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

Shan Chen,Lawrence Jun Zhang,Judy M Parr

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.839152

Shan Chen, Lawrence Jun Zhang + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.839152

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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.

Highlights

In China, with the accelerated pace of economic development and opening-up, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) launched a new round of curriculum reform nationwide to meet the challenges of globalization
While recognizing the inherently socially situated nature of human psychology, Bakhtin’s dialogism does not see humans as being solely passive victims of contextual influences. It views individuals as constructing their own meaning out of contexts and social settings filtered through the lens of their own personal psychology; both of which are “unfinalizable” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 58), dynamic and open to change across time and place
As they experienced the different methods as learners or teachers, they gradually developed an evaluative stance toward these approaches

Summary

Introduction

In China, with the accelerated pace of economic development and opening-up, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) launched a new round of curriculum reform nationwide to meet the challenges of globalization. Proponents of CLT, on the other hand, consider CLT as a positive and constructive development in ELT in China and suggest blending memorization and accuracy with communicative activities (e.g., Adamson, 2001; Zhang, 2021) This heteroglossia of language pedagogy places the great majority of Chinese English teachers at the nexus of competing discourses in a postmethod condition (Kumaravadivelu, 2006) with the emergence of a variety of new localized approaches (cf Wen, 2017; Han, 2018; Zhang and Wang, 2018)

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