If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am.
And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my life, then I, too, must come to know my own story. (McAdams, 1993, p. 11)
Consciously, we teach what we know; unconsciously, we teach who we are. (Hamacheck, 1999, p. 209)
Introduction
When we meet a language teacher, our imagination and understanding of who the language teacher is becomes limited by what is presented in front of us – by the particular time, settings, and discourses that mediate our understanding of who a teacher is. When we see an English teacher, we assume that he or she is what he or she is presented to us as – an English teacher. But the significance and role of researching language teacher identities (LTIs) is to delve deeper than what appears at the surface in order to understand the multiple, intersecting layers and contextual factors that are in negotiation with a language teacher’s professional identity (Barkhuizen, 2017; Douglas Fir Group, 2016).
Gaining a deeper understanding of teacher identity has significant implications towards major aspects of language teaching, such as curriculum design, classroom practice, and teacher education (Barkhuizen, 2016). In essence, a greater understanding of how language teachers perceive their roles in the classroom is connected to understanding how language teachers approach their teaching and relationships with colleagues and students. Furthermore, the
connection between teacher identity and language teaching is not only rooted in the researcher’s
understanding of LTIs but more importantly, for language teachers themselves to reflect on their own identities. As Barkhuizen (2016) puts it:
What teachers know about themselves – their personal histories, their ideologies, their language use, the kind of person they are, how others perceive them – affects their professional practice and their understanding of the power relationships that exist among themselves, their learners and members of the wider community. (p. 4)
At the core of this line of thinking is that our identities influence what we do (Watson, 2006). In this study, I explore the LTIs of a specific demographic of teachers that applied linguistics research has paid little attention to: language teachers who have taught or are currently teaching multiple languages, either simultaneously or during different periods of their career. To describe these teachers, I use the term teachers of multiple languages or TMLs. In a time of increasing globalization and multilingualism, it is important for research to consider that language teachers may be seeking to or put in the position of teaching more than one language during their career.
By researching the LTIs of TMLs, we can begin to understand who they are and how they perceive themselves as TMLs, and how that influences their language teaching.
Research in applied linguistics has explored a wide range of LTIs that grant access to
understanding the rich lives and insights of non-TML language teachers, including but not limited to:• language-based identities: second language teachers (Kanno & Stuart, 2011); native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker teachers (NNS) (Aneja, 2016; Faez, 2011);
multicompetent teachers (Cook, 1999; Pavlenko, 2003); bilingual and multilingual teachers (Kramsch, 2018; Pavlenko, 2003); translingual teachers (Jain, 2014; Menard-Warwick, Masters, & Orque, 2019; Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012)
• experience-based identities: pre-service teachers (Barkhuizen, 2010; Chang, 2018);
novice teachers of English (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2011)
• socio-cultural identities: racialized identities of ESOL teachers (Motha, 2006); East Asian teachers of English (Park, 2015); transnational English teachers (Menard-Warwick, 2008); EFL teachers in Japan (Nagamoto, 2015),
• gendered & sexual identities: female EFL teachers in Japan (Simon-Maeda, 2004);
queer English teachers (Nelson, 2009)
• professional-based identities: EFL writing teachers (Lee, 2013; Racelis & Matsuda, 2015), teachers of English to young learners (Nguyen, 2016); language teachers as researchers (Edwards & Burns, 2016); teacher educators (Trent, 2013)
The diversity of ways we describe language teachers is no accident – the terminology researchers and practitioners develop to conceptualize who teachers are and who they perceive themselves to be is an attempt to account for the realities language teachers experience and confront in their everyday lives (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Douglas Fir Group, 2016). What is missing from the breadth of literature on various LTIs is the recognition and understanding of TMLs as a unique kind of language teacher and the need for research to focus on issues pertinent to them.
Background: Who are TMLs?
TMLs have complex language teaching experiences, often with a wide range of students and classroom settings, that are not apparent at first sight. TML’s backgrounds and experiences even vary widely when compared with one another. For example, TMLs can be teachers who are simultaneously teaching more than one language (e.g., teaching in dual language programs, teaching an English language course and a Spanish language course during same semester). Or, TMLs can also be teachers who used to teach one language and have switched to teaching
another language (e.g., an international student in the United States who had taught English in China and now teaches Chinese in the United States). Also, there may be teachers who are both simultaneous and sequential TMLs (e.g., a teacher currently teaching English and Spanish simultaneously and had taught Chinese in a previous teaching position). Certainly, further categorizations of TMLs are possible and will emerge with the contributions of future research on TMLs. But for now, the main point of emphasis here is the multiplicity and non-linearity that characterize the trajectories of TMLs and influence who they are and how they teach.
At first, one might ask, who exactly are TMLs? Do they really exist? One might even suggest that perhaps TMLs are just unique cases of individual language teachers who have simply made a personal choice to teach another language, rather than being an observable, emerging phenomenon. For some TMLs, becoming a TML might indeed be a matter of personal choice and they may indeed be a unique case among their peers. However, those choices might have been made under the influence of greater systematic trends at play, such as changing market demands for certain languages or new language education policy reforms creating teaching jobs for certain languages.
