Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Johnston 1997 Tesol Quarterly
Johnston 1997 Tesol Quarterly
BILL JOHNSTON
University of Minnesota
1
For the purposes of this discussion, I am lumping together EFL and ESL teaching. I
acknowledge the fact that there are crucial differences between these two broad categories and
that the categorization itself is problematic (Nayar, 1997). Nevertheless, I believe that questions
of teacher life stories are equally relevant to EFL and ESL contexts, however different those
contexts, and hence those life stories, may be.
There are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to
“no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with
intentions and accents. . . . Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on
THE STUDY
The Context
The interviews for this study were conducted in the autumn of 1994,
5␣ years after the fall of communism in Poland. Given the emphasis I have
placed on the need to consider context in understanding teachers’ lives,
it is important to outline the complex and dynamic situation of Poland
and Polish EFL in the years since 1989.
To begin with, I should say a few words about why Polish EFL is of
interest to me. There are two reasons. First, I worked in Poland for
several years and acquired an extensive knowledge of Polish and of many
aspects of the culture, especially education. I believed that in a study of
the lives of teachers in which knowledge of context was vital, my own
status as informed outsider would give me a head start in understanding
emic contextual features as well as provide an easier point of entry into
the world of Polish EFL in terms of making contacts and gathering
information. Another, less personal reason, however, is the fact that
among the countries of the former Soviet bloc Poland has led the way
both in its general socioeconomic development and specifically in the
expansion of EFL. Thus, though as mentioned above the issue of
generalizability is an open one, whatever can be said about teachers in
Polish EFL does seem to have considerable potential relevance for the
situation of teachers in many other countries of central and eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The Poland of today looks hardly anything like the Poland of 10 years
ago. Virtually every aspect of the society has changed, from the economy
and the political system to the lifestyles of families and individuals.
Although economists regard the economic changes as broadly successful
(Slay, 1994), change at the societal level has led to more lasting social
tensions and difficulties (Coenen-Huther & Synak, 1993).
Before 1989, there was only a limited amount of activity in English
teaching in Poland (Fisiak, 1994). As in other countries in the Soviet
bloc, the primary foreign language was Russian. Teaching was hampered
by restricted access to materials and technology (e.g., copiers, comput-
ers) and by the difficulty of contact with Western countries.
This situation changed radically with the end of communism in 1989.
Data Collection
Data for this study come from extended life history interviews with 17
EFL teachers in the Polish city of N., an important cultural and historical
center. The interviews were conducted in the autumn of 1994.
The decision to restrict the study to teachers in a single city was partly
practical and partly theoretically motivated. While reducing claims to
generalizability even within a single national context, it offers more
opportunities to compare data across informants and to gain a fuller
picture of the teaching context in what is admittedly not an ethno-
graphic study.
The relatively small number of informants was intentional. The aim
was to collect richer data and have the opportunity to perform more
sensitive analyses on it than in the case of studies with greater numbers of
informants. This study is intended to provide in-depth data from a few
cases in order to supplement survey research such as the two studies
mentioned above and Tann’s (1994) tracer study of language teacher
training college graduates in Poland. It seemed particularly important to
allow the voices of the teachers themselves to be heard and to explore in
Data Analysis
2
The relevance and validity of the distinction between native- and nonnative-speaking
teachers has been questioned by many (e.g. Rampton, 1990), though others have found it
useful (Medgyes, 1992). My own sympathies lie with the questioners. However, in terms of the
working lives of EFL teachers, there would seem to be an important difference between those
who are of Polish nationality and those whose principal country of residence is elsewhere.
In considering the bare facts of the lives of the teachers in this study,
I can make a few broad generalizations. Firstly, almost all the teachers
had some form of training in language teaching methodology. Nearly all
the Polish teachers had a university degree or teacher training college
diploma in English, and even the least qualified native speakers had the
Royal Society of Arts (RSA)/Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English
as a Foreign Language to Adults (CTEFLA).
Secondly, nearly all the teachers held down two jobs or even more,
along with other work such as private lessons. Incidentally, many of the
teachers worked for considerable hours in both the private and the
public sector. Thus, the private/public distinction mentioned in the
context of informant selection turned out not to be a relevant issue.
Beyond these basic facts, however, other patterns emerged. The major
findings of the study can be summarized as follows.
1. The teachers told their life stories within a complex discursive
context in which many occupational, socioeconomic, and cultural
discourses competed for dominance.
2. Teachers presented their entry into teaching as accidental or as a
second choice and did not draw on notions of vocation.
