'The most popular star-tutor of English': discursive construction of tutor identities in shadow education (original) (raw)
Related papers
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2020
The global spread of private tutoring of English (PTE) has become a driving force of the global marketisation of English. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this study explores how tutors in the PTE sector, an under-researched group of teachers, construct their professional identities in the market-oriented educational, institutional, and socioeconomic settings. Findings show that they have constructed a range of hybrid identities, that is, tutors as exam experts, tutors as salespeople, and tutors as underdogs. These identities reflect multiple overlapping discourse in private supplementary tutoring (PST) underlined by the utilitarian discourse underlying exam-oriented education and the neoliberal discourse promoting the market logic of competition and profit-making. The instability and vulnerability of their identities have led to the tutors’ deprofessionalisation and identity crisis. This paper also offers discussions on the space of shadow education and recommendations on policy making.
The Rhetorical Identity Construction of English Instructors in Online English Courses Advertisements
LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching
The superior image of native English teachers portrayed in ELT professionalism has been heavily criticized among scholars by raising awareness on the expertise than nativeness or races. However, the study is scarce regarding how online discourse such as web-based advertisement of English language courses rhetorically depicts their language instructors: a native speaker and local teachers. To fill this gap, the purposes of this study are to examine the attributes of language instructors and any potential discriminatory or privileged presentation evoke in the online ads. The initial analysis was done within twenty English course sites to view overall trends of English instructors' attributes in several websites in Indonesia. I then closely explored two websites, WSE and TBI, and how they textually and visually privilege and discriminate the competences of native English teachers or local teachers. The result shows the dominant rhetoric of native English teachers as English languag...
(Re)constructing Teacher Identity through the Contesting Narratives of ELT Associations
The English Teacher, 2021
Discussions in the mainstream media about the declining standard of English in Malaysia have focused on a variety of contributing factors, one of the more prominent being the quality of teaching. English language teachers have been central actors in these narratives and are often easy targets for assigning blame. Left uncontested, such narratives have the capacity to shape a damaging image of Malaysian English language teachers which can have lasting implications for the ELT profession in the country. Fortunately, alternative voices emerge to challenge narratives describing Malaysian English language teachers as inept and incompetent. In this paper, I examine such narratives as they are presented through multimodal texts published and circulated in the public domain by the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association. Drawing on the frameworks of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and visual grammar, I examine a series of posters disseminated through the association’s social media p...
Discursive Representation of Teacher Identity in News Media Articles
International Journal Corner of Educational Research
Teacher identity is discursively represented in the discursive spaces of the news media, which influence the public opinion on teachers and the teaching profession in general. Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically Halliday's transitivity analysis, this study analyzed these discursive representations in 30 news media articles from three of the largest news media outlets in the Philippines. It was found that teachers are ascribed to material, mental, verbal, relational, and behavioral processes. As participants in the process types, it was revealed that the teachers were discursively represented as perpetrators, victims, and role models. This reveals the discursive representations of teacher identity in media that are perpetuated in the public discourse consumed by educational stakeholders.
Young learners’ portrayals of ‘good English teacher’ identities in South Korea
In the climate of shifting language policies and constant influx of native English-speaking teachers to South Korea, the question of what constitutes a " good " language teacher (GLT) arises. To this end, the present study examines how 577 young English learners (K-6th grade) come to demonstrate their understanding of GLT by making use of visual images and written narratives. A social semiotic, multimodal approach to analysis is employed to scrutinize how these textual and visual narratives construct and/or presuppose a certain image of teacher identity and, as a result, display societal ideologies (Jewitt 2009). The findings yield two dimensions with regard to the objects associated with GLTs, an emotional/abstract dimension and a teaching-related dimension, and the differing use of these objects in relation to teacher gender indicating students' awareness of teacher roles and gender. Moreover, the ways in which learners place themselves in the storied worlds seem to provide evidence for how teacher identity is, in fact, co-constructed with the notion of learner identity. Thus, the study underscores the complex nature of GLT identity construction and further highlights the benefits of using both textual and visual methods to gain better insights into learners' beliefs about, attitudes towards, and perspectives on teachers, students, and language learning.
Juggling identity and authority: A case study of one non-native instructor of English
2011
Authority in the classroom is an important concept to teachers everywhere. The act of teaching continuously engages them in the negotiation and construction of an identity that is accepted as authoritative by their students. Identity and authority, however, are in conflict in the context of NNSTs [‘non-native’ speaker teachers] of English (and other languages). Commonly-held beliefs like the “native speaker fallacy” (Phillipson, 1992), which holds that ‘native’ speakers are the ideal teachers of a language, pose a threat to a NNST’s ability to speak with authority in the classroom, requiring the construction of an identity that is authoritative without being ‘native’. In light of this, a case study was undertaken of one NNST teaching a grammar course in a US setting. Class meetings and an interview with the participant informed the study. The analysis revealed that the participant uses a variety of strategies to juggle his ‘non-native’ speaker status and his need to speak as authority in the classroom. In particular, it was found that the participant constructs an identity as linguist allowing him to successfully maintain his authority. Implications for teaching and teacher training are discussed.
'English Teacher? Any Tom, Dick or Harriet Will do' Discourse, Power and Identity in ELT.
English Language teaching is sometimes viewed as an idiosyncratic career option, or, even less flatteringly, as something which occurs by chance or through default rather than design. "Do EFL teachers have careers?" pondered Johnston (1997). Answers to this will vary with context; a British graduate working in Spain may characterise her work very differently from, say, a colleague teaching English in her native Vietnam. This paper localises the question through reference to Peter, a highly experienced English teacher working as a "casual" short term part time pre-sessional lecturer at a British university. It explores his interview with a colleague (this writer) in order to portray the unsettled ELT landscape he roams.
Identity and knowledge work in a university tutorial
Higher Education Research & Development, 2010
In the contemporary university the large classes associated with many core units mean that tutorials are often taken by many part-time sessional who are typically employed on a casual basis, paid an hourly rate and not paid to attend the lectures. Given this situation, unit coordinators are often responsible for another phase in curriculum development, namely constructing written tutorial plans that outline the tutorial processes and explicate some of the central ideas and knowledge from the lectures. These plans are designed to be informative for the tutors as well as providing a guide for the teaching and learning in the tutorials. In this paper, using analytical tools made available in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) I analyse a written tutorial plan as an example of a university curriculum text. The analysis opens up new ways of seeing these texts and for reviewing and critiquing my university teaching practice.
The Critical Analysis of the Construction of Teacher-ness Identities in Contemporary Thai Films
Asia Social Issues
This article aimed to analyze the construction of teacher-ness identities in contemporary Thai films. The Thai teacher-ness identities represented in films were a unit of cultural analysis in contemporary popular culture, a methodological approach informed by British Cultural Studies. The researcher analyzed the texts of nine teacher-related films released in cinemas between 1977 and 2017, under the theoretical framework of the construction of social realities. The findings indicated that teacher representations were presented in three ways: 1) the ideal teacher-ness, 2) the negotiation with the ideal teacher-ness, and 3) the non-ideal teacher-ness. In general, teacher characters were created to exhibit consistent and different from the social realities. However, the representations of teacher-ness identities that appear in films have not kept pace with the changes in teacher-ness identities in the real world, due to the political, socio-cultural, and ideological landscape in Thaila...
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION, 2021
Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four decades (1980–2018), this study explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of the reviewed research does not draw on teachers’ own perspectives, we call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to understanding teachers’ complicated roles and negotiations in this time of neoliberal globalisation.