Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Teacher agency
Case study 2: Sam
Foreshadowing the importance of structure in teacher cognition
The case studies of Fran and Sam at the level of agency corroborate the findings of such scholars as Freeman (1996b) and Golombek (1998) who argue cogently that teachers’ previous learning experiences (and not necessarily the knowledge that they are exposed to in the course of their graduate studies) influence what they do in the language classroom. Johnson (1994, p. 767) concludes that “theory can inform classroom practice only to the extent to which teachers themselves make sense of that theory.” While teacher agency may shed light on Fran and Sam’s differential reactions to particular seminar readings and their divergent portrayals of the ways in which they might incorporate DA into their FL teaching, social realist investigation advocates that their responses to DA might be explicated more fully if one were to simultaneously consider the level of structure. In the cases of Fran and Sam, structure includes the particular institutional setting in which they were embedded as graduate student-teachers of FLs as well as the larger social context of graduate FL study and FL TE in FL departments in the U.S. in general. Sam and Fran (and all student-teachers) have both explicit and implicit “learning experiences” in these configurations as well, which influence the “lived social complexity” (Freeman, 1996b, p. 736; see also Morris, 2001) of FL teaching.
I offer two excerpts from Fran and Sam’s reaction journals which contain meta-commentary on the disciplinary interests of the other. At the level of situated activity (i.e. maintaining a reaction journal in the DA seminar), these comments mirror the institutional tensions between ‘language’ and ‘literature’ that exist at the structural level in many US FL departments (see Scott & Tucker, 2001). The ‘language’ vs. ‘literature’ dichotomy constitutes a socio-institutional pressure point:
I’d just like to say for the record that something that really bugs me about linguistics is that some more “traditional” linguists with more “quantitative” methods...are just as subjective (if not MORE so, because they believe their methods are impervious to subjectivity) as the “modern”, more qualitatively-oriented linguists. [Fran; reaction journal]
In our discussion of [Wondratschek’s short story “Mittagspause”] I could not share in on the criticism. I enjoyed the text. I feel it is trying to portray a certain type of person in a certain situation. There is no deeper message but rather just a picture being painted. Since [literature] students believe there is always some sort of deeper message in anything literary..., they will be looking for something in “Mittagspause” that may not exist. [Sam; reaction journal]
