Clare Kramsch and Lihua Zhang
The Multilingual Instructor: What Foreign Language Teachers Say about their Experience and Why it Matters
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22872408 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Min Bao (0000-0002-5347-9663, School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, China), Xuesong Gao (0000-0002-3426-8721, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 602-606 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-14 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0142-6001 • E-ISSN: 1477-450X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/applin/amaa009 |
| OpenAlex | W3007976145 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
As multilingual language teachers ourselves, we believe that this book brings an end to the ongoing debate regarding native speakers versus non-native speakers in language teaching research with a single, well-aimed blow. Nevertheless, situated in a complex, ecological context, the idea of being multilingual instructors as recommended by Kramsch and Zhang remains a highly challenging goal for many language teachers to pursue. We start this review by outlining what the book achieves, before we comment on some outstanding issues that still deserve more attention. First, Kramsch and Zhang problematize the essentialist inclination in the native speaker versus non-native speaker debate, which fails to address the complexity of teaching and its organic connection to the surrounding ecological system. By the term ‘multilingual instructor’, the book unites different types of language teacher who are often differentiated from one another in existing research and presents the shared challenges that these instructors face in North American contexts, including challenges associated with ‘their legitimate status, their social and historical identity, and their educational roles’ (p. 53). As an example of such challenges, language teachers in different parts of the world may have an aspiration to teach languages ‘for their cultural and symbolic value’, but they also have to satisfy the expectation that they will teach languages ‘for their exchange value’ (p. 13).
Context (archaeology) · Face (sociological concept) · First language · Foreign language · Identity (music) · Language education · Linguistics · Pedagogy · Political science · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Zhàng · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Second Language Learning and Teaching
| Highly cited | No |
|---|