Polish EFL teachers, like most other people in Poland, lead busy lives.
Nearly all of those I interviewed held multiple jobs, not all connected
with teaching. Low wages combined with a cost of living approaching
that of a Western country means that teachers need to make more money
than most single positions will give them.
A typical example is Rafal, 3 a graduate of the English department at
the university in N., who was working at a prestigious high school. Along
with his four classes in the high school, which were scheduled in the
mornings, in the afternoons he taught at a private language school for
which he also occasionally did translation work. Finally, 2 days a week in
the early evening Rafal attended a postgraduate program in business
studies at the university. Rafal himself described his time as “pretty much
filled up every day.”
Rafal’s routine reflects some of the complexity of life in post-1989
Poland. Other teachers sometimes have three jobs; many give one-on-
one private lessons, and some earn money outside of teaching, for
example, by selling real estate or life insurance. In any case, in order to
make enough money to get by, teachers can generally not restrict
themselves to a single teaching position; and at the same time, like Rafal
with his business studies program, they must keep an eye on the future
and to act on a number of different fronts at once.
3
Brief notes about each of the teachers mentioned in this paper can be found in Appen-
dix B.
1. It’s like a wonderful bacteria that you can’t destroy, a wonderful virus.
You think you’ve discovered the antibody that will get rid of it, so they
4
Transcription conventions are as follows:
[???] Inaudible material
[...] Omitted material
(tr) Interview originally conducted in Polish; passage has been translated
Other interpolations are self-explanatory.
At the same time, though, in another context, Jan held these exams
up as a model of achievement, with the assumption that getting one’s
students to pass the exams is an objective indication of teaching ability.
In offering evidence for the high level of expertise of one of his
colleagues, he said,
2. This teacher’s results also have been incredible; a pass rate [in the
exams] that is, is almost perfect, I mean nearly a 100% pass rate over the
last 20 years.
3. And he said he, he’d got himself a job at the Language Center, and he
enjoyed it, and we were contemporaries at some point at the university,
but then I think I think I dragged a little bit [laughs], and I graduated 1
year later; so he’d already been teaching when, when I graduated. So he
told me about the job and uh, I knew DS [the Director of the Language
Center], who was our teacher at the university, he, he taught practical
4. By the time I returned to England it was quite late in the year, the
academic year, it was August, I think, so when I looked at the vacancy list
there wasn’t an awful lot to choose from [laughs], which is, I hate to say,
probably the reason I came here. There was Rumania, Poland, Hungary;
I, I don’t really know why I chose Poland at all; I mean, I just sort of
thought, oh, that might be interesting; it was a bit sort of like eeny
meeny miny moe, which one shall I choose. Um, and I did want to work
in Europe.
5. Interviewer: Tell me about how you came to set this school up.
Danka: Well [laughs]; it was 5 years ago; a little bit more than
that; it was right before the holidays; and I used to do a
lot of translations for friends who worked with the Civic
Theater in N.; and one day I remember Janusz [a theater
manager] took me for a drink, and he said, Danka, we
won’t survive; we have to do something about our lives;
and he said art is not really the area now that, that I mean
you can afford to get involved in unless you are a very
rich man; so he said why don’t we open language
courses? And I said no, no, no, I mean I work with the
university, I don’t want to get involved in anything else; at
that time I had private lessons, and that was my extra
source of income. But finally I agreed to teach with those
courses for 6 weeks, before the holiday; and this is how it
all started.
Bernadette
7. Interviewer: What, what other thoughts have you had [???] if you
don’t do the doctorate?
Bernadette: If don’t do a doctorate? Well, I think it’s; [laughs] this
isn’t being flippant. It’s, if I’ve got enough money to stop,
I’ll stop [laughs]. I’ll go to art school; or I’ll; my mother
has an art gallery; I’ll go and work with her for a while; or
I’ll, I’ll do something else. I, I want a break; this is very
intense, sort of, this work.
Rafal
Alternative Identities
Insofar as the teachers in this study had in most cases invested
considerable time and resources in their education and training (in
Poland a basic university program, for example, lasts 5 years, whereas a
college diploma takes 3), it seems in some ways odd that they should
have been so willing to abandon teaching and move into some other
occupation. Yet, as was seen in the previous section, several of the
teachers were considering just this; indeed, some, like Rafal, had already
taken the first steps.
