Fundamentos Teóricos

What is significant about Qatar’s Independent Schools is that teaching and learning in English has literally been made ‘mainstream’ i.e. it is the sole medium for teaching and learning in three of the four subjects which comprise the core curriculum – English, mathematics and science. In broad terms, this might be thought of as immersion by default. As part of my research I looked very closely at the range of materials provided by the RAND Corporation, and those published by

the Supreme Education Council. In none of these could I find any substantive reference to a rationale for making English the main medium of teaching and learning across the curriculum.

What I did observe, however, were assertions that teaching and learning in English would improve educational outcomes as though one were a necessary corollary for the other. And as I noted earlier, Islamic studies was simply omitted from the curriculum until the Ministry of Education syllabus was adopted two years after Education for a New Era began.

The move to teaching and learning in English for Qatar’s Independent Schools was certainly radical, as was the effective down-grading of Qatar’s national language to subordinate status. One net effect of this decision is that as many learners in Qatar’s Independent Schools do not have fluent Arabic speaking teachers, they thus lack bilingual teaching and learning opportunities, something that might be considered a disadvantage, particularly for those at the very beginning of an education in English, and for those who may be struggling with the content demands of mathematics and science, for example.

Clearly, a feature that distinguishes Qatar from many settings in which ESL teaching and learning occurs more widely, is that it obtains for the entire learner population in Qatar’s Independent Schools, not just a sub-set or minority of learners such as might typically be found in settings such as Australia, Britain, Canada or New Zealand. That is to say, the entire school population in Qatar, almost all of whom are native Arabic speakers, undertake teaching and learning entirely English save for Arabic lessons and the Islamic studies curriculum. In some senses then, this means that Qatar is more akin to other places which rely on teaching in English for the large majority of learners who may not have English as their first language e.g. Hong Kong and Malaysia, or in the growing number of English-medium and/or ‘foreign curriculum’ schools in countries such as Korea.

What this means is that many of the strategies employed where there are fewer ESL learners e.g. withdrawal, immersion or additional teaching and learning, are not readily applicable to Qatar’s Independent Schools which means that more sustainable and effective approaches are needed which enable ESL teachers to carry out their work effectively.

As I noted earlier, due to various factors, ESL teachers in Qatar will almost certainly have different needs at different times during their career, more so during a climate of change, and the needs of the Independent Schools in which they work will also change over time. This may mean major and continued pressures on teachers to re-skill and up-date their knowledge in the curriculum, second language acquisition research, composition theory and practice, technology, or assessment.

Moreover, it might be expected that for Education for a New Era, a teacher’s classroom might be the best source of further professional development, but this will very much depend on the support mechanisms which are put in place by the school, and by the Supreme Education Council. Simply assuming that teachers will get better at what they do by allowing them to continue with prevailing approaches and pedagogies is literally fraught with dangers. Further, ignoring the research evidence that has emerged about effective teaching and learning strategies such as content-based instruction does not seem likely to advance and improve quality teaching and learning outcomes in Qatar’s Independent Schools.

I am now turning to teacher education which generally has two main components, these being content and pedagogy, because this is the pre-cursor for direct and responsible classroom experiences, and because in Qatar, ESL teachers have undergone vastly different pre-service programmes, and indeed some have not benefited from them at all. Broadly speaking, pedagogy

encompasses a set of teaching and learning strategies indicated by such things as the theories underlying syllabus design adopted or adapted by the teacher and the learner in order to jointly achieve stated and unstated goals involved in language learning in the classroom. In terms of content, Kumaravadivelu (2003:18) states that in the context of second language education, content is generally seen to form a set of insights and concepts derived from academic disciplines such as general education, linguistic science, second language acquisition, cognitive psychology, and information science. Taken together, these provide the theoretical bases essential for the study of language, language learning, language teaching, and language teacher education.

Many teachers, of whom I am one, when confronted by the “complexity of language, learning and language learners every day of their working lives”, will no doubt share the conviction that “no single perspective on language, no single explanation for learning, and no unitary view of contributions of language learners will account for what they must grapple with on a daily basis” (Larsen-Freeman, 1991:269). As I noted earlier, this is just this sort of complexity with which the women ESL teachers in this study constantly grapple, and it is no less an issue for the type and nature of professional development they both expect and require as a consequence.

Research tells us that there is considerable variation in what teachers do in their classrooms and in the degree to which they are eclectic or follow a particular model. Studies by Swaffer et al. (1982), Nunan (1989), Legutke and Thomas (1991), and Kumaravadivelu (1993), show that teachers, who are trained in a particular method, do not necessarily conform to its theoretical principles and classroom procedures. In such studies, teachers who claim to follow the same method often use different classroom procedures that are not consistent with the method they say they had adopted. In addition, teachers who claim to follow different methods, often use the

carefully delineated task-hierarchy, a weighted sequence of activities not necessarily associated with any established method. In Chapter 8, I explore in more detail the views of ESL teachers in this study who suggested that their approaches were eclectic, and that they did not subscribe to, nor practise, a particular approach.

5.5 Training, Development and the Challenge of Supporting a Heterogeneous Body of