22 The Linguist Vol/59 No/4 2020
thelinguist.uberflip.com
FEATURES
Maria Luisa Perez Cavana considers whether
teachers take on fictitious identities at work
M
any teachers would agree that
teaching involves a sort of mise en
scène: teachers have to project their
voice, as actors do; they have to keep the
interest of the pupils, tell a story, maybe
change their face to appear stricter and so on.
While this experience might be considered by
many teachers as a classroom management
strategy with no further consequences, for
language teachers it seems to be closely
related with their identity, or rather with their
(multiple) identities.
Teaching a language presents specific
challenges to teachers. This ranges from the
physical, required by pronunciation for
example, to the emotional, relating to their
feelings around the language or culture, or
their response to students' expectations
about their language competence.
So being a language teacher is grounded
in being able to 'personify' (enact and
embody) a language that often is not the
mother tongue. In this context, one of the
possible questions that arises is: How does
this embodiment of different languages
coexist in language teachers?
I was intrigued to find out from language
teachers themselves how they experienced
their own involvement with the language
they teach. I wanted to shed some light on
the following questions: What is it like to
teach a language that is not your mother
tongue? How is your sense of self when
teaching a foreign language? How does
your 'language teacher' self relate with your
'normal' self? For my study, I carried out
in-depth interviews with two British language
teachers and used a phenomenological
approach to analyse them. Some revealing
themes emerged from our conversations.
CREATING A FICTITIOUS IDENTITY
One topic that defined the context and
background of the lived experiences of the
teachers was the debate around native
speakers versus non-native speakers. The
established view is that the native speaker is
the norm which language learners – and of
course language teachers – should strive to
emulate. This view seems to have reached a
wide consensus among scholars, language
learners and even (non-native) language
teachers themselves, although there are
more and more critical views regarding it.
A TEACHING PERSONA
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
