This contribution reports on the multimodal analysis of 20 (professional) portraits of foreign language learners and teachers produced by French student-teachers at the University of Hamburg, based on the instructions "How did you become a (potential) French teacher?". I discuss methodological challenges and lessons learnt.
Visual methods have gained a lot of attention recently and have originated a visual turn in Applied Language Studies (Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta, 2018). In the field of foreign language teacher education, studies have highlighted the potential of using drawings to uncover teachers' representations (also known under a myriad of other concepts such as images, beliefs, views…) on subject content, methodologies of learning and teaching, learning theories, the teaching (and learning) profession and professional development across time.
First, I will review the main theoretic foundations legitimising the use visual methods in Applied Linguistics, namely to grasp teacher cognition. Secondly, I will report two empirical study on how foreign language student teachers make sense of the complex and never-ending process of becoming multilingual and on how they (re)construct their professional biographies. The analysis of the portraits gives us a glimpse of how student-teachers think about their developing identities as foreign language teachers, namely the anxieties and insecurity they feel and the way they envision the profession. The analysis of a corpus of visual (linguistic) autobiographies collected in Hamburg will put forward the ideologies attached to linguistic diversity, to language learning and teaching and to teachers' professional development. This presentation ends with a discussion of the main lessons learnt from studies on teachers' representations resorting to visual methods.
