Narrating Their Lives: Examining English Language Teachers' Professional Identities within the Classroom

Chapter 5. From the Language Classroom to the Teacher Preparation Classroom: Using Narratives to Promote Teacher Reflection

123     Chapter 5 From the Language Classroom to the Teacher Preparation Classroom: Using Narratives to Promote Teacher Reflection If you are a language teacher educator, what are the advantages and disadvantages of integrating the autobiographical narrative genre into your courses? “The identity paper was my favorite project in the program and one of the most important things I’ll take from this program. Thank you!” This comment was made by an anonymous Educational Sociolinguistics pre-service teacher on the end-of-the-term student opinion survey in the fall 2010. Some readers may think the statement is selfserving ; but I offer it as an example of what my pre-service teachers have had to say about the autobiographical narrative assignment. Over the years, the pre-service teachers in my class have not always had positive things to say about class assignments, but the autobiographical narrative has received comments that were unanimously positive. This chapter discusses how the assignment is integrated into my TESL 570 Educational Sociolinguistics course, describes assignment expectations, and provides information on the readings pre-service 124 Narrating Their Lives teachers complete in preparation for the assignment. I further describe the assessment criteria used to evaluate the narratives and reflect on the challenges and opportunities provided by the autobiographical narrative assignment.  Assignment Expectations and Course Materials As part of this assignment, pre-service teachers are required to write five or six pages describing their language learning history and how they think it relates to their beliefs about classroom teaching and learning. If pre-service teachers are already teaching or have teaching experience, then they are asked to reflect on whether there are any potential connections between their current or past instructional practices and their language learning history. The assignment also requires making connections with the literature discussed in class (see Table 1). To make assignment expectations explicit, I provide pre-service teachers with a checklist of assessment criteria in advance of the assignment deadline (See Figure 1). The checklist was developed in collaboration with past TESL 570 Educational Sociolinguistics classes. The first few times I gave the assignment, the students and I brainstormed the initial assessment criteria. A draft version of the checklist was revised in collaboration with the students of that and future classes. The checklist has continued to evolve over the years. The materials to which pre-service teachers are exposed are important in promoting critical, alternative discourses (Pavlenko, 2003) or in perpetuating traditional views of SLA. I have chosen to introduce issues of language, power, identity, and critical approaches to language teaching and learning in this course. The course has as its objectives to help pre-service teachers understand the relationships among intelligibility, accent, and race; challenge the notion of the native speaker and introduce the idea of multicompetence (Cook, 1999), code-switching and code-mixing; introduce issues of language use in relation to gender, class, race, ethnicity, power, and identity; and help understand the connotations of terms like World Englishes, 125 5 Teacher Preparation Classroom Table 1. Selected Readings Used over the Years in TESL 570 Educational Sociolinguistics Global English, World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca Burns, A. (2005). Interrogating new worlds of English language teaching. In A. Burns (Ed.), Teaching English from a global perspective (pp. 1–15). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Celce-Murcia, M. (2014). Teaching English in the context of world Englishes. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, & M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a second or a foreign language (pp. 63–70). Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning. Friedrich, P., & Matsuda, A. (2010). When five words are not enough: A conceptual and terminological discussion of English as a lingua franca. International Multilingual Research Journal, 4, 20–30. Jenkins, J. (2006), Current perspectives on teaching world Englishes and English as a lingua franca. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 157–181. Matsuda, A., & Friedrich, P. (2012). Selecting an instructional variety for an EIL curriculum. In A. Matsuda (Ed.), Principles and practices of teaching English as an international language (pp. 17–27). Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. McKay, S. L. (2002). Teaching English as an international language: Rethinking goals and approaches. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Issues of Identity Amin, N. (2004). Nativism, the native speaker construct, and minority immigrant women teachers of English as a second language. In L. D. Kamhi-Stein (Ed.), Learning and teaching from experience: Perspectives on nonnative English–speaking professionals (pp...