Making the Connections: A Teacher Educator's Perspective on Compatibility of English Language Teaching Methods

This article is based on my keynote presentation at the 16th University of Sydney TESOL Research Colloquium in 2024. Teaching about the range of methods that characterise our field is standard in any Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) education course. Common texts provide teacher educators with guidance on how to raise learners’ awareness of the origins of methods, their similarities and differences, and the advantages and challenges of using these methods to teach English to linguistically diverse learners. However, while such texts and other resources help develop an understanding of various TESOL methods, I found that very few provide guidance on how to teach our learners about the compatibility of these methods with their own contexts. Just as there is no correlation between proficiency levels in English language macro skills, experience in teaching English as an additional or foreign language does not guarantee sufficient levels of proficiency in English language teaching methods. In this session, I will share with you my self-study story on ways I approach and develop the teaching of TESOL methods to a linguistically diverse cohort of postgraduate students. At the core of my approach is the adaptation of a critical reflection framework to inform course design, which enables students to make stronger connections between theory and practice. My journey as a teacher educator continues, and I will discuss the implications of this approach for helping our students make connections by exploring the compatibility of the content, making it both meaningful and transformational for their own teaching contexts.