Professional Development

The teaching profession has always been torn between professional teachers and improvisers. The issue of professional development is at stake nowadays with teachers living hectic lives, running from one school to the other, without time for any other activities besides working. However, knowledge of the latest trends and the acquisition of advanced literacy as forms of professional development have become a priority to be able to apply for a job or get a promotion. In this paper, I will analyse two paragraphs from the article by Howley & Howley (2005) by explaining their meaning in a more informal register and I will also analyse and provide a pragmatic classification of the different discourse markers in the text .
The article by Howley & Howley (2005) argues in favour of professional development in rural areas. Its second paragraph reads as follows , “Policymakers and educators see professional development as a way to improve the quality of instruction in classrooms across the nation, but the empirical literature linking professional development to improved student achievement is extremely thin. Logically, though, it would seem that the right kinds of professional development would improve instruction, and that better instruction would result in higher student achievement. Very limited empirical evidence suggests that such linkages may exist.” (Howley & Howley . Winter 2005 . p-1)
Paraphrasing Howley & Howley (2005) I would say that those people in charge of designing educational statutes, being supervisors, researches or legislators working at the Ministry of Education together with the teaching task force aknowledge the importance of developing higher education standards in the teaching profession. In this way , teachers would improve the quality of their practice and , transitively , students would learn more.
However, some researchers like Caret, Birman, Porter and Hermann (1999) expressed their disbelief in the correlation between improvement of teaching by professional development and students´ improvement. They maintain that even though teachers may engage in developmental programs their teaching practice may remain unaltered. As there is not supporting evidence favouring one side or the other , researchers like Lave(1991) , Wenger(1998) , Lenge(1994) and Choo(1998) proposed three principles of organizational learning that may be considered to enlarge organizational capacity. Some approaches to professional development stem from the principles mentioned above. One of these approaches is the Data Based Improvement .
“Grounded in management approaches such as Total Quality Management, some improvement strategies involve educators in the establishment of standards and benchmarks followed by an ongoing process of assessment and classroom-level reform. The Malcolm Baldrige program is perhaps the best-known approach of this type, but there are other, less prescriptive alternatives”. The opening of the paragraph refers to one of the Management approaches, The Total Quality Management”, which lay the foundations for the development of improvement strategies. By using the phrase “grounded in management approaches” the authors are expressing that their research is based on the results of the TQM (Total Quality Management) approach.
Regarding the analysis of the syntactic relations of the different parts of speech in the article I can point out the use of a number of discourse markers which help the reader understand the text without fragmentation of ideas . “In linguistics, a discourse marker is a word or phrase that is relatively syntax-independent, does not have a particular grammatical function, does not change the meaning of the utterance, has a somewhat empty meaning ( Moder & Martinovic - 2004) and “.....tends not to have a specific semantic meaning , contribut(ing) to scaffold the pragmatic coherence of interaction....” (Romero-Trillo - 2006).
Some discourse markers found in the article denote addition. Such is the case of : In addition, A recent addition, and , additional, furthermore, moreover , also . Some
others express exemplification. These words are: examples of ....are, i.e, for example, for instance. Words like” even though”,”however”,” rather than”,” instead of” ,” but”, indicate contrast . We can identify the sub notions of antithesis, neutral contrast aand concession within the notion of contrast , referring to contrast as the umbrella term . In order to be able to categorize words in any of these sub notions, it is necessary to examine the whole utterance or sentence in context. In this article “even though” indicates concession whereas “but” indicates antithesis. The word “because” indicates either reason or result , changing its meaning according to the position in the sentence. “Or” indicates choice. When the authors use the words “First” and “Second” at the beginning of the sentence followed by commas, they mean to structure their explanation by ennumeration . “In general” is used to generalize an idea and the phrases “At the same time” or “as well as” indicate parallelism .
As a conclusion I can state that the task of paraphrasing provides EAP(English for Academic Purposes) students with practice in order to help them in the writing of papers without overusing quotations and the analysis and categorization of discourse markers triggers off the awareness of cohesive devices that an EAP student should possess and make use of in order to acquire advanced literacy . When trying to relate the analysis of different paragraphs and discourse markers in the article by Howley & Howley to its theme I can say that these two tasks provide good practice for the professional development in the teaching profession.


References

Dagmar Barth – Weingarten . Concession in Spoken English . On the realisation of a discourse-pragmatic relation .

Greenbaum, S & Quirk , R . (1973) A University Grammar of English.

Howley, Aimee, Howley, Craig B . Winter 2005 . The Rural Educator : High Quality Teaching: Providing for Rural Teachers' Professional Development.)

Moder, C.L. & Martinovic-Zic, A (2004). Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 117. 9027230781. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse-marker , August, 26,2009.

Discourse markers- Linking your Ideas in English
http://esl.about.com/cs/advanced/a/a_dmark.htm retrieved, August,25,2009

Techniques of Sentence combination.
http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/AEP/BU113/English/discmark.htm retrieved August ,25,2009.