do eflteachers have careers

8/4/2019 Do EFLTeachers Have Careers

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681TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 1997

Do EFL Teachers Have Careers?

BILL JOHNSTONUniversity of Minnesota

The terms career andprofession are increasingly common in discussionsof EFL/ESL teaching. Yet little is known about the working lives of

teachers in this field. It is time to gather empirical data on teacherslives in various contexts and to examine whether in fact these lives can

best be conceptualized in terms of careers and profession or whetherother theoretical approaches might be more fruitful.

The present article describes a study based upon life history inter-views with 17 EFL teachers in Poland. In light of a range of substantiveand theoretical problems with applying existing teacher career modelsto an EFL context, the study employed an innovative analysis based on

the theory of language of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin describes languageas heteroglossic, or comprising multiple, competing discourses that are inongoing, dynamic dialogue with one another. In the present study, theinterview transcripts are treated as discourse, and the central questionis: What discourses do teachers draw on in discursively constructingtheir lives?

The analysis reveals that in teachers discursive presentations of theirlives, teachers life-story narratives do not appear to be present. Rather,teachers stories reflect dynamic and nonunitary identities that interact

discursively in complex ways with a range of other discourses from thesocial, economic, and political context. The implications of this situa-tion for the field of EFL/ESL are considered.

It has become common to speak of careers in EFL and ESL teachingand to encounter references to EFL/ESL as a profession. A recentinformational brochure from TESOL, Inc. (1996), for example, de-scribes TESOL as a professional association and the field as a profes-sion: The teaching [of] English to speakers of other languages is aprofessional activity that requires specialized training (n.p.). OtherEFL/ESL organizations employ similar rhetoric, and advertisements inteachers journals offer assistance in building a career in TESOL. Theuse of these termscareer andprofessionthus far seems to have goneunchallenged.


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The reality of teaching EFL/ESL,1 however, should at the very leastgive pause for thought. Teachers in many national contextssomewould say in mosttend to be underpaid and overworked, oftenoperating in difficult physical and psychological conditions. The occupa-tion of EFL/ESL teaching as a whole lacks the status of the establishedprofessions such as medicine and law. Many teachers work without jobsecurity or benefits.

In light of this situation, and given TESOLs claim to be an interna-tional education association (TESOL, 1996, n.p.), it seems important toexamine more closely the notions of career and profession in ESL/EFLteaching. In fact, little is known about the lives of teachers who work in

this field. It is time to gather empirical data about the working lives ofactual teachers and to make these lives the focus of research. Can EFL/ESL teachers be said to have careers? Do they regard themselves asprofessionals? Is ESL/EFL teaching a profession? Do teachers have a lifestory to tell? If not, how do they present their lives and their occupation?And finally, an important theoretical and methodological question: Inwhat way or ways might these issues best be questioned?

THE LIVES OF TEACHERS

Teachers Lives in Mainstream Education

In mainstream education, the working lives of teachers have been thesubject of a number of research projects over the past 15 years or so.There have been at least three major studies. Fessler and Christensen(1992) looked at 160 K12 teachers in the U.S.; Huberman (1994)interviewed 160 secondary school teachers in Geneva and Vaud canton,Switzerland; and Sikes, Measor, and Woods (1985) examined the lives of40 secondary school teachers of science and art in England. In each case,data consisted of multiple extended, semistructured interviews with theteachers. Each study offers a generic model of teachers lives or careers

based on a composite analysis of the data.

For example, Fessler and Christensen (1992) devised the TeacherCareer Cycle Model, in which a central Career Cycle circle is influenced by two sets of elements: Personal Environment and Organizational

1 For the purposes of this discussion, I am lumping together EFL and ESL teaching. Iacknowledge the fact that there are crucial differences between these two broad categories andthat the categorization itself is problematic (Nayar, 1997). Nevertheless, I believe that questionsof teacher life stories are equally relevant to EFL and ESL contexts, however different those

contexts, and hence those life stories, may be.


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DO EFL TEACHERS HAVE CAREERS? 683

Environment. The Career Cycle itself comprises eight stages, thoughthey are not necessarily conceived linearly: Preservice, Induction, Com-petency Building, Enthusiastic and Growing, Career Frustration, CareerStability, Career Wind-Down, and Career Exit.

