Language Teacher Psychology
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Language Teacher Psychology

Sarah Mercer, Achilleas Kostoulas, Sarah Mercer, Achilleas Kostoulas

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eBook - ePub

Language Teacher Psychology

Sarah Mercer, Achilleas Kostoulas, Sarah Mercer, Achilleas Kostoulas

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About This Book

To date, the majority of work in language learning psychology has focused on the learner. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to teacher psychology. This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by bringing together various strands of research into the psychology of language teachers. It consists of 19 contributions on well-established areas of teacher psychology, as well as areas that have only recently begun to be explored. This original collection, which covers a multitude of theoretical and methodological perspectives, makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of language teacher psychology as a domain of inquiry within language education.

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1Introduction to Language Teacher Psychology
Sarah Mercer and Achilleas Kostoulas
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers.
Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.
Ken Robinson, 2013
Why a Book on Language Teacher Psychology?
If you think back to your language learning at school, you might remember specific tasks or projects you did, but, even more likely, you will remember your teachers. You will remember the kind of people they were, the atmosphere they created in their classrooms and how you felt in their class and in your relationship with them. Teachers are absolutely defining in terms of a person’s educational experience as well as often in terms of their life trajectories after school. Surely these people, who have the privilege and considerable responsibility of crafting learning experiences, are so important that understanding their characteristics, personalities, needs, motivations and well-being should be a priority. And yet, in second language acquisition (SLA) to date, this has not been the case.
Understandably and quite rightly, the learner-centred movement drew attention to individual learners. It raised awareness among educators and researchers of the ways in which learners can vary as individuals and how these differences can impact on how they acquire additional languages. This movement was necessary in light of the dominant focus at the time on the language itself and the technical methods for teaching language to learners, with little or no consideration of their personal characteristics. However, in the field’s eagerness to move pedagogically and empirically away from teacher-centred approaches, it has perhaps inadvertently led to a neglect of attention being paid to teachers as a population and as individuals. While the field of individual differences in SLA blossomed in respect of learner characteristics such as motivation, sense of self, beliefs, styles and strategies, attention to the teacher and teacher individual differences all but vanished. Around the 1990s this began to change as researchers started to examine teacher identities and teacher cognition, marking a gradual introduction of a body of work focusing on teachers as individuals, yet still comparatively limited in scope when compared to the body of work which examines learners.
More recently, the field of learner individual differences (ID) research in SLA has also undergone something of a transformation. First, the field has expanded its empirical focus to include research on constructs such as emotions (Dewaele, 2015; MacIntyre & Gregersen, 2012), attributions (Williams et al., 2001), mindsets (Mercer & Ryan, 2010; Ryan & Mercer, 2012), goals (Woodrow, 2012), personality (Dewaele, 2012; Oxford, 1996) and others (Dörnyei, 2009; Ehrman et al., 2003; Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). In a parallel development, there has also been a broadening of methodological approaches used to investigate learner diversity, incorporating qualitative and mixed method designs in addition to the more typical quantitative studies which dominated early work in the field (Tatzl et al., 2016). As the field has broadened, there has also been a notable trend towards increased interest in more holistic approaches, which examine interconnections between constructs and also the situated nature of constructs, and these new perspectives have often been influenced by complexity theories (Dörnyei, 2009; Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). Most recently, the field of ID research has grown to such an extent in content, scope and diversity of approaches that there is increasingly recognition of a community of research that falls under the umbrella of ‘psychology of language learning and teaching’, as evinced by the series in which this collection is situated. This new emerging field of scholarship extends beyond the traditional ID paradigm and, as such, creates the perfect conditions for broadening the agenda of those working in this area to include teachers, as is our intention with this collection.
There are several reasons why we feel it is especially important to study the psychology of language teachers. One important reason for studying the psychology of teachers is a need to redress the imbalance between studies that have focused on learners and those that have focused on teachers. When compared with the diversity, depth and breadth of research available on learner psychology, there is a notable scarcity of comparable studies examining a wide range of psychological constructs in teachers, teachers at all career stages and from multiple theoretical perspectives. Yet, if we can better understand teacher psychology, we can more easily appreciate the kind of support language teachers need to ensure that they flourish in their professional roles and are able to be the best teachers they can possibly be – for the sake of their own professional well-being as well as for their learners’ well-being and ultimate learning. Indeed, understanding teacher psychology is a worthy goal in its own right (Holmes, 2005). As Maslach and Leiter (1999) point out, teachers are the most valuable part of the educational system and so their professional well-being must be a priority.
