Dorota Werbińska

Uniwersytet Pomorski w Slupsku

This study examines how forty-eight Polish in-service language teachers position them- selves through their discourse during professional promotion examinations for teachers. The data were collected via field notes concerning the participants’ narratives and their responses to the questions asked by the members of the examination commissions. Of pa...

Although learning is usually associated with some regulatory bodies, external education, programmes or experts, there is another kind of learning which can be gained from reflection on a language teacher’s biography and their teacher identity learning in a professional environment. The present article focuses on the analysis of four veteran Polish...

While studies on interpretative repertoires have been conducted in SLA, this is still a fairly new topic with regard to language teachers. Due to various contextual differences, teachers’ interpretative repertoires change, which also seems a sufficient reason why they should be investigated on a regular basis. The aim of this study is to identify a...

Teacher identity building rather than learning teaching in terms of skills and subsystems has recently been acknowledged as a priority in future teacher preparation. Several teacher identity models have been offered, including the 3A Language Teacher Identity Framework (3ALTIF) (Werbińska, 2017a) in which teacher identity comprises affiliation (tea...

Studies conducted on teacher identity have mostly focused on preservice language teachers. By contrast, this study looks at the professional identity of a veteran teacher of French as a foreign language in Poland. It describes a two-stage biographic study in which the narratives obtained are subjected to semantic deconstruction with the application...

Although the last decade has seen a growing interest in language teacher identity, the investigation of ESP teachers' professional identity has remained practically unexplored. The present study examined the role of action research in ESP teachers' professional identity development. We collected interactionally oriented narratives produced by 3 ESP...

The chapter discusses the construct of preservice language teacher identity related to the aspects of positive psychology. The author draws on findings from a three-stage longitudinal duoethnographic study of 10 pairs (duo) of preservice English teachers with a view to exploring what preservice teacher identities are emerging from their dialogues,...

The significance of duoethnography as an alternative qualitative method for investigating research in the humanities and social sciences has considerably increased in the last decade or so. Yet, despite its increasing popularity and the growth of duoethnographic studies in second and foreign language learning and teaching, duoethnography is still u...

Although there is an increasing body of research on diverse aspects of language teachers’ professional practice there are still contexts that remain hardly explored. One such context is the oral examination situation encountered by experienced language teachers in Poland who aspire to be promoted in the ranks of the teaching profession. Drawing on...

Private English tutoring, understood as the paid English teaching service offered to students to supplement their learning of English at school or prepare them for an examination in English, has become a popular out-of-school learning activity. In order to obtain deeper insights into its intricacies, the need arises to examine the experience of one...

This article focuses on first-year English teachers’ competences from the perspective of teachers themselves. The point of reference is offered by B. Kumaravadivelu’s (2012) language teacher education KARDS model (KNOWING, ANALYSING, RECOGNIZING, DOING and SEEING), which is based on cognitive and social constructivism. Providing an answer to progre...

This article reports a qualitative research project focused on examining the professional biographies of four post-service Polish teachers of foreign languages. The main objective was to find out what experiences in their professional biographies the participants perceived as the most critical, and to see if those memories were roughly similar in t...

Learners moving and learning languages across contexts have always been natural subjects of applied linguistics research. In recent years, however, teachers' mobility across contexts and their temporary work and stay due to internationalization in education has been an equally important development. While research on language teacher identity is no...

The concept of professional agency has recently been predominating in the field of teacher education. Despite this considerable attention given to exploring professional agency embedded in different contexts, there is still scarcity in research on teacher trainees’ agentic roles. To this end, this study focuses on exploring the impact of practicum...

Duo-ethnography is a research methodology, through which people of difference reconceptualise their histories of a particular phenomenon in juxtaposition with one another. Although initiated by researchers, duo- ethnographies can also be used as an innovative pedagogic tool that develops deep reflection in teacher candidates. After discussing the e...

Invoking two of Bakhtin’s concepts, voice and authoritative/persuasive discourse, from his dialogical approach, the study in the present chapter attempts to show the construction of professional identity of one EFL teacher, highly regarded in her professional milieu and a former Ph.D. student of Krystyna Droździał-Szelest. The analysis of three in-...

Although numerous research studies have explored the concept of learner autonomy, the synergy of autonomy, motivation and identity has received scarce attention in language learning literature. This article aims to shed some light on this issue by reporting the findings of a longitudinal four-year study which sought to investigate autonomous behavi...

Although there is an increasing body of research on the formation/re-formation of language teacher identity, there are still contexts within the professional practice of language teachers that remain relatively unexplored. One such context is the oral examination situation undergone by language teachers in Poland as part of the procedure for profes...

This chapter describes the investigation of language teachers’ professional-identity trajectories through an analysis of discontinuities (interruptions), as inspired by Herbart and Dewey, such as encounters with difference, unfamiliarity or disagreement. The paper discusses a four-year qualitative study that investigates the experiences of four pre...

This paper suggests a research framework for analyzing the empirical material collected from narrative-biographical interviews. This is followed by an analysis of real data obtained from an empirical biographical study in which the suggested research procedure has been put to the test. Through close examination of one retired Russian-language teach...

The aim of the paper is to report a three-year phenomenographic study conducted on seven EFL Polish teachers with the focus on presenting how they experience different aspects of language teaching at three crucial stages: 1) the time of ELT theory studying, 2) the time of school placement, 3) the time of first-year working as professional teachers....

Recent approaches to second language learning have focused on the role of individual differences, out of which beliefs seem increasingly to be drawing researchers’ attention. While focus on teachers’ beliefs has been theorized with regard to their definitions and content, there is a dearth of empirical research on beliefs as to how much changeable...

The general aim of this article is to present second language acquisition from the perspective of an English philology student. Taking the position that identity is a relevant concept in language acquisition, it explores how the identity of English philology students, both day and extramural, is constructed in their narratives when drawing on Bakht...

The experiences of teachers in their first year in the classroom are currently receiving an increasing amount of attention in the literature on second language teaching. The present study is continuing this focus by investigating the time of entering the English teaching profession by Polish teachers (N = 64), seen as crossing the borderland, a ter...

This paper presents and discusses a research study aimed at defining the profile of an effective Polish teacher of English. The study, which is qualitative in nature, has been conducted among English language teachers in Poland who are considered excellent in their professional environment. Their kinds of knowledge and their beliefs about the langu...

The article aims at presenting a longitudinal two-year study on the per-ception of language learning from the perspective of five adult learners in their late 50s who are teacher consultants by profession and participants of an elementary course in English. The attention is focused on two as-pects: 1) what general expectations they have with regard...

The aim of this article is to show some possibilities of using autobiographical narratives in the learning and teaching languages. The first part, focused on theoretical aspects of autobiographical research, points to its functions, problems for the researcher and possible content to be examined. The second part describes an example of the author’s...