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The purpose of this study is to develop a measurement instrument to be used as an assessment tool of teachers’ development of conscientização (i.e., critical consciousness), defined as an individual’s ability “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality”. After examining the different stages and components of conscientização, the author describes the process of generating initial items, determining the instrument’s format and content validity, and revising the instrument. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted with a diverse sample of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), resulting in four internally consistent factors: (a) teacher beliefs about schooling and emotions towards inequality, (b) teacher as activists, (c) teacher awareness of local educational context, and (d) content selection and teaching strategies in the classroom. Psychometric properties of the scale are included.

The question of use of second language speakers’ personal narratives-in-interview as data has been widely debated in the applied linguistics field. I subscribe to scholars before me who argue for an analysis beyond content but one that also takes into consideration context and form. Bamberg’s positioning theory (1997; 2004) guides this analysis as I examine the storied world, the storytelling world, and the existing discourses in the personal narratives-in-interview by a woman from the island of Chuuk residing in Hawai‘i. I discuss the linguistic, rhetorical, and interactional properties of her narratives, how she positions herself in relation to ideologies of language and identity that have value in her spaces, and juxtapose them against sociolinguistic and socio-historic contexts in which they were produced. I argue that by looking at the interdependence between all positioning levels (i.e., context, content, and form), it is possible to understand how the narrator positions herself with regards to societal discourses on language and identity both in the micro and macro contexts of the interview space and of Hawai‘i.