| The purpose of this in-depth case study was to document the tensions experienced by a non-native speaker (NNS), Peiling (pseudonym) during her one and a half years of study in a Master's language education program in the United States (US) and in her subsequent teaching practices upon returning to teach English as a foreign language (EFL) in an elementary school in Taiwan.; Grounded in theories of postmodernism, the study employed narrative inquiry mediated by Peiling's voices and lived experiences to capture the complexities of identity construction relating to language teaching and learning. Methods of data collection included in-depth interviews, classroom observations, dialogue journal exchanges, questionnaires, and inspection of relevant documents. Instructors and peers in the US and administrators, colleagues, students and their parents in Taiwan were also interviewed, observed, and/or surveyed as co-constructers of her sociocultural identities. Gee's discourse analysis (1999) served as an analytical framework for analyzing the situated meanings of Peiling's identity (re)construction in the US and in Taiwan.; The results indicated that knowledge about language, language teaching, and language learning was embedded in a larger situated historical, social, and cultural framework that was ideology-driven. Hence, the interrelationships among theory, belief and practice were ingrained in contested value systems. How to cope with the tensions resulting from the conflicting systems of knowledge was the core issue confronting Peiling during and after her teacher education program.; The results also showed that the positions co-constructed by teacher educators (“no compromise” and “no solution”) and Peiling (a consumer approach and a conformist orientation) produced and reinforced a one-way, top-down, “great-divide” paradigm. A collaborative model proposed in response calls for repositioning and viewing teacher education as seeking passage through co-journeying between teacher educators and NNSs. This model urges that language teacher education programs reconceptualize the “encounter” of competing and contradictory systems of knowledge about language pedagogy and curriculum.; This study concludes that much needs to be learned by both teacher educators and NNSs to foresee, examine, interrogate, reconfigurate, rearticulate, seek meaning, and reflect upon the journey from learning to teach in one culture to teaching to learn in another culture. |
