Teacher-researcher's beliefs about language and language skills
Keywords:
language beliefs, language skills, language view, monologism, teacher-researcherAbstract
This article focuses on a young teacher-researcher’s beliefs about language and language skills. The research is motivated by findings of former studies according with which teachers’ beliefs are often relatively permanent and have a strong effect on their teaching and evaluation practices. The data consists of a teacher-researcher’s diary notes from storytelling events (n=19) in which storycrafting has been used with young primary school pupils. The study was carried out by a theory-driven content analysis in order to reveal and to be able to assess teacher-researcher’s beliefs that are only implicitly present in the data: diary markings were analyzed by comparing them to widely used dichotomies which represent language beliefs (structural – communicative, formalistic – functional, atomistic–holistic, normative – descriptive, monological – dialogical). The results show that formalistic, atomistic and structure-centered orientation toward language and language skills dominate the diary notes of the young teacher-researcher. According to content analysis, language is mostly seen as a monological concept produced and received as a linguistic code. The more independently a child is able to use the language when creating a story, the more authentic that language is considered to be. Nativelikeness seems to be regarded as the goal of learning a language. However, diary markings are multi-voiced in a sense that they also represent a communicative, functional and dynamic view of language and an appreciative attitude to language learners’ growing linguistic repertoire.
