Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
The Influence of Structure on Fran and Sam’s Responses to DA in FLL&T.
Fran indicated that she wanted to include discourse analytic pedagogical applications of literary texts in her classroom, but suggested that it was difficult within the language program in which she was teaching. She explained that weekly meetings within the departmental teaching practicum left no time for the discussion of text-specific pedagogical interventions, since they consisted primarily of administrative concerns. The notes to the instructor in the teachers’ edition of the commercial textbook used in the department’s basic language program served as the primary source of suggestions for ‘what to do in class’ (personal communication to the author). As a systematic approach to language TE, this practice is dubitable, since several scholars have argued that the profit-driven interests of commercial presses often result in (a) an obfuscated or streamlined portrayal of the foreign reality that the textbook is designed to convey (Kramsch, 1987; 1988), and (b) the simplification or even misrepresentation of the inter-relationship between research findings in SLA and applied linguistics and classroom teaching practices (see Belz & Kinginger, 2003, for the presentation of the socio-pragmatic complexity of address forms in a number of introductory German-language textbooks). While Fran’s previously developed professional interests in identity, plurality, and hybridity may have primed her to adopt those aspects of DA that resonated with these constructs into her repertoire of analytic tools for literary analysis, she did appear to develop an understanding of the ways in which FL teaching also was bound together with these concerns. Her apparent willingness to incorporate many of these theories and techniques into her own FL teaching may belie a growing understanding of the intellectual validity of FL teaching and its crucial role in the intellectual work of FL departments. It may be the case that the limited possibilities for the integration of literary texts and theory-based pedagogical applications of those texts into Fran’s language class in this particular setting exerted influence on her decision to leave the department in the following fall semester.
Prior to his participation in the DA seminar, Sam had taken numerous courses in the university’s linguistics program, in which Chomskyan approaches to linguistic inquiry were well-represented. As a result, Sam had experienced his primary socialization as a linguist in a scholarly discourse community where language was thought to be largely autonomous of socio-cultural factors. At the time of the DA seminar under study, there was no alternative scholarly community at Sam’s institution in which he might encounter a competing discourse with respect to the epistemology of language. If Sam were to adopt alternative perspectives on the nature of language and FL teaching, he may run the risk of not being recognized as a member of the scholarly discourse community into which he initially had been socialized (Gee, 1999, p. 20). For example, if he were to pursue his line of thought concerning the nuances and complexities of language-in-use (i.e., performance) that he began in an early entry in his reaction journal, then he might have to consider that FL teaching is not necessarily about breaking language down into smaller and smaller chunks and transmitting these chunks to students. He may have to reconsider his views on ‘functionalist’ approaches to FL teaching and he may no longer be able to uphold the opinion that discussions of the teaching of culture are “quite mundane.”
Such reconceptualizations of language and FL teaching may not only set Sam apart from the community of linguists at his institution, they may also complicate his livelihood as a student-teacher in his home unit. The disproportionate number of faculty lines devoted to literature study, the displacement of the methods course into other language departments, and the proclivity of the departmental teaching practicum toward administrative concerns may indicate to Sam that FL teaching is nothing to worry about; he can sit back and enjoy the theoretically-grounded, discourse-based suggestions for FL teaching that he was experiencing in the DA seminar because, in the grander political scheme of his home unit, he can afford to discount their implementation into his own language classroom. In short, all the structural signals at Sam’s institution appear to indicate that language and FL teaching are not validated components of the intellectual work of his degree-granting unit.
