The emergence of the additional language teacher/adviser under the complexity paradigm

A emergência do professor/conselheiro de língua adicional sob o paradigma da complexidade

ABSTRACT

In this text, we discuss the emergence of a complex additional language teacher/adviser under the complexity theory framework by reflecting upon disturbances in the teaching and learning subsystems of pre-service education. The complex teacher/adviser values all sub- and suprasystems, embraces the fractalized identities, conciliates assorted conceptions associated to this role, energizes and moves different systems linked to the profession, and uses several methods and approaches to language teaching and learning. We bring up some evidences of the complex teacher/adviser emergence in language teaching preparation and in language learning advising.

Key-words:
complex adaptive system; additional language; teacher; adviser

RESUMO

Neste texto, discutimos a emergência de um professor/conselheiro complexo de língua adicional sob o arcabouço da teoria da complexidade refletindo sobre os subsistemas de ensino e de aprendizagem da educação pré-serviço. O professor/conselheiro complexo valoriza todos os sub e suprassistemas, acolhe as identidades fractalizadas, concilia as várias concepções associadas ao seu papel, energiza e move diferentes sistemas ligados à profissão e usa diversos métodos e abordagens de ensino e de aprendizagem de língua. Demonstraremos evidências da emergência do professor/conselheiro complexo na formação inicial para o ensino e aconselhamento em aprendizagem de língua.

Palavras-chave:
sistema adaptativo complexo; língua adicional; professor; conselheiro

Introduction

The Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) field is a well established area within Applied Linguistics. Johnson and Freeman (2001) and Freeman (2014[2009]) synthesize the scope of SLTE in higher education, as follows.

Since the 1950s, the SLTE was imbued by the process-product education tradition with the perspective that “knowledge about teaching and learning can be ´transmitted´ to teachers by others” (Johnson and Freeman, 2001: 54).

So, in the 1970s, according to Freeman (2014[2009]), the SLTE was focused on training (skills) and/or on the abilities of the teacher, that is, on teacher-training routines provided by short term courses and degrees that differentiated teachers of foreign language (other than English) and teachers of English as a second or foreign language. The ‘80s emphasized learning (education) and/or the person of the teacher; hence “[i]t was argued that the procedural aspects of teacher training could be balanced by the person-centred notion of teacher development” (p. 13) aiming to advance qualitatively the teacher’s career. The 90s, as yet pointed out by Freeman, were a “watershed in refining the scope of second language teacher education” (p. 13), illuminating the discussions in the area in the new millennium - strongly influenced, we would add, by the critical pedagogy perspectives enlightened by Freire’s and Giroux’s notions of conscientization and transformative intellectual, respectively. With the vision of the teacher as a decision-maker, a learner (no longer understood as just a technician) already present in the ‘80s, the SLTE´s scope moves forward to a variety of conceptions and program designs (not without arguments, it´s worth noting) on teacher education. As a result, in the 2000s, the SLTE field was concerned with the nature of knowledge that underlies the programs, rather than the nature of training activities, and with “not simply what teachers needed to learn, but increasingly how they would learn [and apply] it” (p. 13, author’s italics). In this new way to understand SLTE, the term second language has come to be referred to as English as a second, foreign or additional language. Still, in the 2000s the SLTE researches turned their reflections to operational issues in professional development, such as “the sequence of professional learning and which aspects of teaching were best learned at which points in a career and through which processes” (p. 15); both with regard to disciplinary knowledge as to social practices, as well as to how this process would influence individual development and professional identities.

