Intercultural Dialogue on English Language Teaching

This book examines how educators conceptualize their profession and (re)construct their professional selves. Drawing on a narrative-based study, it reports research that follows closely five multilingual English language teacher educators teaching in a teacher education program at a large private university. It explores their learning and teaching experiences and how they attach meaning to these experiences, the (re)construction of their professional identity, their commitment to their profession, and the various factors that mediate these experiences and understandings by analyzing their narrative accounts. In this exploration, there is a particular focus on the nature of language, identity and culture in intercultural teacher education settings.Overall, the book demonstrates the complex, nuanced, and dynamic nature of professional learning and intercultural identity construction, involving multiple, sometimes competing, discourses of professionalism in ELT. The teacher educators' professional learning narratives provide an insight into their 'struggle for voice' (Britzman, 2003) in their immediate teaching and learning context, as well as internationally. Their struggle for a voice highlights the frictions, negotiations, and dialogues with the dominant western discourses of ELT professionalism that have often been imposed on them in their profession. In addition, their teaching and learning accounts emphasize the importance of revisiting, re-evaluating, and reimagining the teaching paradigm of ELT in this teaching setting in engaging with today's globalized world. These accounts suggest a call for pedagogical and curriculum reform in ELT that takes into account learners' linguistic and cultural identity, and that will enable them to use English as a language that mediates their identity work as national, international and intercultural selves.This book is about English language educators' professional learning, and will be of interest to teacher candidates, teachers, and teacher educators who wish to extend their knowledge and understanding of the dynamicity and complexity of teachers' learning through narratives of teaching.