The Implications Of Expertise Study

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Expertise studies, like this one, are revealing from a theoretical point of view, providing insights of interest to the applied linguist. But arguably of more importance is their value in providing a research-informed basis for teacher training.

For instance, those in training could be given the task of participating in similar types of materials evaluation studies, producing think-aloud protocols of the sessions, the transcripts of which they and their classmates could then analyse for purposes of determining and possibly improving their own evaluation styles.

This suggestion for using data gathering methods to train teachers was proposed by Westerman (1991) following her study of teacher decision-making ...
... in order to '[promote] reflection for expert teachers as well as for novices' (ibid: 303).

An empirically-grounded method of teacher training such as this could go a long way towards helping student teachers to recognize their own textbook evaluation styles, as well as to learn more about the use of concurrent verbalization in research.

The LATEX study also points to the benefits of training teachers to take an in-depth approach to evaluation whereby the evaluator[goes] beneath the publisher's and author's claims to look at... the kind of language description, underlying assumptions about learning or values on which the materials are based or... whether the materials seem likely to live up to the claims that are being made for them.

(McGrath 2002: 27-8)This certainly was the style employed by T3 during the study. Following this systematic method of evaluation seemed to enable him to take a more holistic stance in his assessment of the textbook and, in so doing; he was able to consider what lay behind the textbook's design and aims.

Thus if we wish to train teachers to evaluate textbooks, we will benefit (one might argue) from knowing something about how experienced evaluators operate—what procedures they use and what issues they focus attention on. Given the limited generalizability of the results from this small-scale study, it is an overly-ambitious goal to develop any definitive statements with regard to training objectives.

But further research into this area seems likely to reveal aspects of behaviour which would otherwise be ignored by trainers. It is true that the precise ways in which expertise studies can inform the trainer need to be thought about with care. Certainly it would be naive to try and teach all the characteristics an expert possesses and think that thereby a novice will become an expert; research shows, for example, that teaching novice chess players to improve their chess memories to be as powerful as those of a grand master may indeed result in improved memories, but will not in itself transform novices into grand masters.

So, training implications need to be considered carefully. Nevertheless it seems a worthy and sensible target to aim for a research-informed basis to training, and it is this target which provides a rationale for research projects like the one discussed in this paper.