Paradigms in Language Teacher Education
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educational ethos in many countries, hence stress on error correction, high levels of accuracy and the knowledge of language elements rather than on the development of skills and competences. It is not at all impossible to present and practice grammar in a situational context, even in large classrooms, and in this way to ensure message focus in class-lesson teaching. Methods, techniques and task types typical of second language acquisition approaches are also relatively easy to employ in foreign language teaching. Pair work and group work helps introduce natural student-student interaction increasing the time for free practice, especially in large-sized, mixed ability classes. In this task format students can develop communication strategies and use feedback from their peers. Collaborative modes of learning, based on projects, promote autonomy in topic choice, information search and presentation techniques. They also encourage students to identify their preferred strategies, integrate new information with their background knowledge and reflect on their own learning. Home assignments and work in self-access centres invite more input, e.g. in the form of extensive reading or extra listening. All those forms of work get students used to self-assessment and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning. Although theoretical foundations of the approaches outlined above are usually incorporated in pre-service teacher education courses of FLT methodology, some teacher training institutions delegate these issues to be covered during the teaching practice in schools. Yet, school teachers supervising the teaching practice, the so-called mentors, do not feel qualified to discuss theoretical issues (Hake 1993) and find it difficult to justify their suggestions, however appropriate these suggestions might be. Moreover, mentors often lack skills of critical feedback (Aspinwall 1994). Trainees’ role is therefore reduced to imitate mentors’ behaviour, which automatically shifts the teacher education paradigm from the reflective to the craft model (Wallace 1991). Even though mentor training is more and more often organized by teacher training colleges and universities, basic teacher formation with respect to the experiential model ought to take place in teacher training institutions. Only then should practice be delegated to the school context and, even then, a rational division of duties between teacher education institutions and mentors is indispensable.