was not bound by the words she did not know. In fact, when
reading in Spanish, Beatriz integrated strategies that characterize good
readers: She looked over pictures and captions, read the title of the text,
and reread sentences when she had trouble understanding their meaning. These ndings suggest that the lack of reading uency observed in
Albitas and Beatrizs English reading may have resulted, in part, from
their view of reading as a word-centered process as well as from their lack
of L2 vocabulary.
Lupita and Edith viewed reading in both languages as a process of
meaning construction, and their approach to reading was consistent with
this belief. When reading in English, both readers employed a multistrategic approach integrating a variety of comprehension-monitoring,
text-based, and high-level strategies, although Ediths reading process
was sometimes short-circuited in that it did not result in accurate
comprehension. When they read the Spanish text, they adapted their
reading strategy to t the perceived demands of the text (Anderson,
1991; Block, 1986; Carrell, 1989; Devine, 1988; Kamhi-Stein, 1998). For
Lupita, this exible strategy use involved text-based and high-level
strategies designed to help her negotiate the meaning of the text.
Equally exible was Ediths approach to reading the Spanish text: In
reading it quickly and repeating it to herself afterward, she adapted her
strategy to the point of exhibiting what at rst seemed to be limited
interaction with the text. On further analysis, this lower level of interaction was attributed to Ediths automaticity in reading, which perhaps
resulted in part from Ediths status as a procient Spanish reader and
from the notion that the text was not difcult to understand.

62

TESOL QUARTERLY

Reading Strategies and Recall

Although reading strategy behavior transferred across languages, the
four readers exhibited individual differences. However, differences in
reading strategy use or approach to reading (logocentric versus meaning
centered) did not produce major differences in the readers performance on the recall tasks in either language. All four recalled the thesis of
the Spanish text and nearly the same number of main ideas. Three of the
four readers recalled the thesis of the English text and nearly the same
number of main ideas. Perhaps the nature of the recall task, in which the
readers were asked not to look at the original texts they were attempting
to recall, affected their ability to recall information. Another plausible
explanation is that the lack of reading purpose, resulting from the
readers lack of awareness that they would be asked to complete recall
tasks, affected their ability to recall information.
The ndings also showed that the four readers took a linear approach
to reading in English. None considered a goal in reading; instead, they
all read it straight through from beginning to end. As Pressley and
Aferbach (1995) noted, lack of planning, which is typical of poor
readers, often affects subsequent reading (p. 32). In the current study,
lack of planning when reading the English text may have resulted in the
readers failure to activate prior knowledge, which ultimately could have
resulted in better understanding of the text. In particular, Edith and
Beatrizs lack of planning may have resulted in their failure to activate
prior knowledge regarding the European colonization of Latin America,
an important topic in the curriculum of Latin American schools.
Additionally, the linear approach observed in this investigation could
have been an artifact of the think-aloud task, which instructed the study
participants to think aloud in the presence of the researcher. It is not
clear whether the readers would have set a goal for the reading or read
in a nonlinear manner if the think-aloud instructions and task been
different. Nor is it clear whether the task would have discriminated the
participants L1 reading abilities more if the Spanish text had been more
difcult.
An unexpected nding in this study was that none of the four readers
showed an awareness of cognate relations, regardless of their views of
their home language. Interestingly, the words that Edith chose to look up
after reading the English text (generic and ostracizing) were cognate
terms. When asked why she had selected them, she answered that they
prevented her from understanding the ideas in the passage. Similarly,
many of the words that Albita and Beatriz looked up when they read the
English text were cognate terms. The fact that Edith and Beatriz did not
show an awareness of cognate terms was rather surprising given that most

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

63

of their schooling had been in Spanish in Mexico and El Salvador.

However, Beatrizs lack of reliance on cognate relations could be
explained by her belief that bilingualism is confusing. As she explained
in her interview, the fact that some words look the same in Spanish and
English confused her; therefore, she avoided thinking in Spanish.
None of the three readers who looked up words in the dictionary paid
attention to or was aware of how content words in English and Spanish
can change their form by adding derivational afxes. For example, when
Albita encountered the word sindicales (union) in the Spanish text, she
looked up the term, read the rst dictionary entry, and engaged in a
word hunt in which she proceeded to look up sndico (trustee) and
sindicato (union). These ndings suggest that readers like Albita could
greatly benet from instruction in how to use dictionaries. Additionally,
readers like Albita would benet from learning how to recognize word
parts in order to gain control of the word-building process.

CONCLUSION
The results of this study suggest that affective factors, including
readers views of their home language and beliefs about reading, may
play an important role in reading. Further think-aloud studies need to
provide more in-depth information on the relationship between affective
factors and reading behavior in two languages. However, such research
needs to engage readers in two or more reading tasks in each language
to provide a more reliable picture of the relationship between affective
factors and reading strategies in two languages.
Future studies need to focus on three broad areas. The rst is the
notion that the use of mental translation may be a function of the
readers views of their home language. Research in this area would focus
on the following questions: To what extent, if any, is the use of mental
translation related to the views of so-called underprepared L2 readers
about their home language, to their prociency in the target language,
or to the difculty of the reading tasks or texts? Second, future research
needs to investigate whether the ndings of this study, which point to the
notion that L1 and L2 reading behavior is, at least to some extent,
inuenced by readers beliefs about reading, can be replicated. This line
of study would help to answer the following questions: What relationship, if any, is there between the beliefs about reading of L2 readers who
are seen as underprepared, and these readers L1 and L2 strategy use?
Specically, to what extent, if any, are readers beliefs about reading
related to the L1 and L2 reading strategies implemented by readers at
different L2 prociency levels? Finally, the results of this investigation,
which point to the logocentricity exhibited by two of the readers, suggest
64

TESOL QUARTERLY

the need for longitudinal training studiesa point made by Carrell

(1998)designed to answer the following questions: Can reading instruction promote vocabulary development? If so, to what extent would
vocabulary development promote changes in the readers logocentric
approach to reading? Or should instruction focus on promoting changes
in the readers beliefs about reading? And to what extent would such
instruction affect the reading behavior exhibited by L2 readers seen as
underprepared?
Research studies in these three areas would help develop a better
understanding of the relationship between reading behavior in two
languages and affective factors. Such an understanding would greatly
assist in the development of programs designed to improve the reading
performance of the growing numbers of L2 readers who are considered
underprepared for their academic work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Patricia L. Carrell and Andrew Cohen for their valuable feedback on earlier
versions of this paper and the two anonymous readers for their valuable insights and
suggestions.

THE AUTHOR
La D. Kamhi-Stein is an associate professor at California State University, Los
Angeles, where she teaches in the TESOL MA Program. Her teaching interests are
ESL/EFL methodology, the teaching practicum, and computer-assisted language
learning. Her research interests are academic literacy, teacher education, and
nonnative-English-speaking professionals.

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Series, Research Report No 11). Tempe: Arizona State University. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED201972)
Olson, G. M., Duffy, S. A., & Mack, R. L. (1984). Thinking-out-loud as a method for
studying real-time comprehension processes. In D. E. Kieras & M. A. Just (Eds.),
New methods in reading comprehension research (pp. 253286). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pressley, M., & Aferbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of
constructively responsive reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Real Academia Espaola. (1970). Diccionario de la lengua espaola [Dictionary of the
Spanish language] (19th ed.). Madrid: Editorial Espasa-Calpe.
Ruz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8, 1534.
Smith, H. L. (1999). Bilingualism and bilingual education: The childs perspective.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2, 268281.
Tang, H. (1997). The relationship between reading comprehension processes in L1
and L2. Reading Psychology: An International Quarterly, 18, 249301.
Wade, S. E. (1990). Using think-alouds to assess comprehension. The Reading Teacher,
43, 442453.
Wiley, T. (1996). Language planning and policy. In S. L. McKay & N. H. Hornberger
(Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language teaching (pp. 103147). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

APPENDIX A
Think-Aloud Texts
En rapport, in Opposition: Cobrando cuentas a las nuestras 1
Watch for Falling Rocks
The rst time I drove from El Paso to San Diego, I saw a sign that read Watch for Falling Rocks.
And though I watched and waited for rocks to roll down the steep cliff walls and attack my car
and me, I never saw any falling rocks. Today, one of the things Im most afraid of are the rocks
we throw at each other. And the resultant guilt we carry like a corpse strapped to our backs for

1
From Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (3rd ed., pp. 540546), by P. Rothenberg,
Ed., 1995. Copyright by P. Rothenberg. Reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

67

having thrown rocks. We colored women have memories like elephants. The slightest hurt is
recorded deep within. We do not forget the injury done to us and we do not forget the injury
we have done another. For unfortunately we do not have hides like elephants. Our vulnerability
is measured by our capacity for openness, intimacy. And we all know that our own kind is driven
through shame or self-hatred to poke at all our open wounds. And we know they know exactly
where the hidden wounds are.
I keep track of all distinctions. Between past and present. Pain and pleasure. Living and
surviving. Resistance and capitulation. Will and circumstances. Between life and death. Yes. I
am scrupulously accurate. I have become a keeper of accounts.Irena Klepsz
One of the changes that Ive seen since This Bridge Called My Back was published is that we no
longer allow white women to efface us or suppress us. Now we do it to each other. We have
taken over the missionarys lets civilize the savage role, xating on the wrongness and moral
or political inferiority of some of our sisters, insisting on a profound difference between oneself
and the Other. We have been indoctrinated into adopting the old imperialist ways of conquering
and dominating, adopting a way of confrontation based on differences while standing on the
ground of ethnic superiority.
In the dominant phase of colonialism, European colonizers exercise direct control of the
colonized, destroy the native legal and cultural systems, and negate non-European civilizations
in order to ruthlessly exploit the resources of the subjugated with the excuse of attempting to
civilize them. Before the end of this phase, the natives internalize Western culture. By the time
we reach the neocolonialist phase, weve accepted the white colonizers system of values,
attitudes, morality, and modes of production. It is not by chance that in the more rural towns
of Texas Chicano neighborhoods are called colonias rather than barrios.
There have always been those of us who have cooperated with the colonizers. Its not that
we have been won over by the dominant culture, but that it has exploited pre-existing power
relations of subordination and subjugation within our native societies. The great White ripoff
and they are still cashing in. Like our exploiters who xate on the inferiority of the natives, we
xate on the fucked-upness of our sisters. Like them we try to impose our version of the ways
things should be, we try to impose ones self on the Other by making her the recipient of ones
negative elements, usually the same elements that the Anglo projected on us. Like them, we
project our self-hatred on her; we stereotype her, we make her generic.

Just How Ethnic Are You?

One of the reasons for this hostility among us is the forced cultural penetration, the rape of
the colored by the white, with the colonizers depositing their perspective, their language, their
values in our bodies. External oppression is paralleled with our internalization of that
oppression. And our acting out from that oppression. They have us doing to those within our
own ranks what they have done and continue to do to us Othering people. That is, isolating
them, pushing them out of the herd, ostracizing them. The internalization of negative images
of ourselves, our self-hatred, poor self-esteem, makes our own people the Other. We shun the
white-looking Indian, the high yellow Black woman, the Asian with the white lover, the Native
woman who brings her white girl friend to the Pow Wow, the Chicana who doesnt speak
Spanish, the academic, the uneducated. Her difference makes her a person we cant trust. Para
que sea legal, she must pass the ethnic legitimacy test we have devised. And it is exactly our
internalized whiteness that desperately wants boundary lines (this part of me is Mexican, this
Indian) marked out and woe to any sister or any part of us that steps out of our assigned places,
woe to anyone who doesnt measure up to our standards of ethnicity. Si no cualifica, if she fails
to pass the test, le aventamos mierda en la cara, le aventamos piedras, la aventamos. We throw shit in
her face, we throw rocks, we kick her out. Como gallos de pelea nos atacamos unas a las otra
mexicanas de nacimiento contra the born-again mexicanas. Like ghting cocks, razor blades
strapped to our ngers, we slash out at each other. We have turned our anger against ourselves.
And our anger is immense. Es un acido que corroe.

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Linda Chvez 2
Como en un cuento de hadas, la hija de un humilde campesino tejano alcanza una carrera
brillante como dirigente sindical en Estados Unidos. Pero en su historia no hay encantos ni
hechizos, solo dedicacin y mucho esfuerzo.

Por Orietta Madrigal

Cuando Linda Chvez-Thompson ocup el puesto de vice-presidenta ejecutiva de la AFLCIO
(Federacin Americana del Trabajo y Congreso de las Organizaciones Industriales) en 1995,
millones de latinos residentes en Estados Unidos se sintieron inmensamente orgullosos de que
fuera una mxico-americana quien llegara a esta importante posicin en la organizacin
sindical ms grande del pas.
Lo que seran sus primeros pasos en las lides sindicales comenzaron cuando apenas tena 20
aos. Todo empez cuando su to la recomend al agente del sindicato local de Lubbock,
Texas, la ciudad donde viva. All necesitaban una secretaria bilinge, debido a que ms del 65
por ciento de los miembros eran mxico-americanos. Linda no perdi tiempo en presentarse
en el lugar y as obtuvo el empleo. Corran los aos sesenta ye en aquel entonces ella era una
joven sin experiencia que slo haba trabajado en labores de limpieza. Linda recuerda as su
segundo trabajo como secretaria:
Al poco tiempo de trabajar all, cre nuevos procedimientos de contratacin y logr una
mejor comunicacin con los miembros del sindicato. La situacin existente me fue llevando a
involucrarme cada vez ms en la ayuda a los trabajadores. Hoy considero que en aquel
momento respond ms a un llamado que a una decisin personal.

Un remedio para su dolor

Linda naci en Lorenzo, un pequeo pueblo de Texas, situado a 20 millas de Lubbock,
donde creci. Su familia, muy humilde, estaba compuesta de sus padres y 8 hermanos. Su padre
era un campesino texano que se dedicaba a la cosecha y recogida de algodn. Linda, al igual
que sus hermanos mayores, comenz a trabajar en los campos de algodn siendo apenas una
nia.
Eran largas horas de faena, recuerda. Trabajbamos en las plantaciones de algodn
durante diez horas al da, de lunes a viernes durante el verano, y en invierno lo recogamos
despus de las clases, incluso los sbados.
Para Linda, todo hubiera marchado bien si su padre no le hubiera pedido que abandonara
los estudios. Era necesario que ella trabajara jornadas completas para poder ayudar a sustentar
su hogar. Apenas haba terminado el noveno grado y su sueo era poder entrar a la universidad.
Su sueo haba sido tronchado por el trabajo de limpiar casas y granjas a cambio de un
salario nada envidiable: un dlar por hora. Pero, en poco tiempo, la necesidad la ayud a
encontrar un remedio para su dolor.
Trataba de leer cuanto libro cayera en mis manos, recuerda Linda hoy. Cuando no poda
comprarlos, los peda prestados. Era la mejor forma que tena de aprender con lo que tena a
mi alcance.
Despus que cumpli los 20 aos, se cas con Jos Luis Ramrezel padre de sus dos hijos:
Marisela y Pedro Javiery ambos trabajaron en una compaa de limpieza. Para la joven tejana,
la vida segua siendo muy dura.
Sin embargo, algo le deca que no poda rendirse. Y ese momento lleg. Nunca se sinti tan
segura de su sueo como cuando trabaj ayudando a los damnicados de un tornado que
arras a Lubbock en 1970. Fue suciente para saber que era capaz de hacer cosas y de cambiar
otras.
Entonces Linda decidi que no regresara ms a su puesto de secretaria. Iba a luchar y a
tratar de ayudar a otros, cuenta emocionada.
Hoy lleva ms de treinta aos hacindolo y, al contrario de lo que la gente se imagina, Linda
no tiene queja alguna de discriminacin en el cargo que ocupa. Ni siquiera por ser mujer: Ese
punto de ser mujer no fue preocupacin para mi. Yo fui capaz de trabajar a la par de ellos y
pude mantenerme rme hasta lograr el respeto que yo senta que mereca, arma Linda.
2
From Linda Chvez, by O. Madrigal, 1998, Cristina: La Revista, 7(12), pp. 5253.
Copyright Cristina: La Revista. Reprinted with permission of Cristina: La Revista.

READING IN TWO LANGUAGES

69

APPENDIX B
Prior Knowledge Assessment
English Text
1. What did the European colonizers do when they came to America?
2. What does efface mean?
3. What does indoctrinate mean?

Spanish Text
1. Qu es una cenicienta?
2. Qu es una organizacin sindical?
3. Conoces a Linda Chvez?

APPENDIX C
Interview Protocol (English Version)3
Would you like to be interviewed in English or Spanish?
1. How did you learn English?
2. What does the word reading mean to you?
3. What are the characteristics of good and poor readers? What are the differences between
good and poor readers? Are you a good reader in Spanish? Are you a good reader in
English? Please explain.
4. What are the characteristics of a reader who has learned ESL and of a reader who is a
native English speaker? Are there any differences between the two?
5. What does a person need to know to be a good English reader? To be a good Spanish
reader? Is there a difference?
6. Does being able to read in English help you to read in Spanish? Explain.
7. Does being able to read in Spanish help you to read in English? How?
8. Does being bilingual help you or hurt you when you read? Please explain.
9. Is reading English different from reading Spanish? If so, how?
10. Why do you read?
11. What kind of materials do you read in Spanish? And in English?
12. Do you ever translate from English into Spanish when reading English? If so, please
describe what you do.
13. Do you ever translate from Spanish into English when reading Spanish? If so, please
describe what you do.

APPENDIX D
Self-Assessment Inventory
The purpose of this questionnaire is to collect information about your reading skills and needs.
Please make an X in the boxes or ll in the spaces below where appropriate.
1. How well would you say you are able to read in Spanish?
very well
well
not well
poorly
very poorly
3

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The Spanish version is available from the author.

TESOL QUARTERLY

2. How well would you say you are able to read in English?
very well
well
not well
poorly
very poorly
3. How well would you say you understand what you read in English?
very well
well
not well
poorly
very poorly
4. How well would you say you are able to read in English?
very well
well
not well
poorly
very poorly
What do you believe are your main difculties when reading in English? Mark all that apply:
Yes
No
5. Vocabulary

6. Comprehension

7. Concentration

8. Speed

9. Fatigue

10. Boredom

11. Other. Please specify:

APPENDIX E
Multiple-Choice, True-False, and Fill-in-the-Blank Questions
English Text
Answer the questions below. You may look over the article.
1. Gloria Anzalda believes that women of color easily forget when they are hurt or when they
hurt other people.
Right or wrong? Please explain.
2. According to Anzalda, European colonizers conquered by:
a. understanding the natives values
b. destroying the natives cultural system
3. Anzalda believes that colored women are like the colonizers because
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
4. By othering people, Anzalda means:
a. identifying with people
b. disqualifying people
c. believing in people
d. dissenting with people

Spanish Text
Responde las preguntas a continuacin. Puedes mirar el texto.
1. Linda comenz su carrera sindical como __________________
a. secretaria bilinge
b. campesina
c. empleada de limpieza
d. voluntaria
2. La familia en la que naci Linda era muy pequea. Verdad o mentira? Explica tu eleccin.
3. Linda comenz a trabajar cuando cumpli 30 aos. Verdad o mentira? Explica tu eleccin.
4. Cuando Linda termin el noveno grado,
a. entr a la universidad
c. entr a limpiar casas y granjas
b. entr a trabajar en plantaciones
d. entr a trabajar como secretaria
de algodn
en un sindicato
5. Linda siempre estuvo interesada en la lectura. Verdad o mentira? Explica tu eleccin.

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71

Fine Brush and Freehand 1:

The Vocabulary-Learning Art of
Two Successful Chinese EFL Learners
PETER YONGQI GU
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore

Two successful non-English-major EFL learners at Beijing Normal

University took part in a think-aloud and an interview session, respectively, on how they handled vocabulary learning during and after
reading. Results show that, like successful learners everywhere, these
learners (a) saw vocabulary as but one aspect of language learning that
needs to be integrated with language use, (b) demonstrated high levels
of self-initiation and selective attention, and (c) employed a wide range
of vocabulary-learning strategies. The two learners also displayed revealing differences in learning style. Their highly exible, skilful integration and execution of strategies may be due to a combination of
Chinese conceptions of learning, traditional schooling, and literacy
practice, the prevailing methods for teaching and learning English in
China, the demands of the vocabulary-learning task, and individual
learning style.

successful learner is in effect a learning theorist (Brown, Bransford,

Ferrara, & Campione, 1983). The strategies such learners decide to
use are determined by their analysis of the task at hand, their own
learning characteristics, and the learning context. Empirical work on
language learning strategies has come to the conclusion that good
learners are good because they know where their strengths are and when
to use certain strategies to tackle certain learning problems exibly
(Cohen, 1998).
This article illustrates the interwoven relationship among person, task,
context, and learning strategies by focusing on two successful Chinese
learners of vocabulary in an input-poor Chinese EFL context. It shows
1
One way to classify Chinese paintings is into the categories fine brush (gongbi ) and freehand
(xieyi). The rst school is characterised by meticulous attention to detail, and the second, by
simple, bold, and expressive strokes.

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

73

how vocabulary learning and learning strategies are inuenced by a

learning culture that differs from the orthodox conceptions of learning
championed by theorists and researchers in the West. It also demonstrates how these two learners wielded their particular congurations of
strategies masterfully in the art of vocabulary learning.

LEARNING STRATEGIES:
PERSON, TASK, AND CONTEXT
Chinese Learners and the Chinese Culture of Learning
Teachers and researchers often describe Chinese learners as rote
learners who learn mechanically without meaningful understanding
(Ballard & Clanchy, 1984; Bradley & Bradley, 1984; Samuelowicz, 1987).
Some researchers kindheartedly attempt to teach their Asian learners
better, deeper, and more sophisticated learning strategies, often resulting in ungrateful resistance from these learners (OMalley, Chamot,
Stewner-Manzanares, Kupper, & Russo, 1985; Politzer & McGroarty,
1985). Anecdotes abound, and feelings are strong. However, surprisingly
little empirical research has investigated how Chinese learners go about
achieving their equally often reported academic success with these socalled rote learning strategies. Still fewer researchers have tried to
explain the apparent discrepancy between learning strategy and learning
result.
The most comprehensive attempt at explaining the paradox of
Chinese learners achieving academic success using rote strategies and
surface learning approaches was a collection edited by Watkins and Biggs
(1996). These researchers argued that learning should be construed in
context and that Chinese learners do not t into Western learning
theories because such theories impose Western cultural concepts on the
understanding of Chinese learners learning process. Biggs (1996), for
example, made a distinction between rote learning, that is, mechanical
learning without meaning, and repetitive learning, which uses repetition as a means of ensuring accurate recall (p. 54). He argued that
whereas the use of repetition as a strategy is more common in Confucianheritage cultures (p. 46) due to traditional beliefs about learning and
Chinas longstanding examination culture, Westerners often mistake
repetition for rote learning. Likewise, Marton, DallAlba, and Tses
(1996) interview study of Chinese conceptions of learning revealed that,
for Chinese learners, memorisation and understanding are not mutually
exclusive. Furthermore, memorisation with understanding could include both memorising what is understood and understanding through
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TESOL QUARTERLY

memorisation (p. 77). Marton et al. concluded that the Western notion
of rote learning does not seem to capture adequately practices associated
with memorisation and repetition in the Chinese learning culture.

Vocabulary Learning
Applied linguists contend that learning vocabulary in a foreign
language is much more than making form-meaning correspondences
and simply piling up individual words (Nation, 2001; Richards, 1976).
Knowing a word means knowing at least its form, its meaning, and its
basic usage in context receptively and productively. A word is also related
to other words in the mental lexicon along paradigmatic and syntagmatic
dimensions.
A crucial distinction is often made between knowing a word and using
a word; that is, for every vocabulary item, there is a knowledge dimension
and a skill dimension. Knowing a word should only be a prerequisite for,
and does not necessarily entail, using the word automatically in a wide
range of contexts (McCarthy, 1984). In fact, evidence suggests that the
knowledge aspect requires conscious and explicit learning mechanisms
whereas the skill aspect involves mostly implicit learning and memory
(Ellis, 1994).
Vocabulary-learning strategies, therefore, should include strategies for
using as well as for knowing a word. Knowledge-oriented strategies
include those for remembering form-meaning pairs (e.g., most mnemonic devices); skill-oriented strategies involve the use of words in
meaningful contexts and aim to develop automaticity in retrieving and
producing those words (e.g., reading extensively and deliberately using a
newly learned word in ones own writing). And perhaps more importantly, neither knowledge nor skill should be neglected. In other words,
teachers and learners should aim for integration rather than separation
of knowledge-oriented strategies based on depth of processing and skilloriented strategies based on the frequency, recency, and regularity of
appearance and the power law2 of practice.

2
According to the power law of learning, which has been found to be a ubiquitous rule
governing the acquisition of skills (Anderson, 1982; Kolers, 1979; Neves & Anderson, 1981),
rapid increases in speed occur during initial stages of learning and performance, after which
speed improves only slightly and over a long period of time. Expressed in terms of logarithms,
the logarithm of the time to perform a task is a linear function of the logarithm of the number
of practice trials.

FINE BRUSH AND FREEHAND

75

Empirical Work on Vocabulary-Learning Strategies

If Chinese students have traditionally been seen as rote learners, their
foreign language vocabulary learning has been associated with word lists
and repetition. Fortunately, the eld is much more mature now, as
evidenced by the robust line of empirical research on deep processing
strategies such as mnemonics and semantic mediation. Another area that
has received extensive attention in recent years (most notably by Coady
& Huckin, 1997; Huckin, Haynes, & Coady, 1993; Wesche & Paribakht,
1999) and has shed signicant light upon the understanding of vocabulary acquisition is incidental learning through reading (see Huckin &
Coady, 1999, for a review). Nevertheless, intentional learning of vocabulary has not received its fair share of research effort, and the majority of
research has concentrated on the what (the target or product) rather
than the how (the process) of vocabulary learning (Crow, 1986; McNeill,
1990; Meara, 1980).
A number of studies have focused on naturally occurring vocabularylearning strategies. Most have used a quantitative approach and tried to
nd patterns (e.g., Ahmed, 1989; Gu & Johnson, 1996; Kojic-Sabo &
Lightbown, 1999); others have attempted to closely observe learners
strategy choice and use (Parry, 1991, 1993, 1997; Sanaoui, 1995). Besides
establishing a link between students choice and use of individual
vocabulary-learning strategies on one hand and their language learning
outcomes on the other, all the studies mentioned above found that
learners seemed to fall into types and that each type was associated with
preferred strategy combinations. Ahmeds (1989) cluster analysis of
think-aloud data from 300 Sudanese learners of English produced three
clusters of good and two clusters of poor learners. A previous large-scale
survey of 850 Chinese EFL learners (Gu & Johnson, 1996) also produced
ve clusters of learners with distinctive preferences for vocabularylearning strategies. Of particular interest here are the two types of good
learners in that study. One cluster, active strategy users, were characterised
as hardworking and motivated, using a wide range of strategies. The
other type of good learners, readers, whose self-initiation was equally
strong, used a narrower range of strategies that were associated mainly
with reading and contextual learning.
Despite the interesting patterns seen in the quantitative studies, they
do not show how a particular type of strategy is used in the development
of vocabulary. In this regard, the qualitative approach has been insightful. Parrys exemplary case studies (e.g., Parry, 1991) showed not only
how vocabulary development was achieved over time but also how it was
associated with two styles of vocabulary learning, holistic and analytic.
More importantly, Parry (1997) concluded that both approaches are

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necessary but that neither is appropriate at all times and that students
need to develop exibility (p. 67). Similarly, Sanaouis (1995) case
studies illustrated two distinct styles of vocabulary learning, a structured
approach characterised by systematic planning, organising, and studying, and an unstructured approach with little self-management. Unlike
Parry, however, Sanaoui found that learners who had a structured
learning approach were more successful in retaining vocabulary taught
in their classes than learners who had an unstructured learning approach (p. 26) and that the structured approach was more effective
than the unstructured approach for both beginning and advanced
learners.

The Current Study

Although different tasks demand different strategies, learners bring
with them preferred learning styles, which might initiate strategies that
relate more to the learner than to the task. Likewise, learners from
different linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds cannot be
expected to benet from the same strategies in the same manner. In this
regard, this study focuses on Chinese EFL learners, arguably the largest
group of English learners in the world and one that is understudied and
often stereotyped.
In particular, in this study I examine two successful adult Chinese EFL
learners and portray in detail what they do in vocabulary learning. I
show, for example, how these learners conduct rote learning such as
memorising word lists.3 In so doing, I attempt to account for the
apparent discrepancy between the rote style of learning and the high
levels of success achieved by these learners. This study also attempts to
conrm what other researchers (e.g., Ahmed, 1989; Gu & Johnson, 1996;
Parry, 1997) have indicated, directly or indirectly: that learners can
achieve success through different approaches to and styles of learning. I
examine three stages of learning a word (Brown & Payne, 1994; Gu &
Johnson, 1996): (a) initially identifying and handling a new word, (b)
committing the word to memory, and (c) attempting to use the newly
learned word.
The focus is on the learning of vocabulary through intensive reading,
the single most important source of English input in the Chinese EFL

3
Word lists here refer to decontextualised lists of words, including lists compiled by learners
from various sources and dictionary-type lists of words in alphabetical order, and including
simple lists of L1-L2 meaning equivalents and more sophisticated lists containing, for example,
L1 equivalents, L2 synonyms, usage information, and examples.