Concerning the SLTE´s multiple conceptions and program designs emphasized above, Richards (2010[2002]) discusses the art-craft view of language teaching underlying teachers education. In this conception, the teacher, a decision-maker, has to make an effort to understand “that a range of options is available based on the particular class circumstances, and then selects an alternative which is likely to be most effective for the circumstances” (p. 23). Also in this context, but discussing syllabus design in second language education curriculum, Finney (2010[2002]) supports the notion of a mixed-focus curriculum in a ‘new pragmatism’ system value, where - integrating structural, functional and procedural syllabi - the teacher “is responsible not only for teaching language for communication and language as knowledge, but also for encouraging learners to take responsibility for their own learning so that they develop skills and strategies for continuing to learn outside the classroom” (Richards and Renandya 2010[2002]: 65).

In the 2010s, with the advent of the complexity paradigm in Applied Linguistics - brought up by the work of Larsen-Freeman (1997) and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) - SLTE has begun to understand teacher development (and systems and subsystems nested in it) as complex, chaotic systems (Borges 2014a). For instance, in curriculum education, van Lier (1996; 2000) proposed an AAA Curriculum (awareness, autonomy, and authenticity) aligned with an ecological approach to language learning. In the same vein, Borges (2014b; 2016) presented a semiotic-ecological syllabus design - that goes beyond the integration of syllabus types proposed by Finney (2010[2002])´s mixed-focus curriculum - and a chaotic model of reflective development of language teachers´ professionality based on the complexity theory (CT). The semiotic-ecological syllabus´ flexibility and focus lie on the teacher and the student(s) co-adaptation afforded by centripetal (linguistic normativity) and centrifugal (linguistic creativity) forces that emerge in classroom activities in action. The chaotic model uses the classical concepts of language as well as the notion of language as a complex adaptive system (CAS) as initial conditions in supervised language teaching practice.

Other works (however not in the second language area), like Cochran-Smith et al. (2014), Davis and Sumara (2012) and Opfer and Pedder (2011) have also been discussing how to think and understand teacher education through the prism of complexity by seeing the phenomenon as complex rather than complicated, as it usually is the case. Cochran-Smith et al. make the point that teacher education from a CT perspective can be addressed in conceptual terms - it uses “theoretical constructs (…) to suggest how complexity theory can reconceptualize the field” (p. 9); and/or empirical research - it uses CT “to describe and interpret in new ways particular cases or aspects of teacher education practice” (p. 9) or still as a key to make some changes in the teacher education program as well to understand (and document) its transformation. Davis and Sumara delineated innovations to teacher education programs oriented by complexity thinking including “broad awareness of theories of learning, specialization across levels, integration of pre-service and in-service offerings, a developmental curriculum, and deep partnerships with schools” (p. 30). Opfer and Pedder, in their turn, on a literature review about teachers´ professional development practices in England, demonstrate the prevalence of process-product designs (cause-and-effect approaches) rather than the desirable use of “methodological practices that focus on explanatory causality and the reciprocal influences” (p. 376) of the teacher, the school and the learning activity subsystems.

Also, in the first decade of the new millennium, another area of interest in the macro field of teacher education is language advising. The literature on the role of language learning advisers (Mozzon McPherson, 2007) insists on the fact that their understanding of the learning process should be a holistic one without leaving aside the context in which it takes place and at the same time giving special attention to what is happening within each learner. This integrated view is, after all, a complexity stance into learning, seeing all its parts as integrated ones in different scales of the same process. Even without mentioning complexity, Mynard (2012) - when proposing the context, tools and dialogue model for language advising - highlights the roles of different agents and elements influencing each other.

In Brazil, published work on advising has appeared through journal articles as in Magno e Silva et al (2013), Magno e Silva and Santos (2014), Magno e Silva, Matos and Rabelo (2015), Magno e Silva, Mohry and Rabelo (2016), among others. When discussing the role of the student and of the teacher in a complexity approach, Magno e Silva and Paiva (2016) stress the influence the practices of advising can have on the ones of a teacher, making him/her more aware of the individual needs of different students’ trajectories. Santos Junior (2018) shows the adviser as one more agent in the language learning system, with the power of disturbing trajectories of students, considerably influencing students’ paths, especially in nested systems, as motivation for learning an additional language. The language adviser helps the learner to reflect upon his own learning process enhancing possibilities of autonomization. In the same line of thought, Taztl (2016) makes the link between autonomy and complexity by defending a systemic understanding of the first once it cannot be considered an individual characteristic, but an emergent one that arises from social contexts and relations among elements of a given system. According to him, autonomy, seen in a dynamic systemic perspective, emerges from the interactions between the person and the other systems with which he/she relates to, including teachers, classmates, pedagogical materials and varied contexts.

