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The purpose of this article is to propose a possible way to integrate cultural knowledge into English teaching by using children literature. It also presents an alternative method for researchers to investigate personal identity by using a character from literature as a case study. The article also offers an example of an exploration of the main characters’ identity in Jasmin Warga’s Other Words for Home. The story represented a life of a twelve-year-old girl from Syria who left behind the war torn city order to live in United States. Her identity formation process was analyzed through the theory of Symbolic Interactionism. Themes found from her journey of moving into new culture included “self as an English language learner” prior to moving to the United States and “self as an immigrant” was presented when she entered American society.  her  This teaching method might be useful in promoting English learners to become integratively motivated which can be achieved by understanding the cultural and ideological aspects and by developing a cross-cultural awareness of the how to become part of community that speak the target language.

Interpretive frameworks may be helpful to understand narratives, yet they also risk displacing unique information of the research context. In this paper, we argue that such is the case in narrative inquiry studies of English language teaching set in the Asian context, perhaps due to the pressure to use familiar interpretive frameworks that are sanctioned by scholars. Through meta-ethnography, we examined recent narrative inquiry studies set in Asia. It was observed that the research findings do not offer any critical insights about the context of the study; instead, they add to the prevalence of broad constructs of English language education, such as the components of identity. For future narrative inquiry research, we recommend researchers to consider utilizing local meanings pertinent to the study context as an analytical lens, as a means to Asianize the field.

The teacher education program in Thailand has undergone various reforms, with the latest being the shortening of the teacher education curriculum from five years to four. To date, very few studies have accounted for this reform. To address this gap, our study sought to analyse pre-service English teachers’ perceptions towards the reform. This was done through a semiotic analysis of visuals contributed by the pre-service teachers. There were a total of 43 visual contributions, which were analysed through Labbo’s typology of symbolisms and attributes discerned from the visuals and their corresponding captions. We were able to categorize the visuals to three types of symbolisms, which were transformative, typographic, and the third type being a combination of the first and second. The most common attribute was positive affect (emotion), with a few visuals rationalizing or questioning the reform. The analysis revealed that the pre-service teachers did not really understand the nature of the reform, despite their positive perception towards change.

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