Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 8

Editorial · Hu & Hashim · Ellis · Machida

Reviews of Reviews · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4  ·  Roundup

This is the eighth post in a series reading a single issue of JALT Journal, the May 2026 number, for what the field shows about itself when it speaks in its own pages.

Review of a Review

Professionalising English Language Teaching: Concepts and Reflections for Action in Teacher Education
Andrzej Cirocki and Wolfgang Hallet · Cambridge University Press, 2024
Reviewed by Emily MacFarlane, Tohoku Gakuin University

Of the four reviewers, Emily MacFarlane is the one who most clearly remains a person on the page. She calls herself a novice teacher, and that self-description is significant in itself. It does not weaken her authority in the review. It gives the review its point of entry. She is not writing as someone already settled inside the professional structure the book describes. Nor does she signal that she wants to be identified with it. She is reading from the position of someone still finding her way into the work.

MacFarlane presents the book respectfully. She recognises the problem it addresses: English language teaching is often not treated as a true profession, and the industry can value native-speaker marketing and commercial considerations over genuine pedagogical qualifications. She accepts that the effort to raise the standards, reputation, and status of English language educators through professionalism is important.

At the same time, she makes clear that the book is not quite the book she had expected to read. Although its stated audience includes practitioners, students, administrators, and policymakers, she finds it most applicable to pedagogical trainers and administrators rather than to classroom practitioners. The chapters, as she describes them, lean heavily towards theory rather than practical suggestions. She had picked up the book expecting something more directly useful for her own teaching, and she asks us to understand the review as written from the point of view of a novice teacher rather than from the book’s main intended audience.

That gives the review its particular interest. MacFarlane is reading a book about professionalising English language teaching from a position that the book does not seem to have been written to meet fully. Her concern is not resistance to theory. She values the research, the reflection questions, and the sections that connect more directly with practice. But she also notices the distance between a framework for teacher education and the lived concern of a teacher trying to understand and develop her own teaching.

Organised around professionalism, competences, frameworks, teacher education, and reflective tools, the book’s stated aim, as MacFarlane reports it, is to systematise English language teacher education and define the core pedagogical competences required to teach English successfully and professionally. That is a recognisable project. Teaching is often treated as a loose craft, a set of techniques, or a personality-driven activity. A serious account of teacher education quite reasonably tries to give the work more structure, visibility, and standing.

But MacFarlane also reports an important difficulty. The book acknowledges that there is no settled consensus in ELT about what characterises a “teacher professional.” If professionalism is being offered as the organising answer, the meaning of a professional teacher cannot remain uncertain in the background. Otherwise professionalism can become an external marker before the nature of good teaching has been clarified.

This is where the language of professionalism begins to show its limits. Professional standing is conferred from outside. It depends on recognition, standards, procedures, and institutional legitimacy. None of those things is irrelevant. But they do not by themselves tell us what kind of attention a teacher brings to a learner, what kind of judgement is being exercised in the room, or what quality of experience is being nurtured.

The same difficulty appears around the word excellence. As MacFarlane reports it, the book aims to guide teachers towards professional excellence. But excellence can mean more than recognised competence within a professional framework. It can also mean the relation a person holds to the work itself. In that sense, excellence is lived from inside. It is not simply the achievement of approved competences. It is the quality of attention, honesty, perception, conscientiousness, and care that a person brings to what is actually happening.

Neither professionalism nor excellence can be settled without a prior question that the book, as reviewed, does not appear to ask directly enough. What is education for? What is intelligence? What is happening when one person teaches and another learns? Without some coherent answer to those questions, professionalism and excellence can only be described as standards. The standards may be useful, but the ground beneath them remains less clear.

MacFarlane’s discussion of Bildung is revealing here. The concept is introduced in the book’s first chapter, and she notes that it was new to her and may also be unfamiliar to readers in Japan. She also observes that although it appears to be presented as important, it is rarely mentioned outside that chapter. The book therefore appears through her review to reach toward valuing the whole person, but this deeper possibility does not seem to become the organising ground of the book.

A model built from core competences and reflective frameworks can help a teacher see. But it can also subtly undermine her trust in her own intuition and intelligence. It can teach a teacher to look first at the framework.

MacFarlane seems to feel this absence without naming it in those terms. This may be why, in her review, she is especially drawn to the tools for self-reflection and teacher-led research. She describes those sections as detailed, accessible, immediately usable, and requiring no administrative support or management direction. She says that this was what she had initially hoped for from the whole book.

There is a remark by Arthur Miller that is relevant here. Looking back from the late 1980s after the political commitments and conflicts of the 1950s, Miller was asked what he would say to a young person who wanted to devote his life to saving the human race. He answered that he would tell him first to find “a locus of his own professional life” and deal honestly with everybody around him. “And he’ll find himself in trouble soon enough,” Miller added. “And there will be the issue.”

MacFarlane’s review shows something of that kind. She is honest about the distance between the book’s framework and her own position as a novice teacher, and respectful of the book she is reading. These may be closer to professionalism than the external language of professionalism itself.

MacFarlane gives the book a fair and often admiring reading. The difficulty lies in the distance between the concern she brings and the answer the book is built to provide. The book, as the review presents it, answers through concepts, competences, frameworks, and professional standing.

Those may all have value. But the issue is not simply which competences should be added, or which reflective tools should be used. It is whether professionalism, once turned into a list of competences, can still recognise what is most professional in MacFarlane’s review: her honesty about where she stands, and her respect for the book she is reading.

Reference

Miller, A. (1989, January). A Miller’s tale [Interview by E. Hobsbawm]. Marxism Today.