FINE BRUSH AND FREEHAND

77

context. Intensive reading is a reading-based intensive language training

course on which students and teachers in China spend most of their
time. For Chinese students, intensive reading means much more than
reading for in-depth comprehension. Its aims are at least twofold:
reading to comprehend texts and reading to learn English, the latter
being probably the most important form of English learning in China. In
a typical intensive reading session, the teacher goes over the text
(normally around 1,000 words in length) sentence by sentence, explains
the meaning, claries the grammar, pinpoints important and difcult
vocabulary items, and shows how to use them. Conscientious students
preview the text and locate difculties of textual understanding and
vocabulary usage before class, listen to the teachers explanations in
class, and review the text after class by rereading it and revisiting new
words.
In addition, this report illustrates the role of metacognitive knowledge
and beliefs and metacognitive control (Flavell, 1979; Wenden, 1987) in
successful language learning. In particular, the report shows how the
learners orchestrated their beliefs, made strategic choices, and deployed
their strategies.

METHOD
Participants
Participants were chosen from 978 third-year non-English majors at
Beijing Normal University based on their scores on the annual nationwide English prociency test, College English Test (CET) Band 4. All
students took the test at the end of their fourth semester, about 3 months
before this study took place. All 27 students (fewer than 3%) scoring
above 90 (maximum possible score = 100) were contacted. Eleven
participated in this study; most others were not available due to the
summer holidays.
A preliminary analysis of the data based primarily on the type and
number of strategies these participants used revealed two types of
learners (obtained as described below). Nine of the 11 followed their
textbooks closely and paid meticulous attention to details; the other 2
focused on large quantities of extracurricular reading (cf. active strategy
users and readers in Gu & Johnson, 1996). Two participants, 1 exemplifying each type, were selected for case study in this report (see Table 1).
The top student of the year, Chi Wei,4 who scored 96.5%, epitomised the
4

78

Names of participants are pseudonyms.

TESOL QUARTERLY

rst group. Another top student, Chen Hua, who scored 91.0%, was
selected to represent the second group. In choosing these 2 subjects, I
considered only how well they represented each of the two groups and
disregarded gender and social class.

Instruments
Task
The task was a familiar one to all participants: read a text similar to
their intensive reading textbook passages and verbalise their strategies
for handling new vocabulary items they encountered during reading.
Any contextual vocabulary learning normally starts from an initial
encounter and handling of a new word. At this stage, students would
quickly decide whether they could guess the word or whether learning
the word required dictionary work or note taking. They would then
decide whether committing the word to memory required conscious
effort. A student might try to use words considered to be particularly
valuable. Decontextualised word-list learning is only one of the stages a
learner might go through in learning words. A student may or may not
employ list learning exclusively (see Ahmed, 1989; Brown & Payne,
1994).

Text
All subjects read an intensive reading passage on pollution in Athens
(Walter, 1982, pp. 4851; see Appendix A). This text was selected

TABLE 1
Participants
Characteristic
Sex
Age
Department
Grade
College entrance English score (%)
CET Band 4 score (%)
Years of English study
Previous school
Parents occupation

FINE BRUSH AND FREEHAND

Chi Wei
Male
21
Radio electronics
Year 3, Semester 1
80
96.5
8
Provincial key school
Peasants

Chen Hua
Female
21
Chemistry
Year 3, Semester 1
86
91.0
9
Beijing municipal key school
Teachers

79

because it was not available to the participants and because it was similar
in genre and difculty level to the texts in their textbook. A pilot newword density analysis among 13 randomly selected third-year nonEnglish majors at the same university revealed that the texts ratio of
familiar to unfamiliar words was 43.7:1.0 (about 98% vocabulary coverage, the safe threshold for text comprehension and learning; see Laufer,
e.g., 1992, for details).
The text was broken up into meaningful segments, normally sentences or long clauses, depending on the length of the sentence. These
segments were separated by means of small red strokes, which acted as
reminders for the subjects to stop reading and verbalise their thinking
processes (Cohen, 1998).

Think-Aloud Protocols
I obtained think-aloud protocols on reading processes as well as on
vocabulary learning during and after reading. For learning strategy
researchers who focus not only on strategic behaviours but also on the
decision-making processes that lead to these behaviours, the use of
verbal reports, arguably the best available means to get into the learners
mind, so to speak, is standard practice (Cohen, 1998). Most concerns
about verbal reports centre on the intrusive effect of think-aloud
techniques (see Ericsson & Simon, 1993, for a review of the pros and
cons of verbal reports). However, relative to tasks on cognitive processing, thinking aloud should intrude less on tasks that focus on the
conscious strategies being attended to. In addition, careful planning and
training, and thinking aloud at sentence intervals, help reduce the
intrusive effect (Cohen, 1998).

Interviews
To capture information on strategies that think-aloud data could not
reveal, I conducted two types of interviews: immediate retrospective
interviews and general interviews. The immediate retrospective interviews were based on eld notes of subjects performance, and were thus
individualised and spontaneous. In the general interview, however, all
participants were asked roughly the same questions (see Appendix B).
The purpose of the immediate retrospective interview was to elicit taskspecic vocabulary-learning strategies, whereas that of the general interview was to uncover general vocabulary-learning strategies and beliefs as
well as emotional reactions to vocabulary learning.

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Procedures
To become familiar with the think-aloud procedure, the participants
took part in a 1020 minute training session. They were informed about
the purpose of the study and asked to read a text entitled The Town
That Kids Built (Walter, 1982, pp. 2831) that is similar in new-word
density to the passage used in the study. Subjects were told to read the
passage in exactly the same way as they would usually read a passage from
their intensive reading textbook before the text is taught, a common
practice among Chinese EFL learners. They were asked to verbalise
everything in their minds as they went through the passage. Audio
recordings of all think-aloud tasks after the training session were
obtained with the explicit approval of the subjects.
After the training session, strategies for (a) initially identifying and
handling new words in context and (b) remembering new words after
initial reading were elicited through the intensive reading passage on
pollution in Athens. The participants were then asked what they usually
did after reading and processing their intensive reading text. All participants indicated that they would try to remember the new words in a
decontextualised list, resulting in a list-learning session immediately after
reading. Think-aloud protocols were audiotaped as subjects carried out
these tasks. Immediately after, I conducted a retrospective interview to
elicit specic strategies not voiced during the think-aloud sessions (e.g.,
I notice you paused for a while at Line [X]. What were you thinking at
the moment?). One week later, I interviewed the subjects on their
general learning strategies. To obtain accurate information on strategy
use while not overburdening the participants with L2 processing (Cohen,
1998), I conducted all think-aloud and interview sessions in Chinese.
Data shown in this article are English translations.

Analyses
After transcribing the think-aloud and interview data, I derived
categories from existing research (e.g., OMalley & Chamot, 1990) and
the transcriptions. I then applied these categories to the data to identify
the strategies each participant used, for what purposes, and in what
context. A Chinese EFL teacher who was experienced in teaching college
students in Beijing also coded the data; our coding matched more than
80% of the time. I resolved disagreements through discussion with a
third coder, another experienced learning-strategy researcher. Results of
the strategy analysis along with my observations and the interviews were
used as evidence for how the learners handled vocabulary learning
through reading, and how they tried to remember and use new words.
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RESULTS
Data from the think-aloud protocols and interviews yielded a description of each participants vocabulary learning in general and examples
showing how they had learned a particular new word. In presenting
these data, I describe the following vocabulary-learning activities: how
the learners selectively attended to different vocabulary items, how they
guessed using contextual clues, how they looked up a word in the
dictionary, whether and how the learners noted down the word for later
reference, how the word was committed to memory through list learning, and how the learners used the word. I also draw conclusions about
what might have made the learners successful and how they differed
from each other as language learners. I then relate these two successful
learners strategy patterns to current theories of vocabulary learning,
and attempt to construe their strategies of vocabulary learning in terms
of their particular conguration of task, person, and learning context.

Chi Wei: Learning to Excel

Whatever I learn, I always aim to be the best, at least among the best. . . . As
far as English is concerned, I think being able to speak is the most important.
Sure we learn English to pass tests, but itll be such a pity if you cant use it.
When youre speaking English, you feel youve learned the real thing. . . . I go
to the China-Canada Language Centre [an English training centre at Beijing
Normal University providing training for the CanTest] privately just to talk to
someone in English, and I go to the English Corner very often. I also mumble
to myself in English.

Vocabulary Learning From Reading

Chi Wei read the passage three times: an initial reading for gist, a
detailed reading for vocabulary learning, and a nal reading for overall
comprehension. Table 2 shows the new vocabulary items Chi Wei
identied and the way he reported handling each one. He treated
different words in different ways: Words that he regarded as commonly
used he not only guessed at and looked up in the dictionary but also
reinforced intentionally later so as to commit them to memory.
During the rst reading, Chu Wei went through the passage trying to
get the gist. He underlined words that were unfamiliar to him and words
he thought he would go back to later. He guessed at the meaning of
unfamiliar words at this stage, and did not bother to stop reading and
check them in the dictionary. In the second reading, he scanned the
passage for his underlined words and any other unfamiliar words he had
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TABLE 2
Chi Weis Treatment of New Words and Phrases
Word or
phrase
honk
horn
smart
choke
sense
Plato
Pericles
sewerage
hem
ruins
in ruin
marble
Parthenon
eat away
treasure
Acropolis
Premier
Constantine
Karamanlis
hinterland
citizenry
killing level
issue
representative
ministry
unclog
in-migration
stay put
master plan
fringe
in the works
literally
suffocate

Initial guessing
(rst reading)

Dictionary work Reinforcement 1 Reinforcement 2

(second reading) (third reading)
(after reading)

overlooked during the rst reading. He then looked up these words in

his dictionary and located the meaning that he thought was appropriate
to the context. For words that were important and interesting to him, he
looked up information on usage, and other meanings and usage that had
little to do with the context. Occasionally, he browsed through the page
in the dictionary on which he found the target word to see if there were
any other words of particular interest to himfor example, words that
resembled the target word in spelling or sound and would be easily
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confused with it. Sometimes he became so interested in a word he found

in a denition that he went on to look up that word.
During the second reading, Chi Wei took two types of notes. For words
that he thought were especially interesting and useful to him, he noted
down meanings, usage, and sometimes examples on a piece of paper,
which served as his notebook (see Figure 1). Also included in his notes
were pronunciations of words that he thought were difcult (e.g.,
sewerage) and synonyms from the text and from his own vocabulary
repertoire. For example, in writing hem: n. edge, fringe; v. hem in:
enclose, surround in his notes, Chi Wei identied hem, hem in, and
fringe, which appeared in the reading text, as new vocabulary items but
retrieved edge, enclose, and surround from his own lexical repertoire. Thus
he not only regrouped and hence recoded words semantically for
himself, linking new words with words he already knew, but also classied
words according to their grammatical functions (here, the part of
speech). For the rest of the unfamiliar words that were useful in text
comprehension, he wrote their meanings along the margins or between
the lines of the original text.
Finally, Chi Wei went through the whole text quickly a third time,
focusing on overall understanding of the passage. He paused only when
he thought certain words or phrases were worthy of special attention.

FIGURE 1
Excerpt From Chi Weis Vocabulary Notebook
1. Smart: a blow henhen yi ji
vi. ci tong
as as a new pin feichang xiaosa
2. choke the senses
qiang
ganguan
3. Sewerage /su:rid/ n. wu shui, gou qu xitong
4. Hem
n. bian edge
fringe
v. baowei ( . . . in, shut)
enclose, surround
5. In ruin (lie . . ., be laid . . .)
6. Marble dalishi
7. treacherous
treasure jinyin
treasurer ren
8. Premier of the State Council guowuyuan zongli
9. Hinterland qiongxiang pirang
10. A peoples representative renmin daibiao
11. Stay put liu zai yuan chu budong
12. Suffocate, be ed with (by) excitement
13. In the works
Note. Italics represent Chinese characters in the original.

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After he had read the text three times, Chi Wei usually reinforced
vocabulary items he had identied as unfamiliar or partially familiar
during reading, which included 32 vocabulary items (about 8% of the
entire text). He paid by far the most attention to the words and phrases
he had written in his notebook. First, he glanced quickly at his denition/explanation of each item in either Chinese or English and looked
away to recall the original English word or phrase. Words that he thought
were long or difcult to spellfor example, treasurer he scribbled
rapidly on a piece of paper. He attempted to recall not just the words
referential meaning but everything he had gone through to understand
a particular item, from the contextual meaning to other related or
unrelated meanings, and from words that looked similar, to synonyms, to
phrases and examples he had found in the dictionary (e.g., treasure,
treasurer, treacherous). He also made up sentences using some of the items
of special interest to him. Finally, he went through his list swiftly two
more times, rst from the top down and then from the bottom up. The
whole process, interview time excluded, took roughly 90 minutes.

An Example From Chi Wei: Smart

Chi Weis treatment of the verb smart illustrates his vocabularylearning procedures during and after reading. First encountering the
verb during his initial reading, he inferred its meaning from its word
class and his general knowledge before deciding to underline the word
and postpone thorough study of it until he had nished reading the
passage:
I know its an adjective, but here it must be a verb, a verb. Smart the eyes
must be hurting the eyes. Im not absolutely sure about it, though. Should
have it conrmed later. Needs to be carefully studied when I have time later.

After getting the gist of the passage, he focused on the details. This
time, he went directly into the dictionary to look up the underlined
word, again using the part of speech to locate the applicable meaning
among all the meanings in the dictionary entry:
Smart is usually an adjective, but it doesnt seem to be an adjective here. Smarts
[reading from dictionary] smart, smart is denitely not an adjective here, so
Ill go for the verb. Oh, there is such a meaning for smart, it means to sting.

He then tried to put the meaning back into the context and test his
hypothesis: No? Smarts the eyes . . . oh, yes, it is to sting. So its this
meaning, then.
After Chi Wei had found the right meaning of smart for the context,
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he went on to use the dictionary as a learning tool, paying special

attention to phrases that he thought were commonly used: Let me see if
therere any set expressions that go with it. Aah, I see an adjective with a
related meaning here. A smart blow, a smart blow, a good beating. This,
need to remember this. At the same time, he was monitoring his own
performance and reminding himself that his dictionary expedition
should be centred on the contextual meaning: I need to go back to the
verb. For the verb, its only the meaning to sting.
Next, Chi Wei looked for information on the usage of smart, attending
only to information that interested him:
Let me see the example sentences. Wha- whats this? It can be an intransitive
verb, and then, feeling painful, with, from, from. Heres an expression,
but I dont want to remember it. Cant remember everything anyway. Are
there any other expressions? As smart as a new pin, very handsome, ahh,
this Ill remember. Very handsome is something quite often used.

At this point, he was bemused by the word pin and could not resist
looking it up in the dictionary to learn what it had to do with looking
smart. Realising that he could not solve his problem, he decided just to
remember the phrase as it was and wrote it down in his vocabulary notes.
During the third reading of the text, Chi Wei reinforced what he had
learned during the second reading:
Smog smarts the eyes and chokes the senses. Now here, when I come across
smart, when I read smarts the eyes, I tell myself to remember it, to
remember smarts the eyes, its to sting the eyes painfully. And also chokes
the senses, because I remember I took it down in the notes. Now I better
reinforce it. Its no more than telling myself to pay attention to it, and Ill
certainly read on.

Chi Weis last step in learning the word smart was to use it. During the
list-learning session after reading, he looked at the Chinese equivalents
in his notes, recalled the original English words and phrases, and made
up his own sentences in English for the two phrases that interested him.
He repeated each sentence at least twice: I gave him a smart blow
yesterday; He is as smart as a new pin, telling himself how useful each
sentence was and laughing, perhaps about the contexts in which these
sentences could be used. By this time, Chi Wei was well aware that he had
learned a useful word.

List Learning
Learning English without memorising words, that must be daydreaming! Chi Wei stressed the importance of list learning in the subsequent
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interview. He saw list learning as a major strategy for vocabulary learning,

not just a supplement to other strategies. This section summarises the
interview data on how Chi Wei learned vocabulary through lists.
Whats in the textbooks certainly needs to be remembered. And the
next thing I have in mind is to expand beyond that. Perhaps like the
majority of Chinese learners, Chi Wei was course centred, and his
ambition was to excel in examinations. His priority was to fulll all the
requirements of the textbooks and remember all the new words that
appeared there. Unlike the majority of learners, however, he did not stop
there; he wanted to build a larger vocabulary so as to ensure better
performance on examinations. This self-initiated, well-planned, almost
ruthlessly implemented vocabulary expansion goal involved three types
of work:
1. memorising examination-oriented word lists: Word lists of this kind he had
memorised in the previous 2 years included the required word lists
for CET Band 4, CET Band 6, and the English Test for Postgraduate
Matriculation.
2. memorising other word lists and dictionaries: In this category were
learners dictionaries and volumes of commercially available word
lists with Chinese equivalents, basic usage, and example sentences
for each word.
3. paying close attention to English words he encountered in everyday life. For
example, he learned the word jade from a brand of toothpaste with
that name.
To memorise words on commercial word lists in his spare time, Chi
Wei started from page 1, with words beginning with A, and read
through to the last page, to those that began with Z, at least two or three
times, one after another. The rst time he went through the list slowly,
picking out every word he did not know. He read the information
provided on the list and decided if it was enough. Nouns and the like
are easy, he claimed. I just go through them like that. But verbs are
different, especially commonly used verbs and phrasal verbs, you need to
know what precedes them and what follows them. He looked up a new
word on a list in his dictionaries to nd out more about it, read the
examples, and see how it was used. For words he regarded as commonly
used, he made up sentences. The second and subsequent times he went
through the list quickly, using at most one fourth of the time spent in the
rst round. Each time he went through the list he marked the words.
Words he did not remember after the second time he recorded in his
vocabulary notebook as a reminder to give them special attention.
Chi Wei claimed that he rarely attempted to remember the spelling of
words. He placed supreme importance on being able to pronounce a
new word:
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I will normally be able to spell it out if I can pronounce a word, and I seldom
write new words again and again. Words are stored as sounds in my mind. I
remembered only one word letter by letter, student, S-T-U-D-E-N-T, see? And
never again have I ever tried to do that.

He explained that remembering the pronunciation of new words helped

him not only reduce memory load but also speak.
Chi Wei insisted that list learning never bored him:
Theres one principle: I never force myself to remember anything. I just go
over them a couple of times, and they sink in. It may be a little monotonous,
but since I dont put any pressure on myself, I never feel bad about it. I even
enjoy it.

Successful Chinese EFL learners may nd Chi Weis strategies familiar.

After hearing the above description at the data analysis stage, a Chinese
friend immediately shouted, Thats me! Most of Chi Weis learning
strategies (e.g., meticulous study of selected texts, list learning, and
repetition) are either deeply rooted strategies for the acquisition of L1
literacy in Chinese or strategies commonly recommended by Chinese
experts in the eld of foreign languages. For example, some experts
have told of tearing up a dictionary page by page as they learned the
words on each page. The very availability of books that contain nothing
but word lists speaks to how common list learning is in China.

Chen Hua: A Love Affair With English

I enjoy the beauty of English. Probably because I read a lot of prose and
novels, and I dont like their jerky translations, so when I read the original
version, I can, as it were, feel the humanism brimming over the smooth
structure of the sentence. The same thing goes with listening. When I hear
something read beautifully, like a dramatised story with music, it feels like
spring water tinkling through my heart.

Vocabulary Learning From Reading

Chen Hua read the passage twice. She spent 34 minutes going over
the whole passage silently and then started verbalising:
This essay seems to be about a city, the wretched environment of the city. And
it goes on to say something about the measures that the government is taking
in order to reduce environmental pollution and noise pollution and the like.
At rst, I felt I wasnt clear enough about the passage, its logical development
and stuff, and then I felt I needed to read it faster and see what it really is. So
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I didnt underline anything, and thought that I would go for a deeper

understanding of the logical relations and so on when I read it a second time.

Chen Hua started paying attention to details during the second

reading. She identied 15 new vocabulary items: stinking, honk, smart,
Plato, Pericles, sewerage, hem, eat away, marble, hinterland, unclog, stay put,
fringe, literally, and suffocating. She treated these items in one of three
ways: (a) She either guessed their meaning, or she ignored them,
underlined them, and said she would like to hear what the teacher had
to say about them (e.g., smart, Plato, Pericles, literally); (b) she guessed
their meaning, and then looked up other words and wrote down their
meanings (and sometimes their pronunciation) in the margins of the
text (e.g., honk, sewerage, marble, hinterland, stay put, fringe); or (c) she
identied them as unknown, guessed their meanings, looked them up in
her dictionary, wrote down their meanings in the margins of the text
where they appeared, and wrote them on the small cards that often
served as her notebook (e.g., the verbs stink, hem, eat away, unclog, and
suffocate).
Of the words written in the notebook (see Figure 2), two, stink and
suffocate, received more attention than the others. For suffocate, for
example, Chen Hua wrote basically a shortened version of the entry for
the word in A New English-Chinese Dictionary (1985, p. 1388), with
FIGURE 2
Excerpt From Chen Huas Vocabulary Notebook
Stink /stik/ (stank, stunk)

vi. Fa e chou

That sh stinks.
He stank of garlic.
stink with money
stink in somebodys nostrils
vt. Stink somebody out
n. e chou

stinker
hem in the enemy baowei zhu diren
Eat away, boys. Theres enough time yet.
Clog /klg/

n. zhangai, fangai
vt. Zhangai, fangai

unclog
suffocate /sfkeit/ vt. shi . . . zhixi
be suffocated by (with) excitement
suffocate the re
vi. men si, zhixi
suffocation n.
suffocative a. shi ren zhixi de
Note. Italics represent Chinese characters in the original.
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apparent attention to usage. She noted suffocation and suffocative together, but they were separate entries following suffocate in the dictionary.
When asked in the immediate retrospective interview about the
criteria she used in choosing new words to give special attention to, Chen
Hua said,
For proper nouns, terminology and words like that, they normally dont need
special attention. I dont try to remember their example sentences and usage.
Knowing what they mean will be enough. But if a word, when I translate it
into Chinese, its Chinese equivalent is used pretty often, Ill try to remember
its usage and the like, because I assume its used pretty often in English as
well. And Ill need to remember its usage and example sentences, so that
when I use it myself, itll sound more idiomatic. And also, when I see a word
with a lot of related meanings illustrated in the dictionary, it must be an
important word and a high-frequency word as well. But when Im reading,
when I cant understand the sentence or the context without knowing a
particular word, that word is a very important word, and I have to look it up.

Chen Hua was an experienced reader. She read the passage the fastest
of all 11 participants and had the least difculty understanding the
content. When dealing with specic vocabulary items, she never lost
sight of the meaning of the whole passage. Her reading process seemed
to combine the two functions of reading: reading for information and
reading to learn, with the former taking precedence. In comprehending
the passage, Chen Hua employed a classic hypothesis-testing approach.
She constantly jumped from individual words, dictionary entries, and
immediate contexts to make global sense of the passage, saying, for
example, A city is dying, this passage must be about this city having
serious problems; Oh, I thought it was an American city at rst, now I
know its in Greece; and This whole paragraph talks about the extent to
which the city is polluted. I guess the next paragraph should be about
how these problems demand attention. At the same time, she paid
highly selective attention to new words, their meanings, and their usage,
limiting her attention to two verbs: stink and suffocate.

An Example From Chen Hua: Stink

Chen Hua thought that her lack of knowledge about the word stink
prevented her from understanding the context clearly, and she proceeded to look it up in the dictionary. She located the contextual
meaning by going over the major meanings in the dictionary entry and
negotiating back and forth between the dictionary entry and the text:
It has a lot of meanings here. Let me read it rst. /stink/. Stink means giving
out a bad smell, intransitive verb; driving somebody out with a bad smell,
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transitive verb; and unpleasant smell, noun. What follows here are the
compounds and phrases. So it must be this meaning, this giving out a bad
smell here. Stinking buses, their passengers pale and tired . . . . so were
talking about the buses that give out a bad smell, and the passengers that look
pale and they look exhausted as well. So it must be this meaning.

She then wrote down the Chinese equivalent and the pronunciation
in the margins. As she read the dictionary entry, she realised that
perhaps it was worth noting down in her notebook as well. Stink, stank,
stunk, she mumbled to herself as she did so, repeating the irregular
forms so as to remember them.
Like Chi Wei, after getting the contextual meaning from the dictionary, Chen Hua went on to learn the usage from sample sentences so
that she could use the idiomatic expressions in her own speaking and
writing:
The rst meaning is to give out a bad smell. The example sentence here is:
That sh stinks, and it means that the sh is giving out a bad smell. The next
sentence, He stank of garlic, he gave out this garlic smell. If I said it myself,
I wouldnt be able to use the word this way, so Ill copy this down as well.

Chen Hua copied down a few more sentences illustrating the words
use as an intransitive verb, a transitive verb, and a noun (see Figure 2).
She constantly evaluated her progress and monitored her own learning
behaviour as she wrote:
I think I now have a basic feel of the word.
This is simple; simply copying the sentence down will be enough.
I think I can use the verb form now, and the noun form is much easier.
I wont try all those phrases, because I dont have to remember things that can
be guessed when I see them later.
The whole sentence becomes much clearer after the rst word is understood.
Ill go on.

Vocabulary Learning After Reading

After making sure that she understood the passage in general and the
new words in particular, Chen Hua went through her new words again by
browsing through the text and her notes. She scribbled each new word
three or four times, mumbling its pronunciation to herself while trying
to recall the meaning. Unlike Chi Wei, however, Chen Hua said that she
remembered her words primarily through visual stimulation, because
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there is no one-to-one correspondence between spelling and sound in

English. She reiterated this point later, saying she could not do anything
to new words she heard in listening practice unless she saw them in
writing. She paid attention to the pronunciation of words simply because
she wanted to use them in speaking. Next, Chen Hua read her notes and
tried to remember the meaning and usage of the new word. She read her
sample sentences and told herself whether a particular word was a verb
or a noun, or whether a verb was used transitively or intransitively.
New words that I take from my readings, she said, I normally copy
onto my small cards. She then drew a rectangle measuring about 2 cm
by 5 cm:
I copy the word on one side of the card, and its pronunciation and meaning
on the other side, so that when I look at the word on this side, I can recall its
pronunciation and meaning, and when I look at the other side, I can recall
the English word.

List Learning
Chen Hua employed basically two types of lists: (a) the cards on which
she recorded words encountered in reading and (b) commercially
available word lists. She rarely used vocabulary notebooks.
Vocabulary cards. Chen Hua had developed the habit of collecting new
words on vocabulary cards, described above, early in her English
learning experience, and it was one of her favourite strategies for
vocabulary learning. Cards thus accumulated were bound together in no
particular order with rubber bands. Every week or so, she took out the
cards and went over them once, picking out words she had forgotten at
that point.
When I was little, I had to remember a lot of these words, with my little cards.
But because of the high frequency of those words, I got to see them a lot
during reading, so gradually I could remember them all. I discovered that I
was picking out fewer and fewer forgotten words. Things are different now.
Im getting a lot of cards that I dont remember, because theyre lowfrequency words most of the time, and I dont come across them often
enough.

Volumes of word lists. Like other Chinese learners, Chen Hua made use of
commercially available word lists, simply because her preferred way of
learning vocabulary was too slow and the quantity of words not
enough for exams. She recognised the compensatory nature of this
method while realizing that words thus learned are not as deep as words

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you remember from your own readings. Chen Hua said that she went
through a 5,000-word list twice and a 10,000-word list one and one-half
times, simply reading the list word by word from A to Z and testing
herself by trying to recall them. It mightve helped, she added,
referring to her attempt at memorising word lists, but its certainly not
as helpful as reading.
In fact, time spent on word lists constituted only a fraction of the time
Chen Hua had spent on English. From memorising word lists, to
collecting and reviewing vocabulary from context on cards, to using
English (mainly by reading), Chen Hua can be said to have employed a
whole range of vocabulary-learning strategies on a continuum from
decontextualised to contextualised.

Using English
Chen Hua stood out from the 11 learners studied because of the
extent to which she had been using English. (In fact, because Chu Wei
spent the overwhelming majority of his time studying English, I cannot
describe his use of English here.) She did a great deal of reading and
listening, and a considerable amount of speaking and writing as well.
I dont think you need to pay special attention to learning grammar, because
grammar sinks itself in naturally when you read a lot. I never tried to analyse
a sentence. Whats the purpose of doing that anyway when you can understand the sentence?

