Inquiry into professional teacher development of Assistant Language Teachers in Japan and Australia

The purpose of the present study is to inquire into the process of teacher development of assistant English language teachers in Japan and assistant Japanese language teachers in Australia working for public schools through narrative analysis of informal interviews. In the English/Japanese as a Foreign Language contexts of each country, some Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) conduct team-teaching lessons with Japanese/Australian teachers of the target language and others have solo-teaching in their language classes. In order to investigate how native Japanese teachers in Australia and native English teachers in Japan (re)construct their own teaching theories of everyday language lessons as ALTs in their own professional development, their oral narratives were collected to analyze from the sociocultural viewpoint. First, the qualitative analysis of the ALTs narratives spotlights the concepts relationships that configure each of ALT's teaching theories in their language teaching. In particular, I attempt to identify the roles of their teacher awarenesses in their teaching. Second, the analysis clarifies that their narratives about teaching experiences as ALTs are deeply concerned with their social, cultural, and historical backgrounds of each school, local community, and prefecture. Through experiencing teacher awarenesses in their individual contexts, each of their concepts that compose their individual teaching theories gradually improved, and that enabled them to understand what they need to do, what they want to do, how they fulfill their purpose as ALTs in the classrooms. Narratives allowed them to reconceptualize their own understandings of their teaching theory. Eleven ALTs in two countries showed different aspects of teacher learning, depending on where they were in the process of professional development when they had the interview.