Warren2016
| Warren2016 | |
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| BibType | PHDTHESIS |
| Key | Warren2016 |
| Author(s) | Amber Nichelle Warren |
| Title | Respecifying Teacher Beliefs in English as a Second Language Teacher Education: A Discursive Psychology Approach to Analysis |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Teachers, Second Language, Discursive Psychology, Online Interaction |
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| Year | 2016 |
| Language | English |
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| School | Indiana University |
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Abstract
Studies of teacher beliefs have been important in teacher education research since the late 1960s. For the most part, these studies have utilized representational approaches that conceptualize teachers’ beliefs as individualistic and representative of teachers’ mental states. However, a growing body of scholarship suggests studying talk at the site of interaction can be a valuable source for understanding teachers’ belief construction. Following this suggestion, I used a conversation analysis informed approach to discursive psychology, an approach to discourse analysis which has often focused on the social construction of cognitive concepts. This allowed me to shift the analytical focus from the content of teachers’ beliefs to the processes by which they are constructed and the functions that they serve.
The overarching research question guiding this study was: How are belief claims about English as an additional language teaching discursively constructed and deployed by pre- and in- service teachers? To explore this, I examined participants’ belief constructions within and across two contexts: an online class and a set of interviews. By analytically foregrounding talk-in-interaction, I recast language teachers’ beliefs as belief claims, focusing on beliefs not as the property of an individual, but as discursively constructed in and through interaction. This allowed me to identify and explore conversational patterns, particularly storytelling and the use of membership categories, which participants used in constructing and supporting their belief claims.
Findings point to the potential of this theoretical and methodological approach for informing educational research about teachers’ beliefs within teacher education pedagogy, and to how understanding these processes can be instrumental for understanding how institution-level knowledge about central topics (i.e., teaching practices, students) is simultaneously constructed. Findings further suggest that it is necessary to look beyond current conceptualizations of teachers’ beliefs as in/consistent and changeable, and instead look to how understanding beliefs as interactionally produced and contingent can better inform language teacher education online and perhaps even beyond. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the body of scholarly work on language teacher beliefs by providing a detailed exploration of how beliefs – as belief claims – are evoked, constructed, and accounted for by participants engaged in learning and talking about their teaching.
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