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

Chapter 1. From “The Sound of Music” to “the Sound of Silence” and Back: Language Learning, Teaching, and Identity

18     Chapter 1 From “The Sound of Music” to “the Sound of Silence” and Back: Language Learning, Teaching, and Identity Think about the first time you were in a foreign or second language class. Was your experience a good one or a poor one? What happened (or didn’t happen) to cause you to think that way? This chapter describes my first experiences as an EFL learner and then analyzes those experiences by drawing on two different explanations: one provided by traditional SLA research and the other by poststructuralist views in SLA. I also discuss how my initial experiences have influenced my instructional practices as a teacher educator.  A Language Learner’s Story Like many professionals born and raised in Expanding Circle (Kachru, 1992) environments, I studied English so that, as an adult, I would have access to a higher paying job. While my mother’s motivation for putting me in an EFL institute in Buenos Aires was instrumental because it was practical in nature, my own motivation for studying 19 1 Language Learning, Teaching, and Identity English was significantly more ambitious. At the age of 10, my parents took me to see the movie “The Sound of Music.” Something magical happened to me that day. When the movie ended, I left the theater dancing and singing in English, believing that I was or could become Julie Andrews even though I did not know a word of English. Right then and there I fell in love with the English language and everything the language represented. As a language learner, my initial classroom experience was not a successful one. On the first day of class, my teacher, who had an excellent reputation and was professionally prepared as an EFL teacher, asked students to listen to and repeat vocabulary terms from a picture dictionary. When it was my turn to repeat the word desk, I got nervous and said deks. My teacher looked at me, snapped his fingers (signaling that it was my turn to repeat the word, as was the practice in the audiolingual method), and asked me to repeat the word desk again. I became more nervous and said deks again. After the fourth time that I repeated the word incorrectly, the teacher moved on to the next student. My confidence as a language learner dropped immediately and I became silent in class—although cognitively involved in the classroom activities—the rest of the year. Silence was not typical for me; everyone’s perceptions of me were that I was an excellent and hard-working student. But in that EFL class, my voice literally disappeared . Outside the classroom I was an active and strategic learner who listened to The Beatles and played their songs thousands of times, trying to decipher what they were saying as I sang along. I also sought opportunities to interact with people in English, although in those days the opportunities were very limited.  Understanding My Language Learning Experience My initial experience as a language learner can be explained in two different ways. The first explanation would draw on traditional views of SLA, which place the burden of learning on the language learner. 20 Narrating Their Lives The second explanation draws, for the most part, on the seminal work by Bonny Norton Peirce (see Norton, 1997; Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000), which supports the notion that the language learning process cannot be isolated from the world in which the language learner is immersed (a point that has also been made by researchers like Pennycook, 2001, and Norton & Toohey, 2001). As explained by Norton, traditional views of SLA would look at my classroom experience in terms of individual factors. For example, my silence could have been attributed to personality factors (e.g., introverted or extroverted, inhibited or uninhibited). In my case, my teacher could have described me as being introverted due to my lack of participation. Given that my classroom participation was very limited , I could have been perceived as not seeking opportunities to practice the language, which resulted in less input and, in turn, resulted in fewer opportunities to learn the English language. Traditional views of SLA could also explain my lack of participation in terms of another individual factor: anxiety. The literature identifies three different types of anxiety (trait: a personality characteristic ; state: the apprehension experienced in response to a specific learning situation like taking a grammar test; and situation-specific: in response to a...