The Role of Teachers' Future Self Guides in Creating L2 Development Opportunities in Teacher-Led Classroom Discourse: Reclaiming the Relevance of Language Teacher Cognition

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between teachers' use of language in teacher-led discourse (TLD; Toth, 2008) and opportunities for L2 development is a well-established area of SLA research. This study examines one teacher's role in creating such opportunities in TLD in her EFL classes in a state secondary school by examining the inner resources that informed her interactional practices. The database comprises audiorecordings of TLD from eight lessons, pre- and post-observation interviews, ethnographic field notes from multiple school visits, and repeated ethnographic interviews with the teacher. The results from a close analysis of TLD and a grounded theory analysis of the ethnographic data show that the teacher's future self guides, conceptualized as language teachers' possible selves (Kubanyiova, 2009), had a critical influence on how she navigated classroom interaction and the L2 development opportunities that arose as a result. The findings offer new insights into the types of professional development opportunities needed to transform teachers' discourse. By bridging two domains of inquiry-SLA and language teacher cognition-in a single study, this article sets a new research agenda in applied linguistics and responds to calls for increasing its relevance to the real world (Bygate, 2005; Ortega, 2012a).