Listening. Chen Hua used four types of materials for listening practice:
(a) listening textbooks; (b) listening practice textbooks, listening skill
books, and test samples for the Test of English as a Foreign Language
(TOEFL); (c) short stories, plays, and adapted novels on audiotape; and
(d) radio programmes. She used the rst two types for intensive listening
and the second two for extensive listening:
I walked around with my Walkman and my earphones. Every evening from
10:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., when other girls were chatting in the dorm, I would
plug my pair of earphones into my ears. When I look back now, it really
worked.

Speaking. Chen Hua used to have a conversation partner, her best friend,
who started learning English with her in the same Primary 5 class. From
junior middle school until they parted to attend different universities,
the two girls chatted in English during every class break, whenever they
met outside class, and over the telephone. She said regretfully,

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93

But my university classmates never speak English, so I get very subdued every
now and then, then I have to mumble to myself in English. Occasionally, after
I nish listening to a nice story or after watching an English movie, my
English channel is turned on, so to speak, and I feel the urge to speak in
English. And if I happen to be at home [laugh], my parents have to suffer,
because whatever they say to me in Chinese, I talk back in English. They dont
understand a word, and I dont care either. I mustve done this pretty often to
them, because they seem to have got used to it.

Reading. As intensive reading, Chen Hua claimed that, since Junior 1, she
had read aloud the passages in her textbooks so many times that she had
memorised every one. She had also memorised a few selected readings
that she thought were beautifully written. Not that I wanted to recite
them; they get memorised after you read them a few times. And once
theyre there, they become part of you, the sentence structures, the set
phrases, and the new vocabulary. Obviously, repetition and memorisation
were integrated with understanding and enjoyment (cf. Marton et al.,
1996).
Moreover, Chen Hua had an extensive reading programme. During
her middle school years, she read almost all the simplied readers
available in China. After entering the university, she read original
English prose and novels with Chinese notes and explanations. She also
found chemistry textbooks in the library and studied them on her own.
By the time this study took place, she was reading English works
exclusively in the original (e.g., Readers Digest and novels such as Jane Eyre,
The Great Gatsby, Tom Sawyer, and Gone With the Wind). She said,
I go for content, and I look up a word only if it prevents me from
understanding the paragraph or if it appears again and again and I think its
important to learn to use it myself. I look it up only after I nish reading at
least the whole paragraph.

Writing. Chen Hua did less writing practice compared with other skills.
She wrote in a diary in English two to three times a week, wrote an
occasional letter to her best friend in English, and, like Chi Wei, wrote
English compositions to prepare for examinations.
Chen Hua appeared to be intrinsically interested in English while
seeing its instrumental importance. She knew how much time she
needed to learn English well, and estimated that, during the rst 2 years
of her university life, she spent about two thirds of her time and effort on
English, entirely on her own initiative, and kept a close eye on her
chemistry courses.5 From Junior 1 on, she devoted every vacation to
5
After being in the top third of her chemistry courses in the rst 2 years, she decided to
spend less time on English and concentrate on chemistry courses in order to get a
scholarship. Within a few months she climbed to the top 5%.

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reading in English. Like Chi Wei, Chen Hua emphasised that she never
forced herself to learn anything and that English learning had always
been natural to her: Ill stop when Im tired. Ill stop before Im
bored. I never care about making mistakes. Mistakes are natural. Its not
my mother tongue anyway.
Chen Hua represents only a small minority of successful non-English
majors. Although the proportion of time she spent on English was not
unusual, the extent to which she used English for authentic and
meaningful purposes was rare among this group of Chinese learners.
Second, Chen Huas overall English use was the best among the 11
learners in the sample, although her score of 91% on the CET Band 4
did not reect this superior skill. Third, as one of the more socially
advantaged learners in the sample, Chen Hua had more resources
available to her than other Chinese learners do. The fact that her parents
were intellectuals and lived in Beijing ensured the availability of books
and contributed to the type of education she received. That said, rather
than discourage other Chinese learners, Chen Huas success should
encourage them to aim for a more communicative approach to learning
in a noncommunicative and input-poor environment. Chen Huas social
background was not unique; her unusual motivation and learning
strategies may have made the difference.

Summary
Chen Hua succeeded in vocabulary learning in a far different way
from Chi Wei. Although their basic procedures of vocabulary learning
through intensive reading were surprisingly similar, Chi Wei focused on
the details of word learning, identifying many new or partially new
words, whereas Chen Hua was more concerned with overall understanding of the passage, focusing only on new words that she found important
or interesting. Chi Wei made up sentences on the spot for his chosen
words, but Chen Hua said she would try to use them later in real
situations. Chi Wei spent a great deal of time learning through the
passage because intensive reading had been his main source of English
input. Chen Hua, on the other hand, spent less time on intensive
reading passages and much more time on extensive reading, which
ensured the natural recurrence of words she had tried to learn in
intensive reading. Chi Wei spent about 90 minutes completing the
learning tasks whereas Chen Hua spent only 40 minutes. If language
learning is an art, then Chi Weis style corresponds to gongbi (ne brush)
and Chen Huas to xieyi (freehand).

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95

DISCUSSION
Approaches to Success
Chi Wei and Chen Hua correspond almost precisely to the two types of
vocabulary learners, active strategy users and readers, that emerged from
Gu and Johnsons (1996) cluster analysis results. These two learners
underscore an important point: Not all successful Chinese learners are
alike.
One difference between Chi Wei and Chen Hua was their learning
styles: Chi Wei preferred auditory learning, and Chen Hua might be said
to have a slight preference for visual learning, although both learners
used some strategies consistent with each style. Chi Wei was meticulous
about details and focused mainly on textbooks (the ne brush style)
whereas Chen Hua focused on reading and enjoying extracurricular
material (the freehand style). Motivation was another area of difference.
Chi Wei was learning to excel whereas Chen Hua was learning because of
her intrinsic interest in English. Chi Wei persevered, and Chen Hua
enjoyed her learning process.
Nevertheless, distinct as they were in their approaches to vocabulary
learning, the two learners showed more similarities than differences.
Both demonstrated high levels of motivation, revealing a link between
motivation and the use of strategies (Oxford, 1996), especially metacognitive strategies such as self-initiation. Metacognitively, both learners
had high levels of self-initiation in learning and went well beyond
what was required in their English course
consciously chose to treat different words with different strategies
selected vocabulary to learn based on three criteria: (a) its relevance
to text comprehension, (b) its interest to them, and (c) an on-thespot evaluation of its importance
consciously emphasized multiword units such as phrasal verbs and
idiomatic expressions as well as other words of their choice
Cognitively, both learners
employed a wide range of vocabulary-learning strategies
engaged in frequent contextual inferencing using a variety of clues
used the dictionary for comprehension purposes, negotiating between dictionary denitions and contextual meaning
used the dictionary for vocabulary-learning purposes, taking various
types of notes when they felt necessary
spent considerable time on and demonstrated remarkable skill in
memorising word lists
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tried to use some of the words they had just learned so as to cater to
the knowledge and skill aspects of vocabulary learning (Ellis, 1994)
tried to nd and create opportunities to use English in authentic or
semiauthentic situations

Learning Strategies With Chinese Characteristics

These strategies do not seem to differ dramatically from those
employed by successful learners elsewhere (cf., e.g., the analytic vs.
holistic approaches to vocabulary learning in Parry, 1997). Nevertheless,
Chi Wei and Chen Hua also used some strategies of which, though
endorsed and encouraged by traditional Chinese practice, Western
teachers may express disapproval.
This tension might be explained in the context of often-misunderstood Chinese conceptions of learning (Biggs, 1996). First, Chi Wei and
Chen Hua seemed to know instinctively that vocabulary can be learned
both intentionally and incidentally. They might also have known that
their learning context did not provide them with much input. Therefore,
they consciously chose to emphasize highly intensive intentional learning.
Second, although the way in which Chi Wei and Chen Hua tried to
memorise word lists would seem on the surface to be unsanctioned by
Western teachers and scholars, close observation of this strategy and its
use in combination with other strategies demonstrates a potential
benet. Repetition and memorisation that are usually associated with
rote learning are part and parcel of meaningful learning in China
(Marton et al., 1996). Sayings like Meaning reveals itself after a hundred
times of reading demonstrate the integration of repetition and meaning
in the Chinese learning culture. Another saying, Master 300 Tang
poems, and you become a poet yourself, might be thought of as a folk
theory of implicit learning.
Third, Chi Weis strategic behaviours indicate an independent nature
oriented toward self-cultivation and self-realisation. On the other hand,
Chen Huas love affair with English did not prevent her from adopting
examination-oriented strategies, and she was well aware of the importance of English to her life. If love of English led to success for Chen
Hua, living with English without intense love for it certainly worked for
Chi Wei. These Chinese learners were pragmatic learners; the dichotomy
of intrinsic versus extrinsic perhaps does not apply to them the way it
applies to their Western counterparts.
Fourth, both learners demonstrated effort, perseverance, and the joy
of learning. As non-English majors, Chi Wei and Chen Hua spent much
more time and effort on English than on all their other academic
subjects combined, and both enjoyed the whole process. This stance is
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97

consistent with a well-known quotation from Confucius Analects: Is it

not enjoyable to learn with a constant perseverance and application? In
the Chinese culture, effort and perseverance are not just gloried means
to sagehood; they are an integral and enjoyable part of the learning
process. Chi Weis and Chen Huas success in the face of a difcult
learning situation and a severe lack of input and output opportunities
underscores the value placed on the virtues of effort, perseverance, and
willpower in the Chinese EFL context.
Finally, the ends of dichotomies, such as intentional and incidental
learning, reliance on memorisation and meaning, intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, and perseverance and enjoyment, are often seen as good or
bad if not mutually exclusive (Biggs, 1996). However, the two successful
Chinese learners in this study seemed to have no problem integrating
the ends. This ability to integrate seemingly opposing viewpoints might
explain the paradox of why some Chinese learners achieve success even
while practising the supposedly bad strategies of rote learning. The
Confucian philosophy of the mean, which is characterized by balances
between opposing ends, might be the learning mechanism at work
(Biggs, 1996).
Most of Chi Weis and Chen Huas behaviours (e.g., perseverance) can
be found among successful learners elsewhere. However, the consistent,
distinctive combinations of these behaviours and the cultural conceptions of learning behind them may be a sign of their Chineseness or
Asianness. As I have suggested, these behavioural patterns may be due
to a combination of Chinese conceptions of learning, traditional schooling and literacy practice in China, the prevailing methods for teaching
and learning English in China, the demands of the English learning task,
and individual learning style.

CONCLUSION
Two successful EFL learners from the same Chinese learning context
approached the same vocabulary-learning task in different ways. At the
same time, they demonstrated some patterns of strategy use that were
different from those reported in other learning contexts. As Schmeck
(1988) put it,
If we keep a situation constant and look across people, we see situational
inuences; and if we keep the person constant and look across situations, we
see the inuence of personal style. However, the two are normally operating
simultaneously in a sort of chemical reaction that, in the end, may be
unanalysable. (p. 10)

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Schmecks notion of the chemical reaction highlights the learning art

of successful learners such as Chi Wei and Chen Hua and expresses the
difculties of studying strategies. While researchers have a hard time
distinguishing between different types of strategies, such as metacognitive
and cognitive, these expert learners wield their own conguration of
strategy combinations with ease (A. D. Cohen, personal communication,
September 10, 2001). And they even use the same strategies, for
instance, guessing through context, differently. Furthermore, what makes
vocabulary learning an art for these two students is not the strategy
repertoires they used or how often they used them but the exible and
skilful analysis, choice, deployment, execution, and orchestration of all
strategies at their disposal in accordance with their own preferred style of
learning.
The two learners reported in this study represent only a small
proportion of successful Chinese EFL students. Many Chinese learners
use rote strategies as their major way of learning vocabulary. Although it
might be presumptuous to derive pedagogical implications from a study
of two learners, teachers can certainly encourage their students, Chinese
or not, to follow Chi Weis and Chen Huas examples. A rst step toward
helping rote learners, for example, might be to show them how Chi Wei
and Chen Hua used a wide range of strategies, including list learning, in
the art of vocabulary learning and how they grew as people as they
acquired a foreign language.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Robert Keith Johnson, Andrew Cohen, Sandra McKay, and the anonymous
reviewers for comments on the article; Kate Parry, Bernard Spolsky, and Cindy Gerstl
for comments on the article and for encouragement; and the two participants in this
study, who provided me with insightful data.

THE AUTHOR
Peter Yongqi Gu is assistant professor at the English Language and Literature
Academic Group of National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include vocabulary acquisition, learning strategies, language planning, and computer-assisted language learning.

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APPENDIX A
Reading Text in Segments
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.

102

A City Is Dying
Stinking buses, their passengers pale and tired, jam the crowded streets.
Drivers shout at one another and honk their horns.
Smog smarts the eyes and chokes the senses.
The scene is Athens at rush hour.
The city of Plato and Pericles is in a sorry state of affairs, built without a plan, lacking even
adequate sewerage facilities, hemmed in by mountains and the sea, its 135 square miles
crammed with 3.7 million people.
Even Athens ruins are in ruin: sulfur dioxide eats away at the marble of the Parthenon
and other treasures on the Acropolis:
As Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis has said,
The only solution for Athens would be to demolish half of it and start all over again.
So great has been the population ow toward the city that entire hinterland villages stand
vacant or nearly so.
About 120,000 people from outlying provinces move to Athens every year,
with the result that 40% of Greeces citizenry are now packed into the capital.
The migrants come for the few available jobs, which are usually no better than the ones
they ed.
At the current rate of migration, Athens by the year 2000 will have a population of 6.5
million, more than half the nation.
Aside from overcrowding and poor public transport, the biggest problems confronting
Athenians are noise and pollution.
A government study concluded that Athens was the noisiest city in the world.
Smog is almost at killing levels:
180300 mg of sulfur dioxide per cubic meter of air, or up to four times the level that the
World Health Organization considers safe.
Nearly half the pollution comes from cars.
Despite high prices for vehicles and fuel ($2.95 per gallon), nearly 100,000 automobiles
are sold in Greece each year;
3,000 drivers licenses are issued in Athens monthly.
After decades of neglect, Athens is at last getting some attention.
In March a committee of representatives from all major public service ministries met to
discuss a plan to unclog the city, make it livable and clean up its environment.
A save-Athens ministry, which will soon begin functioning, will propose heavy taxes to
discourage in-migration,
a minimum of $5 billion in public spending for Athens alone, and other projects for the
countryside to encourage residents to stay put.
A master plan that will move many government ofces to the citys fringes is already in the
works.
Meanwhile, more Greeks keep moving into Athens.
With few parks and precious few oxygen-producing plants, the city and its citizens are
literally suffocating. (Walter, 1982, pp. 2831)

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APPENDIX B
General Interview Questions
I. Metacognitive Aspects of Vocabulary Learning
A. Metacognitive Knowledge and Beliefs
About self in vocabulary learning
1. Overall, how do you see yourself as a language learner?
2. Do you see yourself as good at learning vocabulary? In what way are you good at it (e.g.,
having a good memory, found successful strategies, or others)?
3. People have different styles of vocabulary learning. Some must see a word before it is
remembered; others might prefer to hear the word. What is your personal style?
About English vocabulary
4. Do you think English vocabulary is rule governed? Can you elaborate on this?
5. What does it mean to you when you say you have learned a word?
About vocabulary learning
6. How important is vocabulary learning in learning a foreign language? From what
experiences have you generalized the above-mentioned ideas?
7. Are English words hard/easy to learn? Why do you think so?
8. Do you think there are gimmicks that can make vocabulary learning fast and easy? Why do
you think so?
About vocabulary strategies
9. What do you think are the vocabulary-learning strategies that work best for you? And what
are those that dont work for you?

B. Metacognitive Regulation
Planning
10. Do you plan your vocabulary learning? How?
11. Do you deliberately try new strategies to learn vocabulary? How often do you do that?
Monitoring
12. How do you keep track of your progress in vocabulary learning?
Evaluation
13. How do you know that a particular word or expression is worth remembering?
14. When someone tells you about a good strategy to learn vocabulary, what do you do when
you see that it doesnt work for you? (Do you simply abandon it, try it again and see if it
works, blame yourself for not practicing it enough instead of questioning its usefulness, try
to nd better strategies, or fall back on your known strategies?)

II. Cognitive Aspects of Vocabulary Learning

15. Can you think of as many strategies as possible that you yourself use to learn English
vocabulary?
16. What do you do when you come across new words while listening?
17. What do you do when you come across new words while reading?
18. When you dont know an English word when speaking, what do you do?
19. When you dont know an English word when writing, what do you do?
20. How do you enlarge your stock of passive vocabulary?

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21. Do you deliberately try to change your passive vocabulary (comprehension only) into
active vocabulary? How do you do it?

III. Affective Aspects of Vocabulary Learning

Affective responses
22. Some say vocabulary learning is tiring, boring, and even overwhelming. How do you
comment on this?
Affective strategies
23. How do you cope with these problems?

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Dueling Philosophies:
Inclusion or Separation for Floridas
English Language Learners?
ELIZABETH PLATT
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, United States

CANDACE HARPER
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida, United States

MARIA BEATRIZ MENDOZA

Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, United States

Educational policies in Florida affect one of the United States largest

and most diverse student populations. A major consequence of the
comprehensive restructuring of education for English language learners since 1990 has been a rapid move toward inclusion (mainstreaming)
for these learners. The current study provides an overview of the
historical background and philosophical bases of inclusion versus
separation and presents recent developments affecting L2 education
policy and practice in Florida. Data from interviews with 29 district-level
ESL administrators address their rationales for the models implemented in their districts and their beliefs about the effectiveness of
each model. Administrators expressed both positive and negative
sentiments regarding inclusion and separation. The article notes parallel trends toward inclusion and standardization in national and international contexts. Findings document how issues of equity for English
language learners have been forced into the background and why the
specialized nature of the ESL/EFL teaching profession is in jeopardy.

s the population of English language learners entering U.S. public

schools grows (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs [NCELA], 2002),
issues related to the effective instruction of these students will become
increasingly prominent. An informal survey of professional education

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105

journals published in 200120021 revealed 27 articles featuring English

language learners. Likewise, at conferences of professional teacher
associations in 20012002,2 sessions relating to the instruction of English
language learners appeared in the program regularly. In Florida the
number and growth rate of these students are among the highest in the
nation (Florida Department of Education [DOE], 2001c; NCELA, 2002),
and as a consequence issues concerning English language learners have
been prominent on the state educational agenda for more than a
decade. In this setting a trend has emerged toward the inclusion of K12
language minority students in mainstream settings as early and as fully as
possible (Harper & Platt, 1998; Platt & Harper, 1997). In other states
changes in policy governing the instructional services available to
English language learners (e.g., Proposition 227 in California and
Proposition 203 in Arizona) and testimony at a recent TESOL convention by educators from around the United States (Platt & Harper, 2002)
indicate that the move toward an inclusion instructional model is not
limited to Florida.
TESOL professionals, who may conceptualize ESL in terms of pullout,
or separation, programs, need to examine the trend toward inclusion
within the context of developments in both language teaching and
general education, including alignment of language and content area
curriculum standards (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000; Educational
Testing Service, 2002; TESOL, 2000); emphasis on all students meeting
national standards (Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994); and
accountability as measured by standardized test performance for evaluating students, teachers, and schools (Title I of the No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001). As inclusion becomes more common, responsibility for
students with special needs is distributed among a larger group of
educators, and the consequences for both students and teachers are
considerable. One way of beginning to understand the issues is through
the eyes of those directly involved in oversight of general education
programs (Harper & Platt, 1999; Platt, Mendoza, & Harper, 2000).
This study reports results of research investigating the opinions of
Florida ESL administrators 10 years after the signing of a Consent
Decree that effectively widened the responsibility for these learners to all
K12 school personnel. Based on analysis of interview data, we report (a)
the rationales administrators provided for the instructional programs for
English language learners implemented in their districts and (b) administrators beliefs about effectiveness of inclusion and separation pro1
Educational Researcher, Harvard Education Review, Journal of Teacher Education, Phi Delta
Kappan, and Teaching and Teacher Education.
2
The American Educational Research Association, the International Reading Association,
and the National Council for Teachers of English.

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grams for these learners. We then discuss the larger equity implications
of these ndings as they relate to students and teachers, both in the
United States and internationally.

INCLUSION VERSUS SEPARATION

The Florida story achieves importance against the historical background of inclusion and separation in a larger context. Full inclusion is
the practice of serving students with special needs entirely within the
mainstream classroom (Turnbull, Turnbull, Shank, & Leal, 1995). The
two most common instructional models entailing separation of English
language learners are ESL and bilingual programs.

Inclusion
A number of social forces have combined to create a favorable climate
for inclusion over the past quarter century: a redenition and expansion
of the term special needs student, a rise in dropout rates, and a greater
number of minority students, including immigrants and refugees
(Kochhar, West, & Taymans, 2000). The Civil Rights movement and
advocacy for groups and individuals are associated with this view, and
those promoting inclusion allude to the individual liberties that stem
from the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. With the shift of
emphasis in the 1960s from the study of human psychology in terms of
illness and neurosis toward one of maximizing mental health and native
potential, normalization was seen as the desired state. Normalization
entailed integrating people with disabilities or other special needs into
community norms as much as possible (Wolfensberger, 1972) and led to
the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975
and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act in 1997 (Kochhar
et al., 2000).
The publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) challenged the educational establishment to
promote both equity and excellence (see Taylor & Piche, 1991, for
further discussion). However, desegregating schools and funding programs for linguistic, cultural, and economic minorities have failed to
affect the existing balance of privilege and power (Tate, Ladson-Billings,
& Grant, 1993). In fact, Cohen and Lazerson (1977) claimed more than
20 years ago that the schools were infused not with aspirations to achieve
equity but with corporate values tied to the goals of the economic order.
Although the discourse of schooling always includes a nod to diversity
and equity, ongoing trends in accountability and standardization of
DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

107

curriculum and assessment illustrate a link with the organizational styles

and ideology of advanced capitalism (Carlson, 1988). Despite its roots in
a liberal philosophy, inclusion has become part of a conservative
philosophy regarding equity (Donahue, 1995; Tollefson, 1995). Olsen
(1997) criticizes the recent emphasis on school reform and charges that,
in spite of the inclusive rhetoric of serving all students, an ideology of
individualism and meritocracy prevails; English language learners are
excluded from full participation and success in school, and the current
power structure remains intact.
The people whose color-blindness and refusal to examine issues of different
needs, and their emphasis on serving all children as the same, have
managed to claim the moral high ground. Their position is based on a
language and framework that uses the paradigms and words of civil rights to
argue for a status quo that actually prevents full inclusion and access. . . . In
the popular school reform discourse, specic educational approaches that
have been about equity are thus stood on their heads, taken out of their
educational and political contexts, and discredited . . . . The old paradigm,
which consists of much of the educational pedagogy and set of policies
owing from civil rights concerns, is now associated with such negative
references as segregation, divisiveness, or special treatment. (pp. 246
247)

Conservative inuences have affected instructional programming for

English language learners in the United States and in the international
arena. In California and Arizona, bilingual programs have been replaced
in most districts by structured English immersion (California DOE, 2001;
Crawford, 2000/2001). Many states have adopted grade-level curriculum
standards and assessment programs that do not take English language
learners needs and abilities into account. In England and Sweden as
well as in the United States, some programs have overlooked the needs
of immigrant students (Boyd & Arvidsson, 1998; Leung & Franson,
2001), and in Australia adult ESL programs have been subsumed under
a general literacy umbrella (Lo Bianco, 1998; Moore, 2001). The
increased emphasis on standardization in education begun early in the
past decade has also affected educational programming. In Florida,
despite efforts to improve education for these learners in the early 1990s,
a movement to streamline all educational programs has coincided with
budget cuts and a rapidly growing linguistic minority population, requiring administrators to spread existing resources as widely as possible, in
many cases eliminating separate support programs for these students.

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Separation
Separation occurs when instructional goals or students needs differ
from those of mainstream students such that they require specialized
curricula or teaching approaches. Despite concerns that separation of
students is inherently discriminatory, the Ofce for Civil Rights (OCR,
1991) species rather that discrimination results when a district fails to
provide needed services to English language learners. Thus, separation
of students for specialized instruction is warranted in order to achieve
educational goals, provided that services in the separate environment
facilitate equal access to the curriculum in a timely and effective manner.

Bilingual Education
Bilingual education has existed in the United States since the 1800s,
with greater or lesser standing depending on the historical context. After
the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Supreme
Court decision in 1954, a national social conscience emerged that
produced the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, its various amendments,
and the 1974 Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court decision (Faltis & Hudelson,
1998). Supporters of bilingual education argue that competence in both
languages facilitates the learning of academic content and literacy and
promotes positive cognitive effects, including an analytic orientation to
language, higher verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and divergent
thinking (Bialystok, 1991; Cummins, 1981; Cummins & Swain, 1986;
Lambert & Tucker, 1972). Baca (1998) has promoted bilingual education on the basis of equal educational opportunity and the potential for
positive interethnic relations, and Thomas and Colliers (1995, 2002)
large-scale research indicates that students in bilingual education programs with long-term support in the home language reach academic
parity with native-English-speaking peers faster than students in other
types of instructional programs.
In spite of such evidence, support for bilingual education has failed to
gain signicant momentum, and reauthorizations of Title VII of the
Bilingual Education Act narrowed the role of home languages and
cultures in favor of a greater role for English. In 1994, the Improving
Americas Schools Act and the Goals 2000: Educate America Act changed
Title VII programming by giving greater control and exibility to the
states. Goals 2000 also sought to ensure equal educational opportunities
through systemic reform and the setting of standards. Recent federal
initiatives of Title I and Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001)
have set the stage for further changes regarding the types of instructional

DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

109

programs offered and the assessments required of English language

learners, and will limit bilingual education and other specialized, often
separate language support programs for these students.

ESL
Like bilingual models, ESL programs separate English language
learners from the mainstream for specialized language and content
instruction. ESL gained a professional identity in the United States in the
1930s (Crawford, 1991). Early ESL instruction was inuenced by a
behaviorist/structuralist approach to language teaching and was geared
toward cultural assimilation and oral language prociency. As late as
1976, the mission statement of TESOL still focused exclusively on the
spoken language, with little attention to literacy or academic competence. The effectiveness of typical ESL programs of the 1970s and 1980s
was called into question. Cummins (1989) labeled such programs
subtractive, supportive of neither academic achievement nor retention of
the home language or culture. Further, Krashen (1984) argued for ESL
programs that provide a range of support (including home language
support) and that gradually move English language learners into the
mainstream. In recent years literacy and academic language prociency
have joined oral communication skills as important learning goals in ESL
(TESOL, 1997, 1999), and content-based ESL and sheltered content
instruction (Short, 1998), the cognitive academic language learning
approach (CALLA; Chamot & OMalley, 1994), vocational ESL (Friedenberg & Bradley, 1984), and adjunct academic programs (Kasper, 2000)
have ourished.

THE FLORIDA CASE

In Florida, the challenge of providing equal educational access to a
rapidly growing population of English language learners has led educators to consider a range of approaches. The decisions made in instructional programming for these students, however, occur within the
broader educational context.

The ESOL Consent Decree

Since the 1960s Florida has experienced tremendous growth in the
size and diversity of its immigrant population, placing it among the top
three states in the United States in number of students with a home
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TESOL QUARTERLY

language other than English (NCELA, 2002). In the 1970s, Florida

developed standards for the identication and instruction of students
whose L1 was not English, and for the certication of bilingual and ESL
teachers. However, concerns for English language learners did not reach
a critical mass until the mid-1980s, when families from the Caribbean
and other parts of Latin America began arriving in greater numbers and
settling in central as well as south Florida (Wilson-Patton, 2000). In the
late 1980s, leaders of several community groups representing schoolchildren of Hispanic and African American origin sought the assistance of
the legal rm Multilingual Education, Training, and Advocacy (META)
to bring suit against the Florida DOE for denying equal educational
opportunity to language minority students. In response, the DOE
complied with the terms set forth by META, and the complaint and a
Consent Decree were led on the same day in 1989 (Wilson-Patton,
2000). Compliance was mandated in six areas: (a) identication and
assessment, (b) equal access to appropriate programs (curriculum and
instruction), (c) equal access to categorical and other programs, (d)
schoolwide training of personnel, (e) program monitoring, and (f)
student outcome measures. (See Florida DOE, 1990, for a more detailed
account.)
According to the guidelines established in the Consent Decree, each
school district was to be monitored periodically by the DOE for program
compliance and effectiveness. Over the next few years, the DOE and
META debated various policies, clustering being one of the rst. Clustering refers to the grouping of English language learners for instruction
within and across schools. Despite the OCRs (1991) specication of
what does and does not constitute discrimination against these students,
the Florida DOE considered clustering to be potentially discriminatory,
an interpretation that ultimately resulted in the careful scrutiny of all
instructional programs involving the separation of English language
learners from mainstream settings.
In 1995 the DOE disseminated a technical assistance paper (Florida
DOE, 1995) providing criteria for districts in the implementation of
inclusion programs. The criteria included school or district consensus
about the models appropriateness for delivering comprehensible instruction, assurance of adequate instructional resources (e.g., a lower
student-teacher ratio and more homogeneous classrooms), and clearly
established implementation guidelines. This ofcial document discouraged the adoption of inclusion at the expense of other effective
educational programs and advised districts to implement inclusion one
student at a time. Since 1995, however, the criteria for adopting inclusion
have been inconsistently applied, and some successful ESL pullout,
sheltered content, and newcomer programs have been dismantled and
replaced by inclusion programs. The DOE promotes ESL as a method of
DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

111

instruction rather than a discipline and believes the ESL curriculum

should be synonymous with the general English language arts curriculum, with some adjustments for levels of English language prociency
(Florida DOE, 2001b).
Recent educational policy initiatives in California and Arizona were
initiated by political pressure from supporters of the Ofcial English
Movement and other conservative groups (see Chavez, 2000). The
Consent Decree in Florida, however, emerged from grassroots efforts by
the affected population, aided by progressive lawyers and an activist
court (Wilson-Patton, 2000). However, the intent of the Florida Consent
Decree has been reshaped over the past decade to conform to the
prevalent political philosophy within the state and the nation as a whole.
Although the inclusion policy directives mentioned above were issued by
the state, a more general standardization initiative has its origin in and
support from the national level (e.g., Title I of the No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001). Thus, early and full inclusion of English language learners
in regular classrooms, a decrease in specialized services and curricula,
and accountability for student progress through mandated standardized
assessments are logical manifestations of this trend. As data from
interviews with Florida ESL administrators will show, however, professional educators do not wholeheartedly endorse full inclusion of English
language learners in mainstream classrooms, especially those learners
most at risk of failure.

