| This thesis focuses on educating teachers to become critically aware of the ways they understand language, their students and their teaching practice. I studied teachers' understandings of a first language, or that which is first learned by the individual at home through his/her family, and which is also spoken and taught at school. My particular interest in this area related to the impact of practitioners' understandings of nonstandard language variations upon the ways they construe their teaching and their views of students.;I started my thesis journey with a concern for two problems: the uses of nonstandard varieties of language in the classroom; and the lack of pre-service and in-service teacher development programs that center on practitioners' critical awareness of language. These two problems led me to articulate two research questions, respectively: How do my participants understand language, their students, and their own language teaching? and How do my participants respond to a process of sharing their reflections with me upon their language teaching?;Theoretically, the study is grounded in transformative bidialectalism, critical language studies, transformative teacher education, personal construct psychology, and reflection-on-practice. Methodologically, the study took the form of a narrative inquiry, complemented by heuristic research and qualitative-interpretive approaches to data analysis, known as hermeneutic phenomenology.;For a period of ten weeks, I worked with three first language teachers in the Brazilian public school system. My basic research tool was myself and our one-to-one reflective conversations. Through Rep Grid elicitation we surfaced and discussed their understandings of language and students. Shared videotape analyses of the participants' teaching provided further access to the ways they construe language pedagogy. Results of the shared interpretive analyses show aspects of the participants' personal and professional experiences in dialectical relationship with their understandings of language, students and teaching.;The educational significance of my study lies both in the shared reflective process as a tool that can foster critical awareness of language/pedagogy; and in my journey and growth as a teacher educator. I sought to develop by moving away from competence-based approaches and towards more transformative, reflective approaches to teacher education. Aspects of my participants' beginning movement towards transformative and reflective language teaching practices were also discussed. |
