Browsing by Subject "Foreign language"

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    Learning to teach a foreign language: a student teacher's role identity negotiation
    (2013-05) Martel, Jason Peter
    Traditional foreign language remains a conservative and underdeveloped subject. Change-promoting efforts like ACTFL’s National Standards have had a limited impact on teachers’ pedagogies (Glisan, 2012), and program-exiting student proficiency levels remain relatively low (CASLS, 2010). Given the reciprocal shaping relationship between identities and classroom practices (Kanno & Stuart, 2011), documenting the ways in which budding teachers construct their identities may help in supporting the implementation of much needed educational innovations. Using symbolic interactionism (Reynolds & Herman-Kinney, 2003) and teacher socialization (Zeichner & Gore, 1990) as complimentary theoretical lenses, the present study adds to the paltry amount we know about foreign language teachers’ identity development. It employs ethnographic methods associated with qualitative case study to deeply explore the identity construction processes of a student teacher seeking Spanish licensure in a preparation program that emphasizes content-based instruction (CBI). Data sources include interviews, classroom observations, digital journal reflections, documents, and post-observation conference recordings. Findings show that the participant negotiated her identity at the interface of competing messages from significant others (e.g., students, university supervisors, mentor teachers) in her preparation program and student teaching placements and that she demonstrated agency in appropriating or rejecting these messages. She grappled with two principal “designated” (Sfard & Prusak, 2005) identities encoded in these messages: (a) provider of target language input and (b) enactor of a particular approach to foreign language teaching. It also surfaced that she left the program with a weaker Spanish teacher role identity than when she started, which may be attributed to concerns she had with her Spanish proficiency, a strained connection with her secondary-level students, and the lack of opportunities for validating her Spanish teacher role identity—i.e., for inhabiting the role in a comfortable fashion that reinforced a positive sense of self. Important discussion topics for foreign language teacher educators stem from these findings concerning student teaching placement timing, mentor choice, and opportunities for developing language skills. Above all, they call us to ponder the following question: How can we as teacher educators support student teachers in constructing the identities they want to have for themselves as new foreign language teachers, all while encouraging them to acquire identity positions that improve the state of foreign language teaching?
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    Tale of two teachers: Chinese immigrant teachers’ professional identity in US foreign language classrooms.
    (2010-06) Gao, Yunli
    This study looks at Chinese immigrant teachers' identity through the theoretical framework of the figured worlds, aiming to explore how the Chinese immigrant teachers navigate the cultural and educational practices and negotiate their professional identities in the figured world of foreign language classes in the US public schools, and how the two competing storylines of "Chinese" and "American" teacher interplay in the teachers' identity. Two Chinese immigrant teachers were interviewed and observed in their classrooms over a period of four months. The findings revealed the uncertainty and figuring involved in the inscribed acts and meaning regarding the "American" and "Chinese" pedagogical storylines of teaching, and the situated processes of the figuring, positioning, and choices made by the immigrant teachers. The teachers' professional identities are complex and highly contextualized, reflecting positioning in multiple memberships and orchestration of various discourses in the "space of authoring" in the cultural worlds of the schools. The study contributed to immigrant teacher research at the age of global migration.