Yet, teachers are also at the centre of classroom life and their feelings, thoughts, goals and resulting behaviours dictate to a large extent the atmosphere for the whole group as well as individual learners (DeVries & Zan, 1995; Reyes et al., 2012). Essentially, teachers who are in a positive and enabling state of mind when they teach will not only enjoy their jobs more, but research shows that they will do their job better, with more creativity and enhanced pedagogical skills (Albrecht, 2006; Corcoran & Tormey, 2012; Furrer et al., 2014). As Bajorek et al. (2014: 6) explain, ‘a teacher with high job satisfaction, positive morale and who is healthy should be more likely to teach lessons which are creative, challenging and effective’.
However, it is more than just the atmosphere they create. In many ways, teacher and learner psychologies represent two sides of the same coin. Through the process of contagion, we know that positive teacher emotions are closely connected to the affective states experienced by the learners (Frenzel et al., 2009; Patrick et al., 2000). This means that if teachers are happy and motivated, then it is more likely that their learners will be too. If learners are motivated and engaged, this too is motivating for teachers and so ensures an upward spiral of positivity, which benefits both teachers and learners (Fredrickson, 2013). As Mercer et al. (2016: 224) conclude, ‘successful language learning depends to a large degree on teachers and, as such, for all concerned, we must make their professional well-being a priority’.
This book represents a plea for the importance of extending our understanding of the psychology of teachers, first, because they represent centrally important stakeholders in the language education process and are worthy of investigation in their own right, and secondly, because understanding language teacher psychology is centrally related to an understanding of the psychology of their learners too.
What We Already Know about Language Teacher Psychology
It is important perhaps to stress here that we are not claiming that there is no work on teacher psychology in SLA. A considerable body of research already exists, although there is a clear imbalance in respect to the work on teacher and learner psychologies (see Mercer, 2016, in press). Perhaps one of the key areas that has developed an extensive body of work concerns teacher cognitions – a term that encompasses teacher knowledge, beliefs and thinking processes. Research on the cognitions of language teachers builds on a well-established body of empirical and theoretical work in mainstream education (e.g. Shulman, 1986). An overview of early research on language teacher cognition has been provided by Borg (2003), who notes that research on teacher cognitions has typically focused on connections to prior language learning, teacher education and classroom practice. Later studies have tended to focus on three additional themes: a possible mismatch between teacher and learner beliefs; the connections between teacher cognitions and classroom practices; and the development of teacher cognitions in the course of the teachers’ career trajectory (Kalaja et al., 2016). Within this body of literature there have been notable developments that are relevant for our understandings of the field of teacher psychology as a whole. Recently, a special issue of the Modern Language Journal has expanded the scope of research on teacher cognitions by suggesting contemporary understandings of the construct, which reflect their dynamic nature, their embeddedness in contexts, and the related trend towards the use of complex systems theory as a conceptual frame (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015). These developments foreground more holistic approaches which examine teacher cognitions in relation to other dimensions of teacher psychology, including teacher emotions in particular (e.g. Aragão, 2011; Barcelos, 2015; Golombek & Doran, 2014).
A second main body of work in language teacher psychology consists of studies conducted in the field of teacher identity, which has been heavily influenced by research on learner identities, following the seminal publication of Norton (2000). Writing 10 years ago, Tsui (2007) identified three salient themes in research, namely the multidimensionality of identity, the relations between social and private identities, and the relations between agency and structure in the way identities are constructed. Work on identity has continued to expand in scope; the vibrancy of the field can be seen in the publication of recent special issues that have appeared in TESOL Quarterly (Varghese et al., 2016) and the Modern Language Journal (De Costa & Norton, 2017), as well as comprehensive collections of empirical and theoretical papers edited by Cheung et al. (2014) and Barkhuizen (2016). The diversity of theoretical perspectives in teacher identity research was outlined by Varghese et al. (2005), who argued for an openness to theoretical pluralism, although the vast majority of work has tended to take some form of sociocultural perspective. This sociocultural focus has resulted in increased sensitivity to the situated nature of identity construction, which has proved to be an enduring theme in teacher identity work (e.g. Clarke, 2008, 2009; Hawkins & Norton, 2009; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Menard-Warwick, 2013).
Another area of research that is beginning to attract empirical and theoretical attention is language teacher motivation, which has drawn on an increasing body of work in teacher motivation research in general education (Richardson et al., 2014). Considering the salience of motivation in SLA research in general, it is perhaps surprising that such interest has been slow to develop. Typically, teachers have been examined in terms of how they can influence learners’ motivation but not in terms of the character and quality of their own motivation. One especially notable recent publication is Dörnyei and Kubanyiova (2014), in which the authors describe how the L2 Motivation Self System (Dörnyei, 2005) can also be considered in re...

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