Criteria for Selection of ESL Teachers

Every evaluation, and eventual selection, of educational and instructional ESL program components--including teachers, is operationalized in terms of specific standards such as utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy. This very brief discussion of basic criteria to be used in selecting ESL teachers has no such pretension: All it aims to do is to point out some of the characteristics which are generally deemed necessary for an ESL teacher to be able to help students learn most effectively and reach their educational goals.

Whichever evaluative criteria are considered, Rivers-and- Temperley's (1978) words ought to be heeded: "Learning to use a language freely and fully is a lengthy and effortful process. Teachers cannot learn the language for their students. They can set the students on the road, helping them to develop confidence in their own learning powers. Then they must wait on the sidelines, ready to encourage and assist, while each student struggles and perseveres with autonomous activity" (p. vii). In this perspective, the teacher is essentially a facilitator of learning, a motivator of efforts, a guide of seeking minds, a mentor of children and adults, rather than a holder-of-the-truths who decants factual information into students' memories. She or he is a long way from being the only or even principal resource in the didactic armamentarium. This Socratic function in no way belitt

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e speakers and second language acquirers is necessary and sufficient condition for second language acquisition to take place. The teacher's competencies Competence is "a term used in linguistic theory, and especially generative grammar, to refer to speakers' knowledge of their language, the system and rules which they have mastered so that they are able to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences, and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. It is an idealized conception of language, which is seen in opposition to the notion of performance, the specific utterances of speech" (Crystal, 1991, p. 66). Competence includes communicative competence and the relevant aspects of cognitive and affective competencies. It involves a practical knowledge of the components of linguistic description (Pronunciation and writing, grammar, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics, phonetics, phonology, prosody, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric and stylistics, semiotics, and the fundamentals of applied linguistics generally). Competence assumes a thorough grounding in ESL methodology seen from Behavioristic, Cognitive, and Communicative views, and a capacity to discriminate meaningfully among these views in terms of

Category: Psychology - C