A Poststructural Discourse Analysis of a Preservice Teacher’s Linguistic Ideological Becoming

Abstract

This dissertation is a single-case study and employs a poststructural approach to discourse analysis to investigate how language ideologies of a world language (WL) preservice teacher develop. Prominent discourses about language teaching and learning in U.S. K-12 schools support monolingual ideologies (e.g., Rivers & Robinson, 2012). While many WL preservice-teacher mentors combat these discourses with multilingual ideologies, monolingual ideologies and associated practices persist within the field (Turnbull, 2018). As a result, WL preservice teachers are bombarded with conflicting discourses, and they can become disoriented regarding the theory and practice options presented to them. They may then enter the profession feeling unprepared without a professional identity or the ideological grounding for making informed decisions (Martel, 2013). Little research regarding WL teachers’ ideological development has been published. With more understanding of the ways WL preservice teachers navigate conflicting discourses, WL teacher preparation programs would be better equipped to help them establish strong professional identities.Using ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and poststructural discourse analysis (Baxter, 2008) as theoretical lenses, this study contributes to the sparse literature available in this context. I analyze interviews, observations, and documents to examine how a preservice teacher and his cooperating teacher negotiated their language ideologies and how those ideologies evolved during their ten-week, high-school-Spanish student-teaching placement. Findings suggest that both participants gained a greater consciousness of their beliefs and values about language teaching and learning. They show how both participants’ language ideologies were influenced by discourses from their own language learning experiences and how participants negotiated conflicting beliefs in dialogue with one another to navigate their partnership in the classroom. I explore these findings to understand how the preservice teacher’s beliefs about language teaching and learning evolved through this dialogue, eventually leading him to leave the profession. This study implicates the connection between language ideologies and instructional practice, the co-construction of ideologies through dialogue, and the complexity of ideological becoming for WL preservice teachers. I propose methods to more effectively support preservice teachers’ professional identity development that help them gain a consciousness of the discourses that impact their ideologies regarding language teaching and learning.