Ongoing Research in Florida

From the perspective of research in both special education and ESL
(Harper & Platt, 1998; Platt & Harper, 1997), inclusion appears to be a
megatrend in education, beginning with desegregation and continuing
with the education of the mentally or physically handicapped in the least
restrictive environment in the United States (see the Education for All
Handicapped Children Act of 1975; Turnbull, Turnbull, Shank, Smith, &
Leal, 2002). We believe our research in Florida contributes to documenting this trend, particularly as it relates to the inclusion of English
language learners in mainstream settings.

Surveys of Florida ESL Administrators

In 1999, a decade after its implementation, Floridas ESL professional
organization called for information on the consequences of the Consent
Decree. In response to this call, we surveyed ESL administrators in each

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of Floridas 67 county school districts.3 These administrators, a group

underrepresented in previous research on beliefs about effective instruction of English language learners, were selected for study because of
their understanding of district-level policy and implementation. The
twofold purpose of the survey was to identify (a) the types of instructional programs in place for English language learners in the state (e.g.,
pullout or self-contained ESL, bilingual education, sheltered content,
and full inclusion) and (b) the major issues currently facing Florida
school districts. Administrators in 44 districts responded to the survey.
Because the size of a districts population of English language learners4
was considered relevant to the types of program models offered, we
grouped the responding districts into ve categories for analysis (see
Table 1 for the number and percentage of districts returning surveys in
each category and the number of administrators interviewed; note that
these are not ofcial state categories). In Category 1, which includes
districts with the largest populations of English language learners, for
example, administrators in all 5 districts responded to the survey, and all
5 were subsequently interviewed. (See Harper & Platt, 1999, for details
and discussion of the responses to this survey.)
Districts in Categories 1 and 2 provided more program options for
their English language learners, especially at the elementary level.
Inclusion was the most widely used program model in districts at all
levels, with the exception of the equally prominent ESL pullout model in

TABLE 1
Survey Responses and Interviewees by District Category
Surveys returned
District
category

LY population

Administrators
interviewed

1
2
3
4
5

> 8,000
1,0007,999
400999
30399
< 30

5
10
6
11
12

100
77
46
58
71

5
8
4
9
3

44

29

Total

3
This study received funding from Sunshine State TESOL (the state TESOL afliate) and
from a Title VII professional development grant (USDOE T195A970018).
4
The Florida DOE uses the term LY students to refer to English language learners who are
being served in classes that have been designed or adapted for their needs.

DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

113

the elementary grades in Category 1 and 2 districts. In the smaller

Category 3 and 4 districts, inclusion was the most common type of
program reported, and it was the only program reported in Category 5
districts. Only three districts (all in Category 1) reported having bilingual programs. Administrators also reported that instructional programs
and English language learners progress were the issues of greatest
concern in their districts.

Interviews With Florida ESL Administrators

Twenty-nine of the responding administrators agreed to either face-toface or telephone interviews, conducted between March and June of
1999. The survey results provided the basis for the interview protocol
(see the Appendix). Interviews lasted 3045 minutes each and were
documented with detailed notes and, whenever possible, direct quotations. Questions were asked about the administrators position and role
in the district, the districts demographics, the history of and rationale
for programs serving limited English procient students in the districts,
and the administrators own views about the programs and their effectiveness within the context of the district.

METHODOLOGY
We conducted interviews to gain a qualitative view of program
rationale and effectiveness by taking the pulse of administrators in
each reporting district. The administrators we interviewed speak with
authority because many have extended experience in their positions and
because they have witnessed the effects of implementation at the
program level in their own districts (although we do not mean to say that
administrators always base their beliefs strictly on facts or hold a
complete understanding of the implementation of the Florida Consent
Decree). Their opinions are informative to the TESOL profession even
though they do not indicate whether separation environments are
superior to inclusion environments for English language learners in
Floridas schools. Although achievement test data are available at the
school and district levels through the Florida DOE (2001c), it will take
years of consistent assessment with the same measures and long-term
maintenance of a districts ESL program before connections can be
drawn among school site, instructional program, and student performance. Moreover, numerical data alone may obscure some of the variables
relevant to program option, teacher effect, demographic factors, and
student performance. (An example is student mobility: Migrant chil114

TESOL QUARTERLY

dren, among the most vulnerable students in Florida, are likely to be

tested in a different school from the one where they received most of
their instruction.)
Our interviews of the administrators revealed differences in their
opinions about the effectiveness of inclusion and separation, and yielded
a great deal of information about their districts programs, policies, and
concerns. The analysis of these data continues as further studies are
conducted in Floridas schools (on program and policy issues, see Platt &
Mendoza, 2002; Platt et al., 2000). Because we have been documenting
the consequences of the Consent Decree and Floridas move toward the
inclusion model, we wished to investigate administrators statements
more systematically. Our data analysis began with a search through the
transcribed interviews for factual statements and opinions pertaining to
the ve major domains discussed in the interviews: demographic,
administrative, instructional, curricular, and assessment issues. From
these data we generated a coding scheme and rened the scheme until
reaching consensus on the coding of 1 complete interview in each
population category, 1 through 5. Then we coded and classied all
statements in all 29 interviews. For the purposes of this article we focused
on factors affecting optimal instructional environments for English
language learners. The emergent philosophical positions regarding
programs were represented by statements of rationale for program
models and claims about the effectiveness of those models.

FINDINGS
The ndings from the interview data are described as they address the
following questions about separation and inclusion programs:
What rationales do the administrators provide for the models
implemented in their districts?
How effectively do the administrators believe each model serves
students and teachers?

Rationales for Separation and Inclusion Programs

In this section we present proles of three administrators describing
rationales for their respective districts instructional program models.
Although we do not claim that the views of these three administrators are
typical of all Florida ESL administrators, their proles were selected for
their clearly articulated opinions about optimum learning environments
for English language learners. The three administrators are highly
DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

115

experienced and widely respected professionals in Florida. Two were

proponents of separation models (one bilingual and one ESL pullout),
and the other favored the inclusion model.

Separation Through a Bilingual Model

Ardyce Billings5 was the ESL administrator in a Category 1 district. Ms.
Billings, with teaching experience and a masters degree in bilingual
education, explained that the superintendent as well as the parents of
the English language learners valued bilingual instruction. She mentioned a middle school parent meeting in which the parents expressed a
preference for a transitional bilingual program. Here the parents are
aware; they have been able to compare programs. Ms. Billings reported
that more than 100 languages were represented in this district. For this
reason, not all students could participate in a bilingual program, and
ESL pullout and sheltered programs were also available. She explained
that inclusion was one program model that was not supported: One
elementary school tried inclusion but it didnt work. Regular teachers
were not consistently using the strategies, so inclusion has a bad name in
this district. She went on to say,
Parents dont want their kids to be guinea pigs. If we are serious about
working with these kids, we must make instruction comprehensible input. Its
hard for me to believe that comprehensible instruction can be done in any
other way than in L1.

Ms. Billings statements reveal her strong belief in the importance of

specialized support in the home language for English language learners.
The interview data as a whole indicated that the use of students home
languages in instruction was valued in many districts, and bilingual
paraprofessionals and teachers were regularly recruited. However, full
bilingual programs were implemented only in Category 1 districts. Far
more numerous were ESL pullout programs, found in most of the larger
districts and in some of the smaller districts.

Separation Through an ESL Pullout Model

The strongest proponent of separate ESL instruction was Marilyn
Edwards, the administrator of long standing in a Category 2 district. She
reported that the ESL curriculum at the high school level was guided by
5
Names of administrators are pseudonyms. Interview notes are paraphrased and incorporated into the discussion; statements in quotation marks are verbatim statements from the
administrators.

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TESOL QUARTERLY

the state standards for the English language arts, with performance
indicators designed by district staff for ESL learners. Beginners and
intermediate learners typically spent two periods each day in an ESL
pullout classroom, while more advanced students spent only one period.
Students were mainstreamed the rest of the day.
In providing the rationale for the ESL program, Ms. Edwards
statements expressed her belief in serving as an advocate for English
language learners. In this district, her centralized ofce assumed the
major responsibility and oversight on their behalf, monitoring teacher
and school compliance with the Consent Decree, asserting that we cant
violate the law and students rights. Another of her concerns was that
the Consent Decree gave teachers with little ESL training too much
responsibility for English language learners (through a grandfather
clause allowing teachers who can document successful instruction of
English language learners to earn an endorsement with 60 hours of staff
development instead of the 300 required of language arts teachers):
People can get an endorsement, but I dont want them being ESOL
teachers! People must go through a process. This statement reects Ms.
Edwards strong belief in the value of the specialized profession of ESL
and the importance of serving English language learners as a special
population.

Inclusion
The administrator who most clearly articulated a rationale underlying
the inclusion model was Frances Inge, the administrator for instruction
for English language learners in a Category 2 district guided by an
overarching philosophy of student learning at all levels and in all
programs. Ms. Inge argued that the school should be a nurturing
community of learners, providing exibility to allow for variability in
length of time to accomplish learning tasks and to recognize students
domain-specic strengths and weaknesses. She explained that each
neighborhood school acknowledged its responsibility for English language learners in implementing the inclusion model.
Ms. Inge described certain attitudes and practices toward English
language learners emerging from this policy. For example, although
teachers and administrators received training in awareness of these
learners differing needs and of ways to meet them, teachers were
reluctant to treat students as different or decient, in accord with the
districts inclusion philosophy. Instead, English language learners were
supported inconspicuously in the content classroom. For example, using
an electronic device, a bilingual aide in the classroom could provide a
translation or explanation in the students language, and only the
DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

117

student, outtted with an unobtrusive earphone, could hear it. Ms. Inge
cited this as an example of the ways in which English language learners
differences were rendered invisible in the mainstream.

Program Effectiveness for Students and Teachers

In addressing the second research question on administrators views
of the effectiveness of their programs, we examined evaluative statements from the interviews that were in accord with any of four possibilities: (a) views in support of separation of English language learners from
the general student population for some type of language support
services (e.g., ESL or bilingual instruction), (b) views critical of separation of English language learners from the general population for
special language support, (c) views in support of full inclusion of English
language learners in mainstream programs, and (d) views critical of full
inclusion of English language learners in mainstream programs. Table 2
shows the results for each administrator, giving the LY student population category and district (Column 1) and the percentages of LY
students at elementary and secondary levels in each program type
(Columns 27; percentages were clustered in the surveys to facilitate
reporting by administrators). The xs in Columns 811 indicate the
number of statements made by the administrator for that district, and
the totals at the bottom of each column are the number of administrators expressing this opinion followed by the total number of statements
made. Although the administrators as a group made 86 statements on
program effectiveness, we do not discuss all of them here. Nonetheless,
each point made is represented. Not all administrators commented on
the effectiveness of their programs, some stated the same point in several
different ways, and some opinions were expressed by more than one
administrator.
Of the 29 administrators interviewed, 22 expressed at least one
opinion about program effectiveness. Of these, 14 expressed concerns
about inclusion, for a total of 34 statements. Twelve also made
proseparation statements, 21 in all. Statements favorable to inclusion
were made by 8 administrators, 2 of whom accounted for 11 of the 20
statements. An additional 5 administrators made antiseparation statements, with 1 person making 7 of the 11 total statements. Seven
administrators in all made statements both in favor of separation and
against inclusion. Seven more expressed anti-inclusion sentiments but
made no statements supporting separation. Five administrators from
districts in Categories 1, 2, and 3, where inclusion had been adopted as
the major model, made pro-inclusion statements. Support for inclusion
came from only 3 Category 4 district administrators, with 2 also making
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TESOL QUARTERLY

TABLE 2
Summary of Administrators Statements on Program Effectiveness
Program type (%)
ESLa

Inclusion
E

Administrators statements on
Bilingual

District

A
B
C
D
E

60

81100

60

020

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H

25
6180
4160
100
81100
100
5

30
75
6070 020

4160
6180

80
020
81100

81100
95

100

70
3040
6180
2140
20

510
100

A
B
C
D

100
100

2140
100
6180
100
50

81100 81100 020

50
020

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I

100
100

100
100

81100 100
020

60
100
40
100
100

4160 4160 2140 2140

100
100

2140 020 6180 81100

100
100

40
40
6180
100
020 6180
6080
50
81100 100

Category 1

020

2040
50
020

Separation

Inclusion

Sup- Finding Sup- Finding

porting fault porting fault Total

xxx
x
x
xx

xxxxx
x
x
xx

8
2
2
4
0

Category 2
x

x
x

xx
x
x
x
xxx
xxx

xx
xxx

xx
xxx
x
xxxx

2
1
2
3
6
5
7
3

Category 3
x
xx
xx

1
2
2
0

Category 4

A
B
C

100
100

6180
100

Totalb

0-20

xxx
xxx

xx
x

xxxxxxx xxxxx
x

x
xx

xxxxxx

x
xxx

Category 5

3
5
12
3
0
2
0
8
3
0
0
0

12/21

5/11

8/20

14/34

86

Note. E = elementary, S = secondary. One administrator from each district was interviewed (total = 29).
Includes a small number of ESL classrooms at the elementary level and sheltered content and ESL
pullout classes at the secondary level. bNo. of administrators expressing view/no. of statements
expressing view.

DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

119

antiseparation statements. Two administrators in all made statements

both for and against separation, a third found fault with both models,
and the administrator from 1 district in Category 1 expressed both proinclusion and proseparation views. In the following sections we provide
the full range of the administrators arguments for and against these two
general program types.

Supporting Separation
Of the 12 administrators who expressed opinions favoring separation,
3 said that if bilingual programming were feasible in their districts, it
would be the best model for English language learners. Ms. Billings,
from her vantage point in a district supportive to bilingual programming, stated that use of the students L1 was the only way for them to be
taught comprehensibly. Yet few specic advantages of ESL were mentioned, and none of those interviewed defended the ESL pullout model
from any instructional or curriculum-theoretic perspective. For the most
part, separating students was seen to be necessary in order to provide
more support. An administrator in a Category 2 district said, Faculty felt
that some LEP students at the fourth- and fth-grade levels needed more
support in English language arts, so now there is a sheltered language
arts program for those LEP students. Even Ms. Inge recognized the
need for sheltered language arts, especially for secondary students with
low levels of English prociency and literacy in the L1 and in English.
Sheltered newcomer programs were favored by 2 administrators in
Category 2 districts.
Another advantage claimed for separating English language learners
was that the ESL classroom served as a helpful and safe haven within the
school. For example, another Category 2 administrator supported the
notion of a comfortable classroom environment where students can
build on what they know and can be made to feel good. Finally, those
who advocated separate, specialized classroom instruction generally
expressed a protective attitude toward English language learners. Like
Ms. Edwards, a Category 3 administrator saw an advantage for students
being taught by specialist teachers, reporting that her district provided
self-contained elementary classrooms for new English language learners
for a maximum of 1 year, after which they were placed with regular
elementary teachers. When asked about the possibility of her district
moving toward inclusion, she said, That would be a big mistake. I think
kids . . . dont get nearly what they get with ESL teachers.

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Finding Fault With Separation

Administrators in one Category 4 district with an inclusion program
said that separate instruction was not effective for English language
learners, particularly if students remained in special programs too long.
One stated, As a classroom teacher for 25 years, thats what I saw. . . .
Grouped ESOL kids achievement was not as high. Another argument
against separate instruction was offered by an administrator who felt that
English language learners did not get sufcient exposure to English,
either at home or in schools where services were centralized. She
believed that these students understood a lot more than they let on. A
third administrator explained that the students should be removed from
the protective coddling of ESL teachers who did not push the kids
hard enough and allowed them to stay in a nonchallenging classroom.
Parental preference that their children not be taught in separate classes
was mentioned in two cases, and concern over students civil rights and
charges of discrimination was expressed in another. For example, a
Category 4 district administrator stated that separate environments were
inherently unequal, insisting, These kids deserve equal access to education.

Supporting Inclusion
Statements in support of inclusion were made by eight administrators,
four in the largest districts and four in Category 3 and 4 districts. A
Category 1 administrator supported the inclusion model for the more
procient students, claiming that outside evaluators found the model to
be effective. One Category 2 administrator and one Category 3 administrator claimed that inclusion achieved their districts goals of desegregation and site-based management, respectively. Another administrator
from a Category 2 district with a high percentage of English language
learners reported a transformation in her district since it moved to an
inclusion model. She explained that the mainstream teachers were now
carrying the burden of these students. According to Ms. Inge, The
philosophy has created an atmosphere wherein each neighborhood
school acknowledges its responsibility for the LEP students. A Category
3 district administrator claimed that one of the benets of inclusion was
greater awareness by teachers of these learners and better understanding of how to teach them. Two Category 4 district administrators who
emphasized the value of diversity in the classroom said that mainstream
teachers found these students to be pleasant and the diversity rewarding.
From the perspective of English language learners language development and academic achievement, two ESL administrators in Category 4
districts mentioned interaction with native-English-speaking peers as an
DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

121

advantage of inclusion settings. Another Category 4 administrator avowed,

Weak students did better because they had role models. She acknowledged that the ESL specialist had a role, however, by stating that in small
districts with few English language learners, they are best served in
mainstream classrooms where they can get extra help with language arts.
A Category 3 administrator even highlighted the reciprocal nature of the
inclusive classroom, saying that the native English speakers wanted to
learn Spanish, prompting her to submit a grant proposal for this
purpose.

Finding Fault With Inclusion

Fourteen administrators in all expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the inclusion model, their concerns relating to students, teachers,
and external pressures. The overall concern relating to students was
their apparent lack of academic success in inclusion settings. Administrators in two Category 4 districts were unhappy about students being
placed at noncenter secondary schools, citing lack of student progress
due to inadequate modication of instruction and assessment. In one of
those districts the ESL centers had recently been dismantled under
pressure from the DOE. Other administrators were concerned about
especially fragile populations of English language learners. One administrator in a Category 1 district worried about inadequate support for
newcomers or students with very limited English prociency, who, she
said, needed self-contained English or sheltered content classrooms. The
administrator in a Category 2 district explained, There are a lot of
refugee students in the district now who have experienced posttraumatic
stress disorder and who need special attention that they dont get in
regular classrooms. She, too, expressed concern about low-Englishprociency students in the mainstream. An administrator in a rural
Category 3 district with a large number of farm workers said that most of
her rural Mexican students had limited formal education. Such children
had literacy and language needs that could not adequately be met in
inclusion settings.
Other concerns put forward in the interviews centered on the role of
teachers in the success of English language learners in inclusion classrooms. One concern was the uneven commitment and inconsistent
assistance provided to learners within any given school or district. The
effectiveness of grandfathered teachers was a concern expressed by a
Category 3 administrator. An administrator in a Category 2 district with
site-based management said she thought that in some of the schools it
was sink or swim, depending on the teacher. She explained that not all

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teachers had fully accepted responsibility for English language learners

and that teachers degree of use of ESL strategies in the classroom was
unknown. Another major concern was for the regular teachers lack of
time. As one administrator put it, Everyone is feeling overloaded,
especially the teachers. Above all, lack of the expertise required to assist
the English language learners was a great concern. An administrator in a
Category 2 district reported that English language learners with the
lowest levels of English prociency could not function in the regular
language arts classroom, so they had been clustered with additional
instructional support provided through sheltered language arts. Another
administrator reported that regular classroom teachers, especially at the
secondary level, did not know how to signicantly modify their curricula
and struggled to help their students. The high school English teachers
complained about the unfairness of placing English language learners in
classrooms where literature such as Julius Caesar was being taught,
admitting that they had no idea about how to help these learners attain
the state standards in English.
With respect to external pressure, a Category 2 administrator criticized DOE efforts to discontinue special programs for newcomers and
students with almost no English. She said it was impossible for science,
math, and social studies teachers to teach non-English speakers in a
regular class of 35 students. Another administrator worried about the
numbers who were not making it and about the pressure on them to
achieve grade level in 2 years. What they are doing is causing our kids to
drop out. Its ridiculous! Finally, the administrator of another Category
2 district with an ESL pullout model explained that unrealistic expectations had been set for both teachers and students. Although academic
achievement is a general goal for all students, with the current emphasis
on accountability and assessment, one administrator claimed that students had not performed well on the state-mandated achievement tests
but that it was unreasonable to expect immediate results.

Summary
The three portraits gleaned from our interviews illustrate administrators rationales for their English language learner programs. Two of
these administrators claimed signicant advantages for separating English language learners for specialized instruction, either in the students
L1 or in ESL support settings. The other strongly favored inclusion in
the context of her districts promotion of individualization and exibility.
With respect to the second question on program effectiveness, we
found a broad range of views in support of or critical of separation for

DUELING PHILOSOPHIES

123

special instructional services and in support of or critical of inclusion.

Within this range, administrators supported separation programs when
they provided safe social and academic environments with specialized
instructional support but criticized these programs when they fell short
of expectations of rigor and speediness, and when parents objected to
the separation of their children from the mainstream. We found that
inclusion was supported for integrating English language learners with
native-English-speaking students, promoting an interest in bilingualism
among majority language students, and spreading responsibility for
English language learners among staff throughout the school. Inclusion
was problematic in that it left some of the most needy students behind,
posed serious challenges to teachers, and exacerbated external pressures
at all levels, from the school district to the individual child in the
classroom, for high scores on the state-mandated exams.

DISCUSSION
The variety of administrators views regarding the instructional programs available for English language learners in Florida indicates cause
for concern. Nearly 20 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk
(National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and 12 years
after the signing of the Florida Consent Decree, we nd that in the
pursuit of excellence, equity remains elusive. On the surface, the
Consent Decree appears progressive and positive, fostering integration
of English language learners into the mainstream, developing new skills
among teachers, and setting high expectations for language and content
learning. However, equity requires both challenge and support for
English language learners. ESL and bilingual classes have traditionally
provided support but have not always challenged students academic
development. Inclusion can indeed be a means to provide this challenge,
but for students with limited educational backgrounds, very low English
prociency, migrant status, or traumatic experiences, the provision of
support in inclusion settings has been serendipitous. According to our
data, where resources are available and where welcoming attitudes are
clearly demonstrated, administrators believe that students can fare well
in inclusion settings. However, where a districts resources are stretched,
or when administrators and teachers lack time, expertise, or the will to
help this special group of students succeed, outcomes are likely to be less
favorable.
According to the administrators working with the largest and most
varied groups of English language learners, the more obvious negative
consequences of inclusion are for vulnerable students with low levels of

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English and academic skills. Many teachers, particularly at the secondary

level, do not understand English language learners special language
learning needs, or they feel inadequate to teach them well within the
limits of time and their own expertise. Thus, in our view a great concern
about inclusion is the validity of the assumption that English language
learners will get the help they need to succeed in school. What is needed
is a better understanding of the extent to which teachers who have been
trained in strategies for working with English language learners can
actually provide adequate support for these students in mainstream
classrooms.
An additional concern is that of the socializing peer group for English
language learners. The inclusion philosophy is built on the assumption
that mainstream classes provide the best opportunities for the students
to interact with their native-English-speaking peers. The degree to which
they are able to take advantage of such opportunities is unclear, however,
as Harklau (1999), Naranjo (2000), Olsen (1997), and Valds (2001)
have demonstrated. In addition, if an assimilationist goal is in place,
language minority students may become marginalized or even invisible
in the school community. If an inclusion program attempts to conceal
the so-called English language decits of students, or if the school
ignores the linguistic and cultural diversity that English language learners bring, then the goals of inclusive education are subverted.
The attitudes of school and district leaders and their knowledge about
the language learning process contribute to setting the proper tone for a
welcoming inclusion of English language learners. One might speculate
that in the district where the ESL administrator talked about majority
language children wanting to learn Spanish, teachers and administrators
celebrate diversity and openly acknowledge the value of bilingualism.
The opposite is reected in the statements of the administrators who
disparaged the ESL environment as overly protective and assumed that
use of the home language hindered students progress in school. Such
statements may reect a devaluing of home language maintenance, or
they may reveal lack of knowledge about the importance of L1 mediation
in L2 development (Anton & diCamilla, 1998; Swain & Lapkin, 2000).
Inuences at the state and national level can also affect the ability of
a program to effectively serve English language learners. In Florida,
ESL/bilingual language development syllabi have been replaced by the
Sunshine State Standards for the English language arts, and statemandated achievement tests drive the curriculum in many schools.
Students are expected to sit for these tests, often before they are ready.
Several administrators across program types and distinct population
categories expressed serious concerns about pressure from the state level
to produce good test scores within a limited time frame, with unrealistic

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125

expectations being placed on teachers and students.6 Many said it was

unrealistic to expect English language learners to meet grade-level
benchmarks, especially given the states failure to promote alternative
assessments of student learning. Therefore, equity entails acknowledgment of these students special curricular and instructional needs and of
the time required to develop academic language prociency. Indeed,
Gutierrez (2001) criticizes the New Literacy movement, in which many
schools (often by mandate) identify students language differences and
needs and then ignore these needs through one size ts all approaches
to language and literacy learning (p. 565).
Equity also entails funding. In Florida a large percentage of language
minority students live in poorer districts, although the legislature attempts to ameliorate tax base differences by providing additional funds
to those districts. Different sources provide different information about
per-pupil spending.7 Further, as a result of intangibles tax breaks and
corporate tax deferment (Lake County Education Association, 2002,
n.p.), Floridas tax base has been cut by more than $2.2 billion since
1998. Clearly, this loss of revenue negatively affects education. Thus, it is
difcult for these districts to provide adequate educational resources for
students with special needs, including English language learners (for
further evidence, see Educational Testing Service, 1991; Moss & Puma,
1995; Taylor & Piche, 1991). Quality programs of all kinds have suffered
cuts at the state and federal levels, forcing local administrators to
reallocate funds in ways that benet as many students as possible, often
reducing services for special needs students. When the support systems
necessary for English language learners success in inclusion programs
are removed, students may simply not be served.8
The comparative effectiveness of different programs remains to be
investigated further, but the data provided in this studygathered from
knowledgeable persons who are directly responsible for administering
the programsoffer some important insights on this complex issue.

6
Under the rules of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, students with 3 or
more years of instruction in English should be tested along with native English speakers, with
fewer years at the discretion of state and local policy. Although for a time the number of years
before students would be tested in Florida was 2 years, recent changes in Title I of the No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001 have mandated testing after the rst year (Florida DOE, 2002).
7
According to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (2002), the national average cost
per pupil by state in 20002001 was $8,254, and the average in Florida (ranking 33rd) was
$7,473. Alternatively, the Lake County Education Association (2002), citing Education Week,
reports that Florida ranks 44th, having fallen further behind the national average and spending
$5,982 per pupil. Florida DOEs Florida School Indicators Report (2001a) provides data on schools
in each Florida districts, including cost per pupil. These data indicate differences between
regular and at-risk students.
8
Further cuts are anticipated as the state now must lower class size as a result of a recent
citizens initiative (Florida Constitution, Amendment 9, 2002).

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Indeed, Brisk (1998) found that many different conditions distinguish

successful educational programs for language minority students, and
several studies have shown that type of instruction cannot be easily
mapped according to program model (Baker, 1993; Ramrez, Yuen, &
Ramey, 1991; Tikunoff, 1983). August and Pease-Alvarez (1996) identied several convergent variables that promote the successful education
of language minority children, though they caution against simple
solutions. A wide range of learner and contextual characteristics must be
considered when designing effective programs: cultural backgrounds,
language socialization practices, cognitive styles, educational experience,
differences in age and level of language and literacy development, and
the status of the home language and culture in relation to the target
language and culture.

