Building professional capability

Agents and agencies that offer in-service education include the national and regional advisers, School Support Services, and language associations. These agencies offer professional development opportunities, including workshops, courses, in-school support, personal contact, and visits where teachers meet together off-site or at a local school. Native speakers and language assistants can provide classroom assistance for language learning, working alongside the teacher.

Professional development can help teachers of languages:

• to integrate the learning strands at each curriculum level;
• to affirm the use of language with their students;
• to create opportunities in specific contexts for meaningful communication in the language;
• to respond to students' individual learning needs and strengths.

Where possible, professional development needs to include opportunities for teachers to hear and use the language they are teaching in its natural setting. This allows them to build both their proficiency and their ability to convey the vitality of the language to their students.

The goal is for the student to communicate effectively in a range of contexts, both orally and in writing, with other speakers and users of the language.

...students will need explanation, modeling, coaching, and other forms of assistance from their teachers, but... this teacher structuring and scaffolding of students' task engagement will be faded as the students' expertise develops. Eventually, students should become able to autonomously use what they are learning and regulate their own productive task engagement.

J. Brophy (2001), as quoted in Learning Languages, page 41

Effective professional development for teachers

There is clear evidence that effective professional development needs to:

• establish links between theory and practice;
• be relevant to and owned by teachers and focus on their everyday concerns;
• involve "situated" learning, that is, learning located in the real world of teachers.

Effective professional development leads ultimately to a change in teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and expectations so that pedagogical practice is modified and transformed.

Curriculum Update 50, page 5

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