key concepts in e l t

Expertise in language learning

and teaching
Keith Johnson

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An expert is someone who is particularly skilled in a specific area, and the
study of expertise looks at what characteristics experts possess, what
procedures they follow, and how they differ from non-experts. Expertise
studies received impetus in the 1960s with the development of artificial
intelligence, and attempts to build machines capable of simulating areas of
human expertise. Popular domains for early study were chess, problem
solving, and medical diagnosis. By the early 1990s, interest in the area was
such that Ericsson described understanding expertise as ‘one of the most
exciting challenges in cognitive science today’ (Ericsson and Smith 1991:
vii). Around that time, a number of books on expertise research appeared,
including one written by authors particularly interested in applied
linguistics—Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993).
It seems to have been Carroll (1967) who suggested that a way of finding out
about good (expert) language learners would be to collect together a group of
them and study what they had in common. A number of ‘good language
learner’ studies followed, the best known being the Canadian project of
Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern, and Todesco (1978). Work like this led to studies in
learning strategies, of which Oxford (1990) is a well-known example. In the
general educational field, there is a body of work looking at teacher
behaviour, particularly lesson and course planning (Clark and Yinger 1987),
while Berliner (1995) provides a general model of teacher expertise. As
regards language teaching specifically, Woods (1996) focuses on teacher
cognition, and a major study undertaken by Tsui (2003) in Hong Kong
involves case studies of four teachers representing different levels of
expertise, and looks inter alia at how their expertise develops.
Other areas that have received attention are language teacher education and
task design; see the contributions by Waters and Samuda in Johnson (2005)
(an edited collection which overviews work in the language learning and
teaching fields). The Lancaster University LATEX (LAnguage Teaching
EXpertise) research group has also stimulated a number of recent studies.
Johnson, Kim, Liu, Nava, Perkins, Smith, Soler-Canela, and Lu (2008) look
at expertise in materials evaluation as does doctoral work being undertaken
in South Korea; procedures followed by expert textbook writers are also
being researched at the same level, while a study reported in Johnson and
Jackson (2006) focuses on the expertise of trainers in various skills (sports,

E LT Journal Volume 64/2 April 2010; doi:10.1093/elt/ccp104 217

ª The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Advance Access publication December 27, 2009
 music, and aircraft piloting), and considers implications for language
teaching.
The research methods used to study expertise have been various. Some
employ batteries of psychological tests to search for important
characteristics; others prefer case studies or verbal reports (including think-
alouds and stimulated recall techniques). Studies involving comparisons
between experts and non-experts are particularly common. It can also be
pointed out with some justice that expertise studies, at the moment at least,
are rather atheoretical, being based (or ‘grounded’) on data provided by
subjects, rather than systematically exploring theoretically motivated
hypotheses. This will doubtless change with time, as more coherent

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theoretical frameworks for expertise are developed. In the meantime, the
research does provide rich and often fascinating observations of use to many
in the language education field who are concerned with helping to develop
expertise in language learners or trainee teachers.

References language teacher anything to learn?’ System 34/4:

Bereiter, C. and M. Scardamalia. 1993. Surpassing
Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications
of Expertise. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Berliner, D. C. 1995. ‘The development of
pedagogical expertise’ in P. K. Siu and P. T. K. Tam
(eds.). Quality in Education: Insights from Different
Perspectives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational
Research Association.
Carroll, J. B. 1967. ‘Research problems concerning
the teaching of foreign or second languages to
younger children’ in H. H. Stern (ed.). Foreign
Languages in Primary Education. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Clark, C. M. and R. J. Yinger. 1987. ‘Teacher planning’
in J. Calderhead (ed.). Exploring Teachers’ Thinking.
London: Cassell.
Ericsson, K. A. and J. Smith. 1991. ‘Prospects and
limits of the empirical study of expertise: an
introduction’ in K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith (eds.).
Towards a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and
Limits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, K. (ed.). 2005. Expertise in Second Language
Learning and Teaching. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Johnson, K. and S. Jackson. 2006. ‘Comparing
language teaching and other-skill teaching: has the
532–46.
Johnson, K., M. Kim, Y.-F. Liu, A. Nava, D. Perkins,
A.-M. Smith, O. Soler-Canela, and W. Lu. 2008.
‘A step forward: investigating expertise in materials
evaluation’. ELT Journal 62/2: 157–63.
Naiman, N., H. Fröhlich, H. H. Stern, and A. Todesco.
1978. The Good Language Learner. Toronto: Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education.
Oxford, R. 1990. Language Learning Strategies: What
Every Teacher Should Know. Rowley, MA:
Newbury House.
Tsui, A. B. M. 2003. Understanding Expertise in
Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Woods, D. 1996. Teacher Cognition in Language
Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The author
Keith Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics
and Language Education at the University of
Lancaster. He has written widely in the field of
language education and has in recent years
developed a particular interest in the study of
language teaching expertise. His Lancaster
University page (http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/
profiles/Keith-Johnson/) has a link to the L AT E X
site.
Email: k.johnson@lancaster.ac.uk

218 Keith Johnson