Within the field of teacher education, there has been an on-going debate about what constitutes a professional knowledge base. However, comparatively few language teaching scholars have participated in the debate. In the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), not many studies on teaching knowledge have been pursued (Borg, 2003; Gatbonton, 2000). With its aim to educate English teachers, TESOL has the urgent need to explore what constitutes a comprehensive knowledge base to better prepare its students and help continuous growth of its professionals in the field.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the kinds of teaching knowledge that two native and two non-native English teachers have, and how those different kinds of knowledge influence their classroom instruction. Specifically, the teaching context explored was a Freshman English for Non-Majors course at a Taiwan university. In this study, I drew upon Shulman’s (1986; 1987) model of teaching knowledge and modified it to examine how the teaching knowledge worked in practice.
This study followed a dominant-less dominant mixed-methods research design (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 1998), beginning with the dominantly qualitative case study methodology to explore four university English teachers’ integrated pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practice, and ending with the less dominant quantitative survey method to investigate students’ perceptions of their teachers’ instructions at the end of their study in the Freshman English course.
Findings from this study indicated that all the four participating teachers demonstrated eight types of knowledge base in their teaching of the Freshman English course in Taiwan, including knowledge of content, pedagogy, curriculum, learners, contexts, educational goals, self, and assessment. It is found that these eight types of teaching knowledge were in nature and in reality inseparable when the four teachers taught the course. With a combined knowledge, the four teachers were found to demonstrate a high level of integrated pedagogical content knowledge in their teaching, as evidenced by the materials they selected for their students and the activities they engaged their students in doing.
The four teachers’ being native or nonnative status was found to weigh far less than their years of teaching experience, professional training, and life experiences in influencing their knowledge and instruction of the Freshman English course at a Taiwan university. It is hoped that this study helped provide those in the English-teaching field with an integrated knowledge framework and good teaching practices which they can make reference to.