1. Exploring Teacher’s Beliefs about Teaching ESL:
A Discursive Psychology Approach
Amber Warren PhD Candidate, Department of Literacy, Culture and Language Education
ABSTRACT Teacher beliefs have been a significant focus of educational research for at least 50 years. However, beliefs have largely been studied within cognitive and sociocultural approaches, frequently limited to teacher-produced reflections occurring after the fact. A growing body of scholarship suggests that studying talk at the site of interaction can be a valuable source for understanding teachers’ belief construction. Drawing on a discursive psychology approach, this study explored teachers’ belief claims about ESL teaching as constructed in an online class. Analysis revealed that participants established their “rights” to make belief claims about ESL teaching in patterned ways and that these patterns of talk actively co-constructed both their identities as teachers and the identities of their students, suggesting value in interpreting teacher preparation as an ongoing, discursive practice. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Despite the large body of research on teacher beliefs, little of it has considered actual discourse produced by teachers in situ, instead being limited to teacher-produced reflections occurring after the fact. To wit: this research has tended to rely on methods such as interviews (e.g., Hewson & Hewson, 1989), questionnaires (e.g., Weinstein, 1988), self-report scales (e.g., Wehling & Charters, 1969) narrative biographies (e.g., Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) metaphor analyses (e.g., Munby, 1982, 1986), case studies (e.g., Farrell & Bennis, 2013), and classroom observations (e.g., Farrell & Kun, 2008). However, it is important to consider that these “methods of eliciting teachers’ belief claims – such as interviews, spontaneous talk, and writing assignments – are all discursive acts in themselves where speakers/writers orient to the given task in order to achieve a certain social and interactional goal” (Oreshkina & Lester, 2015, p. 3). To this end, there is a growing body of scholarship which suggests that studying talk at the site of interaction can be a valuable source for understanding teachers’ belief construction (e.g., Hunt & Handsfield, 2013; Lazaraton & Ishihara, 2005; Oreshkina & Lester, 2015).
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
Discursive psychology with an emphasis on conversation analysis (Potter, 2012)
Oriented to teacher’s beliefs as discursively constructed, bounded and produced in an through interaction
Asked how teachers engage in claiming beliefs about ESL students in the context of an online class
Explanations were generated by noticing how beliefs were “invoked, oriented to, and contested” (Potter, 2010, p. 658)
CONTEXT & DATA SOURCES
Data were drawn from a Master’s level pedagogy of writing instruction course for pre- and in- service teachers. Weekly readings covered a range of theoretical and pedagogical issues in teaching writing to ESL students. Readings served as the foundation for student-led asynchronous forum discussions.
The study at a glance:
FINDINGS
Teachers constructed themselves as knowledgeable experts with the “right” to categorize ESL students based on their experience:
“While teaching 4th grade, I have discovered [that] ESL students tend to take less risks [sic] as writers.”
“Often times it is the ESL students who fall through the cracks because they are such well behaved [sic] and follow the rules.”
Teachers used storytelling (Sacks, 1992; Sidnell, 2013) as a means to bolster their claims
“It isn’t the kids; it is the parents - most often times. This reminds me of a conversation I had last night with my sister who lives in Houston, TX. She is a kindergarten teacher. When I called her at 9 p.m. to discuss our favorite subject, ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ she said she had just gotten home from work. Even though they are an hour behind us, this was still 8 p.m., and she arrives at school around 7:30 a.m. Good grief what were they doing for so long? Well, her answer applies here. They had a night (which they do once a month) where they bring in the parents and teach them how to 'help' their children and to educate them about what is happening in the classrooms.” […]
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
The discursive perspective taken up in this study emphasizes the contextualized nature of phenomena such as claiming beliefs, and thereby the ways in which beliefs – as belief claims – are bounded and produced interactionally. Thus, by moving away from a view of teacher beliefs as a representational concept, this study also moves away from constructing beliefs as the property of an individual, instead focusing on the ways that belief claims are made in different contexts and the ways these claims achieve different purposes as teachers engage in a variety of practices. By exploring how the pre- and in- service teacher participants in this study constructed their belief claims in situ, findings from this study begin to unravel the discursive practices involved when practitioners make claims to mental states like beliefs.
For further information:
Please contact Amber Warren
The Data
13 weeks of forum discussions
1,019 individual posts
89 threaded conversations
The Participants
10 teacher-learners
(0-30 years’ experience)
1 teacher (researcher)