Search results for: Discourse analysis

This study made explicit the discourses of 10 teachers working as university-based teacher educators in Singapore to understand their enacted identities. It framed identity as discursive, constructed through language and talk. Interview data were analyzed using descriptive discourse analysis tools, with critical discourse analysis influencing the process. The discourses are as follows: (a) The value of seconded teachers is located firmly within schools, with practice and practitioner elevated above theory and academics; (b) teaching is the core role of seconded teachers, and discourses about learning, development, and research are weak; and (c) an individualistic framing situates the locus of change on teacher-practitioners. Hybrid spaces that bring theory and practice together are discursive spaces. Both the strengths and limitations of existing discursive identities need to be acknowledged, and multifaceted and complex practitioner identities explored. This article contributes to the integration of practitioners into the wider community of teacher educators in the university.

This paper presents an analysis of teacher professional standards from five of the most culturally diverse nations in the English-speaking world. The authors examine how culturally and linguistically diverse learners and culturally responsive pedagogy are positioned, and what the standards stipulate teachers should know, and be able to do, in fulfilling their professional obligations. Based on this analysis, the authors conclude that the teacher professional standards do not acknowledge, let alone make explicit, the complex and specific knowledge and skills needed for culturally responsive teaching.

This paper reports findings from a discourse analysis, informed by a discursive psychology (DP) perspective, of pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teacher effectiveness as constructed in reflective papers. DP treats beliefs as discursive productions that are occasioned by an interactional task and are made visible through discursive features. The analysis highlights the discursive features employed by pre-service teachers as they wrote about teacher effectiveness in relation to their field observations.

This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the identity construction experiences of one group of beginning English language teacher educators in Hong Kong. Drawing upon a theoretical framework that incorporates both identity- in-practice and identity-in-discourse, a narrative approach was adopted to examine participants’ identity trajectory as they crossed multiple boundaries from language learners, to language teachers, to language teacher educators. The study suggests that the challenges teacher educators faced at different stages of their professional identity construction reflected the negotiation of past experiences, future ideals, competency, agency, and marginalization.