Analysis of Curriculum Components of Language Teacher Education：Enhancing Academic Knowledge or Developing Professional Skills?

초록

Two of the principal goals of language teacher education are to enhance teachers’ academic knowledge and to develop their teaching practices. Yet, there is a paucity of empirical studies to verify how these goals are realized at actual curriculum of teacher education programs. The present study investigates curricula of language teacher education in order to identify how these dual goals are addressed across programs at the curriculum level. First, the analysis of required courses of 30 randomly selected programs shows that there are too small a number of language education courses to address relevant topics and issues with a sufficient depth. Furthermore, linguistics and education have figured most prominently in academic content across curricula, although linguistic courses outnumber education courses considerably. Second, a detailed case study of one teacher education program looks into the relationship between programmatic features behind its curriculum and the students’ evaluation of them. It is found that, while the course works are designed to develop students’conceptual capacity for their independent decision-makings in their classrooms, students are more concerned with whether and to what degree given courses reflect their classroom realities. Implication for curriculum designers and further studies are discussed.

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