Page 44 - ELG2102 Feb Issue 474

COMMENT .

Point

of View

Dr Jane
Evison

Digging into

the question

of!identity The words people use tell others if they feel part a group or not

Exploring professional identities helps us reconsider the native versus xploring professional identities helps us reconsider the native versus
E
non-native divide, as Melanie Butler discovers from Dr Jane Evisonom Dr Jane Evison
non-native divide, as Melanie Butler discovers fr

You teach on master’s courses and!run (perceived) positions. These positions could and one thing that continues to surprise
the University of Nottingham’s be explicit or implicit in what they’re saying. us is how often speakers signal to others
online MA TESOL. Your area of Discourse analysis is a way of getting at the groups to which they don’t belong and
research is teachers’ identities, these positions, as it allows the talk to be whose values they don’t share. That’s often
including the!difference!in identities considered as a whole, not simply as a set of easier, and less risky to do, than it is to
between!native speakers and non- discrete answers to questions. Using discourse clearly articulate specifically the group to
natives. Has your experience teaching analysis means that you can spend lots of time which you do align.
master’s informed this area of research? looking at deceptively small items.
Just 10 or so years ago, there tended to be Your latest paper on language teaching
assignments organised around comparison looks at how ideas of career trajectories
and fairly unproblematised lists of the I’ve been vary between two groups. One sees a
characteristics of supposedly different master’s as a way of being recognised
sorts of teachers. Gradually these privileged to as ‘not a backpacker’ and for the other
have been replaced by more nuanced as ‘not just a local’. Does this affect the
engagement with a number of issues, way the groups see each other?
such as unfair recruitment practices, the learn about the I’ve been privileged to learn about the
challenges of pre-service training and professional lives of many teachers from
opportunities to professionalise. professional lives of around the world through my work at
From the very beginning of their Nottingham. I teach on the face-to-face
studies, our teachers share the stories of many teachers from programme, the web-based one and for
their career journeys and how they’ve a quite a number of years I also taught
been included or excluded when working on our programme in Malaysia. I’d say
in different places, along with their around the world that in their daily lives, teachers who are
aspirations for the future. professionalising by taking master’s courses
They also take part in structured online like this aren’t so much interested in who is
peer discussions where, as well as doing I’m endlessly fascinated by things like in which group, but who makes a supportive
tasks that are set, they often share complex pronouns, deictics – especially ‘here’ and colleague, who is doing their job well and
identity issues relative to their own contexts. ‘there’ – and common interactional items who they can get inspiration from.
like ‘you know’. I also focus on the use of
You use discourse analysis as a tool for vague language, as in ‘teachers like us’; ‘CLT,
digging into the question of identity. TBL and stuff like that’ or ‘lesson planning Jane Evison is Associate Professor at
What are the advantages of this? and wot-not’. When an interviewee uses the School of Education, University of
I’ve always researched spoken language, these kinds of expressions, they are making Nottingham, UK. Her research interests
originally using corpus linguistics, so it’s assumptions about shared membership of a include talk and interaction, the discourse
impossible for me to see an interview as group that can ‘unpack’ the meaning. of teacher education and teacher
anything other than a ‘speech event’ in which If you simply see interviews as data to be professionalism in international settings.
the participants are not simply interviewer thematically coded, you can miss these kinds She is the leader of the MA TESOL
and interviewees. of subtleties. (web-based) programme and the School
They are interlocutors, first and foremost, My co-researcher, Lucy Bailey, and I have of Education’s Senior Tutor.
orienting themselves to each other’s done several research studies in this area,
44 February 2021