Article by Jane Evison and Lucy Bailey from ELTED Journal.
The English language continues to be of key strategic importance in East Asia (Hu & McKay 2012). Growing numbers of English language
teachers – both local and expatriate – in East Asia are professionalising by taking higher level qualifications including MAs in TESOL (Teaching
English to Speakers of Other Languages). For many higher education institutions, MAs in TESOL are important international programmes
(Hasrati & Tavakoli 2015) and have been increasingly popular with language teachers since the 1990s, part of the broader trend towards
professionalisation of the field (Burns & Richards 2009). Nevertheless, English language teacher professionalisation in East Asia, and English
language teacher development more generally, remains under- researched (Copland et al. 2017; Trent 2012).
The aims of this study are to examine how, by analysing the pronoun choice in different stretches of talk about their studies and their work,
professionalising English language teachers from East Asia instantiate relationships key to their teaching lives. In particular, we draw on small
items that may often be overlooked in thematic analysis, but which have the potential to shed light on complex relationships. These items are the
personal pronouns: I, we and they. It is worth noting that these interviews were held with researchers who were concurrently the participants’ tutors on their MA programmes, so the professional allegiances expressed are in the context of this specific professional relationship. We thus align ourselves with other researchers interested in the discourse of teacher
professionalism such as Walsh (e.g. 2013) and Garton & Richards (2008), who argue that it is imperative to understand teacher development as
something that is ‘instantiated through talk’ (Ibid: xiii).