Teachers' Discourse on English Language Teaching: Faces of Resistance and Neo-colonialism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.2.1.0071
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Pages: 71-91
• Author: Gilberto Alves Araujo
• Subject Matter: discourse,English language,resistance,teachers,curriculum

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 2.1 June 2019

Teachers’ Discourse on English

Language Teaching:

Faces of Resistance and Neo-colonialism

Gilberto Alves Araujo

English Department, Universidade Federal do Pará, Altamira, Brazil

Gilberto Alves Araujo is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Media Studies,

The University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), with an exchange period

at the Department of Linguistics, University of Mannheim (Germany); Junior

Researcher and Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics, Department of English

Language, Universidade Federal do Pará (Brazil).

ABSTRACT

This work analyzes discursive representations within Tocantinian teachers’

enunciations regarding themselves and the exercise of their teaching role, as well

as English teaching-learning and its insertion in school. Considering our incursion

through French Discourse Analysis we employ conceptions of forgetting, subjecting,

ideological and discursive formations, according to Michel Pêcheux. In addition,

we use analytical-methodological procedures by Eni Orlandi. Our investigation

indicates that prestige and social status, often assigned to English language (EL),

offer signicant space to the ideas of struggle and suffering, whereas the sense of

accomplishment, self-fulllment and nancial gains tend to be silenced. Teachers

nd the reasons for EL teaching through a presumed intellectual superiority,

a linguistic utilitarianism and the economic system, while averting this same

teaching from a propaedeutic function. Furthermore, a “unifying” discourse, which

is a component of Brazilian imaginary, projects teachers as constant sufferers

and strugglers. There is also a strong tendency, by teachers, towards reproducing

learners’ discourse about EL as a beautiful and difcult language. This image

contrasts with an undervalued and underestimated position that teachers believe is

assigned to EL in the school curriculum.

KEYWORDS

discourse, English language, resistance, teachers, curriculum

72 gIlBerto alVes araujo

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 2.1 June 2019

Introduction

This article is intended to discuss discursive representations by teachers regarding them-

selves, their teaching job, languages teaching-learning in general and the discipline of

English language in school. To this end, we resort to theoretical conceptions from French

Discourse Analysis-FDA (Pêcheux, 1995, 1997, 2006) as well as the methodology presented

by Orlandi (1998, 1999).

This paper is divided into four more sections. The first one presents our theoretical

assumptions. The second one introduces methodological perspectives and the third one

analyzes and discusses teachers’ discourses on the self, the teaching job as well as teaching-

learning in general and English Language (EL) as a discipline. At last, we shall synthetize our

discussion, also offering some general approaches for future language education.

Theoretical Framework

In this work, we resort to concepts of polysemy, paraphrase, metaphor and anticipation, as

well as notions of Discursive Formation (DF), forgetting (number one and number two),

Ideological Formations (IF) and subjecting, which on its turn can be divided into the pro-

cesses of identification, disidentification and counteridentification.

These conceptions enable one to reveal how discursive formations, strategies and

processes perform the ideological work towards shaping teachers’ discourse into a

colonial framework, constraining individuals, redirecting a school discipline and con-

forming subjects to very specific, contradictory and unusual positions. They also allow

one to see how the presence or absence of neoliberalism and democracy-freedom

might interfere in each other’s effects/potentials through teachers’ views on the school

curriculum of EL, whose implementation seems to be quite ineffective in the Brazilian

case in question.

From a phenomenological standpoint, Pêcheux’s Discourse Analysis is the most ade-

quate to read discourses. Firstly because, different from other types of Discourse Analyses,

it posits historical materialism as a theory of social formations and transformations. Second,

it relies on linguistics mostly as a theory of syntactical mechanisms and processes of enun-

ciation, not becoming excessively dependent on tangible linguistic data. And third, because

it sees a theory of discourse as a theory of historical determination of semantic processes.

Accordingly, for the researcher this means that semantics is the essential dimension

within linguistics. Semantics, therefore, brings together the philosophy of human experi-

ence and the historical materialism. Put differently, if discursive processes are considered

the source of the production of meaning effects, language is the material space in which

these effects are concretized. Evidently, from Pêcheux’s viewpoint, language will still sustain

its relative autonomy before differences and struggles between social groups and alliances,

which in their turn will always appropriate language differently. Thus, another contribution

of this article might be the exploration of the degrees of language autonomy in face of ideo-

logical conflicts in discourse.

Namely, Pêcheux (1995, p. 160) conceives DF as a project of cohesion and coherence,

which, under a certain conjuncture and state of the classes struggle, “determines what can

and should be said (articulated in the form of a speech, a sermon, a pamphlet, a report, a