In relation to the SLTE´s scope, from the 2010s on, we understand that the field shows compatibility with the language advising area and with the complexity paradigm, as it has also turned its attention towards the responsibility of learners for their own learning (Finney 2010[2002]) - besides the teaching abilities (theoretical and practical), the teacher decisions and the procedural aspects in the classrooms. Self-organization is a key-conception in CT, thus it can be related to the autonomy of any CAS, such as the teacher and the learner. In this matter, CT has been urging us to reflect upon the role of the language teacher and the language adviser in contemporary settings as the two sides of the same coin, since the discussions about the education of the language teacher and the language adviser lay its emphasis on the teaching and the learning systems, respectively. Therefore, from a complexity stand point, the role of the teacher and the adviser should embrace both teaching and learning systems as subsystems of the same phenomenon: teacher/adviser development. Or is the teacher not an adviser and the adviser is not a teacher? Or does the teacher not enfold learning and the adviser does not perform teaching?

In order to evolve our reflection, we are going to explore how we (teacher educators) can foster the emergence of this complex teacher/adviser. Thereunto, this work will be divided into three sections, besides this introduction and the conclusion. In section one and two, we discuss some disturbances (personal experience reports and results of theoretical and empirical studies) in the teaching and the learning systems that reveal the emergence of the complex teacher/adviser. In section three, imbued with the statements in the previous sections, we argue that, in CT, the complex teacher is also a complex adviser and vice versa focusing our discussion on three main factors (advising, affective dimension and language pedagogy). In this paper, we use the term complex teacher/adviser (besides complex teacher and complex adviser) highlighting the importance of the emergence of this agent in the SLTE´s postmodern era.

The complex language teacher emergence: disturbances in the teaching system

Previous studies reflecting on CT in Supervised English Language Teaching Practice (SELTP) (Azevedo and Borges 2014; Pereira and Borges 2016; Borges 2016; Barbosa 2016; 2017; Verenka 2017; Borges et al. 2018), and also in the in-service teacher education (Migliorini et al. 2018) - in which the teacher educator discusses with the student teachers the CT approximations with the real practice in action - have shown us that novices tend to emphasize that they have been dealing with complexity for a long time both as English apprentices and as teachers.

This perception might come from the fact that many pre-service teachers have already had English teaching experiences during the undergraduate course, like in private language schools, for instance. However, when reporting this strange sense of familiarity with the previously unknown CT principles, they also struggle with explicit and implicit forces, such as their more traditional beliefs about themselves as students and/or teachers, the language teaching-learning process in general, and the classroom, including the school and the textbooks’ perspectives which are part of their history.

The familiarity with these aspects is, at least, awkward, coming from teachers in development who have never had contact with CT before. The same thing happens with the prospective and in-service teachers in short-term courses based on CT provided by the university with our coordination. Why is that? One plausible answer is the fact that any classroom in action - as well as the language and the second language acquisition - is a CAS, so is each student, the teacher, the lesson plan, the textbook (subsystems), and the curriculum, the school, the government (suprasystems), etc.

In this regard, many complaints that novices and teachers have, concerning the difficulties to manage the classroom and the teaching-learning processes in general, may be grounded on the struggle of dealing with a nonlinear system seeing it as a linear one. This may also explain very common expressions among teachers like in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are not. The teachers may be right after all. Nevertheless, on the subject of CT we would say that theory and practice are pretty much the same. So, the crucial point is to change the theoretical foundations of the higher education courses by moving the SLTE´s scope to the development of the complex teacher. However, this might be a long-term process that essentially depends on educational policies, not easy to implement in a process-product paradigm (Johnson and Freeman, 2001) and/or a Cartesian educational system like it is the case of Brazil.

