Abstract

This book brings the voices of teachers into the fierce debates about language ideologies and cultural pedagogies in English language teaching. Through interviews and classroom observations in Chile and California, this study compares the controversies around English as a global language with the similar cultural tensions in programs for immigrants. The author explores the development of teacher identity in these two very different contexts, and through the narratives of both experienced and novice teachers demonstrates how teacher identity affects the cultural pedagogies enacted in their classrooms.

Julia Menard-Warwick offers here a rich trove of testimonies by English teachers in Chile and California on their experiences trying to make English as a global language locally relevant and pedagogically appropriate for their students. In this book, the ideologically ambiguous power of TESOL is addressed with nuance and empathy within a Bakhtinian framework that calls for more 'dialogism' and for a 'cultural pedagogy' that goes beyond mere communicative language teaching.

Menard-Warwick's comparative study of English language teachers in Chile and California is consistently insightful and theoretically engaging, particularly in its treatment of Bakhtin and the exploration of dialogue and interculturality through 'discursive faultlines'. This important book is also timely, given current field interest in identity pedagogies and the inner world of language teachers as a key dimension of professional development.

Julia Menard-Warwick is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Davis, USA. Her research interests include bilingual identity development, second language learning and teaching, and narrative. She is the author of 'Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning' (Multilingual Matters, 2009).