Under the umbrella term ‘teacher knowledge’ are more specific categories of knowledge suggested by theorists and researchers over the past several decades. For example, a) content knowledge (Shulman, 1986), which defines “the amount and organization of knowledge per se in the mind of the teacher”, is composed of three categories: Subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, curricular knowledge (p.9); b) craft knowledge (Calderhead, 1996; Schön, 1983), which refers to the knowledge that teachers acquire from their teaching practices, is also identified as “wisdom of practice” and refers to a potential source of knowledge (Shulman, 1987, p.11); and c) personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983), which emphasizes the role of teachers’ life experiences in shaping teachers’ knowledge and development, and influencing teachers’ adaptation of this knowledge into real classroom teaching. The views on categories of teacher knowledge above indicate the significance of this topic in previous studies.
Instead of focusing on one specific category of teacher knowledge, a variety of models of teacher knowledge (e.g. Calderhead, 1996; Grossman, 1995) have been proposed with more categories. Compared with others’ definitions, Shulman’s (1986, 1987) model seems to be comprehensive in classifying teacher knowledge. It has an emphasis on content knowledge and is composed of seven categories:
• subject matter content knowledge (knowledge about a subject)
• curriculum knowledge (knowledge about teaching programs and instructional materials) • general pedagogical knowledge (knowledge of pedagogical skills)
• pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of teaching a subject by using appropriate examples, illustrations, explanations and techniques to make students understand)
• knowledge of learners (knowledge of students’ learning needs, strengths and motivations etc.)
• knowledge of educational contexts (knowledge of assessment system and English teaching program etc.)
• knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values, and their philosophical and historical grounds
Shulman’s model suggests that all teachers’ content teaching decisions are made on the basis of the seven knowledge categories. In this sense, the achievement of successful teaching depends on teachers’ understanding of subject matter content and curriculum, and teachers’ capabilities of selecting appropriate pedagogies to make the subject matter content comprehensible to their students with a consideration of contextual issues. Shulman’s framework was employed in the current study because it is a theoretical and epistemological model about teachers’ knowledge bases (Tsui, 2003). Furthermore, this model has been successfully adopted in the area of L2 research on TC and teaching practices (e.g. Baker, 2014; S. Borg, 2001; Freeman, 2002; Gatbonton, 1999; W. Zhang, 2008). While Borg’s model is too general (Gerami & Noordin, 2013), Shulman’s (1986, 1987) model has more comprehensive coverage of teachers’ knowledge bases, and is thus useful to identify the teacher participants’ knowledge of writing instruction. Those seven categories of teacher knowledge in Shulman’s (1986, 1987) model, however, are frequently integrated and intermesh constantly in practice, and are thus less easy to distinguish (Grossman, 1995; Tsui, 2003). For example, appropriateness of pedagogical application often relies on sufficient understanding of curriculum and it requires teachers’ knowledge about students. Furthermore, specific contextual factors such as assessment systems and English teaching programmes also need to be considered. This notion of the inter-related nature of the knowledge categories seems useful in understanding teacher participants’ knowledge bases in the present study.
On the whole, Shulman’s model is useful in gaining an insight into teacher participants’ initial knowledge of teaching writing prior to the training in the genre pedagogy. It is also helpful in
framing possible changes to teacher participants’ knowledge bases after they have received professional training in the SFL genre pedagogy.
3.4 Summary of the Chapter
This chapter has presented an understanding of language in SFL theory as developed by Halliday (1978, 1994), which considers the inter-relationship between language and social context, and how a text is constructed on this basis. The social contexts consist of two inter-related levels of cultural and situational contexts. Cultural context determines the overall textual structure and social purpose (genre) whereas situational context determines the linguistic features regarding the three variables of register. The application of the genre pedagogy in SFL is in the model of the teaching-learning cycle, comprising of three stages of Deconstruction, Joint Construction and Independent Construction, with the segments of ‘setting context’ and ‘building field’ throughout. Accordingly, to learn a target genre such as the Discussion Genre, teacher participants in the present study were required to assist their students to develop the awareness of its social communicative purposes, textual structure and appropriate choices of language features through a set of interaction activities. Informed by the underpinning theory of Vygosky’s ZPD and scaffolding in the cycle, teachers were required to adjust their support until they finally withdrew when students became independent writers.
After explaining the genre theories, the important role of TC in achieving the research goal was acknowledged, because the success of any educational innovation depends on teachers’ belief in the changes (Fullan, 2001) and attention was paid to teachers’ perceptions when investigating the potential of the genre pedagogy. The outline of TC as the other important theoretical framework of the current study is twofold: Borg’s (2003) model of TC was employed as it represents the overarching relationship between TC and its sources including schooling, professional education, and classroom practice; Shulman’s (1986, 1987) model was also used because it illustrates teachers’ knowledge base comprehensively. These two models were chosen because they are
useful in identifying teacher participants’ overall cognition and specific knowledge base about teaching writing respectively.