CONCLUSIONS
Our ongoing research in Florida on the impact of the Consent Decree
and the increasing use of the inclusion model for English language
learners has highlighted two important concerns. One is the equity
imbalance that may arise when students are not provided the support
they need to achieve inclusive goals in the classroom. The deprivation of
specialized ESL services to students with the greatest need for language
and literacy support runs counter to the guidelines provided by the
OCR, even though full inclusion is promoted at policy levels as the
means to achieve equity. Our research illustrates that ESL administrators
in Florida possess a range of views on the optimum learning environments for English language learners. Yet despite our own critical stance
toward inclusion classrooms, we do not believe that programs that
separate students are necessarily better, particularly when they do not
rapidly prepare students to read, write, and comprehend English well
enough to participate meaningfully (OCR, 1991, n.p.) in regular
classrooms. Unfortunately, ESL as a viable program has been criticized
for lack of academic rigor and for its tendency to place students in a
dependent or marginal status too long. We agree that a comfort zone is
an inadequate justication for a program and that equity cannot be
achieved when students are not challenged. Rather, ESL professionals
must advance the academic program through instruction that is well
integrated with the content and skills of the academic disciplines,
balanced with attention to the language development needs of the
students. We do not wish to take a stand against standards. Indeed,
standards can provide the stimulus for ESL, bilingual, and content area
programs to create appropriate yet challenging learning environments.
ESL Standards for Pre-K12 Students (TESOL, 1997) provides such a
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127

framework for integrating language development with content curriculum and assessment.
The other concern is the impact on ESL teachers and the TESOL
profession itself. Language development, the traditional focus of the
ESL/bilingual specialist, now seems a marginal concern in light of the
emphasis on Floridas Comprehensive Assessment Test. ESL/bilingual
teachers are increasingly assigned to mainstream classrooms in Florida
districts. Teachers in formerly self-contained ESL classrooms have become resource persons in support of standard curriculum teachers
objectives, with the result that they spend less time working directly with
the students. In some cases ESL teachers have taken on other duties,
such as record keeping regarding compliance with the Consent Decree,
staff development, tutor training, or curriculum adaptation (see Franson,
1999, for an account of the difculties associated with teacher partnerships in United Kingdom classrooms). When ESL specialists are eliminated or forced to become jacks-of-all-trades in a school, however, their
curricular and methodological expertise is either lost or diluted for
distribution to the general faculty, who often lack fundamental knowledge of language and the L2 learning process and of how to implement
this understanding.
If the current trend toward standardization of curriculum, instruction,
and assessment continues, and if specialized language support is considered peripheral rather than essential to the success of English language
learners, then radically different roles are in store for ESL and bilingual
teachers. During our study of the changing nature of ESL language
policy and practice in Florida over the past decade, state university
teacher education programs have begun to prepare all new teachers for
the roles that ESL/bilingual specialists have traditionally performed.
Whereas many celebrate this development, we fear that many teachers
are not adequately prepared for and are insufciently committed to
these important roles. We believe that the consequences to the TESOL
profession will be profound and that this trend should be acknowledged
and discussed at all levels of the profession. If, as we believe, the Florida
story is typical, then TESOL as a professional practice is clearly at a
crossroads at the beginning of the 21st century. Indeed, in her discussion
of the mainstreaming of English language learners in Australia, Davison
(2001) describes the tension between the philosophical base of the ESL
eld which emphasizes diversity and complexity, and the demands of the
mainstream educational agenda for commonality, simplicity, and homogeneity (p. 29). The TESOL profession must therefore dene more
explicitly and publicly its evolving instructional and curricular identity. If
we as TESOL professionals are unable to articulate and defend our
specialized roles, we may nd ourselves swept away by mainstream
educational reforms.
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THE AUTHORS
Elizabeth Platt is an associate professor in multilingual/multicultural education at
Florida State University (FSU). In addition to researching the fate of English
language learners in Floridas schools generally, she studies the discourse of teaching
and learning in classrooms and investigates early L2 language learning processes,
particularly from a sociocultural perspective.
Candace Harper is an assistant professor in ESL in the School of Teaching and
Learning at the University of Florida. Her research interests include second language
acquisition and academic achievement among K12 English language learners and
reading processes among L2 learners of varying ages. She is currently the editor of
Sunshine State TESOL Journal.
Maria Beatriz Mendoza is currently a doctoral student in multicultural/multilingual
education at FSU. She holds a BA in TESL from Universidad Metropolitana,
Venezuela, and an MA in multilingual/multicultural education from FSU. She works
as an ESL instructor at the Center for Intensive English Studies at FSU.

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APPENDIX
Interview Protocol
Interviewer: ____________________Interviewee: _________________________
Date: _________________________
District: ____________________________
Would you like a typed summary of this interview (yes/no)? Mailing address (if yes):
Please explain your position in the district (your roles/responsibilities, length of time in
position, and prior background/experience related to this work).
Please verify/clarify your district demographics [taken from returned surveys].
Total number of LEP (LY) students:
Elementary LY students:
Secondary LY students:
Please verify the types of program models serving elementary LY students* [taken from
surveys].
Please verify the types of program models serving secondary LY students* [taken from
surveys].
Please describe any background or details on how these programs are implemented in your
district.
Please provide the rationale for these programs (explain why these programs were selected).
Please express your opinions on the effectiveness of these programs.
Please explain any concerns you may have regarding the following in your district.
Instructional programs for LY students:
LY student achievement/progress:
Other issues regarding LY students:
*Program Model Descriptions: Five program models serving LEP students in Florida [taken from survey]:
ESL pullout: Elementary or secondary LEP students leave their regular classroom to go to an
ESL classroom for at least one class period per day.
ESL self-contained classroom: Elementary LEP students spend most of the day in a selfcontained ESOL classroom.
Sheltered content classes: Secondary LEP students are taught academic content by subject
matter teachers in classes designed specically for their needs.
Inclusion classrooms: Elementary or secondary LEP students are served in mainstream
content classrooms where ESL strategies are being used, where materials are adapted, and/
or where an ESL teacher or paraprofessional assistance is available.
Bilingual or home language instruction: Elementary or secondary LEP students spend at
least part of the day being taught through the home language.

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THE FORUM
TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL
profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks
published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

On Reconceptualizing Teacher Education*

ROBERT YATES and DENNIS MUCHISKY
Central Missouri State University
Warrensburg, Missouri, United States

There is a quiet revolution going on in TESOL teacher education. . . . It is

stirring the very essence of what stands at the core of TESOL teacher
education; a core that has long been based on the subject matter of language
teaching and less on the sociocultural processes of learning to teach (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). ( Johnson, 2000, p. 1)

This proclamation about a quiet revolution appears in the introduction to a collection of articles published by TESOL entitled Teacher
Education, edited by Johnson (2000). The reference to Freeman and
Johnson (1998a), which appears to be the revolutions manifesto, comes
from the lead article to a special-topic issue of TESOL Quarterly (Freeman
& Johnson, 1998b) devoted to research and practice in English language
teacher education. A recent review of the state of language teacher
education (Crandall, 2000) has said that no other volume in the last
decade better portrays the major concerns in language teacher education than this special issue (p. 46), and as such it appears to be an
excellent point of departure for examining the revolution, which calls
for a reconceptualization of the knowledge base of language teacher
education.
The position taken by Freeman and Johnson (1998a) regarding the
knowledge base of teacher education merits careful consideration because it suggests the critical areas of knowledge that should be included
*A version of this commentary was presented at the 35th Annual TESOL Convention, St.
Louis, Missouri, in March 2001.
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

135

as professional knowledge in the discipline. Discussion of this position

holds the potential for constructive self-examination and has important
implications for the eld at a time when an increasing number of
teachers, teacher educators, and others concerned with English language education are looking to the eld for guidance. We would like to
add to the discussion by questioning the extent to which the profession
should be reconceptualized along the lines suggested by Freeman and
Johnson. We argue that the reconceptualization they suggest marginalizes
critical issues, such as what it means to be able to use English, how L2s
are learned, and how these issues inuence what teachers do in the
classroom.

THE RECONCEPTUALIZATION:
MARGINALIZING LANGUAGE
A number of participants in the quiet revolution have painted a
picture of their vision of critical areas for teacher education over the past
15 years. One important paper expressing these views articulated the
need for greater focus in the profession on the act of teaching, but at the
same time it deemphasized what language teachers need to know about
language and language acquisition. Freeman (1989) proposed that
language teacher education serves to link what is known in the eld to
what is done in the classroom. In labeling this link a conuence of
these two streams of research and practice, he claimed that that
conuence will come about not through greater attention to teaching or
research per se, but through a closer examination of how people learn to
teach (p. 30). The absence of the word language in this conuence is
noteworthy because it forecasts the lack of focus on language that
permeates the quiet revolution in language teacher education.
In the 1989 article, Freeman argued that it is teacher awareness that
unies the notions of knowledge, skills, and attitude that a teacher has.
He asked three questions about awareness:
1. Are teachers aware of how they are responding to students? In other
words, are they aware of their attitude toward them?
2. Are they aware of how a particular type of correction is working? Are they
aware of their skills in correcting?
3. Are they aware of what students already know? Are they aware of their
students prior knowledge in relation to the content of the lesson? (p. 34)

These questions are relevant to the eld, but it is not clear whether
research has attempted to address them. Instead of focusing on individual teacher decision making, the agenda appears to have shifted to
questions intended to place individual teachers in their social setting.
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About 10 years later, Freeman and Johnson (1998a) proposed to

reconceptualize the TESOL teacher education knowledge base with the
following three components:
(a) the nature of the teacher-learner; (b) the nature of schools and schooling;
and (c) the nature of language teaching, in which we include pedagogical
thinking and activity, the subject matter and the content, and language
learning. (p. 406)

These three interdependent components are intended to offer a contrasting perspective to the binary distinction between subject matter and
learners on which, Freeman and Johnson claim, most discussions of
language teaching and language teacher education have been based
(Celce-Murcia & McIntosh, 1979; Oller & Richard-Amato, 1983; Widdowson, 1978) (p. 406).
Freeman (1989) asserts that language teacher education is based on
the fundamental misconception that a transmission of knowledge about
applied linguistics and language acquisition is sufcient for a preservice
teacher to become an effective classroom instructor. Based on this
interpretation of language teacher education, Freeman and Johnson
(1998a) make the following statement:
Drawing on work in general education, teacher educators have come to
recognize that teachers are not empty vessels waiting to be lled with
theoretical and pedagogical skills. They are individuals who enter teacher
education programs with prior experiences, personal values, and beliefs that
inform their knowledge about teaching and shape what they do. (p. 401)

Richards and Lockharts (1994) text, designed to be used in a L2

teacher education course that focuses on classroom observations and
theories of teaching, or in a practicum course, is specically designed
not to follow the awed transmission model of language teacher education. Rather, it aims to develop a reective approach to teaching (p. 1),
that is, one in which teachers and student teachers collect data about
teaching, examine their attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and teaching
practices, and use the information obtained as a basis for critical
reection about teaching. They note in the beginning of their text that
critical reection involves asking a number of questions; 23 are given. It
is noteworthy that only 3 of those questions have the word language in
them. Another text by Gebhard and Oprandy (1999), designed for
similar classes, is even less directed to language teacher education. For
example, in the last chapter, entitled How Yoga Was Taught: Connecting
My Student and Teacher Selves (Gebhard, 1999), one author shares
with the reader his experiences in nding a yoga teacher whose feedback
he found effective.
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REEXAMINING THE RECONCEPTUALIZATION

Analogies about feedback in yoga class and questions about teacher
awareness or the nature of schools and schooling no doubt have
something to offer in TESOL teacher education. The idea of
reconceptualizing TESOL in a manner that marginalizes language and
second language acquisition (SLA), however, seems worthy of careful
consideration by faculty like us who are involved in TESOL teacher
education. In reading the work associated with the call for the
reconceptualization, we notice that some of the claims about current
practices in teacher education are not consistent with our experience.
We do not see evidence supporting the idea that language teacher
education is solely concerned with the transmission of knowledge or that
language teacher educators assume that students in MA TESOL programs enter such programs as empty vessels. We would attribute
approaches we see toward teacher education in TESOL to the fact that
teacher educators in our profession have experiences as language
learners and language teachers and are therefore aware of how incomplete course work alone is for helping a student become a competent
language teacher. Based on our observations of and contacts with
language teacher educators in MA professional programs in North
America, regardless of where those programs are located in the university, we have noted that many of our colleagues have actually had
classroom experiences in a variety of contexts, both ESL and EFL, prior
to and since having become teacher educators. In our own MA program,
all the faculty have lived outside the United States for at least 2 years,
everyone speaks or has studied at least one language, everyone has
taught both ESL/EFL at a variety of settings and levels, and everyone
regularly teaches our universitys ESL support courses. Based on this
multifaceted experience, we believe that an understanding of how
language is organized and how languages are learned is fundamental to
becoming a competent language teacher.
The advocacy of reective teaching called for by the quiet revolution
seems valuable in this setting, where teacher educators regularly draw on
their own experiences as they work with future teachers. However, a
critical limitation in the perspective on reective language teaching is
revealed by what questions are not asked. For example, Richards and
Lockhart (1994) discuss reective teaching in chapter 3, entitled Focus
on the Learner. The introduction to this chapter observes, Learners,
too, bring to learning their own beliefs, goals, attitudes, decisions which
in turn inuence how they approach learning (p. 52). This entire
chapter ignores something else that learners bring with to learning: a
developmental grammar referred to as an interlanguage. Because this
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quences for the kinds of language that learners both comprehend and
produce. From this perspective, for example, errors (or, more accurately,
nontargetlike structures) are not all the same. A reective language
teacher should also ask questions such as what it means to know a
language, how teachers should treat learners nontargetlike forms, how
teachers can assess learners knowledge, whether learning a L2 is similar
to or different from learning an L1, and whether language learning is
similar to or different from learning other subjects, such as mathematics,
social studies, and chemistry.
Encouraging language teachers to reect on so many factors other
than language makes the call for the reconceptualization of language
teacher education incomplete at best and perhaps even misguided. One
of the most distinguished teacher educators in the profession, Marianne
Celce-Murcia, expressed the issue as follows in an interview in which she
was reecting on the profession and her career:
Youve got to know your subject matter. How can you teach the English
language if you dont know English as declarative knowledge? There is much
more to teaching than that, of course. . . . But I really think they are going to
have a difcult time . . . if they dont have an understanding of their subject
matter. (Yoo, 2001, p. 193)

Because the profession is concerned with English language learning, it

seems that reection that marginalizes language and how it is learned
threatens to undermine the focus on declarative knowledge of English
that Celce-Murcia regards as fundamental. We share her opinion about
the centrality of language in language teaching and feel that this idea
should not be controversial. Perhaps somewhat less clear-cut is the
connection between SLA research and language teaching.

SLA AND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

The uneasiness felt by many language teacher educators about the
relevance of research in SLA is evident in Freemans (1989) important
paper:
Although applied linguistics, research in second language acquisition, and
methodology all contribute to the knowledge on which language teaching is
based, they are not, and must not be confused with, language teaching itself.
They are, in fact, ancillary to it, and thus they should not be the primary
subject matter of language teacher education. (p. 29)

More than 10 years later Freeman and Johnson (1998a) expressed the
same concern about the connection between SLA research and language
teaching: Because the research knowledge per se does not articulate
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easily and cogently into classroom practice, much current knowledge in

SLA may be of limited use and applicability to practicing teachers (p.
411). Freeman and Johnson offered a further analysis of the problem
with trying to connect SLA research with teacher education, including
the following three points:
1. SLA is itself a constructed view of language learning, by which we
mean that it is subject to its own epistemological claims, counterclaims, and methodological arguments; that because of its roots in
L1 acquisition studies, it has not until recently examined language
learning from the standpoint of socially negotiated, constructivist
processes that may be at play; and that language teachers have
largely been bystanders to both these denitional debates and to the
SLA research community (p. 411).
2. This knowledge base is wrong because much current knowledge in
SLA may be of limited use and applicability to practicing teachers
(p. 411).
3. What is important is that teachers must understand their own
beliefs and knowledge about learning and teaching (p. 412).
In other words, they argued that because research in SLA has different
bases and goals from language teaching, the proper domain of interest
in language teaching should be teachers knowledge and beliefs about
learning and teaching.
SLA research is a legitimate eld of inquiry about the human mind
that does not require any pedagogical application, but it does not follow
that SLA research is irrelevant to language teaching. As language teacher
educators, we do not expect SLA researchers to be under the obligation
to us to articulate how to apply their ndings to language teaching
pedagogy. This is our job. We would argue that it is the responsibility of
all L2 teacher educators to articulate where and how SLA research is
relevant rather than dismiss it as irrelevant. In this regard, Grabe, Stoller,
and Tardys (2000) paper is an example of teacher educators explaining
the value of core disciplinary knowledge to prospective teachers. Moreover, many researchers in SLA have summarized research ndings in a
manner that makes pedagogical links visible, and many are conducting
research in classroom settings, where it would be difcult to fail to see
implications.

Pedagogical Implications of SLA Findings

Recent summaries about ndings from SLA research (Lightbown,
2000; Long, 1990) have clear pedagogical relevance. Lightbown reexamines a list of 10 statements about SLA research she initially proposed 15
years earlier (Lightbown, 1985), for example,
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There are predictable sequences in L2 acquisition such that certain structures

have to be acquired before others can be integrated.
Isolated explicit error correction is usually ineffective in changing language
behaviour.
The learners task is enormous because language is enormously complex.
(Lightbown, 2000, p. 432)

In the anniversary paper, she maintains the same position that she took
in the rst paper: SLA research should not be the major source of
guidance for the how or the what of second language teaching, but it
can help set realistic expectations for what language teachers and
learners [can] accomplish in the second/foreign language classroom
(p. 431). She notes that over the 15-year period the biggest change in
SLA research is the sheer volume of SLA research that has focused on
pedagogical questions (p. 452).
An earlier paper concerned with theory-research connections, The
Least a Second Language Acquisition Theory Needs to Explain (Long,
1990), summarizes research ndings with relevance for language teaching. Long presents eight accepted ndings about SLA that are very
specic to the domain of L2 learning and would never be considered in
a general teaching practices course. Six of them have clear pedagogical
implications:
1. There are systematic differences in the problems learners of different L1 backgrounds have in learning a particular L2.
2. Age inuences both the rate of acquisition and ultimate attainment
in an L2.
3. Affective factors are subordinate to linguistic and cognitive factors in
development of an L2.
4. Some aspects of learning an L2 require attention to language form.
5. It is impossible to learn some L2 items from positive evidence alone.
6. Much of interlanguage development is often U-shaped, which means
a theory assuming that change in a learners interlanguage is based
on the learners perceptions of the frequencies of forms in the input
is incomplete (p. 660).
The pedagogical implications from the fourth statement in particular
are evident. Doughty and Williams (1998), in Pedagogical Choices in
Focus on Form, present six considerations that we believe all language
teachers must consider: the choice of whether to focus on form, reactive
versus proactive focus on form, the choice of linguistic form, explicitness
of focus on form, sequential versus integrated focus on form, and the
role of focus on form in the curriculum. Following on the conclusions in
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Long (1990), Doughty and Williams argue that research on the rst
decision demonstrates that there must be some focus on form in the
language classroom. We would argue that these decisions concerning the
treatment of learners language in the classroom address the critical
domain for language teacher educators more directly than the more
general ones suggested by proponents of the quiet revolution. For
example, Freeman and Richards (1993) advise,
A good teacher is seen as one who analyzes a classroom situation, realizes that
a range of options is available based on the particular circumstances, and
then selects the alternative which is most effective in that instance. (p. 206)

As language teacher educators, we believe that the question of the

range of options available to the teacher should include decisions
specic to L2 teaching such as those considered by Doughty and
Williams.

Situatedness and SLA

Among the criticisms of SLA research in the quiet revolution is that
the distance between the objects of investigation and real classrooms is
too great to make meaningful links between the two. For example,
Johnson (1996) points out that teacher educators must begin to
recognize the situated and interpretative nature of teaching (p. 767).
This means less reliance on the transmission of knowledge model of
teaching teachers (i.e., readings, lectures, exams, term papers) and more
on problem- or case-based method (Richert, 1987; Shulman, 1992) (p.
767). We would point out in response to this valid concern the numerous
classroom-based studies of SLA that might come into play in developing
such teaching units.
Harklaus (1994) and Platt and Troudis (1997) studies are examples
of classroom-based research situated in specic contexts and provide
exactly the kind of domain-specic description of classroom practices
that we believe preservice language teachers need to consider. Harklau
examined the learning environment presented to ve ESL students as
they moved between ESL and mainstream instruction. She noted that
although the mainstream classroom provided a great deal of input in the
form of teacher-led discussions, mainstream high school classroom
teachers seldom adjusted input in order to make it comprehensible to L2
learners (p. 249). In the ESL classrooms, however, there were qualitatively superior input and richer, more frequent opportunities for interaction and spoken language output (p. 252). In addition, the ESL classes
provided students with explicit feedback which drew students attention
to language form in a way that has been found benecial to learners (p.
260). Harklau notes,
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Mainstream teachers often seemed to be at a loss in dealing with the

particular sorts of grammatical errors made by nonnative language writers,
such as verb tense and preposition errors. They lacked the linguistic background necessary to explain to students why their language was wrong. (p.
260)

In other words, the ESL teachers had domain-specic knowledge that

made their instruction more effective.
Platt and Troudi (1997), in Mary and Her Teachers: A GreboSpeaking Childs Place in the Mainstream Classroom, examined the
year a nonnative speaker spent in a third-grade classroom in Florida. The
statements and classroom actions of the teacher in this study reected
the view that language learning followed from acculturation. Mary was
assumed to be able to pick up the language through socialization with
the children and develop an understanding of American classroom
culture in the process (p. 33). The student succeeded in tting into the
culture of her third-grade classroom; however, Mary, who came to the
class with very little English prociency and no literacy or math skills, was
in most academic situations precluded from genuine participation,
because the assistance she received . . . did not always facilitate conceptual learning (p. 38).
The organization and focus of classroom instruction was a direct
result of the teachers belief that instruction should challenge learners
to think critically with an orientation toward solving real-life problems,
even in primary grades (Platt & Troudi, 1997, p. 36). As a result of her
frustrations in the academic setting, Mary developed a set of coping
behaviors that included imitation and memorization. As a consequence,
Mary had not yet learned to read and write independently and could
not control the academic discourse of mathematics that her classmates
were beginning to use (p. 44). The conclusions that Platt and Troudi
reach are as relevant to the issue of what kind of professional knowledge
ESL teachers need as it is as an example of a study that speaks to teacher
education:
Teachers having linguistic minority students in their mainstream classrooms
need a wide range of pedagogical tools, the most important of which is the
ability to listen to students in order to determine their current levels of
prociency and content knowledge. (p. 45)

and
With respect to the developing linguistic system, metacognitive awareness
should be developed along with the language itself. Attention is required at
all levels of languagephonological through discoursal and pragmatic. (p.
45)

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We would add that the ability of the teacher to provide attention to all
levels of language rests on knowledge based in linguistics and SLA.
Harklau (1994) and Platt and Troudi (1997) show that successful ESL
instruction requires a different environment than that provided for
native speakers and that creating this environment requires a set of
teaching skills that are founded on the knowledge base we are arguing
for.
No doubt other TESOL teacher educators have additional research
studies that raise their students awareness and understanding of the
SLA-related issues situated in their classrooms. In our own SLA classes,
we have found that a number of longitudinal studies of particular L2
learners (Ioup, Boustagui, El Tigi, & Moselle, 1994; Perdue & Klein,
1992; Platt & Troudi, 1997; Schmidt, 1983; Schumann, 1978) are
accessible to our preservice teachers and provide a basis for domainspecic discussion about the teaching problems such learners present in
the classroom.
Finally, as with many trends in our eld, discussion of the quiet
revolution seems to be occurring in North America, where native
speakers of English may be less aware of the linguistic issues involved in
language teaching. It is difcult to see the relevance of this reconceptualization to EFL settings. For example, Delasalles (2001) book, a pedagogical guide for EFL teachers in France, does not marginalize knowledge about linguistics or language acquisition.

CONCLUSION
We have argued that the goal of the quiet revolution to displace
language as central to language teaching is worthy of serious discussion.
This discussion about what should constitute the core of teacher
education in TESOL is particularly timely because of the increasing
numbers of nonnative speakers of English coming into classrooms in the
United States, where mainstream classroom teachers have no specic
preparation in TESOL and where school administrators have turned to
ESL teachers for advice. With so many nonnative-speaking students in
classrooms, it is vital to consider what advice our profession has to offer.
There are important questions about what language teachers do in the
classroom that are unique to L2 teaching and that only research on SLA
has addressed. We are concerned with the direction the quiet revolution
is taking. Ignoring the core subject areas of language and SLA research
will, we believe, cause preservice teachers to be less prepared to teach
ESL/EFL and will cause the eld to lose any coherence as a separate
discipline.
There is evidence for our concern. Hones (2000) identies the
unique features of his language teacher education program as a focus
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on the critical roles of L2 teachers as cultural storytellers, cultural

healers, and cultural workers (p. 12). This focus on the central role of
culture places mastery of English language skills for academic success in
a secondary position to acculturation.
We have argued that language teacher educators must provide teacher
learners with a basis for reection about language teaching that is
grounded in what is known about how languages are organized, how
languages are learned, and what options are available for language
teaching inuenced by the settings in which that teaching takes place.
Based on our experience in teaching ESL and in TESOL teacher
education, the relative place for language teacher knowledge about
language and how languages are learned is at the core of whatever the
language teacher does and wherever the language teacher is situated.
The call for reconceptualization privileges knowing how to teach over
knowing the disciplinary knowledge. We recognize that knowledge of the
core does not guarantee that one will become a good teacher; however,
we agree with Celce-Murcia (Yoo, 2001, p. 193) when she says, Its the
same idea in other elds: How can you teach math if you dont know
math yourself?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the TESOL Quarterly reviewers and editor for their very helpful comments.

THE AUTHORS
Robert Yates teaches in the MA TESL program at Central Missouri State University.
He is interested in the relationship of second language acquisition and theory to
teaching an L2, the knowledge language teachers need to have about the nature of
language, and developmental writing.
Dennis Muchisky teaches in the MA TESL program at Central Missouri State
University. He has taught in and directed ESL programs in New Mexico and
Nebraska and has published in the area of immigrant writing development in
intensive language programs

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Grabe, W., Stoller, F. L., & Tardy, C. M. (2000). Disciplinary knowledge as a
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Harklau, L. (1994). ESL versus mainstream classes: Contrasting L2 learning environments. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 241272.
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K. E. Johnson (Ed.), Teacher education (pp. 1127). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
Ioup, G., Boustagui, E., El Tigi, M., & Moselle, M. (1994). Reexamining the critical
period hypothesis: A case study of successful adult SLA in a naturalistic environment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 7398.
Johnson, K. E. (1996). The role of theory in L2 teacher education. TESOL Quarterly,
30, 765770.
Johnson, K. E. (2000). Innovations in TESOL teacher education: A quiet revolution.
In K. E. Johnson (Ed.), Teacher education (pp. 17). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
Lightbown, P. M. (1985). Great expectations: Second language research and
classroom teaching. Applied Linguistics, 6, 26373.
Lightbown, P. M. (2000). Classroom SLA research and second language teaching.
Applied Linguistics, 21, 431462.
Long, M. (1990). The least a second language acquisition theory needs to explain.
TESOL Quarterly, 24, 649666.
Oller, J. W., & Richard-Amato, P. A. (Eds.). (1983). Methods that work. Rowley: MA:
Newbury House.
Perdue, C., & Klein, W. (1992). Why does the production of some learners not
grammaticalize? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 259272.
Platt, E. J., & Troudi, S. (1997). Mary and her teachers: A Grebo-speaking childs
place in the mainstream classroom. Modern Language Journal, 81, 2849.
Richards, J. C., & Lockhart, C. (1994). Reflective teaching in second language classrooms.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richert, A. (1987). Writing cases: A vehicle for inquiry into teaching process. In J. H.
Shulman (Ed.), Case methods in teacher education (pp. 155174). New York:
Teachers College Press.
Schmidt, R. (1983). Interaction, acculturation, and the acquisition of communicative
competence: A case study of an adult. In N. Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.),
Sociolinguistics and language acquisition (pp. 137174). Rowley, MA: Newbury
House.
Schumann, J. (1978). Second language acquisition: The pidginization hypothesis. In
E. Hatch (Ed.), Second language acquisition: A book of readings (pp. 256271).
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Shulman, J. H. (1992). Case methods in teacher education. New York: Teachers College
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Widdowson, H. G. (1978). Teaching language as communication. Oxford: Oxford
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Yoo, I. (2001). Bridging the gap between research and pedagogy: An interview with
Marianne Celce-Murcia. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 12, 187199.