Meanwhile, we, teacher educators, can make efforts to encourage the emergence of the complex teachers that already seems to appear in the novices when the CT is brought into supervised teaching practice.

One alternative to do this is to analyze textbooks adopted in elementary and high schools in order to diagnose the different methods and approaches to language teaching and learning (M&ALTL¹) explicit and/or implicitly present in their units and activities. We have been doing this theoretical-practical exercise in English as additional language (EAL) pre-service education since 2016 with promising results. The analysis emphasized here assumes that all M&ALTL (even those considered incompatible with each other) are constitutive agents of the so-called complexity approach to language teaching and learning (CALTL) (Borges and Paiva, 2011; Borges, 2015).

Borges et al. (2018), for example, present the outcomes of an analysis and critical reflection about M&ALTL in the “Alive - inglês” (Menezes et al. 2012a) textbook for the ninth grade of the elementary school. Pereira and Borges (2016) show part of the same reflection in the “Alive - inglês” (Menezes at al. 2012b; 2012c) textbook for the sixth and seventh grades; and Borges (2015) in the “Alive High” (Menezes et al. 2013) for high school freshmen. This exercise was performed in a language undergraduate course at a state university of Paraná, Brazil, as one of the SELTP activities. Results showed that features of different M&ALTL (like the grammar-translation, audio-lingual, English for specific purposes, communicative, communicational and genre-based, among others) could be seen all over the textbook units, sometimes even in a same unit. The Alive textbook series (for elementary and high school) are based on CT (Borges, 2015), so all the methods and approaches are supposed to be in it; but even in textbooks that do not rely on CT it is possible to find traces of all M&ALTL (Barbosa, 2016) as well - in this regard, the theory and practice are not the same.

In the same perspective, Verenka (2017) exposed a multifaceted process of teaching and learning (MPTL) - one of the CALTL’s agents - during her SELTP’s activities executions under our supervision. Verenka’s work was designed to test the hypothesis that all methods and approaches to language teaching may emerge throughout a teaching lesson even if a priori it is based on only one of them. For this end, she (1) studied the following methods and approaches to language teaching: grammar and translation (G&T), direct, total physical response (TPR), silent, suggestopedia, whole language, multiple intelligences, audiolingual, lexical, natural, English for specific purposes (ESP), communicative, task-based and genre-based; (2) planned a didactic sequence of eight modules for teaching English as an additional language (EAL) in a public high school with activities based on the ESP approach; (3) taught the eight EAL lesson reflecting on (teaching system) which methods and approaches, besides the ESP, would emerge; (4) noticed (learning systems) that features of nine methods and approaches (G&T, audiolingual, suggestopedia, TPR, silent, ESP, communicative, task-based, lexical and genre-based) appeared during her teaching practice. Based on this, she concluded that teaching and learning systems (in action) is really a multifaceted integrated process.

Other possible path to involve CT in pre-service education is to ask novices to write their history as English apprentices so they can realize how non-linear their trajectories are, and thus understand that their future students’ will also be meandering paths. In relation to this, Azevedo and Borges (2014) discussed how teacher identity is built by analyzing the routes of a prospective teacher provided in narratives of her history as an EAL learner.

