Troublesome Knowledge and Liminality in ELT Threshold Concepts: A mirror reflecting how knowledge is processed on the minds of students

Abstract

Troublesome knowledge, being an essential characteristic of threshold concepts, emerges when university students find it too difficult to understand concepts. According to Perkins (2006), the causes of concepts becoming troublesome are when they are perceived ritual, inert, conceptually difficult, alien and/or tacit. As a result, students crossing a threshold concept go through the liminality of four modes of variation, which are preliminal, liminal, postliminal and subliminal (Land & Meyer, 2010; Meyer & Land, 2003, 2006a). Interestingly, investigating troublesome knowledge in tertiary disciplines reveals how students cognitively interact with concepts within the subject matter of a discipline. The aim of this paper, based on a mixed method EdD research study, is to focus on what concepts ELT Omani student teachers perceived as troublesome knowledge, how they processed troublesome knowledge and what types of strategies they used to overcome troublesome knowledge. The findings revealed a huge variety of different concepts that were perceived as troublesome knowledge. They also showed that the strategies of asking others to help, asking my teachers to help and reading more about the concepts were the three top strategies ELT Omani student teachers used.