Comments on Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad,

Randi Reppen, Pat Byrd, and Marie Helts
Speaking and Writing in the University:
A Multidimensional Comparison
A Reader Reacts . . .
MOHSEN GHADESSY
Zhongshan University
Canton, China

In Speaking and Writing in the University: A Multidimensional

Comparison (Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2002), Biber, Conrad, Reppen,
Byrd, and Helt present a multidimensional (MD) analysis of a number of
academic registers that U.S. university students must listen to or read
(p. 19). The purpose of this critique is to show that there is a major
deciency in the theory of register analysis initially put forth by Biber
(1988) in his multidimensional multifeature (MDMF) approach and that
for the past decade or so the framework has been applied to many
materials without a solution for this deciency being found.
To borrow an analogy from the eld of cooking, Bibers MD approach
gives some of the ingredients for a tasty dish without providing the recipe
for making it. The MD framework provides the frequency of some
grammatical categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and
articles, and the probability of their co-occurrence in several registers of
spoken and written English without telling anything about how these
words and phrases are strung together in any register to make meaningful texts. Biber (1995) and Biber et al. seem to be aware of this aw, but
they have not developed or modied the MD methodology to deal with
it. In this commentary, I refer to a number of factors contributing to the
aw and suggest that the MD framework be changed before claims are
made about its power (p. 18) and comprehensive nature (pp. 13, 43)
when dealing with English or with other registers.
The rst factor relates to the denition of register. Finding support in
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Ervin-Tripp (1972), Biber et al. emphasize that linguistic features work

together in texts as constellations of co-occurring features (rather than
as individual features) to distinguish among registers (p. 13). And in a
footnote they say, The term register here is a cover term for any language
variety dened in situational terms, including the speakers purpose in
communication, the topic, the relationship between speaker and hearer,
spoken or written mode, and the production circumstances (p. 10).
However, it is mainly the rst denition and not the second that informs
MD methodology. For example, the methodology does not tell how the
speakers purpose is achieved, how the topic is developed, how turns in
an interaction are taken, or how language resources above the word and
phrase are used for speaking or writing.
According to Halliday (1978, p. 110), the term register was rst used by
Reid (1956). Since then, applied linguists, especially systemic functional
grammarians, have developed and modied the term (Halliday, 1978,
1985; Hasan, 1996; Martin, 1992; Matthiessen, 1993; Thompson, 1997).
As now understood within the systemic functional framework, the term
has three dimensions of variation: the field of discourse, those meanings
that express our experience of the world around us and inside us; the
tenor of discourse, speech roles (mood), person, polarity (positive or
negative); and the mode of discourse, theme/rheme, (method of development), cohesion (texture), information structure (given/new) (Halliday,
1985, pp. 2526). Each dimension is realized through choices in several
systems and subsystems belonging to three metafunctions of language
the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual. Based on this view of
register, a comprehensive analysis should tell more about how a text is
created rather than focus only on the frequency of certain grammatical
categories and their co-occurrence probabilities.
A second, related point is the question of text as product and as
process. MD methodology, by giving frequencies and co-occurrence
probabilities, treats texts as products. Taking a different view of text in
general and a text in particular raises the possibility of using other
methodological tools for analyzing registers more fully. Halliday (1982)
provides such a denition: Text is the process of meaning; and a text is
the product of that process (p. 209). In other words, other tools are
needed to measure the meaning-making processes involved. These
processes include, among others, structure, coherence, function, development, and character (Halliday, 1982, pp. 209210), none of which is
treated adequately in the MDMF approach.
My third point relates to the unit of analysis in Bibers (1988) initial
MDMF methodology. Almost all the units belong to grammatical categories of English, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or prepositions, exemplied by single words or phrases. A few, such as word length and type/

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token ratio, are different. A comprehensive analysis of any register

cannot neglect the clause/sentence, which occupies an important position in any text, and should also consider other discoursal features. With
MD methodology, thematic analysis or measurement of the information
ow in a text is not possible. Moreover, if the clause were added as a unit
of analysis, it is unclear whether thematic analysis would conrm the
results established by MD methodology.
Using the clustering of text types initially established by Biber and
Finegan (1986), I did a small-scale study (Ghadessy, 1999) to nd the
answer to this question. I found that the grammatical and lexicosemantic
features of the themes of the clauses in the texts led to different
clustering. For example, based on 11 grammatical features of the themes
(e.g., simple, multiple, marked, unmarked), academic prose and editorials formed one cluster. This nding is surprising as, according to Biber
and Finegan, academic prose is the best example of the genre formal
exposition whereas editorials are included in the genre informal exposition.
In terms of 10 lexicosemantic features of the selected themes (e.g.,
animate, inanimate, time, cause), biography and romance made one
cluster, a nding that is again at odds with Biber and Finegans results. In
their analysis, biography is the best example of the genre informal
informational narrative while romance is included in the genre imaginative
narrative.
My last point relates to the implications of Biber et al.s ndings for
teaching and learning EFL or ESL. No doubt, their study has, as they say,
powerful implications for test development (p. 42). But these implications are conned to vocabulary and grammar, as MD methodology does
not give any of the discoursal features of the registers. Their ndings also
reect knowledge about registers (p. 42) that can be used in preparing
instructional materials. But here, too, Biber et al.s ndings strengthen
only knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Thus the results of MD
methodology leave language teachers and learners with much more to
do on their own, that is, to nd out the underlying meaning-making
processes in a register.
Despite the above criticisms, I believe that Biber et al.s MD theory for
register identication is a useful tool in analyzing a register. Using a
computer and the statistical methods employed, one can readily place a
text along a number of clines provided by the methodology. But that is
not enough. A comprehensive methodology should give more than a list
of words and their collocation probabilities. Biber et al.s proposed
criteria for register identication are necessary but not sufcient. If the
theory can pool additional linguistic features from the eld, the tenor,
and the mode of discourse, it can establish a more valid prole of each
register.

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REFERENCES
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1986). An initial typology of English text types. In J. Aarts &
W. Meijs (Eds.), Corpus linguistics II: New studies in the analysis and exploitation of
computer corpora (pp. 1946). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1972). On sociolinguistic rules: Alternation and co-occurrence. In
J. J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics (pp. 213250). New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Ghadessy, M. (1999). Textual features and contextual factors for register identication. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and context in functional linguistics (pp. 125139).
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language
and meaning. London: Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1982). How is a text like a clause? In S. Allen (Ed.), Text processing
(pp. 209247). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksel.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). Register variation. In M. A. K. Halliday & R. Hasan,
Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective (pp. 29
41). Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press.
Hasan, R. (1996). Ways of saying, ways of meaning: Selected papers of Ruqaiya Hasan
(C. Cloran, D. Butt, & G. Williams, Eds.). London: Cassell.
Martin, J. (1992). English text: System and structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Matthiessen, C. (1993). Register in the round. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Register analysis:
Theory and practice (pp. 221292). London: Pinter.
Reid, T. B. W. (1956). Linguistics, structuralism, and philology. Archivum Linguisticum,
8, 2837.
Thompson, G. (1997). Introducing functional grammar. London: Arnold.

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The Authors Respond: Strengths and Goals of

Multidimensional Analysis
DOUGLAS BIBER
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
SUSAN CONRAD
Portland State University
Portland, Oregon, United States
RANDI REPPEN
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
PAT BYRD
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
MARIE HELT
California State University
Sacramento, California, United States

We welcome thoughtful discussion of the multidimensional (MD)

research approach, including proposals to make the methodology even
more effective than it is. However, Ghadessys critique of MD analysis is
awed in four major ways. First, it does not acknowledge the strengths of
MD analysis or address whether alternative approaches can retain those
strengths; second, it does not reect an understanding of the linguistic
and statistical bases of MD analysis; third, it incorrectly assumes that MD
analysis has claimed to be an all-inclusive approach to linguistic variation; and, nally, much of the critique is based on personal preference
for linguistic analysis rather than external considerations such as the uses
for the analysis.
The main point of Ghadessys critique seems to be the desirability of
including additional linguistic characteristicsespecially discourse featuresin future MD analyses. We fully agree with this general goal, and
we have called for similar extensions in nearly every published MD study.
For example, in the article under review, we note that additional
featuresincluding rhetorical and lexical featuresalso deserve attention (p. 43). However, we do not believe that the desirability of future
extensions constitutes a major deciency in MD methodology or
diminishes the important contributions of past MD research.
Although Ghadessy raises several specic criticisms in his review, he
does not address or acknowledge the strengths of MD analysis:

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It takes advantage of corpus-based research methodologies to investigate overall patterns of register variation and achieve more generalizable results than in other methodologies.

It is based on the analysis of large corpora, in this case representing

university language use, including long texts, multiple texts from
each register, and a large range of spoken and written university
registers.

The use of computer programs and interactive software tools makes

it possible to analyze a wide range of linguistic features in each text;
in the present case, 67 different grammatical and syntactic features
are covered.

In contrast, most register studies undertaken with other approaches have

focused on a single register, a small number of linguistic features, and a
smaller number of texts. Because of these differences, we claimed that
our study reports results of the most comprehensive linguistic analysis
of academic language to date (p. 11). We stand by this claim, and we
would argue that the strength of alternative approaches should be
evaluated by these criteria as well.
Ghadessy seems most bothered by our claim to be comprehensive
(pp. 13, 43). He seems to assume an absolute meaning for the term,
something like all-inclusive. As a result, he concludes that failure to
include discourse features in MD analyses is a major deciency, a
problem, and a aw, and that such analyses cannot claim to be
comprehensive.
However, we use the term comprehensive as a gradable adjective, with
the meaning of large scope; covering much; inclusive (Random House
Websters College Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. comprehensive, rst denition).
We believe that the analysis is comprehensive by that denition: The
study is based on analysis of a 2.7-million-word corpus, containing 423
texts from 10 different spoken and written registers. Further, we analyzed
the distribution of 67 different linguistic features in each text, including
grammatical classes (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns), meaningful grammatical distinctions (e.g., past tense, perfect aspect, passive
voice), and syntactic/clause-level features (e.g., relative clauses, adverbial
clauses, complement clause types). MD studies are some of the most
inclusive analyses of register variation yet attempted, and the omission of
discourse features does not diminish that accomplishment.
Several other criticisms raised by Ghadessy seem simply to reect his
preference for a different analytical framework. Ghadessy points out that
we do not adopt the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL)
and do not analyze registers with respect to eld, tenor, and mode.
In addition, we analyze texts as products rather than focusing on
meaning-making processes. We agree with these statements, but we do
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not regard them as criticisms. They are simply reections of the research
constructs and goals of MD analysis and the ways they happen to differ
from SFL. We see SFL as a complementary theoretical framework, with
different analytical techniques and research goals from our own. We
would welcome a synthesis of perspectives and methods, but we do not
think that either approach should abandon its own goals and priorities
in that effort.
Finally, Ghadessy makes several incorrect statements that reect
misunderstandings or misrepresentations. The rst has to do with the
denition and identication of registers. Ghadessy characterizes MD
analysis as Biber et al.s MD theory for register identication. However,
in the MD approach, registers are named varieties in a culture, dened
in situational terms, like conversation, letters, textbooks, and lectures. As
we explain (p. 10, Footnote 1), registers in this view are not necessarily
well dened linguistically; that is, there can be important linguistic
differences among texts within a register. Similarly, registers are not
necessarily distinguished from one another in their linguistic characteristics. For example, university textbooks and newspaper prose are
completely different registers, but they are similar in many of their
linguistic characteristics. MD analysis was developed to analyze those
linguistic characteristics, addressing the extent to which any two registers
are similar or different along multiple linguistic dimensions of variation.
Ghadessy is not correct in stating that these dimensions are used to
dene or identify registers; rather, the dimensions are used to compare
the linguistic characteristics of predened registers. A complementary
analytical approachanalyzing text typesidenties text categories that
are well dened in linguistic terms (see the references cited on p. 10,
Footnote 1, in our article).
Second, Ghadessy repeatedly states that MD analysis has an impoverished linguistic basis. He states that it is based on the frequency of some
grammatical categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and
articles; that it is restricted almost exclusively to single words or
phrases; and that it consists of a list of words and their collocation
probabilities. On the ip side, Ghadessy suggests that MD analysis
completely disregards clause-level features. Such descriptions are erroneous at best. In fact, MD analysis includes as wide a range of relevant
grammatical classes and distinctions as possible within its corpus-based
approach, including grammatical classes, analysis of grammatical/syntactic
function, and analysis of many clause types and variants. These features
include word classes like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. Within
most classes, MD analyses further include grammatical/syntactic distinctions. For example, verb phrases are analyzed for their grammatical
function, distinguishing past and present tense; simple, perfect, and
progressive aspect; and active and passive voice. Adjectives are subclassied
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according to their syntactic function as attributive or predicative. More

importantly, in contradiction to Ghadessys claims, MD analysis includes
many clause-level features, both main clause features (e.g., questions,
clausal coordination) and dependent clause features (e.g., adverbial
clauses, relative clauses, complement clauses). Further, dependent clauses
are analyzed for specic syntactic type and variants (e.g., that relative
clause with subject gap, wh- relative clause with object gap, passive
participial postnominal [reduced relative] clause; that complement
clause controlled by verb; wh- complement clause; causative vs. concessive vs. conditional adverbial clauses). These features are clearly listed in
Table 1 (pp. 1516). We nd it difcult to imagine how Ghadessy could
have read our article and come away with the impression that MD
analysis consisted of a list of words and their collocation probabilities.
The MD analytical framework is not static, and we therefore welcome
the addition of new features. For example, we have recently developed a
new MD model of register variation among university spoken and written
registers (see Biber, in press; Biber et al., in press). This analysis includes
many additional linguistic features, like lexical bundle features (e.g.,
preposition initial lexical bundles, such as in the form of; wh-initial lexical
bundles, such as what youre saying is; see Biber, Johansson, Leech,
Conrad, & Finegan, 1999, chapter 13) and many lexicogrammatical
features (e.g., mental verbs controlling that complement clauses and
verbs of desire controlling to complement clauses).
Many discourse featuresincluding characteristics of theme and
theme progression, as discussed by Ghadessyhave thus far been
prohibitively time-consuming to identify and count reliably in a large
corpus. This difculty helps to explain why Ghadessys (1999) study of
thematic features is based on only 1,286 clauses representing about
15,000 words.1 However, although we currently lack the analytical tools

1
Ghadessy cites his 1999 study as evidence that inclusion of thematic features will disconrm
the results of previous MD analyses. In that study, Ghadessy claims to have used a cluster analysis
for this purpose. However, an examination of that study suggests that Ghadessy fails to
understand the statistical basis of MD analysis.
In the MD framework, text types are identied through a multivariate statistical procedure
called cluster analysis; this procedure groups observations that are maximally similar with respect
to certain quantitative variables. In MD studies, the observations are texts, and the quantitative
variables are the dimension scores (see Biber, 1995, chapter 9).
In contrast, Ghadessy (1999) claims to have performed a cluster analysis in a study in which
the observations were individual clauses and the variables were nominal characteristics (e.g.,
whether the theme type of the clause was simple theme, multiple theme, or textual theme). A
statistical cluster analysis is not possible in this case because there are no quantitative variables
that could be used to group the observations. Instead, Ghadessy appears to have relied on a
visual inspection of a cross-tabulation table, which showed the proportional use of each
thematic clause type in each register. From a statistical point of view, the analysis carried out by
Ghadessy is in no way comparable to a cluster analysis, and the results are in no way comparable
to those achieved through MD analysis.

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that permit generalizable, empirical corpus investigations of their distribution, we agree that thematic features are likely to be important register
characteristics, and we welcome efforts to develop analytical techniques.
Until a utopian time when a single methodological approach can
cover all aspects of language use, we are left with examining register
variation through a variety of approaches. It is our position that all
approaches conducted in principled ways should be welcome. We need
to sit down to a banquet, if you will, rather than expecting any single dish
to include all ingredients, and rather than criticizing a dish for not
conforming to another chefs priorities.
REFERENCES
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D. (in press). Variation among university spoken and written registers: A new
multi-dimensional analysis. In C. Meyer & P. Leistyna (Eds.), Corpus analysis:
Language structure and language use. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen, R., Byrd, P., Helt, M., Clark, V., et al. (in press).
Representing language use in the university: Analysis of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and
Written Academic Language Corpus (TOEFL Monograph). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman
grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Ghadessy, M. (1999). Textual features and contextual factors for register identication. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and context in functional linguistics (pp. 125139).
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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RESEARCH ISSUES
In this issue, TESOL Quarterly presents revised guidelines for quantitative and
qualitative research in TESOL. Contributors to the guidelines were Dwight Atkinson,
J. D. Brown, Suresh Canagarajah, Kathryn Davis, Patricia A. Duff, Linda Harklau,
Joan Jamieson, Numa Markee, and Steven Ross.
Edited by CAROL A. CHAPELLE
Iowa State University
PATRICIA A. DUFF
University of British Columbia

Some Guidelines for Conducting Quantitative and

Qualitative Research in TESOL

Research practices evolve as new issues and questions emerge and as

new methods and tools are developed to address them. In view of the
changing landscape of research in the TESOL profession, TESOL
Quarterlys Editorial Advisory Board regularly reexamines the guidelines
for research provided for contributors to keep the guidelines up-to-date
and reective of the agreed-on conventions for undertaking and reporting research. Since 1992 TESOL Quarterly has included guidelines for
statistical research at the back of each issue to guide the growing number
of contributors conducting such research. In 1994, the increase in
qualitative studies submitted to TESOL Quarterly prompted the Editorial
Advisory Board to include a set of qualitative research guidelines for
contributors as well.
In recent years, the character of the submissions has again shifted to
include a wider variety of methodologies. The complexity of todays
research seemed to call for a rethinking of the guidelines rather than the
simple addition of a methodology. Guidelines for quantitative studies
needed to address more fully the rationale underlying the research
rather than concentrating on the procedural aspects of the analysis. The
qualitative guidelines, rather than reecting primarily an ethnographic
approach, needed to reect the multiple legitimate approaches to
qualitative research. Both qualitative and quantitative guidelines needed
to cite authoritative sources to which contributors could turn for
extensive explanation and help.
The revised guidelines address these needs and outline the collective
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003

157

professional judgment about good practice for quantitative and qualitative research in TESOL. The quantitative guidelines include important
considerations in conducting and reporting rigorous quantitative research, with attention to a studys purpose, participants, measures,
procedures, analysis, and interpretation. These guidelines do not attempt to distinguish among the many types of quantitative studies, but
rather focus on common principles and good practice pertaining to a
variety of such studies. Readers are referred to the many other published
sources in the References and Further Reading section of the quantitative guidelines.
For qualitative research methods in TESOL, about which fewer
textbooks or articles have been written, we provide guidelines for case
study, conversation analysis, and (critical) ethnography as three exemplars, each with its own traditions, variants and alternatives, and conventions. Among these three qualitative methods, overlapping principles are
evident, but so are distinctions. Across all four pieces, whether quantitative and qualitative, an overriding theme is that researchers should be
explicit about the research contexts, populations, procedures, analyses,
and basis for interpretations. This requirement tends to imply long
papers, but because of the limits on the length of submissions, writers
and editors must make informed decisions about what information is
essential to include and what is not.
We did not attempt to squeeze the guidelines for each research
approach into exactly the same mold. In view of the diverse epistemologies associated with the research approaches, it seems natural for each
set of guidelines to be expressed in a different way. What they share,
however, is an expression of accepted practice within a particular
research tradition from the view of researchers within that tradition. In
assembling these guidelines, we did not intend to cover every research
approach that might be applied to a problem in TESOL. For example,
contributors can nd discussion of narrative research with comprehensive references in the Research Issues section of Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer
2002). In the future, this discussion might be formalized into guidelines
for narrative research, as might other discussions of approaches appearing in Research Issues. These guidelines are the rst in an expanding set
of summaries to be introduced in Research Issues and in the TESOL
Quarterly section of TESOLs Web site. The guidelines, like those previously published in TESOL Quarterly, will naturally evolve and grow over
time. We welcome readers input and suggestions about guidelines for
other types of research.

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Quantitative Research Guidelines

Quantitative research has played an important role in TESOL for a

long time, but over the years the standards have shifted somewhat. In
part because of the educational role TESOL Quarterly plays in modeling
research in the eld, it is of particular concern that published research
articles meet current standards. To support this goal, the following
guidelines and references are provided for quantitative research papers
submitted to TESOL Quarterly.

INTRODUCTION
Explain the point of the study. What problem is being addressed? Why
is it interesting or important from a theoretical perspective? Briey
review the literature, emphasizing pertinent and relevant ndings,
methodological issues, and gaps in understanding. Conclude the introduction with a statement of purpose, your research questions, and,
where relevant, your hypotheses; clearly explain the rationale for each
hypothesis.

METHOD
Explain your study in enough detail that it could be replicated.

Participants
Clearly state whether there is a population that you would ideally want
to generalize to; explain the characteristics of that population. Explain
your sampling procedure. If you are using a convenience sample, be sure
to say so. Arguments for representativeness can be strengthened by
comparing characteristics of the sample with that of the population on a
range of variables. Describe the characteristics and the size of the
sample. When appropriate, describe how participants were assigned to
groups.

Measures
Summarize all instruments in terms of both descriptions and measurement properties (i.e., reliability and validity). Provide estimates of the
reliability of the scores in your sample in addition to reliability estimates
provided by test publishers, other researchers, or both; when you make
judgments about performance or when language samples are coded for
linguistic characteristics, include estimates of classication dependability
or coder agreement.
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159

Procedure
Describe the conditions under which you administered your instruments.
Design. Make clear what type of study you have donewas your study
evaluating a priori hypotheses, or was it exploratory in order to generate
hypotheses? Was it a meta-analysis? Explain your design, and state
whether your comparisons were within subjects, between subjects, or
both. Refer to standard works such as textbooks for study designs.
Describe the methods used to deal with experimenter bias if you
collected the data yourself. If you assigned participants to subgroups,
explain how you did so. If you used random assignment, tell the readers
how the randomization was done (e.g., coin toss, random numbers table,
computerized random numbers generation). If you did not use random
assignment, explain relevant covariates and the way you measured and
adjusted for them, either statistically or by design. Describe the characteristics and the size of the subgroups. In place of the terms experimental
group and control group, use treatment group and contrast group.
Variables. Dene the variables in the study. Make explicit the link
between the theoretical constructs and the way(s) they have been
operationalized in your study. Dene the role of each variable in your
study (e.g., dependent, independent, moderating, control). Explain how
you measured or otherwise observed the variables.
Power and sample size. Provide information on the sample size and the
process that led to the decision to use that size. Provide information on
the anticipated effect size as you have estimated it from previous
research. Provide the alpha level used in the study, discussing the risk of
Type I error. Provide the power of your study (calculate it using a
standard reference such as Cohen, 1988, or a computer program).
Discuss the risk of Type II error.

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160

Explain the data collected and their statistical treatment as well as all
relevant results in relation to your research questions. Interpretation
of results is not appropriate in this section.
Report unanticipated events that occurred during your data collection. Explain how the actual analysis differs from the planned
analysis. Explain your handling of missing data.
Explain the techniques you used to clean your data set.

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Choose a minimally sufcient statistical procedure; provide a rationale for its use and a textbook reference for it. Specify any computer
programs used.
Describe the assumptions for each procedure and the steps you took
to ensure that they were not violated.
When using inferential statistics, provide the descriptive statistics,
condence intervals, and sample sizes for each variable as well as the
value of the test statistic, its direction, the degrees of freedom, and
the signicance level (report the actual p value).
Always supplement the reporting of an actual p value with a measure
of effect magnitude (e.g., measures of strength of association or
measures of effect size). Briey contextualize the magnitude of the
effect in theoretical and practical terms. Condence intervals for the
effect magnitudes of principal outcomes are recommended.
If you use multiple statistical analyses (e.g., t tests, analyses of
variance, correlations), make the required adjustments to the alpha
level (e.g., a Bonferroni correction).
Avoid inferring causality, particularly in nonrandomized designs or
without further experimentation.
Use tables to provide exact values; present all values with two places
to the right of the decimal point.
Use gures to convey global effects. Keep gures small in size;
include graphic representations of condence intervals whenever
possible.
Always tell the reader what to look for in tables and gures.

DISCUSSION
Interpretation
Clearly state your ndings for each of your research questions and
their associated hypotheses. State similarities and differences with effect
sizes reported in the literature. Discuss whether features of the methodology and analysis are strong enough to support strong conclusions.

Conclusions
Note the weaknesses of your study. Identify theoretical and practical
implications of your study. Discuss limitations and suggest improvements
to your study. Provide recommendations for future research that are
thoughtful and grounded both in terms of your results and in the
literature.

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REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

ON QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Abelson, R. (1997). On the surprising longevity of ogged horses: Why there is a case
for the signicance test. Psychological Science, 8, 1215.
American Psychological Association. (1994). Publication manual of the American
Psychological Association (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American
Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
Anderson, D. (2000). Problems with the hypothesis testing approach. Retrieved January 29,
2003, from http://www.cnr.colostate.edu/~anderson/quotes.pdf
Bailar, J., & Mosteller, F. (1988). Guidelines for statistical reporting in articles for
medical journals. Annals of Internal Medicine, 108, 266273.
Baugh, F. (2002). Correcting effect sizes for score reliability: A reminder that
measurement and substantive issues are linked inextricably. Educational and
Psychological Measurement, 62, 254263.
Bird, K. (2002). Condence intervals for effect sizes in analysis of variance.
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 62, 197226.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Cohen, J. (1994). The earth is round (p < .05). American Psychologist, 49, 9971003.
Cook, T., Cooper, H., Cordray, D., Hartman, H., Hedges, L., Light, R., Louis, T., &
Mosteller, F. (Eds.). (1992). Meta-analysis for explanation. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2001a). ESCI: Exploratory Software for Condence
Intervals [Computer software]. Victoria, Australia: La Trobe University. Available
from http://www.psy.latrobe.edu.au/esci
Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2001b). A primer on the understanding, use, and
calculation of condence intervals that are based on central and noncentral
distributions. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 532574.
Fan, X., & Thompson, B. (2001). Condence intervals about score reliability
coefcients, please: An EPM guidelines editorial. Educational and Psychological
Measurement, 61, 517531.
Gall, M., Gall, J., & Borg, W. (2002). Educational research: An introduction (7th ed.).
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Hatch, E., & Lazaraton, A. (1991). The research manual: Design and statistics for applied
linguistics. New York: Newbury House.
Huberty, C. (1993). Historical origins of statistical testing practices: The treatment of
Fisher versus Neyman-Pearson views in textbooks. Journal of Experimental Education,
61, 317333.
Huberty, C. (2002). A history of effect size indices. Educational and Psychological
Measurement, 62, 227240.
Hunter, J. (1997). Needed: A ban on the signicance test. Psychological Science, 8, 3
7.
Kirk, R. (1996). Practical signicance: A concept whose time has come. Educational
and Psychological Measurement, 56, 746759.
Minium, E. (1978). Statistical reasoning in psychology and education. New York: Wiley.
Mittag, K., & Thompson, B. (2000). A national survey of AERA members perceptions of statistical signicance tests and other statistical issues. Educational Researcher, 29(4), 1420.
Montgomery, D. (2000). Design and analysis of experiments (5th ed.). New York: Wiley.

