Dmitri Detwyler will be defending his PhD research proposal at 11:00 AM on Thursday, June 20th, in Room 1306, PCOH (6445 University Boulevard).
All are welcome to attend.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Steven Talmy (Co-supervisor), Dr. Sandra Zappa (Co-supervisor), Dr. Meghan Corella (Committee member)
Title: The interactional basis of postsecondary language-teacher knowing.
Abstract:
The social turn in applied linguistics (Firth & Wagner, 2007;1997) has inspired new approaches to language teacher education, even as it has prompted questions about the relationship between theory and practice (Ur, 2019) and the nature of language teacher knowledge (Johnson, 2009). Attempts to clarify these connections have been limited by their focus on English (May, 2014), classrooms as the front-stage (Goffman, 1953) of practice, and untenable realist and reflective conceptions of language (Harris, 1983). The resulting theorizations of language-teacher professional knowledge have thus become ironized (Watson, 1994) or disconnected from the everyday interactions in which such knowledge is routinely made relevant and used for a wide range of purposes. I intend to argue that conceptions of theory, practice, and knowledge as they relate to language teaching must be re-specified in interactional terms in order to increase their efficacy, not only for language teachers, but also ultimately for language learners. My research project adopts a discursive constructionist perspective (Potter & Hepburn, 2008) on social life to ask:
1.How do professional language teachers discursively co-construct the problems, people, processes, and institutions of their practice through interaction?
2.How do they perform or ‘do’ a version of ‘expertise’ as one aspect of identity performed in interaction?
3.What tacit or background knowledge do interactants draw on for these accounts, in the institutional setting of social research?
4.What might these constructions imply about and for the wider networks and fields of action in which language teaching is done?
The data for this project will be generated through interviews, focus-group discussions, video-stimulated interviews, and written reflections with a group of 8-10 practicing language teachers, and analyzed from a naturalistic perspective (Speer, 2002) utilizing discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2005) informed by discursive psychology (Wiggins, 2016; Edwards, 1997; Potter, 1996). I anticipate the findings to have wide-ranging practical implications for language-teacher education and professional development, as well as theoretical ones for qualitative research methodologies as social practices (Silverman, 1985; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Cicourel, 1964) grounded in interaction more generally.
This event will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.