Chapter 4. Teachers’ identity and agency in L2 pragmatics

Abstract

To support multilingual speakers in drawing on their hybrid resources effectively, language teachers must embrace their own translingual practices and become critically aware of their multiple identities (Zheng, 2017). Teachers of second language (L2) pragmatics can do this by enhancing their metapragmatic awareness (McConachy, 2018). In this chapter, we uncover how two language teachers and a teacher educator collaboratively constructed this metapragmatic awareness and its application to pedagogy in and beyond a teacher development Summer Institute focused on L2 pragmatics offered remotely through a United States (U.S.) state university. Through narrative inquiry into the dialogic data collected following the Institute, we closely reflected on the Institute discussions to rediscover the translingual identities that permeated the pragmatic and pedagogical decisions the two teachers made in their translingual lives. As implications of this study, we explore ways in which language teachers can strategically deploy translingual identities as pedagogy.