Investigating connections between teacher identity and pedagogy in a content-based classroom

Abstract

Though much scholarship has investigated the nexus of language teachers' identities and classroom pedagogies, such studies often have focused on novice teachers in training or experienced practitioners who are working within university IEP or EAP program contexts. Crucially, little scholarship has examined contexts involving content-based instruction (CBI), where many times, instructors are not linguistically trained yet may adopt discipline-specific practices and/or develop their own unique methods for teaching L2 learners. The current study explores this gap, examining a CBI instructor of a legal research and writing course in an L2 English legal education program (i.e., LLM program). For 16 weeks, the researcher conducted a classroom-based ethnography to investigate how an experienced law instructor's various role identities impacted his pedagogical practices as he taught LLM students to write a legal genre called the office memorandum. Data consisted of: in-class observations, fieldnotes, artifacts (e.g., syllabi, assignments), semi-structured interviews, and a visualization reflection. The findings illustrate how three primary role identities shaped the instructor's pedagogy in ways that permeated his curriculum design and his manner of lesson presentation. Implications for L2 educators and researchers are discussed.

Introduction

The construct of identity has played a critical role in language education during the past twenty years, impacting facets of both research and pedagogy (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2009; Yuan, 2019). Although many scholars have defined the term, notably, Norton (2013) has described identity as “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space” (p. 45), and also something that is a potential site of conflict (Darvin & Norton, 2018). While investigations of teacher identity have been plentiful across sub-communities within language education, scholars such as Martel (2019) have noted that little research has examined the identities of language teachers in content-based instructional (CBI) courses. However, investigating language teachers’ identities and pedagogies across a diverse range of instructional contexts such as CBI are vital for a number of reasons. One reason is that teachers may have their own respective methods, theories, and practices they have developed over time (Freeman & Johnson, 1998), which have the potential to provide insights into the nature of second language (L2) teaching and learning in different contexts, thereby informing future directions in applied linguistics. Secondly, although there is little extant scholarship that explores the identities of CBI practitioners, the handful of studies that have done so have provided insights into the process of identity formation and the struggles that novice teachers in-training may encounter when attempting to adopt CBI in the classroom (e.g., Antonek, McCormick, & Donato, 2011; Cammarata, 2009; Martel, 2019). Despite such insights, it is important to note that additional research is needed that explores the identities of more experienced CBI instructors, as doing so may help novice teachers in understanding the different identities that are available to them for different functional and social purposes (Farrell, 2011).

The current case study examines this issue further by exploring the context of an L2 English legal education program. Using a classroom-based ethnographic approach (Bloome, 2012), the researcher explored the role identities and instructional practices of an experienced law instructor with no applied linguistics/teacher training who taught a CBI legal research and writing course for L2 English learners. In the study, I describe the process of conducting a 16-week classroom-based ethnography, illustrating how the law instructor's various role identities impacted his pedagogy as he taught L2 learners an important written legal genre called the office memorandum.