Training and development

BEYOND TRAINING : APPROACHES TO TEACHER EDUCATION IN LANGUAGE TEACHING * Jack C Richards Two approaches have emerged in second and foreign language teacher education programmes in recent years . One is education as "training", a model that has characterized traditional approaches to teacher education and which still represents the mainstream of current practice . A second approach is referred toas "development" . The contrast between training and development (with the term "education" being a more general and inclusive term) is a useful way of characterizing and describing options in teacher education (Lange, 1983, Richards 1987, Freeman 1989), and in this paper it will be used to describe alternatives available to those planning teacher education programmes . To clarify the differencebetween these two approaches and the implications for teacher education programmes, I will examine 5 aspects of teacher education, contrasting a "training" versus "development" perspective for each one . They are Approach, Content, Process, Teacher Roles, and Teacher-Educator Roles .

TEACHER EDUCATION AS TRAINING 1 Approach By "approach" I refer to the conceptual framework or philosophyunderlying the programme, that is, the theory and assumptions about teaching and teacher education that provide the starting point for programme development . A number of interrelated themes characterize a training perspective. Many of these are implicit rather than overt and have to be teased out or inferred from looking at the programmes themselves and how they are implemented . (i) The first assumptionis that student teachers or teachers-in-service enter the programme with deficiencies of different kinds (Breen et al . 1989) . These may be deficiencies of knowledge about the subject matter (e .g., the English language, Curriculum Design, Reading, ESP) or lack of specific skills or competencies (e .g ., in the use of computers or the ability to teach process writing) . (ii) The secondassumption is that the characteristics of effective teaching are known and can be described in discrete terms, often as skills or competencies . Teaching is not viewed as mainly individual or intuitive but as something reducible to general rules and principles and derived from pre-existing knowledge sources. Often these characteristics are identified with a specific method of teaching. Teachers should setout to improve their teaching through matching

* A keynote address given at a workshop on Second Language Teacher Education, Macquarie University, Sydney, 15 June 1989 .

their teaching style to that of a proven teaching method, or by learning what it is that successful teachers do . The approach is, hence, prescriptive . (iii) A related assumption is that teachers can and should be changed,and that the direction of change can be laid out in advance, planned for, monitored, and tested . (iv) Lastly, the teacher education programme is essentially theory driven and topdown . Experts may be the source of the new information, skills, and theory which underly the programme, or it may be based on new directions in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, or methodology. 2 ContentBy content, I mean the goals, topics, and subject matter that the programme addresses. When teacher education is thought of as training, goals are typically stated in terms of performance, and content is identified with skills and techniques and the theoretical rationale for those skills and techniques . Content is generally pre-determined by the teacher educator . The programme addressesobservable, teachable, and testable aspects of teaching, which are often linked to specific situations . Pre-and post-training differences can then be measured to determine the programme's effectiveness . For example, before training, teachers might be tested to see what their typical wait-time behaviours are when using questions . Following a workshop in which teachers are trained to monitor their use...