Education

Faculty of Education, Bundoora

Academic Staff Profiles

Dr Alan Williams
	BA, DipEd (Monash) BEd (TESOL) (La Trobe) Cert. TEFL (International House, London) MEd (La Trobe) PhD (La Trobe). Lecturer Co-ordinator International Programs (On-shore) Bundoora Campus Education 1 Building, Room 342 Phone: +61 3 9479 2783 Fax: +61 3 9479 3070 Email: alan.williams@latrobe.edu.au

• Background
• Research Interests
• Publications
• Presentations
• Thesis Supervision
• Projects and Grants

Background

Alan Williams is Lecturer in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Methodology in the School of Educational Studies. He teaches Methodology in TESL (teaching English as a Second Language) in the Diploma in Education, Introduction to TESOL Methodology in the Graduate Certificate, and supervises the TESOL practicum in the Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma in TESOL program. He is a senior researcher in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) Research Centre.

Alan has been a teacher of ESL to adolescents and adults in Victoria and Canada, where he also taught in Elementary schools. He has taught History, Geography and Social Studies in Schools in Melbourne and London. Before coming to La Trobe, he was coordinator of an English Language Centre for newly-arrived adolescent students. Alan has also had experience in teacher education and applied linguistics in South East Asia.

Alan has been also active in professional associations, having been on the Committee of the Victorian Association for TESOL and Multicultural Education (VATME) and on the council of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) from 1991 to 1995. He was ACTA policy convenor for this time. He is a life member of VATME and a member of TESOL Inc.

Research Interests

Alan has a general interest in TESOL curriculum and methodology. He has a particular interest in the integration of language teaching and subject matter teaching, and how culture is dealt with in TESOL. His doctoral thesis addressed the cultural conundrum in TESOL, the relative lack of attention given to culture, despite its prominence in the rhetoric of the field.

He has been involved in research projects that have investigated the transition into schools of ESL students with low literacy skills and limited schooling, and the needs of young learners in the Adult Migrant English Program. He was also involved in the AMEP research Centre project that investigated changing groups of clients in the AMEP, in 2005 to 2006 he is coordinating two projects in which the nature of appropriate topic content for youth learners and low literacy learners in the AMEP.

Alan is currently the content manager of an AMEP Research Centre Project to develop a set of curriculum materials for SPP Youth Learners in the AMEP, and he is the series editor of the 'Living in Australia' series, a series of low level readers on aspects of life in Australia.

Selected Publications:

AMEP Research Centre Fact Sheets :

• Teacher Issues Fact Sheets
• Appropriate Topic Content for Low Literacy Learners in the AMEP (with Lynda Achren)
• Youth in the AMEP (with Howard Nicholas)
• Enhancing Language teaching with content
• Teaching spoken and written language (with Howard Nicholas)

Country Fact Sheets :

• Sierra Leone
• Rwanda
• Liberia
• Somalia
• Sudan (with contributions from Tanya Naumova)
• Ethiopia

The pieces of the pattern: Learner backgrounds and profiles (2003) with Lynda Yates in G. Wigglesworth (ed) The Kaleidoscope of adult second language learning: Learner, teacher and researcher perspectives

Turning the Kaleidoscope: Perceptions of learning in the AMEP (2003), with Lynda Yates in G. Wigglesworth (ed) The Kaleidoscope of adult second language learning: Learner, teacher and researcher perspectives.

Learning from each other: Literacy labels and limitations (2001) (edited with C. Davison)

Integrating language and Content: Unresolved Issues. (2001) (co-authored with C. Davison) in B. Mohan, C. Davison & C. Leung (eds) English as a Second Language in the Mainstream

Where to now? TESOL teacher education in turbulent times 1999

Finding and Showing the Way : Teaching ESL in the late 1990s (ACTA Occasional Paper) (1998)

"Content-based Language Teaching: Making Which Connections?" (1995)

"TESOL and Cultural Domination: Are We doing the Devil's work?" (1995)

"The Ethics of TESOL" (1992)

'It's too hard Sir! Teaching a novel to ESL students' (1987)

Unpublished Theses - Content-Based Language Teaching : Problems and Promise

Resolving the Cultural conundrum : A conceptual framework for the management of culture in TESOL

Selected Research Supervision:

• Teaching and learning styles in a non-English-major University in Vietnam
• Investigation and analysis of vocabulary learning strategies taken by English major in Yunnan
• The Effect of Content Schema on the Reading Comprehension of Second Language Learners in the Chinese Context
• The Impact of a Reader Response Approach to Teaching Reading to Non-English Major Students in China
• The Role of Interactive Processing in Teaching Reading Comprehension to Chinese ESL students
• Materials for Teaching Listening skills in Prive English Language Centres in Vietnam
• Reconciliation of the 'grammatical vs conversational' approach.
• In search of an optimum way of teaching English literature to Vietnamese students.
• Learning strategies for Chinese students learning English relative clauses.
• Attitudes and approaches of teachers of English language to the teaching of pronunciation.
• The speech act of refusal in the Lahaholot language: A social pragmatic study.
• Bilingual education in Korea
• An analysis of language use of Indonesian students in writing a letter.

Research Projects:

In 2001 Alan received a grant from the Department of Education and Training (Victoria) to document a project which provided support for ESL students with limited literacy skills in their transition from New Arrivals English Language Centres and Schools into mainstream schools. The resulting report ‘Moving in New directions’ has been presented to the Department of Education and Training, and has been the basis of a professional development package for teachers, which DET commissioned Alan to write in 2003.

He has been involved in a number of AMEP Research Centre projects (see above).

He is currently involved in projects within the School of Educational Studies to explore the nature of student experience in the Graduate Diploma in Education, and in the development of multimedia materials for students from Linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in the Graduate Diploma in Education.

Presentations

Alan has given many presentations at local, National and International conferences on TESOL. The following is a selection of his presentations in recent years