In addition to individual cases of language teachers choosing to switch careers and teach a different language, becoming a TML has actually become an increasingly common career choice that has been systematically implemented in language teacher education (LTE) programs around the world. In the United States, Teachers College of Columbia University offers dual certificate programs in teaching Chinese and English (TCSOL/TESOL) in cooperation with Beijing Language and Culture University in China (Teachers College, 2018) and Osaka Gakuin University in Japan (Teachers College, 2018). In the Netherlands, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht offers undergraduate students the opportunity to complete a double Teacher
Education Bachelor’s degree in teaching English and German (Hogeschool Utrecht, 2018). In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education’s Local-Language-in-Education policy has provided the opportunity for certified, in-service elementary school teachers who are already teaching Chinese or English to also teach one of Taiwan’s local languages (Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and aboriginal languages) (Chen, 2006). These examples of organized TML teacher education programs and policies attest to the fact that there are organized initiatives actively recruiting and training pre-service and in-service teachers to become TMLs. Nowadays, it is not just that people are learning and speaking more than one language (multilingual education and multilingual societies), or that our language teachers are able to use more than one language (multilingual instructors) (Kramsch & Zhang, 2018); also, as this study shows, language teachers are
expanding their professional expertise beyond teaching a single language for their entire teacher career and becoming teachers of multiple languages.
Purposes of the Present Study
The first purpose of this study is to understand who TMLs are. As of now, TMLs are often overlooked or assumed to have the same experiences as teachers of a single language but simply doubled. No study has ever sought to investigate whether the experience of teaching multiple languages influences who a language teacher becomes in areas such as teacher knowledge, LTIs, and teaching practices. Thus, this study aims to understand the individual characteristics of TMLs, their LTIs, and the journey they took to become TMLs.
The second purpose of this study is to gain a big-picture understanding of the contextual factors that influence the teaching of multiple languages. In an increasingly multilingual world characterized by global mobility, fluidity, and diversity (Darvin & Norton, 2015), the
sociocultural institutions and communities language teachers participate in play an important role
in guiding their professional development. Thus, this study also aims to understand how the different contexts TMLs teach in as a result of teaching multiple languages influence the way they navigate transitions between teaching different languages as well as the factors impacting their overall career trajectories.
With these two purposes in mind, I approach this study through narrative inquiry, which focuses on the stories told by the participants of their lived experiences as TMLs. In applied linguistics, narrative inquiry has been recognized as a significant methodology in exploring LTIs (Barkhuizen, 2016; Barkhuizen et al., 2014; Block, 2015; De Costa & Norton, 2016). Johnson and Golombek (2002) describe the significance of narrative inquiry as a resource for teachers to articulate their knowledge, beliefs, and identities.
Research questions
Through narrative inquiry, this study seeks to address the following research questions:
1. What LTIs are involved in the teaching multiple languages and how are they impacted by the teaching of multiple languages?
2. How does teaching multiple languages impact approaches to language teaching?
3. How does teaching multiple languages impact the long-term trajectory and development of a language teacher’s career?
4. How do TMLs navigate the multiple LTIs, workplace contexts, and ideologies that come from teaching multiple languages over the course of their career?
The first and second research questions are guided by the first purpose of this study, which is to understand who TMLs are and how the teaching of multiple languages influences their LTIs and approaches to language teaching. The third and fourth research questions are guided by the
second purpose of this study, which is to examine the greater contextual factors that are involved in the teaching of multiple languages and TML’s career trajectories.
The issues at the core of these questions have to do with exploring individual’s identities as understood from their own perspectives and understanding the relationship between their identities and the context in which they are constructed and performed. Addressing these issues requires a complex, in-depth investigation that allow researchers to learn directly about
individual’s experiences from their own stories and narrative inquiry as a qualitative approach to research provides the framework and tools to do so (Creswell & Poth, 2018).
Organization of the Study
In Chapter Two, I present the conceptual framework that informs this study, the DFG framework (Douglas Fir Group, 2016), and a literature review on language teacher identity and studies relating to TMLs. In Chapter Three, I describe my methodological approach. From Chapter Four to Six, I present the narratives of my three TML participants, Ann, Haruko, and Megan. In Chapter Seven, I provide a discussion that revisits the conceptual framework from the perspective of the TMLs narratives. I also detail the thematic findings from analyzing the
participants’ narratives. Finally, I explain the implications the findings from this study has for LTE, contributions to literature relating to language learning and teaching as well as LTIs, and future directions for research.
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
Below are a list of common acronyms and abbreviations that will be used throughout the study:
CSL – Chinese as a second language EFL – English as a foreign language
ESL – English as a second language FYC – first year English composition L2 – second language
LTE – language teacher education LTI – language teacher identity NNS – non-native speaker
NNST – non-native speaker teacher NS – native speaker
NST – native speaker teacher
TCSL – teaching Chinese as a second language
TESOL – teaching English to speakers of other languages TML – teacher of multiple languages