The Potential of Team Teaching
- Profile of Team Teaching in Poland
Team teaching requires additional effort in consulting colleagues and developing new strategies so it is not an easy task, but it can be beneficial for both teachers and students. It has been noted that in Poland there has been a considerable growth of courses (mainly connected with business or technical fields) intended to teach content through a foreign language. Having interviewed several tutors who teach content through a foreign language I found out that they do not consult any language specialists. Many of them said they just teach vocabulary (most often they explain the unknown words in the student's - mother tongue).
It is necessary that teachers cooperate in order to establish a good and solid organizational patterns for both content and language teaching. Usually content teachers know a foreign language very well but can't teach it, and this is when they need support from a linguist. This would undoubtedly benefit in better motivation for students, improvement of the quality of teaching, personal development among teachers, and prestige for the universities or schools where team teaching would be practiced.
Team teaching brings different approaches, styles, and ways of presenting both content and language. Language tasks are closely related to content, which makes students' understanding of both the content and the language better. They learn more naturally but they need to be supervised by both content and language teachers to make their learning process more efficient. But most importantly, students maintain both the professional and foreign language development, which makes them more competitive in the market job.
Such teaching is also a good way for teachers to try different approaches, to exchange thoughts and ideas, and to develop professionally. Content teachers can get a better understanding of methods and techniques for teaching a foreign language, and language teachers expand their qualifications professionally. The knowledge they receive from the content teachers could be used for teaching a foreign language for specific purposes (FLSP).
There can obviously be some obstacles in the process of team teaching. It takes time to plan and work out the syllabus, the teachers must get on well with each other, the students can be resistant to new methods and techniques. It also demands good interpersonal skills, the ability to adapt to new environments, cooperation and ability to compromise. The possibility of team teaching has to be seriously considered in Poland to make it possible to adapt to the changing approach to education in Europe.
Mariusz Andryszczyk
The Academy of Humanities and Economics, Lódz
