English Language Teachers in Sociohistorical Context

English language teaching (ELT) worldwide is increasingly seen as a 'vector' (Markee, 2000) for a suite of cultural practices, ideologies and commodities ranging from free-market capitalism and neoliberal democracy to fast food and rap videos. The consequences of ELT's proliferation have been long debated (Block & Cameron, 2002; Pennycook, 2010; Phillipson, 1992). Almost absent from these debates, strangely, have been the voices of teachers, those directly responsible for mediating the cultural messages of English in specific classroom contexts (but see Phan, 2008). Moreover, few studies compare the tensions around English instruction in international contexts with the similar linguistic and cultural tensions that surface in educational programs serving immigrants in English-dominant countries (Auerbach, 1992; Duff, 2002).

What is a discursive faultline (Kramsch, 1993; Katz, 1999)? On 13 June 2005, the edge of the Nazca plate slid under the South American plate, triggering an earthquake that killed 11 people in the Andes of northern Chile. A day later, and about 10,000 kilometers northwest, off the coast of California, the Gorda plate skidded along the Juan de Fuca plate, triggering tsunami warnings. Although I was in California, packing to leave for Chile, I heard nothing about the Chilean earthquake and little about potential tsunamis, because the news was dominated by the acquittal of pop singer Michael Jackson on child molestation charges. Two weeks later, I was observing an English class at the University of Las Penas (ULP) in the north of Chile, where a struggling older student gave a brief oral presentation on the Michael Jackson case. His professor, Paloma, responded, 'This was quite the news the day of the earthquake! I think a lot has been said about this. Was it really a fair trial? And you start getting into "was it money?" etc.'

Thus, there are literal faultlines in Chile and California where tectonic plates slide along the Pacific Rim – and other metaphoric faultlines, where tensions, stresses and collisions occur between discourses, which can be defined as competing ways of referring to and evaluating particular topics, such as sexuality, celebrity and the legal system – or ELT, the topic of this book. Almost always these are realized through language, for example, through the use of typical vocabulary, but they often involve visual imagery as well, especially in the news media. Discourses easily cross language boundaries (Risager, 2007) – but also get associated with particular languages, so that language acquisition generally involves the simultaneous encounter with unfamiliar or unsettling discourses, which may be appropriated or resisted.

Theorizing connections between language and power, the great poststructuralist Foucault famously stated, 'Discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized' (Foucault, 1984: 110). However, in examining encounters between actual speakers in particular historical contexts, it often turns out that discourse(s) are hard to seize, or at least hard to hold onto. They tend to be slippery, constantly in motion and subject to the vagaries of human agency. For this reason, I find the theoretical perspectives of Russian linguistic philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin more useful than French post-structuralism for analyzing language(s) and discourse(s) in my context of research, as I shall explain in Chapter 2. Here I should also mention that along with 'language(s)' and 'discourse(s)', I will often have occasion to use the term 'ideolog(ies)' (as does Bakhtin). Influenced by van Dijk (1998), Fairclough (1992) and contemporary linguistic anthropology as well as Bakhtin, I use ideology to refer to beliefs and perceptions linked to power relations between social groups – which may or may not be expressed explicitly as discourses, but often become apparent in taken-for-granted practices (I discuss this in most depth in Chapter 3).

This book is based on interviews with English language teachers and observations of some of their classrooms at a small university in northern Chile and at several community colleges and adult schools in northern California, primarily in 2005 and 2006 (more on this later in the chapter). A central premise of my research is that every instance of language use, and thus language teaching, is 'intrinsically historical' (Blommaert, 2005: 18), and thus must be seen in a historical context (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986b). In this chapter, I contextualize the place of ELT in Chile and California by discussing the recent histories of both contexts, with special reference to 'discursive faultlines': Chile's transitions between dictatorship and democracy, and California's politics of immigration and ethnicity.

In order to connect history to teacher identity development, I illustrate recent Chilean and Californian history through life history narratives of one Chilean and one Californian English teacher, Diego and Veronica, respectively. I begin the book with the stories of these two teachers, Diego and Veronica, because their life history narratives intersect most explicitly with the historical currents that shaped the identities of all the teachers in this study. Rather than trying to cover each teacher's entire life history, I focus on narratives that illustrate how the sociohistorical contexts of Chile and California in recent decades have influenced the linguistic and cultural identities of English teachers. Having thus situated my research in its sociohistorical context, I will explain how I came to conduct this study, detail its aims and focus and give an overview of the contents of each chapter.

My analysis of the narratives in this chapter is primarily thematic rather than discursive (Riessman, 2008). Nevertheless, while looking more at content than linguistic resources, I try to never lose sight of the fact that 'stories (are) co-constructed ... discursive constructions that are situated in a specific place in history' (Vitanova, 2010: 31, citing Pavlenko). Specifically, I examine teacher identity construction in the narratives, defining identity as a negotiation over time between the social positions that individuals claim for themselves and those they are assigned by their interlocutors (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001). Seeing identity as negotiated entails the recognition that language teacher identities develop in connection with the social contexts where they have learned, used and taught languages (Varghese et al., 2005).

In sharing Diego's narratives of Chile and Veronica's of...