The Routledge Handbook of Language Teacher Identity
Chapter: Materialities in Researching Language Teacher Multilingual Identity: Methodological Affordances of the Dominant Language Constellation
Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Language Teacher Identity is the first comprehensive, systematic survey of the field. It offers a broad, cutting-edge, and authoritative overview of language teacher identity, highlighting its growing complexity and global relevance.

This Handbook is organized into six interconnected, sequential parts: theoretical perspectives, analytical and methodological approaches, development and ideologies, innovations, professional development, and specific language teaching contexts. Contributors engage with perspectives and possibilities on an international scale, addressing issues of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, linguicism, accentism, native-speakerism, neo-nationalism, neoliberalism, and (dis)ability, exploring how these intersect with language teachers’ professionalization, sense of belonging, authenticity, and legitimacy. Written in accessible language, thirty-four carefully curated chapters identify the major trends and developments in the field, including translanguaging, digital language teaching, study-abroad, and leadership. The volume also amplifies voices from systematically underrepresented groups, such as teachers of multiple languages and Indigenous language teachers.

This reliable source is of specialised interest for language teachers, teacher educators, students and researchers in the fields of language education and applied linguistics. It supports both academic research and policy development.

Chapter Description
Materialities in Researching Language Teacher Multilingual Identity: Methodological Affordances of the Dominant Language Constellation by Nayr Ibrahim

Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) provide an innovative methodological tool for researching multilingualism and identity in language teacher education contexts. Based on the study of materialities and their affordances, this chapter explores the creation of DLC artefacts in a pre-service teacher education program in Norway and an in-service course in Portugal from a methodological perspective. These material tools (the DLC artefact) provide the teacher participants with agentic tools to create individual biographical trajectories, which aim to uncover ideologies, beliefs and attitudes about living and working multilingually. In conjunction with reflective narratives, the DLC artefact, a produced object of multilinguistic significance, can be conceptualized as a potential change agent. This chapter addresses the challenges of analyzing objects imbued with personal meanings, by questioning the surface-level, albeit creative, affordances of the material narrative of the DLC artefact. In order to go deeper, I explore the DLC artefacts and reflective narratives through a manifest, readily observable, and a latent, hidden and interpretative, lens. I will demonstrate the potential of this dual-lens approach to contributing to a deeper engagement with subjective multilingualism in teacher education and compare the shifting perspectives of pre- and in-service teachers through their material, reflective voices.

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