An Epistemological Approach to Interpret an Article from the Field of Tesol (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)

Philosophy of Science and Social Science Research Practice

An epistemological approach to interpret an article from the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)

Sajjadllah Alhawsawi

19/01/2009

Introduction
In this paper, after reading outside sources, I selected three concepts: humanism, social-constructivism, and scepticism. These will be discussed in the following pages. Subsequently, an article from the field of TESOL was selected. The article, written by Sert (2006) was taken from the Asian EFL Journal and was entitled “EFL Student Teachers’ Learning Autonomy”. It is summarized in order to provide a general background. The literature review part of the article was then interpreted from the perspectives of humanism, social-constructivism and scepticism, taking into consideration an array of underlying sub-species of these concepts and their correlations.

Epistemological Concepts: Humanism, social-constructivism and scepticism • The Concept of Humanism
Humanism is a social concept which states that knowledge is created and shared among humans and it is used to solve human complexities and differences. By and large, humanism is a wide-ranging secular phenomenon which has developed over centuries and has been adopted for several purposes. There are a variety of viewpoints within this concept. According to Gogineni (2000) the dominant view is called ‘modern or naturalistic humanism’ and draws its ‘roots from Aristotle and Socrates’. It is defined as "a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion" (Lamont, cited in Edwords, 1989: para. 6). Therefore, humanism can be described as an ‘anthropocentric’ or ‘human-centered’. It puts great emphasis on the study of both human needs and interests. It believes that human beings act out of

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