Language Teacher Education and Teacher Identity

MANKA VARGHESE

Language teacher education (LTE) and Language teacher identity (LTI) have become a significant topic in Educational/Applied Linguistics in the last 25 years. The early work of Freeman and Richards (1993, 1996) and Johnson (1992) placed this squarely as an important topic of scholarship in the discipline. Their scholarship helped move the notion of language teaching pedagogy as a set of behaviors and practices to a more complex and holistic understanding of language teaching (see Varghese, 2007). This new conception included teachers' prior belief and practices; professional socialization; and the classroom, school and policy context. Currently, the work in LTE and LTI spans at least the study of the following: language teachers' lives and professional work (Cahnmann, 2005; Creese, 2005; Johnston, 1997; Varghese, 2007); language teachers' decision-making processes (Borg, 2003; Tsui, 2003; Woods, 1998); language teachers as language policy-makers (Menken & García, 2010; Skilton-Sylvester, 2003; Varghese, 2008); language teachers in terms of their professional, racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious differences (Allexsaht-Snider, 1996; Benson, 2004; Cahnmann & Varghese, 2006; Galindo, 1996; Lemberger, 1997; Liu, 1996; Monzó & Rueda, 2003; Varghese & Johnston, 2007); language teachers and their professional development (Cahnmann-Taylor & De Souto Manning, 2010; Edge, 2001; Johnson & Golombek, 2002) as well as theoretical insights into language teacher education and identity (Johnson, 2009; Morgan, 2004; Varghese et al., 2005).

Although the topic of language teacher education and identity is not explicitly in the purview of Nancy Hornberger's scholarship, her work in different areas has been influential to my (and others') work on the topic. I will illustrate this here through discussion of Hornberger's application of her continua of biliteracy to bilingual educators' roles and practices. In the continua of biliteracy (see Cahnman-Taylor; Martin-Jones; Skilton-Sylvester; and others this volume), Hornberger describes biliteracy in terms of four aspects, which are nested within the other and exist in the form of a continua rather than fixed points: the media, contexts, development and content of biliteracy. Hornberger and others after her have used it as a framework to examine teaching, research and students' literacy practices. Hornberger has raised questions, produced data and discussed issues specific to teacher education and teacher education in this piece as well as in several other manuscripts (e.g. Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). In this chapter, I bring to the forefront the essential points she has raised and also discuss how my work and that of my students on the topic of LTE and LTI relates to these three which are listed here. Of course, other aspects of Hornberger's scholarship, such as her work on intercultural education, ethnography and linguistic minority rights are also relevant to the research in language teacher education and identity, and that influence is also apparent in this chapter. Furthermore, as Creese expresses in the prelude of her chapter in this book, Hornberger's approach of being open and inclusive of different perspectives (theoretically and methodologically); her commitment to multilingual education both locally and globally; and her attention to vivid detail to make her case permeate the way I have carried out and documented my research in language teacher education and identity. These focii on inclusiveness, multilingualism and details in research are thus present throughout this chapter.

In a paper on the applications of the continua of biliteracy for bilingual educators and bilingual teaching, Hornberger (2004) uses vignettes to provide examples of the different aspects of the continua. Each of these aspects illuminates various dilemmas as Hornberger frames them, that are experienced by bilingual educators: the context aspect is used to explore the global/local dilemma; the media aspect to examine the standard/non-standard dilemma; the development of biliteracy to look at the language/content dilemma; and finally, the content of the continua to illuminate the language/culture/identity dilemma. In this chapter, I explore three of these dilemmas (all except the standard/non-standard dilemma) through examples from my past studies or those of my graduate students in a similar way that Hornberger (2004) did in her original chapter. Within the last dilemma, I discuss in detail how her work on language policy has shaped the understanding of language educators as policy-makers. The aim of presenting all of these as dilemmas is to show how Hornberger approaches the practice of language teaching as a set of dilemmas for teachers that depend deeply on their contexts of teaching as well as their professional identities.

The Global/Local Dilemma

The global/local dilemma is one where language educators experience how their local learning and teaching environments as well as their pedagogical goals are connected with the forces of globalization. Hornberger writes that 'the global/local dilemma ... is how we as bilingual educators can respond adequately and fully to both global and local pressures on our students' (2004: 69). In discussing this dilemma, I bring forth examples frommy work on bilingual teachers in an international dual language school (Varghese & Park, 2010), my work on...