From the point of view of a coherent life story as a teacher, such moves
seem not to make sense. Yet as has already been seen, in the context of
post-1989 Poland they seem much more understandable. In a context
where teaching is poorly paid, it is entirely reasonable to be flexible and
to consider utilizing the skills one has to enter a better-paid occupation.
What, then, of causality and continuity, the discursive elements in
what Linde (1993) calls the coherence principle in telling the life story? If
9. Sometimes I have a feeling that it’s not that what I’m going to do, that I
want to have something, [laughs] again more ambitious, whatever, I
know that it just, um; well, more ambitious for me; it doesn’t mean
English teaching is not ambitious. But on the other hand it’s something
that I’ve been doing for a few years and I’m, maybe I’m not very good at
it but still I have some experience, and I can, I can improve it; so, um, if
you, if you stick to it, in the sense that you, well I can, I don’t have to stick
to teaching English, I can translate things, I can be an interpreter, I can,
uh, even work in business using my English; um, so, but again it’s just, it’s
just continuing something that I’ve started.
10. I did my A-levels in Barrow and decided that I was going to opt for a
career in art and design, so I did a foundation course at Barrow
Polytechnic. It’s a course that follows the Bauhaus model, I don’t know
whether you’re familiar with the foundation course which was run at the
Bauhaus in the 1920s, at Weimar then afterwards at Dessau; well, the one
at Barrow Polytechnic is very very similar to the Bauhaus one. Then I was
offered a job as art critic [...]
[...] I married one of the participants, and basically burned my
bridges; was unable to leave, my wife was unable to leave, this was 1988,
she was unable to, they refused to give her a passport. I wasn’t prepared
to go back myself, so we stayed an extra year; by which time it was too late
to go back [...]. So I lost the grant; so I didn’t go back, stayed in Poland;
and here I am.
11. [Teaching] requires a lot of hard work, and I’ve spent the last 7 years
perfecting my techniques, and I think that as things are at the moment
I’m, I’m good at what I’m doing, I’m respected. My exam results, the
exam results of my participants have been extremely good, the feedback
has been very positive.
12. Interviewer: OK, let’s come back now to your plans for the future. You
said, you mentioned two things: One of them was the
13. Interviewer: How do you feel about the, the role of English language
teaching in your life? Is that, do you feel committed to
that?
Jan: Um, committed? In what respect?
Interviewer: Well, let’s take now; I mean just the job that you’re doing
right now; how, what sort of sense of commitment do you
Marek taught in an elite private high school, but he also espoused the
principle of equal educational opportunities for all. I suggested that his
talents might be more needed in the public sector. He defended his
decision to take a higher paying job in the private sector.
15. It’s just that I’m not such an idealist as to say that it’s a charitable matter
and that you simply have to [???] work for free; that’s not how it is. (tr)
In this eloquent passage, part confession and part accusation, not only
does Joanna reveal that a discourse of profession is absent from the way
she talks about her work, but she also actively resists such a discourse; the
reason for her resistance is found in the sociopolitical context in which
her teaching takes place.
To conclude, I repeat what was said above: All those who took part in
this study appeared to be competent teachers who performed their job
well. Yet they found themselves restricted to a kind of “semi-professionism”
(MacLure, 1993, p. 320) that put discursive limits on the ways in which
they could talk about their work. This situation recalls what MacLure
suggests in the context of teaching in Britain: that “the old iconogra-
phies of teacherhood, with their virtues of vocation, care, dedication and
self-investment, are being eroded under the pressures and interventions
of the late twentieth century” (p. 319). With the caveats mentioned
above regarding the limitations and dangers of professionalization, in
the case of Polish teachers of EFL I would argue that the unavailability of
a discourse of profession is detrimental to individual teachers and to the
system as a whole.
CONCLUSIONS
The findings of this study indicate that for many teachers in Polish
EFL, the straightforward notions of career and profession assumed in
mainstream research on teachers’ lives are not very helpful in conceptu-
alizing the teachers’ lives and the way they construct them discursively.
To grasp the complexity of these teachers’ life stories, a more context-
and discourse-sensitive approach is needed, one that can countenance
the contradictions of competing discourses, a nonunitary view of iden-
tity, and the interplay of occupational and broader socioeconomic
factors.
The Bakhtinian analysis undertaken in this study shows that teachers
do not tell teacher life stories and do not rely on a teacher identity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank all those teachers who gave of their time to be interviewed for this
study. I am grateful to two anonymous TESOL Quarterly reviewers for helpful
comments on an earlier version of this article.
THE AUTHOR
REFERENCES