162

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Myers, J., & Well, A. (1995). Research design and statistical analysis. Hillside, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Parkhurst, D. F. (1997). Commentaries on significance testing. Retrieved January 29,
2003, from http://www.indiana.edu/~stigtsts/
Roberts, J. K., & Henson, R. (2002). Correcting for bias in estimating effect sizes.
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 62, 241253.
Rosenthal, R. (1994). Parametric measures of effect size. In H. Cooper & L. V.
Hedges (Eds.), The handbook of research synthesis (pp. 231244). New York: Russell
Sage Foundation.
Schmidt, F. (1996). Statistical signicance testing and cumulative knowledge in
psychology: Implications for the training of researchers. Psychological Methods, 1,
115129.
Shadish, W., Robinson, L., & Lu, C. (1999). ES: A Computer Program for Effect Size
Calculation [Computer software]. St. Paul, MN: Assessment Systems.
Smithson, M. (2001). Correct condence intervals for various regression effect sizes
and parameters: The importance of noncentral distributions in computing
intervals. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 605632.
Smithson, M. (2002). Scripts and software for noncentral confidence interval and power
calculations. Retrieved January 29, 2003, from http://www.anu.edu.au/psychology
/staff/mike/CIstuff/CI.html
Thompson, B. (1999). Journal editorial policies regarding statistical signicance
tests: Heat is to re as p is to importance. Educational Psychology Review, 11, 157
169.
Thompson, B. (2000). Various editorial policies regarding statistical significance tests and
effect sizes. Retrieved January 29, 2003, from http://www.coe.tamu.edu/bthompson
/journals.htm
Thompson, B. (2002). What future quantitative social science research could look
like: Condence intervals for effect sizes. Educational Researcher, 31(3), 2532.
Thompson, B., & Vacha-Haase, T. (2000). Psychometrics is datametrics: The test is
not reliable. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 60, 174195.
Thompson, W. L. (2000). 326 articles/books questioning the indiscriminate use of statistical
hypothesis tests in observational studies. Retrieved January 29, 2003, from http://
www.cnr.colostate.edu/~anderson/thompson1.html
Vacha-Haase, T., Nilsson, J., Reetz, D., Lance, T., & Thompson, B. (2000). Reporting
practices and APA editorial policies regarding statistical signicance and effect
size. Theory and Psychology, 10, 413425.
Wilkinson, L., & Task Force on Statistical Inference. (1999). Statistical methods in
psychology journals: Guidelines and explanations [Electronic version]. American
Psychologist, 54, 594604. Retrieved January 29, 2002, from http://www.apa.org
/journals/amp/amp548594.html

Qualitative Research Guidelines

Case Study Research

The following guidelines are provided for submissions reporting case

study research aimed at understanding a bounded phenomenon by
examining in depth, and in a holistic manner, one or more particular

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instances of the phenomenon. Case study research in TESOL and

second language acquisition (SLA) has its origins in psychology and
linguistics (e.g., Hatch, 1978), with a focus on the development of L2
syntax, morphology, phonology, and so on, as analyzed by an ostensibly
objective researcher. More recently, TESOL case studies have adopted
the more subjective and interpretive stance typical of case studies in
education and other elds (Gall, Borg, & Gall, 1996; Johnson, 1992;
Stake, 1994, 1995), with less emphasis on the acquisition of discrete
linguistic elements and more emphasis on such issues as learners and
teachers identities, skill development and its consequences for learners,
teachers professional development experiences, and the implementation of language policies in programs and countries. Both approaches
are legitimate but require sufcient detail and contextualization.

ASSUMPTIONS
1. In TESOL, a case typically refers to a person, either a learner or a
teacher, or an entity, such as a school, a university, a classroom, or a
program (see Faltis, 1997; Johnson, 1992; Nunan, 1992). In language
policy research, the case may be a country. Case studies may be
included in larger quantitative or qualitative studies to provide a
concrete illustration of ndings, or they may be conducted independently, either longitudinally or in a more limited temporal period.
Unlike ethnographic research, case studies do not necessarily focus
on cultural aspects of a group or its members. Case study research
may feature single cases or multiple cases (e.g., often two to four).
2. Acknowledging multiple realities in qualitative case studies, as is now
commonly done, involves discerning the various perspectives of the
researcher, the case/participant, and others, which may or may not
converge (Yin, 1994). As an interpretive, inductive form of research,
case studies explore the details and meanings of experience and do
not usually attempt to test a priori hypotheses. Instead, the researcher attempts to identify important patterns and themes in the
data. The richness of case studies is related to the amount of detail
and contextualization that is possible when only one or a small
number of focal cases and issues are analyzed. The writers ability to
provide a compelling and engaging prole of the case, with suitable
examples and linkages to broader issues, is also very important.

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METHODS
Context
Provide sufcient contextual information about the case, including
relevant biographical and social information (depending on the focus),
such as ESL learning/teaching history, L1 background, years of residence in a new country, data collection site(s), or other relevant
descriptive information pertaining to the case and situation.

Sampling
Purposeful sampling is generally used in case study research; therefore, explain sampling procedures and case selection, and the dening
characteristics and typicality or atypicality of the case: Note whether the
case in question is a deviant or extreme case, a critical case, a convenience case, a politically signicant case, and so on (Creswell, 1998; Miles
& Huberman, 1994). Because attrition may deeply affect longitudinal
case studies based on just one or two participants, sampling carefully is
crucial. If multiple cases are used, researchers often provide a detailed
account of each and then some form of cross-case comparison, either in
prose or in a tabular summary (Creswell, 1998). Multiple cases are often
preferable to single cases, particularly when the cases may not be
representative of the population from which they are drawn and when a
range of behaviors/proles, experiences, outcomes, or situations is
desirable. However, including multiple cases limits the depth with which
each case may be analyzed and also has implications for the structure
and length of the nal report.

Data
Draw data either from one primary source (e.g., oral interviews,
journals, or essays) or from multiple sources. As in ethnography, bringing together (triangulating) multiple perspectives, methods, and sources
of information (e.g., from interviews, observations, eld notes, selfreports or think-aloud protocols, tests, transcripts, and other documents) adds texture, depth, and multiple insights to an analysis and can
enhance the validity or credibility of the results. Observations and data
collection settings may range from natural to articial, with relatively
unstructured to highly structured elicitation tasks and category systems,
depending on the purpose of the study and the disciplinary traditions
associated with it (Cohen & Manion, 1994). Data in SLA studies may be
somewhat more restricted (either interviews, tests, writing samples,
think-aloud protocols, or grammaticality judgments), and the analytic
focus may be narrower and more technical as well, such as the development of linguistic or rhetorical structures in oral or written L2 production.
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Establishing a trusting relationship with research participants, using

multiple elicitation tasks (data collection procedures), obtaining adequate relevant background information about case participants and
sites, and having access to or contact with the case over a period of time
are, in general, all highly desirable.

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

Analysis
Case study data analysis generally involves an iterative, spiraling, or
cyclical process that proceeds from more general to more specic
observations (Creswell, 1998; Palys, 1997; Silverman, 2000). Data analysis
may begin informally during interviews or observations and continue
during transcription, when recurring themes, patterns, and categories
become evident. Once written records are available, analysis involves the
coding of data and the identication of salient points or structures.
Having additional coders is highly desirable (but is less common in
qualitative research than in quantitative research), especially in structural analyses of discourse, texts, syntactic structures, or interaction
patterns involving high-inference categories leading ultimately to the
quantication of types of items within categories. Data reduction may
include quantication or other means of data aggregation and reduction, including the use of data matrices, tables, and gures (Miles &
Huberman, 1994).
In multiple case studies, each case may represent a different thematic
nding, such as a different type of learner, teacher, or program (e.g.,
highly successful vs. less successful, domestic vs. international), which
you may also portray as a clustering of properties or even a metaphor;
alternatively, you may analyze and discuss each of the cases in terms of a
small number of pervasive and important themes that run across them to
varying degrees.

Interpretation
Establishing the signicance or importance of themes or ndings is
crucial; the discussion should ideally link these themes explicitly to
larger theoretical and practical issues. However, generalization to populations is not appropriate or desirable in most case studies. Be cautious
about drawing unwarranted inferences because of the small sample size,
particularly if the case is not typical of others in the same set. L2
researchers frequently propose models or principles based on their
results to be supported, tested, compared, or refuted by themselves or
others in subsequent research (e.g., Schmidt, 1983; Schmidt & Frota,
1986).
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Data may be analyzed and interpreted through a variety of ideological

lenses (e.g., positivist, poststructuralist, feminist, or critical (Duff, 2002;
Merriam, 1998; Yin, 1994), although descriptive/interpretive approaches
are still the most common in TESOL. Provide sufcient evidence for
your claims or interpretations to make them clear, credible, and convincing to others. Consider alternate explanations, and account for results
that run contrary to the themes that emerge or for differences among
triangulated sources. It may be worthwhile to consult case participants
for their interpretation of (nontechnical) data or ndings. Young L2
learners or others who are not highly procient in their L2 may not have
the maturity or the linguistic competence to convey their perspectives
easily; in some cases, an assistant who can speak the participants L1 to
explain the research purposes and elicit the participants views in their
L1 may be helpful, depending on the focus of the study (Duff, in press).

THE CASE STUDY REPORT

Reports of case studies submitted to TESOL Quarterly should include
the following elements:

a statement of the studys purpose and the theoretical context

the problem or issue being addressed

central research questions

a detailed description of the case(s) and explanation of decisions

related to sampling and selection

context of the study and case history, where relevant

issues of access to the site/participants and the relationship between

you and the research participant (case)

the duration of the study

evidence that you obtained informed consent, that the participants

identities and privacy are protected, and, ideally, that participants
beneted in some way from taking part in the study

methods of data collection and analysis, either manual or computerbased data management and analysis (see Weitzman & Miles, 1995),
or other equipment and procedures used

ndings, which may take the form of major emergent themes,

developmental stages, or an in-depth discussion of each case in
relation to the research questions; and illustrative quotations or
excerpts and sufcient amounts of other data to establish the validity
and credibility of the analysis and interpretations

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a discussion of factors that might have inuenced the interpretation

of data in undesired, unanticipated, or conicting ways
a consideration of the connection between the case study and larger
theoretical and practical issues in the eld

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

ON CASE STUDY RESEARCH
Cohen, L. & Manion, L. (1994). Research methods in education (4th ed.). London:
Routledge.
Creswell, J. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Duff, P. (2002). Research approaches in applied linguistics. In R. Kaplan (Ed.),
Handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 1323). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duff, P. (in press). Case study research in applied linguistics. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Faltis, C. (1997). Case study methods in researching language and education. In
N. Hornberger & D. Corson (Eds.), Research methods in language and education (pp.
145152). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.
Gall, M. D., Borg, W. R., & Gall, J. P. (1996). Educational research (6th ed.). London:
Longman.
Hatch, E. (Ed.). (1978). Second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Johnson, D. (1992). Approaches to research in second language learning. New York:
Longman.
Merriam, S. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Miles, M., & Huberman, A. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: A sourcebook of new methods
(2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Palys, T. (1997). Research decisions: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives (2nd ed.).
Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Schmidt, R. (1983). Interaction, acculturation and the acquisition of communicative
competence. In N. Wolfson & E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and second language
acquisition (pp. 137174). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Schmidt, R., & Frota, S. (1986). Developing basic conversational ability in a second
language: A case study of an adult learner. In R. Day (Ed.), Talking to learn (pp.
237322). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Silverman, D. (2000). Doing qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Stake, R. E. (1994). Identication of the case. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 236247). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weitzman, E., & Miles, M. (1995). Computer programs for qualitative data analysis.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Yin, R. (1994). Case study research: Design and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Conversation Analysis

The following guidelines are provided for submissions using an

ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis (CA) as originated by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) and Schegloff, Jefferson,
and Sacks (1977). From this perspective, the principal goal of CA is to
explicate and interpret how participants achieve everyday courses of
action by orienting to the underlying structural organization of talk-ininteraction.

ASSUMPTIONS
CA studies submitted to TESOL Quarterly should exhibit an in-depth
understanding of the ethnomethodological philosophical perspectives
and methodologies of CA research (see Firth, 1996; Firth & Wagner,
1997; Markee, 1994, 1995, 2000; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, & Olsher,
2002; Seedhouse, 1997, 1999; Wagner, 1996). Utilizing these perspectives
and methods in the course of conducting CA research helps ensure that
studies represent credible accounts of participants orientations to the
behaviors they display to each other and therefore to analysts. Reports of
CA studies should meet the following criteria:
1. The kinds of data analyzed should include naturally occurring data
from either ordinary conversation (i.e., ordinary chatting among
friends) or institutional talk (e.g., ESL classroom talk, oral prociency interviews, writing conferences).
2. The report should focus on the usual topics of CA research (see
Drew, 1994). These topics include, but are not limited to, the
organization of sequences (i.e., courses of action), turn-taking and
repair practices, syntax-for-conversation, the structure of speech
events, and the integration of speech and gesture. Analyses should
demonstrate how native speakers/users of English, nonnative speakers/users of English, or both deploy these aspects of interactional
competence to communicate in or learn this language.
3. The research should aim to uncover an emic perspective. In other
words, the study focuses on participants contextualized perspectives
and interpretations of behavior, events, and situations rather than
etic (outsider-imposed) categories, models, and viewpoints (van Lier,
1988).
4. The primary data in the study should be the conversational and
other behaviors that participants produce for each other in real
time. The notion of context is principally understood as the talk that
immediately precedes and follows the conversational object under
study (Heritage, 1988); this is sometimes referred to as the cotext of
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5.

6.

7.

8.

talk (Brown & Yule, 1983). Other important aspects of context

include the integration of embodied action and gesture with talk
(Schegloff et al., 2002).
The conversational analysis may be supplemented by ethnographically oriented notions of context that entail the use of triangulated
secondary data (such as think-aloud protocols, interviews, or diaries;
see van Lier, 1988). The study may establish theoretical links to other
perspectives on talk-in-interaction, such as Vygotskyan analyses of
learners zones of proximal development (Ohta, 2001).
Data collection strategies include the collection of videotapes, audiotapes, or both of talk-in-interaction, which are then transcribed
according to the conventions of CA developed by Gail Jefferson (see
Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Boden & Zimmerman, 1991; Goodwin,
1981). Videotapes are strongly preferred because of the importance
of embodied aspects of interaction.
In all cases, the recordings are considered to be the denitive source
of information about the behaviors that were observed. Transcripts
are understood as a tool for analysis to be used in conjunction with
recordings.
External materials, such as classroom materials, interview schedules
or drafts of papers, may be introduced into the database when
relevant and appropriate, such as when participants themselves
orient to these materials.

DATA ANALYSIS
Data analysis is guided by the ethnomethodological philosophy,
methods, and goals of CA research.
1. You should provide a comprehensive treatment of the data under
discussion by demonstrating how participants collaboratively coconstruct their talk. This entails analyzing prototypical examples of
talk-in-interaction, which may consist of either single cases or collections of particular types of conversational objects. Ensure that you
can warrant your claims by pointing to a convergence of different
types of textual evidence and, where relevant, by demonstrating the
characteristics of a particular practice across a variety of contexts
( Jacobs, 1986, 1987).
2. You may use CA ndings to generate hypotheses for subsequent
experimental research. However, this is not the principal aim of CA
research (Schegloff, 1993). If you use quantication, ensure that it
only follows careful analysis of the individual cases that are being
quantied, with categories for quantication emerging from this
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TESOL QUARTERLY

analysis of individual cases (Stivers, 2001, in press). However, the

quantication of data is rarely an important issue in CA research.

THE CA REPORT
CA reports submitted to TESOL Quarterly should include the following
information:
1. a clear statement of the research issues
2. a description of the research site, participants, procedures for
ensuring participant anonymity, and data collection strategies
3. an empirically based description of a clear and salient organization
of patterns found through data analysisincluding representative
examples, not anecdotal information
4. interpretations in which you trace the underlying organization of
patterns across all contexts in which they are embedded
5. a discussion of how the data analyzed in the study connect with and
shed light on current theoretical and practical issues in the acquisition and use of English as an L2
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
ON CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (1984). Transcript notation. In J. M. Atkinson &
J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. ixxvi). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Boden, D., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1991). Transcription appendix. In D. Boden &
D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk and social structure (pp. 278282). Cambridge:
Polity.
Brown, G., & Yule, G. (983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Drew, P. (1994). Conversation analysis. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The encyclopedia of
language and linguistics (pp. 749754). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Firth, A. (1996). The discursive accomplishment of normality: On lingua franca
English and conversation analysis. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 237259.
Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81, 285300.
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization. New York: Academic Press.
Heritage, J. (1988). Current developments in conversation analysis. In D. Roger &
P. Bull (Eds.), Conversation (pp. 2147). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Jacobs, S. (1986). How to make an argument from example. In D. G. Ellis & W. A.
Donohue (Eds.), Contemporary issues in language and discourse processes (pp. 149
167). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Jacobs, S. (1987). Commentary on Zimmerman: Evidence and inference in conversation analysis. Communication Yearbook, 11, 433443.
Markee, N. (1994). Toward an ethnomethodological respecication of second
language acquisition studies. In E. Tarone, S. Gass, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Research
methodology in second language acquisition (pp. 89116). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Markee, N. (1995). Teachers answers to students questions: Problematizing the

issue of making meaning. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 6, 6392.
Markee, N. (2000). Conversation analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ohta, A. S. (2001). Second language acquisition processes in the classroom. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 696735.
Schegloff, E. A. (1993). Reections on quantication in the study of conversation.
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26, 99128.
Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in
the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361382.
Schegloff, E. A., Koshik, I., Jacoby, S., & Olsher, D. (2002). Conversation analysis and
applied linguistics. American Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 331.
Seedhouse, P. (1997). The case of the missing no: The relationship between
pedagogy and interaction. Language Learning, 47, 547583.
Seedhouse, P. (1999). The relationship between context and the organization of
repair in the L2 classroom. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 5980.
Stivers, T. (2001). Negotiating who presents the problem: Next speaker selection in
pediatric encounters. Journal of Communication, 51, 252282.
Stivers, T. (in press). Presenting the problem in pediatric encounters: Symptoms
only versus candidate diagnosis presentations. Health Communication, 14, 3.
van Lier, L. (1988). The classroom and the language learner. New York: Longman.
Wagner, J. (1996). Foreign language acquisition through interactionA critical
review of research on conversational adjustments. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 215
236.

(Critical) Ethnography

The following guidelines are provided for submissions to TESOL

Quarterly adopting an ethnographic approach by developing a rsthand,
contextualized, naturalistic, hypotheses-generating, emic orientation to
the study of TESOL through the study of culture. Ethnography represents diverse research approaches (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Loand,
& Loand, 2001), and the form and content of ethnographic reports
thus vary considerably.

ASSUMPTIONS
Research approaches that use the qualier critical differ from descriptive or interpretive approaches, which historically adopted a more detached, objective, value-free orientation to knowledge, although there is
some convergence between critical and descriptive approaches within
contemporary ethnography. Critical approaches align themselves with
the post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition of situating research in
its social context to consider how knowledge is shaped by the values of
human agents and communities, implicated in power differences, and

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favorable for democratizing relationships and institutions. A critical

approach questions the traditional separation of theory and method,
interpretation and data, subjective and objective, and ethics and science,
and particularly the treatment of the second term in each pair as
constituting valid research. Critical ethnography prefers to see these
binary constructs as interconnected, making mutual contributions to
knowledge.
Ethnography (and critical ethnography in particular) adopts a complex theoretical orientation toward culture. Culturein collectives of
differing magnitude, whether educational institutions, student communities, classrooms, or activity groupsis treated as heterogeneous, conictual, negotiated, and evolving, as distinct from unied, cohesive,
xed, and static. Also, in contrast with a relativistic view of cultures as
different-but-equal, critical ethnography explicitly assumes that cultures
are positioned unequally in power relations. Furthermore, critical ethnography sees descriptions of culture as shaped by the interests of the
researcher, the sponsors of the project, the audience, and the dominant
communities. Therefore, cultural representations are acknowledged as
always being somewhat partial and partisan. Studies that claim to adopt
an ethnographic approach should be informed by the theoretical
assumptions motivating this research practice.
1. Because of the diversity of perspectives represented within ethnography, be as explicit as possible about the disciplinary traditions or
models of ethnographic scholarship that have inuenced your work
(e.g., cultural anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, linguistic
anthropology, ethnography of communication, cultural studies). A
wide array of approaches exist, including but not limited to hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, critical theories, feminist theories,
postmodernisms, constructivism, and critical humanism.
2. State explicitly your specic approach and its underlying assumptions and beliefs about the nature of ethnographic knowledge. For
example, do you believe that ethnographic ndings are scientic,
aimed at uncovering patterned social realities? Or do you believe
that the purpose of ethnography is interpretive, aimed at developing
insights into the symbolic meanings of experiences for participants?
Or do you believe that the purpose of ethnography is, more critically,
the pursuit of social justice?
3. State explicitly the conventions for data collection, analysis, and
reporting that are typical within your chosen school(s) of thought,
and cite exemplars from previously published work.

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DATA
1. Show evidence of residing or spending considerable lengths of time
interacting with people in the study setting, observing and recording
their activities as they unfolded through means such as eld notes
(see, e.g., Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), audio and video recordings, or both. A hallmark of ethnography is extended, rsthand
participant observation and interactions with participants in the
study setting.
2. Record participant beliefs and attitudes through such typical means
as notes or transcribed recordings of informal conversation and
interviews, and participant journals (see Salzman, 2001).
3. Include several different sources of data. Besides participant observation and interactions with participants, these sources might include
life histories (Darnell, 2001) and narrative analysis (Cortazzi, 2001),
photography, audio or video recordings (Nastasi, 1999), written
documents (Brewer, 2000), data documenting historical trends, and
questionnaires and surveys (Salzman, 2001).
4. If called for, as they often are in critical ethnography (as well as in
many cases of descriptive/interpretive ethnography), use additional
sources of data and reection. These include
evidence of how the power differences between you and the
informants/subjects were negotiated. Though it is idealistic to
think that power differences can be totally eliminated, address
how they were managed, modied, or shifted and how they
inuenced the data gathered.
your attitudes and biases toward the community and its culture.
Record how the your perspectives changed during the course of
the research and how these changes shaped the data gathered.
the impact of your activities and behavior on the community.
State whether you involved yourself in the ethical, social, or
political challenges faced by the community. Include in the data
the way such practical engagements may have generated deeper
insights or affected the research (and the ways you negotiated
these tensions).
the conicts and inconsistencies in the statements made by the
informants (or community insiders). Rather than favoring one
set of data over the other or neatly tying all the loose strands to
arrive at generalizations, wrestle with the diversity of insider
perspectives in order to represent culture with complexity.
a broadened understanding of the context of the culture.
Although context is being constantly (re)created through talk
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even as the informants interact with the researcher, reect in the

data the way larger forces outside the community shape culture.
Study how social institutions and political agencies affect the
local culture, and, similarly, seek historical data on the status of
the culture before and after the research.
5. Because ethnographic analytical procedures vary by researchers
schools of thought, you may incorporate quantitative as well as
qualitative procedures and instruments if appropriate (see, e.g.,
Bernard, 2002).

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

1. Emphasize emicor participantattitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and
practices, as the objective of ethnography is to come to a deeper
understanding of how people in particular contexts experience their
social and cultural worlds.
2. Practice reexivity, a process of self-examination and self-disclosure
about aspects of your own background, identities or subjectivities,
and assumptions that inuence data collection and interpretation.
3. Approach data analysis and ndings through an inductive and
recursive process. Expect patterns, categories, or themes to evolve as
data collection proceeds rather than imposing them a priori.
4. In the report, show evidence of triangulation, a systematic process of
looking across multiple data sources for ndings and conrming or
disconrming evidence.
5. Note that because of its rsthand, experiential nature, ethnographic
knowledge is necessarily tied to particular contexts and periods of
time. However, most contemporary ethnographers view it as important to acknowledge the instability and ever-evolving nature of the
cultures under study, and to explore their nestedness in and interdependence with broader sociocultural contexts.
6. Note that while ethnographic reports may present abstractions and
generalizations about attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of the cultures
under study, many ethnographers acknowledge and represent heterogeneity and diversity within the cultures or cultural scenes under
study (see below).
7. Give evidence that you have interpreted the tensions implicit in the
research with complexity and openness, particularly (but not exclusively) in critical research
between insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives. Your
relative outsider status and generalized etic perspectives can
offer interpretive angles that are not available to the insiders.
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between macro- and microperspectives on the culture. Though

the strength of ethnography is its localized, detailed, grounded
perspective, global forces from ideological, economic, and geopolitical structures inuence local culture. Sensitivity to the
macrolevel shaping of the local culture will provide critical
insights into the prospects for community empowerment.
between the structural and the temporal. Although descriptive
ethnography traditionally may have valued capturing the historical presentthat is, culture as a self-contained and well-constructed static systemcritical ethnography considers culture as
open to historical inuences and itself shaping history, though it
is relatively autonomous from other social institutions.
between interpreting and explaining. Critical ethnography recognizes that culture-as-ideology can lead to certain misinterpretations of social life. Similarly, a culture that is merely lived out is
not always open to critical reection for insiders. With sufcient
respect and sensitivity to the community, you may attempt to
explain some of the questions/contradictions left open in the
informants interpretation of things.
between the parts and the whole of the culture. To explain away
the tensions in a culture is to impose a consistency and uniformity on the community that serves to stereotype, essentialize,
and generalize its culture reductively. Thus, a critical interpretation represents the culture in all its complexity, instability, and
diversity.
between the different subject positions of the researcher. Adopt
a reexive approach; interpret your own biases, backgrounds,
and identities (e.g., of scholarship, ethnicity, class, gender,
region) both in the eld and outside; and acknowledge the ways
they shape the research and cultural representation.
8. Indicate the social implications of the cultural description. Interpretation in critical ethnography values not only the validity of the study
(e.g., enhanced by triangulation of data or the sophistication of
methods used), but also the social usefulness of the research and the
ways it addresses issues of social justice, human development, and
ethical integrity.

THE CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY REPORT

Established genres of the research article may not always be suitable
for reporting ethnographic studies that practice a critical ethnography.
The dominant Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion structure is often

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more amenable to reporting descriptive and scientic studies informed

by Enlightenment values, typically presenting a detached, controlled,
authorially imposed version of the ndings. Other emergent genres of
research reporting adopt greater reflexivity (in representing the personal
shaping of the ndings, in light of the changing biases, subject positions,
and involvement of the researcher), narratives (for a more indirect,
context-bound, personal form of theorization), multivocality (for textualizing the plural perspectives and voicesof different informants, researchers, participantson the same culture), authorial collaboration (in
involving the participants/informants in the representation of the
ndings), and open-endedness (in dramatizing the tensions in interpretation and data from the eld, and encouraging the readers to form
alternate paradigms of interpretation). Develop a mode of textual
representation that suits your research experience, objectives, beliefs
about the nature of ethnographic knowledge, and preferences.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING ON ETHNOGRAPHY
Anderson, G. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and
new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59, 249270.
Athanases, S. Z., & Heath, S. B. (1995). Ethnography in the study of the teaching and
learning of English. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 263287.
Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Loand, J., & Loand, L. (2001). Editorial
introduction. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Loand, & L. Loand
(Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 17). London: Sage.
Belsey, C. (1983). Critical practice. London: Methuen.
Berkenkotter, C. (1993). A rhetoric for naturalistic inquiry and the question of
genre. Research in the Teaching of English, 27, 293304.
Bernard, H. R. (2002). Research methods in anthropology: Qualitative and quantitative
approaches (3rd ed.). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Brewer, J. D. (2000). Ethnography. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Canagarajah, A. S. (1993). Critical ethnography of a Sri Lankan classroom: Ambiguities in opposition to reproduction through ESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 601626.
Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research
reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 320330.
Cortazzi, M. (2001). Narrative analysis in ethnography. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey,
S. Delamont, J. Loand, & L. Loand (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 384
394). London: Sage.
Darnell, R. (2001). Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kubota, R. (1999). Japanese culture constructed by discourses: Implications for
applied linguistics research and ELT. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 935.
Marcus, G., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental
moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nastasi, B. K. (1999). Audiovisual methods in ethnography. In J. J. Schensul, M. D.
LeCompte, B. K. Nastasi, & S. P. Borgatti (Eds.), Enhanced ethnographic methods:

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Audiovisual techniques, focused group interviews, and elicitation techniques (pp. 150).
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Peirce, B. N. (1995). The theory of methodology in qualitative research. TESOL
Quarterly, 29, 569576.
Pennycook, A. (1994). Critical pedagogical approaches to research. TESOL Quarterly,
28, 690693.
Salzman, P. C. (2001). Understanding culture: An introduction to anthropological theory.
Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Scheurich, J. J., & Young, M. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research
epistemologies racially biased? Educational Researcher, 26(4), 417.

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REVIEWS
TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL
professionals.
Edited by ROBERTA J. VANN
Iowa State University

The Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd ed.).

Jeremy Harmer. Essex, England: Longman, 2001. Pp. xii + 370.

