Continuities and disruptions in the discursive formation of two English as a second language teachers

Much of the literature on the education of English language learners (ELLS) has asserted that students' opportunities for academic success are improved when classroom and school practices are connected to students' social contexts. This study built upon the findings of that literature and used a Foucauldian lens to examine the discourses circulating in the classrooms of two English as a second language (ESL) teachers. Specifically, the study investigated how classroom discourses both enabled and constrained the teachers from using their classroom practices to attend to their ELLS as social beings embedded in social contexts. Classroom discourses were examined as part of a broader discursive network, which included school, district, and preservice university discourses. These discourses and the relationships among them were explored to determine how the interaction between them produced and sustained particular knowledge about teaching ELLs.; Two classroom discourses are identified and discussed in this study: the discourse of reading strategies instruction and the discourse of beginning language learning. It is argued that both of these discourses emphasized the cognitive dimensions of students' learning and opportunities to connect classroom instruction to students' social contexts were not taken up. This was not due to an individual failing of the teachers, but instead resulted from the interaction of classroom-, school-, district-, and university-level discourses, which mingled in ways that made focusing on students' cognitive skills and needs salient and reasonable. These discourses were not monolithic and immutable, however. This study used the work of Bakhtin and his colleagues on the simultaneously dynamic and durable nature of language, and the work of Kris Gutierrez and her colleagues on the "third space" to illustrate opportunities when classroom discourses examined in this study might have been disrupted and transformed. This dissertation also discusses implications for the preparation of preservice ESL teachers.