Abstract Summary
The article records stances, attitudes and preferences as discussed in an online-community of foreign language teachers in Greece. It investigates, how the written discourse of FL teachers reflects the relations of languages with higher/lower status and how this influences the agency of language teachers in society and in the classroom.
Abstract :
The presentation aims to define the power structures that shape the community of foreign language (FL) teachers in Greece today. In order to shed light on the stances, attitudes and preferences (S,A&P) of Greek FL teachers (Dendrinos/Theodoropoulou 2008; Kiliari 2009), independently of the language they teach, we have chosen to investigate the written discourse of a large online-community of FL teachers. In this way, the online disinhibition effect would provide clearer insights regarding the revealed S,A&P of the teachers. The main pillars, in which the online discourse of the FL teachers was categorized, refer to their pedagogical/didactical, professional, conversational (teacher to teacher) and finally financial ethos.
As far as the methodology of the research is concerned, a corpus of written data from the said online-pool was compiled and analyzed on the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 1995b; Mullet 2018; Wodak/Busch 2004). In order to cross-examine what was revealed in the discourse, a questionnaire was made available to the group members that aimed to show the stated S,A&P and validate the CDA findings.
The main questions can be summarized as follows: does the written discourse of FL teachers reflect the relations of languages with higher/lower status within the Greek educational system and how does this influence the agency of language teachers both in society and in the classroom. More specifically: (i) how do the relations of socio-politically dominant languages affect the interpersonal and professional relations of FL teachers, (ii) does their discourse reveal a pecking order of the different languages taught with regards to their social and linguistic power (Hua/Kramsch 2016), (iii) how is this pecking order accepted and negotiated by the teachers as social agents and (iv) how this affects current and future macro-educational as well as micro-educational (teacher-student, teacher-teacher and teacher-principal interactions) policies.
