Dorota Werbińska (Poland)

Becoming an English language teacher: Continuities and Discontinuities

The aim of the presentation is to report a three-year phenomenographic study conducted on 7 EFL Polish teachers with the focus on presenting their conceptualisations of different aspects of language teaching at three crucial stages: 1) the time of university tuition, 2) the time of school placement, 3) the first year of working as professional teachers. Each stage of the study is presented from the perspective of affordances standing for the respondents’ expectations (continuities) as well as disagreements (discontinuities). The findings inform what it means to be a student of language teaching, a mentee placed at school and a novice teacher, and questions the existence of clear dichotomies in the participants’ professional trajectories.

Dr Dorota Werbińska works in the Modern Languages Department at Pomeranian Academy in Słupsk, Poland. She received her doctorate at the Poznan University. She has taught in schools and worked as a foreign language teacher adviser. Her research interests include narrative studies in language teacher education, language teacher cognition and identity, teacher reflectivity and the concept of hidden curriculum in language education. She is the author of three books, two edited collections and over fifty articles or book chapters published in Poland and internationally (among others in Multilingual Matters, Cambridge Scholars Publishers and Springer).