Toward humanizing SFL praxis: Coconstructing language teachers' understandings of their intersectional identities via language use

Abstract

Contextualized within our Projects in Humanization in language teacher education and part of our on-going collaborative self-study of our language teacher educator practices, we used multiple case study to examine multimodal representations of cultural and linguistic identities curated by three language teachers—Daniel, Yuseva, and Sarah—and humanizing dialog to engage them in reflection on those identities. The central task, the Language Use Profile—part of the foundations course in our language teacher education programs—guided language teachers in developing their understandings of their bi-/multilingual language use, language ideologies, and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). In all three cases, examination of language use served as a window for the language teachers to observe their intersectionality or, in some cases, to become aware of it. Each language teacher took up the assignment in different ways, with the task as the context for reflection on language use and identities journeys such as translanguaging to survive, negotiating my identity and being a white woman who learned Spanish. SFL metalanguage served as a tool for the language teachers to make sense of their multidimensional language use. Our findings point to the potential of the Language Use Profile as a means for guiding language teachers in the identity work that is central in humanizing language teacher education.