Critical approaches to English language teacher education: A narrative inquiry into trainee teachers’ experiences as speakers of English

Abstract

Working within the framework of critical language teacher education, this article concerns itself with the disenfranchising experiences of a group of trainee English language teachers as speakers of English in the world. It presents the results of a mixed-method narrative inquiry carried out with 198 trainee teachers studying undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Teaching English as a Foreign Language in the South of Spain. Both a questionnaire and structured interviews were used to collect participants’ narratives of the disenfranchising experiences they have had as English speakers, their reflections on the factors that played a role in those experiences and their tools to manage them. The ATLAS.ti program was used to carry out the content analysis of the narratives, using both deductive and inductive categories. Results point to the need to address the interrelation of language, power and identity as part of teacher training programs and adopt a critical perspective in English language teacher education in order to equip future teachers to better understand communication and the factors that play a role in it, balance power inequalities in communicative interactions and deal with disenfranchising experiences as English speakers in the world.