All these studies offer valuable insights and advance the fieldsknowledge of teachers professional lives. However, they also evidence anumber of significant methodological and theoretical problems thatsubsequent research has attempted to address. First, as Huberman(1994) himself points out, a trade-off is involved in developing ageneralized model on the basis of large numbers of individual interviews:The resulting model may reflect general patterns in the data but not be

an accurate portrayal of any one teachers life. If, as Donmoyer (1990)suggests, the very point of educational research is to help providespecific solutions to particular problems, such a level of generalizationwill be unhelpful and even misleading. Thus, Tripp (1994), for instance,questions the generalizing purpose of such studies and suggests usingteachers life histories as tools for the professional development of theindividual teachers concerned.

Second, all the researchers mentioned above have assumed a transpar-

ent and unproblematic relationship between the word and the world(Burman & Parker, 1993, p. 5), that is, between what they heard in theinterviews and what the truth is. The language used by the intervieweeswas by and large taken as a direct account of what is. An alternativeapproach, grounded in postmodern theory, is to argue that language isin fact constitutive of reality and that it is through language thatindividuals constantly (re)create their world. Weiler (1992) and MacLure(1993) see teachers life stories as discursively constructed, a notion

utilized in the present study. To say that a life history is discursivelyconstructed is to say that, rather than simply describing a preexistingrealitythe life storyeach telling of a life is created for the specificoccasion of that telling, partly using available forms of discourse(Weiler, p. 41) but also in ways that are sensitive to the context and to thevarious interests at stake. As MacLure puts it, What gets remembered inany given situation is an occasioned matter . . . harnessed to the textualconventions for constructing stories (p. 377).

The third, related assumption is the very existence of stable andunitary concepts like career,profession, and further identity, ambitions, andso on. Again, recent work in postmodern frameworks has challenged thisidea and has questioned the overall coherence of such notions. Peirce(1995), for instance, argues that identity is better conceived as beingmultiple, a site of struggle, and changing over time (p. 14), whereasYoung and Tardif (1992) offer an alternative approach to life history

research by focusing on the question ofvoice in the life history interview.


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Teachers Lives in EFL/ESL

When one begins to look at the lives of teachers in EFL/ESL, these

theoretical and methodological issues are compounded by importantsubstantive problems. In the past decade, research in EFL/ESL hasmoved away from an almost exclusive concern with the learner and hascome to focus on teachers and aspects of their work. Research in teachereducation and teacher development has grown (e.g., Freeman & Richards,1996; Richards & Nunan, 1990). Much of this work has focused on issuessuch as teachers thinking or development over relatively short periodsof time. Nevertheless, there are the beginnings of interest in larger scale,

long-term matters of professional development. Bailey (1992) considersthe conditions necessary for teacher development; Pennington (1995)presents a conceptual framework aimed at modeling teacher change;Freeman (1992) conceives of teachers learning in terms of discoursesdrawn on by teachers in talking about their teaching; Pennington looksat teachers work satisfaction in ESL (1991) and the status of ESLteachers (1992); and Edge (1996) explores the ethical component of theoccupation of teaching.

Finally, research specifically concerned with the professional lives ofteachers has begun to appear. At least two studies have examined EFL/ESL teachers careers on the basis of empirical data. The Centre forBritish Teachers (CfBT) sponsored a study (1989) that analyzed two-pagequestionnaires elicited from 160 British CfBT teachers, about one half ofwhom were working in Brunei and the rest in various other locations.Other than informational questions about present and past teachingpositions, the following questions were asked:

Why did you decide to work in TEFL/TESL?

What do you plan as the next step in your career?

What are your longer term career plans?

If you have left TEFL/TESL, or think you are likely to do so, what arethe main reasons?

The picture that emerges from the analysis of responses is not

comforting: It is hard not to be a little surprised at the vagueness ofmany teachers plans and aspirations. A few frankly admit to having noneat all (CfBT, 1989, p. 25). A heavy attrition rate is implied: By the age of45, a very small proportion [of EFL teachers] are left in full-time EFLemployment (p. 29). The study suggests that a major reason for this isthe lack of an institutionalized career structure: For most teachers whohave done their five or ten years at the coalface and have hopefully


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collected their qualifications, there is probably nowhere to go butsideways (p. 17).

