Authoring Selves in Language Teaching: A Dialogic Approach to Language Teacher Psychology

Abstract

The teacher self is a composite psychological construct which encompasses the cognitive, affective, emotional, and social dimensions of teaching. This qualitative study draws on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism, answerability, and addressivity to discuss how English language teachers negotiated the shifting and conflictive context to construct selves in relation to the promoted communicative language teaching approach. Based on narrative interviews and classroom observations with five tertiary English teachers in China, we found that these teachers were actively engaged in the dialog with their prior learning experiences and active, responsive in answering their contexts while authoring selves in everyday teaching practice. The multiple-case study data support a Bakhtinian understanding that teachers are active users and producers of theory in their own right, highlighting teachers’ agency, creativity, and autonomy. Based on Bakhtin’s dialogism and the case study findings, we bring cognition, identity and practice together and conceptualize the teacher self as having multiple facets and layers: the autobiographical self, the discursive self, and the pedagogical self. The three selves are constitutive of the consummated whole of the teacher self instead of being separate entities functioning individually. The study is concluded with implications for language teacher education and teacher development.

Dialects, motivation, and English proficiency: Empirical evidence from China

“…A significant hurdle to the success of English language learning in China is the combination of a dramatic increase in the number of students seeking to learn English ( Hu and Feng, 2012 ), the unfilled demand for Chinese English teachers ( Wang and Zhang, 2021 ) and the inconsistent quality and access to English language education ( Qian and Smyth, 2008 ; Cheng, 2009 ) while at the same time, the roles and expectations of ESL teachers is becoming more complex ( Chen et al, 2022 ).…”

Developing and Validating the English Teachers’ Cognitions About Grammar Teaching Questionnaire (TCAGTQ) to Uncover Teacher Thinking

“…English language teaching has undergone massive changes in the past several decades in China ( Jiang and Zhang, 2021 ; Yuan and Zhang, 2021 ; Chen et al, 2022 ; Liu and Chu, 2022 ; Sun and Zhang, 2022 ). University English teaching has been critiqued for its teacher-centered classrooms and dominance of the traditional Grammar-Translation teaching method ( Liu and Xu, 2017 ; Wang and Zhang, 2021 ; Wu X. M. et al, 2021 ; Zhang and Zhang, 2021 ).…”