Investigating Global Englishes-oriented teacher development through the lens of transformative learning theory: A study of South Korean elementary EFL teachers’ experiences

The field of Global Englishes (GE) has called for a paradigm shift in English language teaching (ELT) – a move away from standard English-oriented teaching to reflect the diversity, fluidity, and hybridity of English used in the global community. As teachers are important agents of change in the classroom, this call has generated a growing number of studies investigating how to raise teachers’ awareness of GE and help them conduct language teaching grounded in the current sociolinguistic reality of English. Despite an increasing number of studies into GE-oriented teacher development, there have been very few empirical studies that have systemically investigated the overarching mechanism of GE-oriented teacher development. By drawing on transformative learning theory, a framework that is widely used to explicate critical learning of adults, this study aims to provide a theorised account of the outcomes, processes, and factors of GE-oriented teacher development. The study took place in South Korea, where standard language ideology has long been perpetuated in ELT practice, and is based on seven elementary teachers who attended a GE-oriented teacher development programme consisting of a four-day-long workshop introducing GE and its pedagogical implications and a semester-long application of GE-oriented language teaching in their classrooms. Employing semi-structured interviews and reflective writings as primary sources of data and metaphorical drawings, field notes, and video-recorded lessons as supplementary sources, this study explores the participants’ experiences of GE-oriented teacher development. The findings of this study suggest that GE-oriented teacher development consists of three aspects of teacher change: heightened critical awareness of ideology of standard English and the purpose of language teaching (cognitive), increased knowledge and confidence about incorporating GE into one’s teaching context (performative), and willingness to resist hegemonic and normative practice of language teaching (conative). However, not all participants demonstrated cognitive, performative, and conative change uniformly. Investigation of individual differences in learning outcomes revealed that participants underwent unique trajectories of GE-oriented teacher development. Drawing on stages of transformative learning, the findings reveal three distinctive trajectories of teacher development: progressive, regressive, and delayed trajectories. By examining factors of each stage of transformative learning, this study further demonstrates that GE-oriented teacher development was influenced by a variety of internal and external factors of the teacher development programme which mediated teacher cognition and emotion. In sum, this study sheds new light on GE-oriented teacher development from the perspective of transformative learning, providing systemic analysis of possible outcomes, trajectories, and factors of GE-oriented teacher development.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Choi, Koun

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Liu, Yongcan

• language teacher education
• English as a Lingua Franca
• Global Englishes
• World Englishes
• teacher development
• transformative learning theory

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6c2fcb0e-94ef-4ad2-ab9f-c97c028b3f4a/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0001-5987-6240

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/319719