Co-Constructing an EFL Student Teacher’s Personal Experience of Teaching Practice

  • Joseph Ernest Mambu Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga
Keywords: Dialogical narrative analysis, voicing, positioning, self-reflexivity, unfinalizability

Abstract

This study inquires into how a student teacher's pedagogical narrative is co-constructed with a teacher educator. Viewed from a dialogic approach to narrative analysis, the current inquiry is to discover the ways these characterizations confirm and expand previous findings on (double-) voicing and positioning. Using Wortham’s tools for analyzing voicing and ventriloquation, the present findings suggest that voicing is accomplished through positioning oneself in relation to other characters and interlocutors, as reflected in the use of specific references, evaluative indexicals, and quotations. A closer scrutiny to voicing also sheds light on a narrator’s positioning with characters in a past narrated event and with an interlocutor during storytelling, as well as on how the interlocutor views the narrator's positioning. The narrator's interlocutor, through questioning in a storytelling event or beyond, resists the narrator’s finalizing tendency of constructing her self. Resisting narrative finalization is important in reflecting on English-language-teaching (ELT) experiences.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: Uni¬ver-sity of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press.

Bamberg, M. (2012). Narrative practice and identity navigation. In J. A. Holstein & J. F. Gubrium (Eds.), Varieties of narrative analysis (pp. 99-124 ). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

Barkhuizen, G. (2011). Narrative Knowledging in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 45(3), 415-439. doi: 10.5054/tq.2011.261888

Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 207-213.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of trans-languaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401-417. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011. 01207.x

Chafe, W. (1998). Things we can learn from repeated tellings of the same experience. Narrative Inquiry, 8(2), 269-285.

Davies, B., & Harré, R. (2001). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, & S. J. Yates (Eds.), Discourse theory and practice: A reader (pp. 261-271). London: SAGE.

De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). Ana¬lyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-ver¬sity Press.

Edge, J. (2011). The reflexive teacher educator in TESOL: Roots and wings. New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

Ferrara, L. (2011). Reflective TESOL practice. Rome: Aracne.

Frank, A. W. (2012). Practicing dialogical narrative analysis. In J. A. Holstein, & J. F. Gubrium (Eds.), Varieties of narrative analysis (pp. 33-52). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

Heath, S. B., Street, B. V., & Mills, M. (2008). Ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press.

Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In W. Labov (Ed.), Language in the Inner City (pp. 352-396). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.

Mambu, J. E. (2009). Triangulating some discourse-related issues in Indonesian EFL pre-service teachers’ written narratives. TEFLIN Journal, 20(1), 61-82.

Mambu, J. E. (2013). Narrative structures across tellings of the same “good” teaching experience. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2(2), 204-223.

Mann, S. (2011). A critical review of qualitative inter-views in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 32(1), 6-24. doi: 10.1093/applin/ amq043

Mann, S., & Tang, E. H. H. (2012). The role of mentoring in supporting novice English language teachers in Hong Kong. TESOL Quarterly, 46(3), 472-495. doi: 10.1002/tesq.38.

Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Richards, J. C., & Farrell, T. S. C. (2011). Practice teaching: A reflective approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

Talmy, S. (2011). The interview as collaborative achievement: Interaction, identity, and ideology in a speech event. Applied Linguistics, 32(1), 25-42. doi: 10.1093/applin/amq027

Wortham, S. (2001). Narratives in action: A strategy for research and analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wortham, S., & Gadsden, V. (2006) Urban fathers positioning themselves through narrative: An approach to narrative self-construction. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin, & M. Bamberg (Eds.), Discourse and identity (pp. 314-341). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wortham, S., & Locher, M. (1999). Embedded metapragmatics and lying politicians. Language & Communication, 19, 109-125.

Wortham, S., Mortimer, K., Lee, K., Allard, E., & White, K. (2011). Interviews as interactional data. Language in Society, 40(1), 39-50. doi: http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/10.1017/S0047404510000874

Wyatt, M. (2010). One teacher’s development as a reflective practitioner. Asian EFL Journal, 12(2), 235-261.
Published
2015-01-01
How to Cite
Mambu, J. (2015). Co-Constructing an EFL Student Teacher’s Personal Experience of Teaching Practice. K@ta, 16(2), 61-70. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.9744/kata.16.2.61-70