Also, as a theoretical-practical exercise for the prospective teachers’ reflection, the teacher educator can provide a lesson plan model (Attachment) with a specific heading based on theoretical perspective, like language skill(s), language and learning conception(s), language competence(s), deductive and/or inductive grammar, method(s) and approach(es) to language teaching and learning, second language acquisition (SLA) hypothesis(es)/ theory(ies), and so on. Such a model can help novices reflexively connect the headings (theory) with the planned activities (practice) before they go to the classroom. The development of this kind of lesson plan in SELTP would work better with the assistance of the chaotic model of reflective development of language teachers’ professionality proposed by Borges (2016). The chaotic model focuses on language conceptions as initial conditions in order to develop theoretical reflections (like those emphasized above) by the prospective teachers, but the initial condition may be the one that the teacher educator elects as more plausible for his/her student teachers. In order to achieve its goal, the model follows some steps named mapping (questionnaires, discussions), informing (academic texts readings, discussions, lesson plan analysis), interrogating (critical reflections after novices’ lessons), evaluating (reports), redirecting (critical reflection in all activities connecting theory and practice), disturbing (can happen at any time during any step) and feedbacking (to stabilize the novice system whenever necessary).

Yet, in Barbosa (2017) it is possible to see a way of bringing second language acquisition theory (SLATs) as a complex model (Menezes, 2013) into pre-service teacher reflection and self-assessment. By understanding the SLA phenomenon as a CAS (Larsen-Freeman, 1997), Barbosa showed how a prospective EAL teacher (herself) would reflect on teaching-and-learning-systems interactions (in action) through SLATs. As emphasized by Ellis (2009), the SLATs have been of great importance and relevance to second language (L2) teacher education and L2 instruction. Performing the SELTP´s stages under our supervision, Barbosa - like Verenka (2017), above - (1) studied the eight SLATs (behaviorism, connectionism, acculturation, universal grammar, comprehension, lingualization, interaction, and sociocultural) in Menezes’ model; (2) planned a didactic sequence (DS) of eight modules for teaching EAL (considering that some of the eight SLATs would be contemplated in the activities) in a public high school; (3) taught the eight EAL lesson reflecting if the predicted SLATs in the DS emerged; (4) perceived other SLATs (not foreseen in the DS) appearing during the teaching practice (teaching system), dealing with them in order to face unpredictable events in the classroom (learning systems).

Still focusing on SLTAs and Menezes’ complex model, Migliorini et al. (2018) presented a research conducted and discussed by four in-service teachers (of English and Spanish as additional languages) about their retrospective reflection on how the SLATs might have been present in their conceptions of teaching and learning and their teaching actions (teaching system). Results showed that important aspects of the different SLATs appeared (implicitly and/or explicitly) in the teachers’ reflections. This indicates the perspective of SLATs reconciliation in Menezes’ complex model in teaching practice.

2. The complex language adviser emergence: disturbances in the learning system

Advising in language learning has been spread as a practice provided by self-access centers in several parts of the world (Mozzon McPherson and Vismans 2001; Mozzon McPherson 2007; Mynard and Carson 2012). It came to light as a personalized way of attending to students’ needs, especially at the tertiary level. A framework that entails adviser and advisee is one prone to generate synergy between these two agents in a way that the former provides room for reflection on the part of the latter so that the learning process becomes more intentional and conscious. Advising helps learners to become more motivated and self-regulated learners.

A language adviser does not tell the learners what they should do but encourages reflection on the learning process (Mozzon-McPherson and Vismans, 2001; Kato, 2012; Kato and Mynard, 2016). Advisers help learners “define their needs, formulate learning goals, reflect on strategies for achieving these goals, monitor and evaluate learning outcomes and the learning process, and make decisions for further learning” (Tassinari, 2016: 77). To become an adviser one needs to undergo either self-training, by reading and reflecting, or attending some kind of training program. It is undeniable though, that once a teacher assumes the role of an adviser, it is hard not to be deeply influenced by it, resulting in a transformation of his/her way of teaching. Magno e Silva (2016) has shown that this impact is noticed in the amount of attention teachers who are also advisers give to the identities of students and in how they guide them to face their own challenges and find solutions to problems they encounter.