Harmers third edition of The Practice of English Language Teaching

(PELT) is a guide to the teaching of World English for the 21st century. It
presents a comprehensive view of English language teaching theories
and practices that is both carefully researched and imbued with uncommon sense. As such, it represents a refreshing alternative to ESOL
methods textbooks that limit their focus to a single privileged (and
predictable) methodological approach or a narrow set of national
language concerns. At the same time, its comprehensiveness underlines
the problem of trying to t a bit of everything related to the science and
art of teaching English (p. x) as an additional language between the
covers of one general methods text.
PELT runs the gamut of issues related to teaching ESOL, from the
current role of English in world affairs to the classroom behavior
problems of unmotivated learners. As such, it leads something of a
double life; while it advertises itself as a teachers guide to be used for inservice training programs and postgraduate courses, its encyclopedic
coverage results in a somewhat awkward compromise between a reference work and a course textbook. Indeed, given its nine major sections
and 24 chapters, it is difcult to imagine the traditional semester-length
college course that could do justice to the entire book.
PELT is intended for an audience with some previous EFL classroom
experience or training, but even though it is most denitely not an entrylevel text, it is written in a clean, easygoing style, fully accessible and
relatively free of jargon. Harmer has a light touch that dispels the notion
that professional writing must be dry and humorless (his section on
behaviorist theory is titled Pulling Habits out of Rats). Like the writing
style, the layout is clean and attractive, with numerous graphs, tables, and
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179

illustrations. In addition to chapter references, there are a ve-page,

double-column bibliography, separate subject and author indexes, and
follow-up activities for each chapter.
PELT offers a range of topics not often covered in ESOL methods
texts: handling classroom discipline problems, preparing students to be
autonomous learners after the language course is over, avoiding simplistic praise-or-correct feedback routines, grouping students, being sensitive to cultural inuences on students learning styles, and staying
current professionally, to name but a few. There is even advice on what
beverages to avoid during class breaks. In the new edition Harmer has
added material on World English, corpus linguistics, and computer
technology for the language classroom.
The book strikes a balance between theory and practice, generally in
favor of the latter. The chapter on second language acquisition theory is
quite short, and the extensive technical chapters are crammed with
activities for receptive and productive skill classes. There is a special
chapter devoted to using and making classroom videos. Perhaps PELTs
greatest strength is the knowing insight it displays into the psychologies
of learners and teachers. Harmer is particularly sensitive to the concerns
of nonnative-speaking teachers of English and warns repeatedly against
buying uncritically into culturally biased, Western notions of learning
styles and pedagogical approaches.
The book has a few obvious problems. There is no section on teaching
grammar, nor is there any discussion of prescriptivist notions of correctness, one of the most contentious topics in teachers lounges around the
world. The English linguistics chapters (general overviews of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, pragmatics, and discourse) are thin, and one
wonders if they belong in a methods book at all. (This is a problem that
Browns Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy,
2001, avoids by eliminating such content altogether.) Two chapters,
Studying Language and Learner Autonomy and Teacher Development, seem to be somewhat random collections of interesting pedagogical ideas in search of a central focus. The references are generally biased
in favor of authors and publishers in the United Kingdom (e.g., there is
no mention of TESOL Quarterly or TESOL Journal in the chapter devoted
to professional literature), though this bias is probably no worse than the
opposite one found in U.S. textbooks.
On balance, The Practice of English Language Teaching is a thoughtful
and readable alternative to many less internationally minded ESOL
methods books. If one were to have but one general guide to the
teaching of EFL, one could do far worse than Harmers.

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REFERENCE
Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language (2nd
ed.). Essex, England: Longman.
ROBERT WEISSBERG
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States

Teachers Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development.

Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek (Eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 212.

Johnson and Golombeks recent edited volume, Teachers Narrative

Inquiry as Professional Development, is a collection of 13 highly contextualized
narratives that reveal how L2 teachers, by (re)storying their realities,
dilemmas, and epiphanies, navigate their complex professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995).
The books introduction describes the philosophy, procedures, and
potentials of the use of teachers narratives as a way of knowing by
teachers and as a tool for their professional development. Johnson and
Golombek organize the 13 stories in the book into four parts: inquiry
into instructional practices, inquiry into language learners, inquiry into
language teachers, and inquiry through professional collaboration.
Although each of the 13 stories successfully foregrounds one of these
four aspects of L2 teachers professional development, they can also be
read as nuanced, multifaceted accounts in their own right. Indeed, all
the stories are thick, varied accounts of teachers who (re)story their past
and imagine their future while living the exigencies of a present that is
mediated by their ever-evolving (re)conceptualization of curriculums,
students, teachers, professional knowledge, and institutional constraints
from the story of integrating a literature-based curriculum in a secondary
school in the Canadian Northwest, to the story that gives voice to the
hidden ESL community of international spouses in the United States, to
the story of a Japanese teacher of English whose desire for satisfaction
has driven his growth as a teacher, to that of an English teacher in Spain
who comes to grips with the quiet students in his class through dialogues
with colleagues outside his institution.
Reading through the book, one notices that the editors are vigilant to
the possibilities of these stories being misread as other peoples stories
that are not necessarily relevant to the readers or as other peoples best
practices that should be emulated. Instead, the editors want the stories to

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be a collective set that preservice or in-service teachers as well as teacher

educators and researchers can deconstruct, co-compose, and rearticulate.
To achieve this aim, the editors devised initial research questions,
discussion questions, and reective activities for each of the four parts of
the book to engage the readers not only in reading these narratives but
also in composing their own stories, for their own professional development.
Teachers narrative inquiry has come of age in general teacher
education research: It has gone from being dismissed as undertheorized
and anecdotal, to being recognized as a useful method for researchers to
get an anthropological glimpse of classroom practices (Heath, 1983), to
nally becoming a legitimate source of teacher-generated knowledge
and a viable tool for teachers professional development (Clandinin &
Connelly, 2000). This volume, the rst in L2 teacher education research
literature that fully employs in-service L2 teachers narratives as a tool of
inquiry for professional development, should not only inspire more
narrative-based inquiries by L2 teachers but also facilitate the reconguration of L2 teacher education research so that teachers storied ways
of knowing and being in the classroom will play a more prominent role.
REFERENCES
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers professional knowledge landscapes.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: experience and story in
qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and
classrooms. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
AN CHENG
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania, United States

Continuing Cooperative Development:

A Discourse Framework for Individuals as Colleagues.
Julian Edge. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Pp. 295.

ESOL teachers today are increasingly engaged in investigations of

their pedagogical beliefs and methodology. This is no accident. The
convergence of reective teaching, action research, and the teacher-asresearcher movement has shaped what is now being called the new
scholarship (Zeichner, 1999). Edges book is on the cutting edge of this
scholarship. Like Burns (1999), he approaches action research as a
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collaborative practice in which colleagues serve as sounding boards who

help formulate ones ideas. Edge calls his method of reective practice
cooperative development (CD). In CD, a teacher talks about his or her
teaching with a nonjudgmental colleague who listens to and helps focus
this talk, with the aim of uncovering professional development issues for
investigation. The ultimate goal is to empower teachers through professional actions based on their own understanding of their classroom
teaching situation.
The book, a complete revision of Edges 1992 publication, has four
sections. In the rst two chapters, Edge explains his approach. His
audience is in-service teachers who reject formulaic methods and socalled best practices while possessing a genuine interest in professional
development. Part 2 contains instructional tasks to assist colleagues in
learning this cooperative approach to self-development. Part 3 discusses
a number of experiences on using CD recorded by teachers from around
the world. The book ends with a reference section explaining the origins
of the tasks presented.
The heart of this book is the six brief chapters in Part 2 that together
form a training manual for teachers to begin to learn to talk about their
teaching in a new way by learning the roles of speaker and understander.
The speaker is the person seeking professional development, who
initiates an exchange. The understander supports a colleagues development, not simply by listening but by understanding. To the uninitiated
this may sound straightforward, but the role of understander is a
challenging one to master. The understander can never insert his or her
own views on matters raised by the speaker but is limited to restating
ideas and challenging the speaker to reconcile incoherent thoughts. The
practice tasks train the understander in such techniques as attending
and reecting, wherein the understander must listen attentively and
reect back what he or she thinks the speaker is saying by constantly
trying to understand (This is what Im hearing . . . .). The hope is that
by hearing his or her own words restated and further attempting to
clarify ideas, the speaker might gain insights into his or her practice.
To gain an appreciation for this approach, readers must work through
the tasks in Part 2. In doing so, one encounters some of the potential
problems in implementing CD. For example, it might be difcult to nd
colleagues with whom one can be open about problems in pedagogy, and
the key understander role is difcult to master. Readers seeking to
implement CD may nd the design of some of the activities articial or
too clinical. As a colleague and I began learning this new discourse for
development, we varied from feeling self-conscious to feeling uncertain
and frustrated. Yet at the conclusion of every session we agreed that, with
a sincere effort, the purpose and value of each task became apparent.
The approachs articiality and structure have benets. CD encourages
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the scheduling of regular meetings to think about teaching. These

meetings are unlike other meetings between colleagues in that they must
be structured in advance and are focused on individual development.
For teachers interested in reective practice, CD provides a framework
to assist them in exploring what is happening in their classrooms in a
disciplined way while colleagues supply the emotional support needed to
sustain momentum once reection has begun.
REFERENCES
Burns, A. (1999). Collaborative action research for English language teachers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Edge, J. (1992). Cooperative development. Harlow, England: Longman.
Zeichner, K. (1999). The new scholarship in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 28(9), 415.
TIMOTHY STEWART
Miyazaki International College
Miyazaki, Japan

Second Language Writers Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features.

Eli Hinkel. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. xx + 370.
Second Language Writers Text makes a strong case for changes in the way
ESL writing is typically taught to students for academic purposes. Hinkel
presents detailed discussion comparing the frequency with which 68
linguistic features are used by university L2 writers and native speakers
(NSs) writing on the same essay prompts in rst-year composition
courses. Her analysis of this corpus of almost 1,500 essays leads her to
conclude that the L2 writers are greatly limited in the range of vocabulary, syntactic structures, and collocations they can draw on for academic
writing, and she calls for changes in teacher preparation and instructional approaches.
Her theoretical framework draws on contrastive rhetoric as she
analyzes the students writing by L1 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Arabic are represented) along with Bereiter
and Scardamalias (1987) notions of knowledge telling versus knowledge
transforming to dene the kind of writing that is highly valued in
academia. Hinkel characterizes the L2 writers essays as primarily knowledge telling, full of recounts of personal experience and exemplication
without argumentation. By presenting the differences in grammatical
choices made by NSs and L2 writers, Hinkel highlights the linguistic basis
of her claim that the L2 writers rely much more heavily on the grammar

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of everyday interaction while less academically experienced NSs are

using more highly valued features of academic registers. For example,
Hinkel demonstrates that the L2 writers rely on simple conjunctions,
exemplication markers, and demonstrative pronouns to establish text
cohesiondevices appropriate to the personal stories they are telling
but different from the lexical ties used more frequently by NSs as they
provide evidence for their arguments.
Hinkel also compares students responses to different prompts, demonstrating that the type of prompt affects the texts students write. Her
general nding is that the prompts that led students to draw on their
own experiences resulted in essays with personal narratives or statements
of belief/opinion, options that Hinkel argues require little thought and
are less valued in the academic context. On the other hand, this type of
prompt was most popular with teachers, who thought students could
relate to these topics and produce large amounts of text. Teachers were
right about the amount of text produced; L2 writers exceeded NSs in the
amount they wrote. But the students relied on conversational registers,
producing essays with fewer of the linguistic features that the NSs chose.
Hinkel repeatedly highlights the disparity between what teachers and
textbooks typically recommend for L2 writers and what students actually
need. She suggests that a focus on process writing does students a
disservice when they are in academic contexts, where their knowledge
will ultimately be assessed through products. She argues for substantial
changes in ESL grammar and writing instruction to put a greater focus
on teaching language, especially those structures that are most important for academic writing.
This is a valuable book, full of detailed information about students
grammatical choices. The extensive tables provide a comparison of
linguistic features by essay prompt and L1, with lots of detail about the
frequency of occurrence of particular structures. Presentation of the
linguistic features one by one out of context does present some problems; for example, nominalization seems to overlap with some other noun
categories, and seeing nominalization as a set of discrete lexical items
rather than as a grammatical process leads Hinkel to focus on vocabulary
as students primary need rather than highlighting the interaction of
lexis and grammar for functional purposes (see, e.g., Lock, 1996). Her
conclusions, however, strongly recommend substantial changes in ESL
writing and grammar pedagogy to increase focus on the textual functions of grammatical features.
REFERENCES
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
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Lock, G. (1996). Functional English grammar: An introduction for second language teachers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MARY J. SCHLEPPEGRELL
University of California
Davis, California, United States

Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives.

Ann M. Johns (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. i + 350.
In the preface to Genre in the Classroom, Johns laments the fact that
despite the varied and exciting work occurring in genre studies, discussions of pedagogy are rather thin on the ground. This collection of
articles addresses this lack by describing research and teaching that bring
genre theory directly into language classrooms. In doing so, it provides
not only a wealth of ideas for teachers but also a practical survey of the
theoretical camps that have developed in genre studies worldwide.
The books seven parts range along a continuum of viewpoints within
genre theory and practice. Sections representing major schools of
thought are each followed by a section that examines related issues and
extensions of the schools approach to genre-based pedagogy. The rst
two parts, The Sydney School and Related Approaches, represent the
linguistic end of the continuum, with chapters describing classroom
applications of Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics as well as the
use of text type and lexicogrammatical analysis in ESL classrooms. Part 3
looks at genre from the perspective of English for specic purposes
(ESP), focusing on macrolevel features of texts and including a chapter
coauthored by one of the movements greatest proponents, John Swales.
The next section, Bridging Text and Context, considers genres and the
contexts that produce them, including their communicative purposes,
and writers and readers socially constituted roles. Part 5, The New
Rhetoric, represents the social constructivist end of the continuum,
where genres are viewed as highly contextualized communicative events
that can never be adequately discussed apart from the situations in which
they occur. This is followed, appropriately enough, by Pedagogical
Quandaries (Part 6), which examines the practical problems that
teachers face as they attempt to apply this contextual view of genres to
writing instruction, which is out of the genres original contexts.
One interesting feature of the book is its somewhat unorthodox
conclusion: a chapter by William Grabe, followed by responses from
scholars in each of the three schools of thought represented in the rest
of the book. Grabe contends that narrative and expository writing

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constitute two macro-genres that subsume most, if not all, other genres,
thus constituting an important organizing principle for readers and
writers. The responses that follow, from J. R. Martin of the Sydney
School, Vijay Bhatia of ESP, and Carol Berkenkotter of the New Rhetoric,
raise various objections to Grabes argument, suggesting that his macrogenres ignore the specicity of text, purpose, and situation that genres
embody.
Anyone familiar with Johnss previous work (e.g., Johns, 1997) knows
that she tends toward the ESP/New Rhetoric end of the scale, and the
book reects this standpoint, most obviously in the arrangement of the
chapters, which progresses away from the Sydney School and toward the
New Rhetoric. Nevertheless, while those expecting an explicit how-to
book on using genre in the classroom may be disappointed, readers
not only ESL composition teachers but just about anyone involved in
literacy instructionwill nd a book of truly international scope, with a
diversity of perspectives offering plenty of food for thought.
REFERENCES
Johns, A. (1997). Text, role and context: Developing academic literacies. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
PETER CLEMENTS
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, United States

Literature-Based Instruction With English Language Learners.

Nancy L. Hadaway, Sylvia M. Vardell, and Terrell A. Young.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002. Pp. iii + 294.

Hadaway, Vardell, and Young make a simple but compelling argument

in Literature-Based Instruction With English Language Learners: Using literature is one of the best ways (if not the best way) to promote language
acquisition among English language learners in a K12 setting. They
base their argument on current second language acquisition (SLA)
theory and their understanding of the academic language and content
needs of English language learners. The latter part of their argument,
which deals with academic language needs, is somewhat novel in that
many ESL teachers and content teachers fail to see how language
learning and content learning can complement each other through the
use of literature. The authors contend that too often literature is
overlooked because it is deemed too difcult. Instead, teachers rely on
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basals and textbooks that are not only simplied but also pose a
particular problem for the English language learner because they are
frustrating and boring (p. 43). Literature, on the hand, provides the rich
vocabulary and syntax that English language learners need in an
appealing and motivating format. The authors are careful to emphasize
that literature is not a pedagogical panacea: Classroom teachers must
work diligently to incorporate literature into their language or content
lesson. The authors offer ample practical suggestions for doing so.
The 12-chapter book is organized into four sections. Section 1
discusses the current situation of English language learners in K12
settings, theories of SLA, and ways literature can address these issues.
Section 2 covers the connection between literature and the traditional
language development areas of oral skills, reading, and writing. Section
3 reveals how culture can be covered in a literature-based approach.
Section 4 discusses how literature can be a basis for an exploration of
academic content.
The books merits include its lucid argument in favor of literature for
English language learners. The authors point out that ction is not the
only type of literature for English language learners. Indeed, in todays
publishing market there are many nonction trade books that would be
very valid for a range of content and language learning. Other merits
include a sizable list of books that can be used by K12 learners at various
prociency levels. This sort of list is invaluable to both ESL teachers and
content teachers. Equally valuable are the practical suggestions (supported by research and theory) on how to incorporate literature into the
classroom for English language learners. Finally, the sections on poetry,
folklore, and nonction literature explore seldom-discussed avenues
that promise benets for language acquisition.
One potentially negative aspect of the book is that, in their zeal to
promote the use of literature, the authors may leave novice teachers with
the impression that a purely naturalistic approach to all language
learning matters is sufcient. This is not the authors intent, and they
caution against it. Despite this one element, the book would be very
useful for beginning ESL teachers in its review of SLA principles and
their application to this approach. It would be very valuable to experienced ESL teachers and content teachers in its suggestions for the use of
literature and rich list of specic books. Experienced ESL teachers who
are well versed in applied linguistics will nd the rst two chapters a
somewhat supercial treatment of SLA theory and will want to skip them.
Todays language learning pedagogy tends to rely too heavily on drills
and exercises and loses sight of the fact that one of the goals of language
development and literacy is not only the development of academic
language prociency but also the promotion of lifelong reading and
learning. This books strength is that it makes teachers and pedagogues
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reevaluate some of their educational goals and the avenues for achieving
them.
DAVID JOHNSON
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, United States

The Power of Tests: A Critical Perspective

on the Uses of Language Tests.
Elana Shohamy. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2001.
Pp. xi + 182.

Shohamy has trenchantly articulated the issues that surround the uses
and misuses of high-stakes tests in the current age of near-neurotic
accountability. This book documents the sociopolitical contexts and the
global cultures of power-wielding, top-down authorityquite simply, the
voices of the oppressor and the oppressed. Shohamy is direct, clear, and
cogent. Language is never limp or dehumanizing. The voices of despair
are clear and authentic, as when she recounts the following experience
shared with a fellow scholar in language testing and assessment:
On a memorable night in a bar . . . in . . . the Netherlands, during a
conference on language testing, my friend and colleague Tim McNamara and
myself found ourselves deeply engaged in a conversation with a drug junkie
. . . [who] recalled . . . taking a standardized test in 7th grade and failing it
badly . . . . From that point on his father started rejecting him. This eventually
led to a series of events that turned our conversation partner into an outcast
in his family leading him to leave home and gradually reach the point where
he is at now. Needless to say we felt responsible, a face-to-face encounter with
one of our own victims. (p. 8)

Shohamy is quick to say that the point is not the truth or falsity of this
particular, personal story or, for that matter, the truth or falsity of the
testimony by many other test takers that she felicitously recounts. The
point is the perception of powerlessness by test takers and the sociocultural consequences.
Shohamy argues that tests in and of themselves are not usually the
cause of such an unpleasant state of affairs. The culprit is, rather, what is
done with tests: Sometimes they are deployed as a disciplinarians tool,
forcing the test taker to conform; at other times they are the tool of state
policy in schemes of accountability, compliance, and standardization,
forcing teachers to teach to a test. Shohamy writes, Tests can be used for
surveillance to quantify, classify and punish (p. 17). This book could
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serve as one piece in a larger narrative of how democracy sabotages itself,

for it is in the countries where democracy plays itself out in an
enlightened form that the worst transgressions of humanity seem to have
been perpetratedand against children, the last bastion of the oppressed. If Shohamys narrative fails at all, it is in not stating this sad
paradox.
It is no secret that public education is in the stranglehold of highstakes, standardized testing and assessment across the curriculum. The
situation is perhaps acutely painful in the sensitive area of language, for
language is a uniquely human attribute, even a gift, reecting the
versatility and creativity of the human spirit. With language diversity
growing in North American schools, education should be broadening
the scope of its best practices in order to generate thoughtful, critical,
and creative citizens who celebrate linguistic variety and change. Much
to the contrary is the current course of events. Shohamy points a nger
at the expanded role of tests when she writes, Turning tests into a means
for change, into instrumental devices for promoting agendas, narrows
the process of education . . . . making it merely instrumental and not
meaningful (p. 110). Finally, at the outset of Shohamys critical and
creative piece is a simple, touching rhetorical question posed by John
Oller in a personal communication to Shohamy, dated May 26, 1998:
Isnt it possible to have testing of the people, for the people and by the
people? (p. viii). Possible, yes. On the horizon? Not yet.
ARIEH SHERRIS
Center for Applied Linguistics
Washington, DC, United States

Doing and Writing Qualitative Research.

Adrian Holliday. London: Sage, 2002. Pp. xi + 211.

As interest in qualitative research in applied linguistics continues to

grow, Doing and Writing Qualitative Research will be welcomed by many.
Holliday states that he is writing as an applied linguist concerned with
language as a cultural artifact and academic writing as discourse. This
vantage point makes his book especially appealing to applied linguists.
Hollidays objective is to show how to do and write qualitative
research. He compares quantitative and qualitative research, and then
divides qualitative research into two major strands: naturalistic and
progressive, situating himself rmly within the progressive. Although
Holliday describes the different categories of qualitative research as a
uid picture (p. 17), the implication that several schools share ideologi190

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cal underpinnings is controversial. The ramications of this position

become clear in the books nal paragraph, where Holliday appears to
suggest that qualitative research should be critical and stand against the
dominant . . . discourses of our society (p. 195), such as sexism and
racism. Although some qualitative research may be critical in this
respect, surely some of it is not so intended.
Holliday suggests that qualitative researchers must approach their
research experiences as strangers (p. 13) and show the workings (p.
47) in order to reveal their own ideological positions and establish
validity. This insistence on rigour and accountability leads to a highly
nuanced description of the qualitative research process. The section on
research questions and hypothesis building will be particularly useful to
novice researchers.
The heart of the book may well be chapter 5, Writing About Data.
The discussion and gures of the relationships between data, themes,
and arguments are alone worth the price of the book, as is the discussion
of the tensions between real data and artful writing. In chapter 6 the
discussion of discourse conventions is both trenchant and cautious, and
particularly interesting to those involved in discourse analysis. The
challenging areas of dealing with people, cultures, values, and judgments
(chapters 7 and 8) are treated sensitively yet thoroughly. Much of the
advice here is particularly relevant to those engaged in research involving nonnative speakers of English. Each chapter begins with an overview
of the topic, aims, and structure. Clear gures present information
visually. Each chapter contains a summary of main points and a list of
thought-provoking questions. Though there is much to appreciate here,
Hollidays examples are the highlight of this book. For each point, he
presents and analyzes either several selections from an extended example or several different examples. Language is identied to show, for
instance, where authorial presence is established and where references
to the literature support the authors argument (chapter 6). Although
the examples range over a variety of publication types and elds, many
are from Hollidays own work in applied linguistics.
The book concludes with an up-to-date list of references and a short
and somewhat eclectic index. Despite a few editing glitches, Doing and
Writing Qualitative Research is a provocative yet valuable guide to doing
and writing qualitative research.
ANNE FERYOK
The University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand

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Language as Cultural Practice: Mexicanos en el Norte.

Sandra R. Schecter and Robert Bayley. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002.
Pp. xix + 224.

Language as Cultural Practice is an articulate ethnographic account that

provides insights into L1 and L2 socialization of Mexican-descent families in California and Texas. Schecter and Bayley link language maintenance and loss to the school, home, and community contexts while
providing fascinating insights into the families language socialization
practices and dynamics of identity. The authors also call for a restructuring of the terms of debate, away from the ones based on the decit
model of bilingualism prevalent on English-only agendas. They suggest
that those terms should include a focus on the additive potential of
multilingualism and cultural pluralism and acknowledge the positive
consequences of minority-language maintenance as experienced by
individuals. This book will be of interest to a wide audience, including
applied linguists, bilingual educators, policy makers, and anyone involved in language teaching and research.
The organization of the book makes the research context, process,
and arguments comprehensible and relevant to both novices and experts
because of the detailed description of the research agenda, design, and
rationale for locale selection. The inclusion of a description of the
distinct societal characteristics of San Francisco and San Antonio, on
which the book focuses, and an overview of the political and sociohistorical
contexts from the 1700s to the present, is particularly useful to those
unfamiliar with the long Latino history in those areas. The book provides
in-depth descriptions of the participants beliefs about the importance of
Spanish in their lives and their strategies for developing and maintaining
its use. It also offers an analysis of the conicting nature of school
agendas, and parents expectations and their (in)ability to support
childrens literacy needs through a dominant language.
Common assumptions about facilitating factors in L1 maintenance
(i.e., Latino concentration, language policy) were found not to be true
for all the participating families, demonstrating the diversity of the
Mexican-descent population in the United States. Although it is briey
covered in two sentences on page 189, readers could have beneted
from a more detailed description of the cultural diversity of Latino
groups in general. Arguably, most of the work on Latino bilingualism has
concentrated on Mexican Americans (i.e., Merino, 1983) and Puerto
Ricans (i.e., Zentella, 1997), ignoring other Latino groups whose diversity has sometimes been acknowledged but who still remain open for
research. Though it would be unfair to blame this oversight on the
present researchers, it must be identied as a limitation of the research
eld in general.

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Despite the above observation, the strengths of this book make it an

essential addition to the existing research in the eld. Furthermore, it
provides an excellent model for studying L1 maintenance and loss. I
have no doubt that it will become a classic in the small but growing
tradition of qualitative research in language loss and maintenance along
with the work of Kouritzin (1999), Wong Fillmore (1991), and Zentella
(1997). Detaching myself from my role of scholar, as a minority-language
parent facing some of the same issues as the participating families, I nd
this book insightful, enlightening, and, most important, encouraging.
The type of work described in this book is timely given the political
mood in the United States around issues of bilingualism and Englishonly movements. It focuses on some of the concerns that cause controversy, including whether or not bilingualism is a detriment to childrens
academic progress. The books scope and implications are indeed broad
and far-reaching enough to appeal to a wide readership. As such, it will
certainly benet minority-language families through its powerful potential to effect policy change and thus foster the reconciliation of the goals
and roles of school and family.
REFERENCES
Kouritzin, S. (1999). Face[t]s of first language loss. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Merino, B. (1983). Language loss in bilingual Chicano children. Journal of Applied
Developmental Psychology, 4, 277294.
Wong Fillmore, L. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the rst.
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6, 323346.
Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
MARTIN GUARDADO
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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BOOK NOTICES
TESOL Quarterly prints brief book notices of 100 words or less announcing books of
interest to readers. Book Notices are intended to inform readers about selected
books that publishers have sent to TESOL and are descriptive rather than evaluative.
They are solicited by the Review Editor.

Portraits of the L2 User.

Vivian J. Cook (Ed.). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 2002.
Pp. viii + 347.

An array of internationally diverse and well-known scholars contribute

to a volume that is both an introduction to current second language
acquisition (SLA) theory and a portrait of the L2 learner. The book,
Volume 1 in the series Second Language Acquisition (edited by David
Singleton), begins with the assumption that L2 learners are not failed
native speakers but rather are fundamentally different from monolinguals
and entitled to certain language rights. This perspective sets the stage for
new approaches to SLA research.

Change My Life Forever:

Giving Voice to English Language Learners.
Maureen Barbieri. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002. Pp. x + 228.

The author, a middle school teacher, shares experiences in helping

1,400 Chinese middle school students acquire literacy in English while
emphasizing the need to value their old and new cultures and to share
their stories with others. The book includes case studies and classroom
vignettes as well as examples of student reading lists, all intended to
inspire English language teachers to enhance their own students
learning.

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195

Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and

Linguistics 1999: Language in Our Time.
James E. Alatis and Ai-Hui Tan (Eds.). Georgetown University Press,
2001. Pp. 431.

This volume contains the published versions of more than 30 papers

given at the 1999 Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, the theme
of which was Language in Our Time: Bilingual Education and Official
English, Ebonics and Standard English, Immigration and the Unz
Initiative.

Hong Kong English: Autonomy and Creativity.

Kingsley Bolton (Ed.). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2002.
Pp. viii + 324.

Part of the Asian Englishes Today series (edited by Kingsley Bolton),

which sets out to examine the spread of English in Asia from both a
linguistic and a literary viewpoint, this volume challenges the dominant
notion that Hong Kong English is totally derived from and dependent
on metropolitan British English. Collectively, the 15 contributors provide
a detailed historical context for Hong Kong English and examine its
current use from sociolinguistic, structural, and literary perspectives.

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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

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Because the Quarterly is committed to publishing manuscripts that contribute to bridging theory and practice in our profession, it particularly
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197

Carol A. Chapelle
Department of English
203 Ross Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-1201 USA
The following factors are considered when evaluating the suitability of a
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rvann@iastate.edu
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Bonny Norton
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and Literacy Education
and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
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Canada
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General Submission Guidelines

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GUIDELINES FOR QUANTITATIVE AND

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Because of the importance of substantive findings reported in TESOL
Quarterly, in addition to the role that the Quarterly plays in modeling research
in the field, articles must meet high standards in reporting research. To
support this goal, the Spring 2003 issue of TESOL Quarterly (Vol. 37, No. 1)
contains guidelines for reporting quantitative research and three types of
qualitative research: case studies, conversation analysis, and (critical) ethnography. Each set of guidelines contains an explanation of the expectations
for research articles within a particular tradition and provides references for
additional guidance. The guidelines are also published on TESOLs Web site
(http://www.tesol.org/pubs/author/serials/tqguides.html).

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