Theorizing Personal Practice And Practicing Personal Theory Through Classroom Observation And Critical Reflection

For a long time, it has been the fact that foreign language teaching theories are always disjointed with the realities of our country. Although the direction of our research of foreign language teaching has been turned from blindly following foreign trendy theories towards making study on linguistics, many of our teaching theories are just copied indiscriminately from the western countries or too unfathomable to be put into practice. On the other hand, experienced teachers always confine themselves into personal limited scope; their teaching practice has not been theorized based on their professional and personal knowledge. Therefore, as a possible solution of these problems, this paper emphasizes that teachers need to construct self-directed teaching theory to explore the nature of effective teaching and learning, which is the implication provided by Kumaravadivelu's notion of "postmethod pedagogy". So teacher education should help them possess the ability of theorizing personal practice and practicing personal theory to achieve teacher development and effective teaching eventually.For the last one hundred years, language educators have attempted to search for a "supermethod to solve the language teaching problems once and for all" (Richards, 1990: 35). Then the term methods refer to a "theory" of language teaching conceptualized and constructed by experts in the field. However, the notion of all-purpose methods cameunder criticism in the 1990s and a number of its limitations were pointed out. Teachers' dissatisfaction with methods results in their preference for eclecticism. But such an eclectic way cannot contribute to teachers' real obtainment of a context-specific professional theory or full development of personal theory. Hence, with the forthcoming of the "heightened awareness" (Kumaravadivelu, 2003:32) to stop recycling and repackaging old concepts of methods, "postmethod era" is emerging.Kumaravadivelu (2003) proposed that to conceptualize the postmethod pedagogy, one possible way is to be sensitive to the parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility, and suggested a macrostrategy framework to transform teachers' roles from classroom practitioners to strategic thinkers, teachers and explorers.In an effort to overcome the limitations of "method-based pedagogy" and to achieve such a transformation, this paper endeavors to emphasize classroom observation and the notion of critical reflection, which penetrate the whole process of theorizing personal practice and practicing personal theory, to prompt teachers to constantly self-observe, self-analyze, self-evaluate their classroom behaviors.Actually, many researchers have written about classroom observation (Allwright 1988; Allwright & Bailey 1991; Day 1990; Wajnryb 1992). But what is concerned here is not like the traditional approach of classroom observation, which mainly describes teacher behavior (Jarvis, 1968; Moskowitz, 1971) and interpret classroom activities (Allwright, 1980; Van Lier, 1988); Kumaravadivelu's (2003) observation scheme is introduced as a useful observational tool to help teachers analyze and understand multiple perspectives to classroom events, potential mismatches between teacher intention and learner interpretation, and macrostrategies of improving teaching and learning.Besides observation, to shift from "method-based pedagogy" to "postmethod pedagogy", teachers should all the time engage themselves in critical mind. Thereby, critical reflection, which is developed from the more introspective reflection proposed by John Dewey (1933) and Schon (1983), is highlighted with the demands that teachers have to transcend the technicalities of teaching and see their actions in relation to the historical, social, cultural context in which teaching is embedded. (Bartlett, 1990)...