Metalanguage serves as an analytic lens for examining student teacher identity development in relation to a specific discursive context of language teacher education: microteaching sessions and feedback. I show how the invitation to talk about their microteaching sessions created space for student teachers to reflect on what it meant to be student teachers within a TESOL program, as well as their own self identities.
Learning to teach involves negotiating various images of teachers and teaching, that is, sets of ideas about what it means to teach and be teachers. I draw on metalanguage as an analytic tool to examine how student teachers (STs) in a language teacher education (LTE) program surface specific images of teaching and reflections on their own developing teacher identities in talk about a required microteaching assignment.
Drawing on data from a larger, ongoing ethnographic and discourse analytic study of student teachers' experiences within a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) graduate practicum course, in this paper I examine how STs talked about a specific, recurring set of speech events: STs' microteaching sessions and immediate feedback discussions with their peers and instructor. Research on microteaching has highlighted the varying orientations that STs and instructors may bring to it, for example, treating microteaching as more or less like "real" teaching (Bell, 2007). My focus here, however, is on how STs talked about the microteaching and feedback in research interviews and inquiry group meetings (with me and their peers) and how their talk surfaced images of teaching built on particular models of language teaching (as social conduct) and language teachers (as types of persons), and the ideological values associated with these (Agha, 2007). I highlight how metalanguage as a lens for examining ST reflection and identity development within the discursive contexts of language teacher education offers new insights into the ways that STs themselves make sense of teaching.
References:
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Bell, N. D. (2007). Microteaching: What is it that is going on here? Linguistics and Education, 18(1), 24–40.
