Evolving notions of literacy-based foreign language teaching: A qualitative study of graduate student instructors

Abstract

The effectiveness of professional development for future foreign language (FL) professors is more salient than ever, given the significant role played by graduate student instructors (GSIs) in undergraduate education and recent calls for change in the collegiate FL curriculum requiring sophisticated understandings of integrating the teaching of language, literature, and culture. Taking a sociocultural theory perspective, this chapter reports on a study of five FL GSIs’ experiences learning to teach that sought to determine how participation in an advanced pedagogy seminar influenced GSIs’ notions of literacy as a framing construct for collegiate FL curricula. Findings showed that through involvement in the seminar, participants progressed toward a more theoretically based definition of literacy and an awareness of its cognitive and sociocultural dimensions. However, after the seminar, not all participants demonstrated alignment in constructing their teaching practices through conceptual and pedagogical tools of literacy.