Discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Teacher Education
CONCLUSION
The social realist model suggests that psycho-biography, situated activity, setting, and context as well as history and power all influence the meanings that complex social actions have for the people involved. Based on an examination of course reaction journals for two graduate student-teachers of German, I have demonstrated how aspects of their psycho-biographies (i.e., their fundamental belief systems and their disciplinary interests) influenced the ways in which they perceived expertise in DA to be of relevance to their professional activities as graduate-student teachers.
Fran, a student of literature with interests in feminism and post-modern criticism, appeared interested in adopting those discourse-inspired teaching activities that resonated with her notions about the nature of reality and the goals of language and literature study. Sam, a structural linguist, found it difficult to positively value more functionally oriented approaches to linguistic inquiry.
Aspects of the institutional setting and socio-professional context in which these two teachers were embedded also may have contributed to the ways in which they chose to interface with expertise in DA. The minimal and theoretically impoverished attention to TE in their particular FL department as well as institutionalized attitudes concerning the disciplinary boundaries of the language and literature curricula may have sent the implicit message that while it was acceptable to take a seminar on DA, it was quite another thing to re-conceptualize one’s notion of language, language learning, language teaching, and, ultimately, the nature of the intellectual work of a FL department.
Thus, the education of FL teachers as ‘discourse analysts’, i.e. those with an awareness of the importance of both “little d” and “big D” d/Discourse, appears to be rooted in the macro-level structure of the institution and the societal context in which the institution is embedded as much as it is located in the personal agency of any particular student-teacher. In effect, the education of FL teachers as discourse analysts “takes a department”, as Byrnes (2001) proposes. It requires an institutionalized conceptualization of the intellectual work of FL departments to not only include language and FL learning and teaching as curricular satellites of literary and cultural studies, but to place them at their center ideologically, structurally, and in praxis. This is because language and culture are inextricably bound, as Gee’s (1999) definition of discourse illustrates. Indeed, grammar (in a broad sense) is “a theory of human experience” (Halliday, 1990, cited in Kramsch, 1993, p. 8) and must therefore form the core of any intellectual enterprise that seeks to interpret people by means of the linguistically mediated cultural products (i.e. literary texts) that they produce.
In the case of Fran and Sam, however, it appears that the development of FL teachers is framed and determined within a socio-professional context that appears to devalue them. Perhaps the influence of this fundamental disconnect between language and literature is reflected in the following comment by a student of literature and teacher of language in the seminar under study: “I don’t know, it seems like an awful lot to learn; wouldn’t it just be easier to follow the book?”
