Session Information
31 ONLINE 24 A, Preparing teachers for the challenges of language and literacy: Reflective, conceptual and didactical considerations
Paper Session
MeetingID: 868 3049 2361 Code: DRt3Aq
Contribution
One of the challenges placed to pre-service language teacher education, particularly of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), consists in devising learning contexts that promote the critical thinking about language teaching and foster teachers' knowing how to pedagogically act in settings characterised by complex linguistic and cultural landscapes. EFL teachers are asked not only to restructure their language conceptions, but also to expand their views about the aims of language education, a learning process with implications to their identity-as-teachers. (Pinho & Moreira, 2012; Pinho 2019; Rodgers & Scott, 2008). Therefore, it is important to understand how teacher education programmes and particular course units, concur to and support student teachers' professional learning and identity development (Beijaard, 2019; Beauchamp & Thomas 2009; Flores, 2011; European Commision, 2017).
In this context, research in the area of language education has reinforced the need to gain insight about processes of identity construction, specifically with an emphasis on pre-service teachers' self-images as teachers-to-be and on their ambitioned and / or delivered pedagogical practices regarding EFL and pedagogies for linguistic and cultural diversity. This focus is of particular interest when critical, ethical-political approaches are advocated in designing and developing the curriculum of teacher education (Andrade, Martins, Gonçalves, & Pinho, 2012), which seem to require ways of decolonising foreign language education (Kramsch, 2019), and of trying to deconstruct a monocultural and “monolingual bias” (May, 2014) toward more multidimensional, plural, dynamic ways of how individuals develop linguistically (Blommaert, 2010), and construct themselves interculturally through interaction with others (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2011).
Visual or multimodal narratives (Barkhuizen, Benson, & Chik 2014) and metaphors (Rosaen & Florio-Ruane, 2008; Thomas, & Beauchamp, 2011) are considered a research and education resource through which to unveil pre-service teachers’ representations of experience and identity development, particularly when combined with the use reflective processes in the scope of pedagogy for linguistic and cultural diversity (Pinho, 2019).
The current study is set in the context of the scholarship of teaching (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999), follows a practitioner research approach to our own practice as language educators, and is developed in two subject courses of a professional Master’s degree for Teaching English in Primary School. The guiding research questions are:
- What identity constructions are being developed by EFL pre-service teachers, and how are pedagogies for linguistic and cultural diversity being re-signified in that process?
- To what extent is the discourse of intercultural and plurilingual education contributing to pre-service EFL teachers decolonising their views of language teaching, and develop a view of language education as political action?
- What are the implications for the devised and future teacher education strategies?
Method
Methodologically, a corpus of 29 visual or multimodal narratives (drawings) and corresponding explanations are analysed, by resorting to content analysis procedures. This corpus was collected between 2016 and 2021, and involved 13 pre-service EFL teachers in a total of 5 cohorts, to whom informed consent was requested. All the drawings were codified and made anonymous. During the analysis, particular attention was paid to participants’ “I-positions” regarding EFL language, language teaching, and themselves as teachers, as well as to common trends and individual learning trajectories.
Expected Outcomes
The main results point out to trajectories of identity learning both shared and unique, that illustrate pre-service teachers' ambitioned professional self-images, in the scope of which they try to accommodate deep-rooted and new discourses about language education and EFL teaching. The findings provide rich points for reflection regarding the potential of current teacher education strategies and course unit contents.
References
Abdallah-Pretceille, M. (2011). La pedagogie interculturelle: entre multiculturalisme et universalisme. Linguarum Arena, 2, 91-101 Andrade, A. I., Gonçalves, L., Martins, F., & Pinho, A.S. (2012). Développement professionnel: quelles articulations possibles entre formation initiale et formation continue dans un projet de formation à la didactique du plurilinguisme? In Mariella Causa (ed.), Formation initiale et profils d'enseignants de langues: enjeux et questionnements (pp. 279-312). Bruxelles : De Boeck Supérieur. Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2014). Narrative Inquiry in Language Teaching and Learning Research. New York: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flores, M. A. (2011) Curriculum of initial teacher education in Portugal: New contexts, old problems. Journal of Education for Teaching 37 (4), 461–474. Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. (1999). The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments. Change, 31(5), 10-15. Kramsch, C. (2019). Between globatization and decolonization. Foreign languages in the cross-fire. In D. Macedo (ed.), Decolonizing Foreign Language Education. The misteaching of English and other colonial languages (pp.50-72). New York: Routledge. May, S. (2014). The multilingual turn: implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education. New York/London: Routledge. Pinho, A. S. (2019). Plurilingual education and the identity development of pre-service English language teachers: An illustrative example. In P. Kalaja & S. Melo-Pfeifer (eds.), Visualising multilingual lives. More than words (pp.214-231). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pinho, A. S. & Moreira, G. (2012). Policy in practice: Primary school teachers of English learning about plurilingual and intercultural education. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature 12, 1–24. Rodgers, C. & Scott, K. (2008). The development of personal self and professional identity in learning to teach. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, D. McIntyre, & K. Demers (eds), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (pp. 732–755). New York: Routledge. Rosaen, C. & Florio-Ruane, S. (2008). The metaphors by which we teach. Experience, metaphor, and culture in teacher education. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, D. McIntyre, & K. Demers (eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (pp. 707-731). New York: Routledge Thomas, L. & Beauchamp, C. (2011) Understanding new teachers’ professional identities through metaphor. Teaching and Teacher Education 27, 762–769.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.