Advisers tend to have a systemic view of the learner, using contexts as part of their learning experience and facilitating the occurrence of affordances to bring learners to live up to their expectancies. Going one step further, we believe that if pre-service teachers have a complex system language experience, including all subsystems like learning, teaching, advising, motivation, etc. They will be better prepared to understand it as it is and act accordingly when they are teaching their own classes in the future and advising their own students.

In motivational studies, Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011: 77) argue that “context is conceived not in static terms but as a developing process which individuals are involved in shaping, through their actions and responses”. Therefore, by providing pre-service teachers with motivating experiences will make them aware of the power they have to change contexts through their own behaviors. The unit of analysis is then the person-in-context where all their intermingled identities come up and they speak as themselves, a conceptualization that goes hand in hand with the practices of an adviser.

A few years ago, the second author of this text, who is also an experienced adviser, taught a first level English class in a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) program. Students pursuing that degree came from varied backgrounds and with different levels of competence in English. Roughly speaking, about half of the class was already in level B2, according to the Common European Reference of Languages; one fourth, would classify as A2; and the remaining students were absolute beginners. Therefore, initial conditions of this SAC entailed a mixed level class once the university had the policy of not barring the ones who did not speak English. They would need to learn the language and how to teach it at the same time. In the face of this, the teacher/adviser decided to take a complexity approach and transform all learning opportunities as catalysts of new learning. Using the mixed level abilities of the students, cooperation strongly emerged and the whole class functioned as a system whose results were clearly more than the sum of its parts. Each class was planned as an integrated unit, creating opportunities of interaction among students of different levels, hoping that exponential opportunities for learning would be shaped.

There was a syllabus to be met and there was a book to be followed. An inventory of the contents expressed in the book was made and the teacher/adviser decided that most of the items would be covered using different materials and accommodating students’ choices whenever possible. Verspoor (2017) recuperates the “form-meaning-use dynamic patterns of language using” stated by Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 82) as a key to a systemic way to achieve the benefit of learning. According to Verspoor, one of the roles of the teacher working under a dynamic system’s approach is to map the form-use-meaning (FUMs) opportunities in a class. Learning is using language reiteratively and authentically in different opportunities.

One example of this was a reading activity that substituted all senseless excerpts and adapted texts in the book (about global warming, young people’s hobbies, etc.) for biographies and doings of innovative educators or educational designer methods. The class was divided in pairs (one more competent student with one less fluent). Texts on Dewey, Freire, and Montessori as educators and Waldorf pedagogy, Escola da Ponte, Summerhill as educational experiences were chosen by each pair and read. Students could also research further information in the sources they had available. Two of the more proficient students were chosen to coordinate a written and an oral production based on the texts, thus taking advantage of the mixed level class to provide the emergence of collaborative work. The written one consisted in making a condensed version of what each pair had read and researched to be consolidated into a booklet that was shared with all classmates. The oral activity consisted in a brief presentation on the topic, added with a comment on the impact of that reading in his/her formation. The more competent student in each pair had the responsibility of helping the less competent one to reach the maximum of his abilities in presenting it in English since the latter was the one to deliver the pair’s work to the classmates. As an outcome of this whole-person approach, students worked way beyond their expected capacities giving way to new knowledge which emerged in the experience. Besides, since they would become language teachers, knowledge about innovative thinkers and experiences in their field of expertise might illuminate future actions.

Another example was the lesson on buying and selling objects and services, which was part of the book contents. After modeling a few of the necessary structures, the teacher led students to think about what they had or knew that would be interesting for the other students to buy. They thought about it, but did not tell their classmates what they would be selling. The teacher scaffolded students in vocabulary and structure they needed to construct a short text describing what they had to sell. In the following class, they brought posters in which they advertised their objects or services and put them on the walls. All students stood up and walked around the class, looking at the ads and deciding what they would like to purchase. Items offered varied from books and other objects to dancing lessons or sewing services. Some of the posters were so elaborate and detailed that called “customers” attention in a way that they actually “bought” the object and/or service. FUM can be clearly seen here. One of the highlights of this activity was a tango lesson being delivered in situ. Opening the space to new experiences contributes greatly to motivating students in the long process of learning a foreign language, as state Dörnyei and Ushioda (2011).

