Reconceptualizing language teaching: an in-service teacher education course in uzbekistan

Teaching Statement
David L. Chiesa, Ph.D.
My teaching philosophy has evolved over the past fifteen years with 
my experiences throughout the world (e.g., United States, Japan, China, 
Mongolia and Uzbekistan), teaching in a variety of diverse instructional 
contexts, adhering to certain theoretical positions (e.g., sociocultural), and 
with my own empirical and classroom-based research. My philosophy con-
sists of three core values: (1) I believe in helping learners grow into abilities 
they do not yet possess; (2) I provide opportunities to enable inquiry, crit-
ical thinking, and problem solving; and, (3) I believe in forming the neces-
sary social conditions for mediated cognition to occur. The three values will 
be expounded upon and then explained with an example from my own 
teaching.
Growing into Abilities
Bakhurst (1991) explains that “… the mind projects its mature psycho-
logical capacities onto the earlier stages of its development: We see the 
higher mental functions in the infant’s behaviour even when they are not 
yet present” (p. 67). Bakhurst’s explanation is what he called prolepsis, and, 
to me, this is the essence of all pedagogy. It is the essence of empower-
ment and autonomy-supporting actions in the classroom. I treat the learn-
ers as if they had knowledge and skills that they do not yet have, so that 
they may grow into those skills. 

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CHAPTER TWO: LANGUAGE TEACHING
Showing how learners can “grow into abilities” can be exemplified in 
my research writing class. Modern conceptions of learning to write in a 
second language (L2) see writing as a social practice that is embedded in 
the cultural and institutional contexts in which it is produced. Writing is 
not only exclusive to the author, but it is interactional and collective, which 
expresses a culturally agreed upon purpose, reflecting a kind of relation-
ship and acknowledging an engagement in each community. Thus, in my 
research writing class, I moved away from the cognitive-rhetorical process 
of L2 writing grounded in formal linguistic-textual emphases to a stance 
that pursued the specification of the functional-textual-rhetorical resources 
needed. I viewed learners as emerging scholars and provided them feed-
back as if they were already socialized into the research writing communi-
ty; and included them in ethical discussions in class about the standards 
upheld by the broader applied linguistics profession - particularly in the 
design, data collection and analysis, and dissemination phases of research. 
The learners were treated as if they had abilities they did not yet possess, 
which is a necessary condition of the development of those abilities.