Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Teacher agency
Case study 2: Sam
Summary of Fran and Sam’s responses to DA at the level of agency
In summarizing on teacher agency, it is instructive to compare Fran and Sam’s varying reactions to particular seminar readings and activities. While Fran found the technique of scripting to be very helpful for encouraging students’ critical reflections on (literary) texts in the FL classroom, Sam responded to the object of the application of this technique, namely, abstract poetry, and related that the classroom activity actually increased his “dislike for modern lyrical verse.” Fran appraised the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia or multivoicedness (introduced in Fowler, 1996) as “extremely interesting” and used it in her professional activity as a literary critic in order to refine and intensify her interpretation of voice in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. In this way, Fran met the first course objective. In contrast, Sam used heteroglossia as his showcase example of the “ridiculous” proliferation of linguistic terms in current scholarship on language.
Both student-teachers also expressed diametrically opposed views on Fowler’s (1996) explication of textual cohesion. Whereas Fran takes him to task for his “Enlightenment-informed” assertion concerning textual linearity and iconic sequence, Sam found his “discussion of the various facets of cohesion” to be “insightful” and concluded that “knowledge of these concepts can lead to more fruitful text analysis.”
Finally, both Fran and Sam positively appreciated Labov’s (1972) work on narrative syntax. Again, Fran viewed narrative syntax as a means of exposing and perhaps capitalizing on the plurality of student voices in the FL classroom (Belz, 2002c). In addition, she contemplated harnessing this framework in the service of feminist criticism in order to re-semiotize the features of women’s speech. Sam, on the other hand, “got excited” when he “learned about such concrete distinctions used to describe linguistic phenomena” and therefore entered the proposed components of Labov’s model into his personal dictionary of linguistic terms.