The hope is that while experiencing this complexity approach to language learning, students will eventually transform this experience into structurally similar ones, although never the same experiences, in the future.

The adviser is per se one that is prepared not to isolate variables, but to understand advisees in a holistic way. Connected to several systems, the teacher who practices advising ignores borders and bonds adviser/teacher, advisee/student and classmates with the common goal of teaching and learning an additional language, the utmost objective of the macrosystem.

3. The emergence of the additional language teacher/adviser under the CT

In the last two sections, based in our own experience as EAL teacher/adviser educator, we have raised arguments in favor of the emergence of a complex teacher/adviser in the postmodern era. The compilation of the teacher’s role over the past decades in the SLTE’s field developed in the introduction of this paper was helpful, even to discuss the relationships among these roles with the emergence of the complex/adviser teacher (cf. Figure 1), as follows.

Figure 1
The complex/adviser teacher.

The nested circles bounded by non-continuous lines show the permeability of the system at the same time that considers all contributions important. While integrating models of teacher preparation, the complex teacher we propose is tuned to the understanding of himself/herself and each of his students as CAS and is ready to use this comprehension to favor the interconnection of teaching and learning systems.

Our reflections here are essentially grounded on three factors: the recent attention given to advising in Applied Linguistics; the slow but steady incorporation of affective factors into the learning and teaching mainstream, and therefore into teacher preparation; and an appropriate understanding of eclecticism in complex language pedagogy to avoid and/or reinforce misconstruction about the nature of teaching and learning as a complex adaptive system.

The first factor - the recent incorporation of language advising in the macro field of SLTE - means that some of the skills of an adviser, when employed by a teacher, can enhance a favorable climate for learning in classrooms. When teachers are imbued of giving individual attention to each student as a whole and considering the class as a system composed of several integrated subsystems that accommodate different dimensions, the results of positive influence among participants might be visible. So, the language teacher educator specialized in language advising, by his/her research qualification in teaching and advising, is both a teacher and an adviser educator. In other words, the teacher/adviser educator can move from the teaching system to the learning system and vice versa. However, this does not mean that the complex teacher/adviser discussion is settled, but it only shows one of the areas which can develop with some advantage to the educators’ preparation. It might be important to mention that advisers’ preparation epistemology has taken a similar trajectory to that of teachers. From an initial position restrained to training recommended language and procedures, it has recently assumed a more holistic and reflexive structure, much more sensitive to contextual clues, thus a more ecological and complex approach. Although advising is a fairly new field, it is worthy to note that is has a parallel evolution to that of teaching: one can see that the adviser was trained in the past, then he was taught to reflect and provoke reflection on learners, later to research the best ways to offer a menu of strategies to advisees and, finally, to use all these resources and more in a complexity approach to advising.

The second reason for this is that pre-service development of future teachers has given much attention to the pedagogical dimension but has systematically ignored the affective dimension which is evidenced in advising. The feeling that emotional intelligence has been left out from teacher preparation programs is becoming more and more tended to and echoes of this gap have been heard lately. Mercer and Gkonou (2017) argue that taking emotional and social intelligences into account is of paramount importance in teacher preparation programs. When pre-service teachers engage in practices as advisers, they develop emotional and social skills that will enable them to give attention to the affective dimension of language teaching and learning in a complex and thorough way. This has growingly appeared in international publications on the matter, as Larsen-Freeman states in her preface to the volume edited by Gregersen and MacIntyre (2017).

