Co-Constructing an EFL Student Teacher’s Personal Experience of Teaching Practice

Abstract

This study inquires into how a student teacher's pedagogical narrative is co-constructed with a teacher educator. Viewed from a dialogic approach to narrative analysis, the current inquiry is to discover the ways these characterizations confirm and expand previous findings on (double-) voicing and positioning. Using Wortham’s tools for analyzing voicing and ventriloquation, the present findings suggest that voicing is accomplished through positioning oneself in relation to other characters and interlocutors, as reflected in the use of specific references, evaluative indexicals, and quotations. A closer scrutiny to voicing also sheds light on a narrator’s positioning with characters in a past narrated event and with an interlocutor during storytelling, as well as on how the interlocutor views the narrator's positioning. The narrator's interlocutor, through questioning in a storytelling event or beyond, resists the narrator’s finalizing tendency of constructing her self. Resisting narrative finalization is important in reflecting on English-language-teaching (ELT) experiences.

Keywords

• Dialogical narrative analysis
• voicing
• positioning
• self-reflexivity
• unfinalizability