Fostering teacher identity in TESOL through translanguaging

1. Fostering Teacher Identity in TESOL through Translanguaging
Abdullah Al-Mamun
TESOL (2019-2020)
Class roll: 2008

2. Teacher identity
“Teacher identity is a process that has influences on teachers: how
individuals see themselves, and how they enact their profession in their
settings” -Varghese (2006: 212)
 The way a teacher is defined
 Explores the tensions regarding socio-cultural context of learning & learner
(pedagogy, language ideologies, settings of education etc.)

3. Dimensions of teacher identity (Bruns and Richards, 2009)
Teacher identity
personal histories
contextual
factors

4. Native vs non-native
 A number of studies indicate that nonnative English speakers do not have the
status and power of native speaker teachers, and struggle to achieve legitimacy
within the field (Duff and Uchida 1997; Miller 2007; Pennycook 2001; Varghese
et al., 2005).
 In the TESOL workplace, nonnative speakers can face discrimination based on
accent and credibility problems (Maum, 2002)

5. Translanguaging
 Bilingualism mostly promotes identification of two named languages which are socially,
politically and historically constructed (Otheguy et el. 2015) whereas translingualism does not
welcome that distinction.
 Translingualism is seen as a process of knowledge construction that goes both between and
beyond different linguistic structures and systems and modalities (Wei 2018).
 Often the teachers and students use diverse multimodal resources (such as spacing, section
divisions, preceding texts, and the identity of the teacher or students) to make sense of new
language resources (Shipka, 2016).
 The teachers do not frequently employ this pedagogy due to the expectations of their
institutions, colleagues and parents of their students (Canagarajah, 2016).

6. Benefits of translanguaging
Baker (2011) labels four benefits of translanguaging:
 • It may promote a deeper and fuller understanding of content
 • It may help students to develop skills in their weaker language
 • It may facilitate home-school cooperation
 • It can develop learners second language ability concurrently with content
learning (p. 281-282
Blackledge (2015) found the effects of translanguaging practices in the identity
development of individuals in multilingual settings under the framework of
sociolinguistic view.

7. Translanguaging in TESOL (Rowe, 2018)
 Teachers need to value their students’ languages and cultures and supply activities
that focus on aspects of different cultures and languages
 Modeling in different languages and constructing bilingual texts with students are also
important features of this pedagogy.
 Authentic opportunities for bilingual or multilingual communications are also taken
into account.
 A two-way translation method is helpful in making the meaning of challenging texts
clear.
 Building dual-language or multimodal texts in which students write and record texts in
both of their languages is favorable activity.