The third motive is represented by the fact that in the present day - due mostly by the post-method perspective - it is inevitable the perception and use of eclecticism in language pedagogy. As Larsen-Freeman (2012b) has already emphasized back in 1987: “It is not uncommon for teachers today to practice a principled eclecticism, combining techniques and principles from various methods in a carefully reasoned manner” (p. 34). Speaking of which, complexity theory is based on eclecticism all the same, an eclectic range of scientific assumptions (a complexus of theories) in order to understand the behavior and/or emergence of a dynamic, chaotic system. So, what is the difference between these two contemporary perspectives on language pedagogy? Not so much in a perspective, we would say, and we will explain what we mean by that. In order to do so, first we must express that we totally agree with Larsen-Freeman (2012a: 25) when she points out that: (1) even in a post-method phase (Kumaravadivelu, 2001, 2006), “teachers need knowledge of various methods”, thinking of methods not as “intact packages of teaching practice imposed from above, but rather [as] coherent sets of thinking-in-action links available for teachers to interact with and learn from”; and (2) “what is important is for teachers to have their own sense of plausibility (…) their own understanding of why they do what they do” (p. 25). Back to the point highlighted above, we also have the same thing to say about Prabhu (1990)’s and Kumaravadivelu’s post-method assumptions. As we understand it, the sense of plausibility shares significant meaning with the notion of advising, both conceptions as guiding principles for teachers (novices and in-service) that can potentially help them to connect and energize the teaching and learning systems in their teaching/advising practices in action, as well as the supra- and subsystems nested in each system. It seems to us that Prabhu was trying to make an important statement, among many others, about an “eclectic blending of all or several methods” with a particular perception (the sense of plausibility itself) “of what is true about each method” that “makes the blending possible” (p. 167) for different teaching contexts - as we have discussed in topic one, for instance. The reason why CALTL (Borges and Paiva, 2011) was developed in the first place is that we believe in these assumptions; and yes, the CALTL is a new method/approach in a post-method context. However, Prabhu’s plea was for the replacement of the method(s) for the sense of plausibility, and we do not believe in the replacement but rather that the latter is a dynamic agent in the (complex) language pedagogy system that gives rise to an appropriate blending of the former, as well as to the emergence of the complex/adviser language teacher. Therefore, in the case of Kumaravadivelu’s claims, we do not consider practicality as an operating principle in a complexity condition, so to speak - owing to the fact that it may potentially move the teaching system into a specific region of the phase space’s landscape of possibilities (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008: 49) allowing the emergence of a particular mode of behavior (a chaotic attractor) so called practicing (Pimenta, 2002) or Schön’s epistemology of practice (Ghedin, 2002). It would “hold” the teaching system into the learning issue (teacher as a decision-maker) of the 1980s SLTE scope.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the discussions from this work make the following reflections seem feasible. We have allocated the role of the additional language teacher in Complex Applied Linguistics as a complex teacher/adviser, so we argue that he/she must: 1) value the interconnections of all subsystems (classroom, each individual student, lesson plan, syllabus, textbook, learning material, others teachers, etc.) and suprasystems (curriculum, school, local community, government, etc.) in action - conducive to understanding and energizing different systems linked to the profession, reflectively understanding the network connection among them; 2) embrace the student’s fractalized identities (Sade, 2009) in the learning system - with also a view to affective dimensions; 3) comprise the complex language pedagogy nested in the teaching system - using several methods and approaches to language teaching and learning (from the most traditional to the most contemporary ones), combining them (even in a same lesson) in an attempt to meet the different learning systems of each individual student; 4) conciliate assorted historical conceptions associated to this profession (even those that are not compatible with each other) (cf. Figure 1).

In this scenery, the sense of plausibility and advising are two guiding principles in SLTE under the complexity theory that potentially may move the prospective and in-service teachers from the teaching system to the learning system and vice versa.

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• 1
  We use the method and approach concepts in the Anthony (1963)’s sense.

Attachment

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 July 2019
• Date of issue
  2019

History

• Received
  30 Sept 2018
• Accepted
  17 Nov 2018