The Cultural and Intercultural Identities of Transnational English Teachers: Two Case Studies from the Americas

Abstract

This article presents case studies of two long-time English language teachers: a California English as a second language instructor originally from Brazil, and a Chilean English as a foreign language teacher who worked for many years in the United States before returning home. Based on interview and classroom observation data, this research explores teachers' perspectives on the connections between their transnational life experiences and their development of intercultural competence, how they define their own (inter)cultural identities; and how they approach cultural issues with their English language learners. Although both women self-identify as bicultural, they were observed to have somewhat different approaches to teaching cultural issues: The California teacher emphasizes subjective comparisons between the many national cultures represented in her classroom, but the teacher in Chile focuses more on the cultural changes that she and her students have experienced as a result of globalization. Whereas previous studies of teacher identity in TESOL have focused primarily on the dichotomy between native-and nonnative-English-speaking teachers, this article argues that the profession needs to put more value on the pedagogical resources that transnational and intercultural teachers bring to English language teaching. I end with implications for educating intercultural teachers.

Addressing Cultural Identity through Negotiation: Analysis of Student-teacher-authored Narratives

“…Some pioneer studies such as the one by Duff and Uchida (1997) and Antonek, McCormick, and Donato (1997) are the prime examples. Scrutinizing the literature, it can be stated that most of the empirical studies on language teacher identity are focusing on native and non-native speaking teacher identity (Menard-Warwick, 2008). Later on, researchers (e.g., Fichtner & Chapman, 2011;Menard-Warwick, 2011) conducted studies addressing language teachersí cultural identity.…”

“I Am Combined”: Chinese Teachers’ Cultural Identities and Pedagogical Learning

“…First, the teachers in our study used their personal experiences, often cross-cultural ones, and their understandings of these experiences to make sense of pedagogical content and concepts, similar to previous studies (Duff & Uchida, 1997;Menard-Warwick, 2008). Sometimes, this reference to personal experiences and understandings was prompted by the instructors; at other times, the teacher participants chose to connect with their experiences and understandings while processing new concepts introduced in this PD course.…”

“…As we will describe below, research has further revealed that language teachers' cultural identities interacted with various aspects of their teaching (e.g. material selection, teaching approaches) in significant ways (Duff & Uchida, 1997;Fichtner & Chapman, 2011;Menard-Warwick, 2008). This important link between cultural identity and teaching practices points to the value of teachers doing cultural identity work within teacher education contexts.…”

Becoming a language teacher: Constraints and negotiation in the emergence of new identities

“…Meanwhile, somewhat less research has been devoted to language teacher identities, although there has been an increase in recent years (e.g. Clarke, 2008;Gray & Morton, forthcoming;Harbon & Maloney, 2013;Kanno & Stuart, 2011;Menard Warwick, 2008, 2011Miller, 2007Miller, , 2009Phan Le Ha, 2008;Tsui, 2007, Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2005. This research deals with language teacher identity in a variety of contexts distinguished by variables such as the teaching sector focussed on (primary education, secondary education, adult education) or the experience of the teachers involved (pre-service or in-service).…”