McKnight (1992) examined 116 questionnaire responses from gradu-ates of a postgraduate diploma in TESOL from Victoria College,Melbourne, Australia. His findings for Australian ESL echo those of theCfBT study. He states that his study supports common assertions thatTESOL has no proper career structure and that ESL teachers sufferfrom low morale and low status, lack opportunities for study leave, havehigh rates of attrition from the field, frequently lack a power base withintheir institution, and may be treated as an underclass by colleagues andsuperiors (p. 30).

Such empirical findings are echoed elsewhere in the literature, forexample in Maleys (1992) description of EFL/ESL teaching aspermeable,meaning that it is an easy occupation to enter and to leave; and inClaytons (1989) condemnation of unreal (p. 56) teachers in EFL(young, unqualified native speakers looking to spend a couple of years inEnglish teaching to make money, gain overseas working experience, andso on).

These findings add problems of a substantive nature to the theoretical

and methodological problems with teacher career research outlinedabove. If EFL/ESL teaching is so easy to slip into and out of, if the fieldevidences such a high rate of attrition and so few older teachers, and ifthere is nowhere to go but sideways, then it seems a pointless andindeed impossible task to try to shoehorn the working lives of largenumbers of teachers into a model such as the Teacher Career Cycle,which is after all designed to describe a lifelong career (all three majormodels draw explicitly on the age-and-stage life history literature, e.g.,

Erikson, 1959; Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & Chiriboga, 1978).Indeed, it can be argued that the assumption of coherence and of astraightforward conceptual base, as mentioned above, is related to thefact that the major studies have all been conducted in mainstreameducation and in relatively stable sociopolitical and economic contexts.In EFL/ESL teaching, which takes place in a broad range of nationalcontexts, many of which are far from stable, such assumptions aremisleading and in research terms may be counterproductive.

Such substantive issues in turn create a theoretical problem of how toprovide a conceptual framework that generates interesting insightsabout teachers lives without the restrictions of inappropriate modelsin other words, how to theorize the lives of EFL/ESL teachers in usefuland appropriate ways. The following section describes an attempt toaddress this problem.


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THEORIZING TEACHERS LIVES:A BAKHTINIAN FRAMEWORK

In this study, the interviews with teachers were analysed using atheoretical framework derived from the theory of language of Bakhtin(1981, 1986). Although Bakhtins own research concentrated on litera-ture, and although his work has been used in innovative analyses in fieldssuch as philosophy of science, anthropology, sociology, and more re-cently education (e.g., Freedman, 1995; Hall, 1995), his entire approachis grounded in a detailed theory of language and discourse and as suchseems to offer fascinating possibilities for the analysis of data such as

interview transcripts.The Bakhtinian concepts that are of special relevance to the analysis

of life history interviews are those ofheteroglossia, multiple and competingdiscourses, and dialogism. Bakhtin rejects the notion of a unitary languageand instead proposes that language is heteroglossic, or multivoiced:composed of multiple discourses that belong to particular social groups,professional groups, genres, and so on. This much is familiar from theconcepts ofdialect, register (Cruse, 1986),genre (Swales, 1990), and so on.

However, Bakhtins novel contribution is to point out how these differentdiscourses coexist and, further, are in constant competition within thespeech of individuals. They are in dialogue with each other; this dialogueis never resolved but constitutes an endless dynamic.

At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot fromtop to bottom: it represents the co-existence of social-ideological contradic-tions between the present and the past, between different socio-ideological

groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, allgiven a bodily form. These languages of heteroglossia intersect each otherin a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying languages. (Bakhtin,1981, p. 291)

(I have preferred the term discourses to the use of languages in thepreceding, which is of course a translation from Bakhtins Russian.)

Bakhtin sees language as something that is fundamentally in use (in

this, he has been seen by Todorov, 1984, and others as the founder ofpragmatics). But in Bakhtins view, the meanings of words and phrasesare determined by their previous use in specific circumstances, so alllanguage is colored and marked by the situations in which it has alreadyappeared. As Bakhtin (1981) puts it,

There are no neutral words and formswords and forms that can belong tono one; language has been completely taken over, shot through with

intentions and accents. . . . Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on


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the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is halfsomeone elses. (p. 293)

The discourses that enter into dialogue are, moreover, fundamentally

ideological in nature: They are competing verbal-ideological beliefsystems (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 311), whereas language as a whole is in itsvery essence ideologically saturated (p. 271).

Bakhtins conception of multiple, opposing, ideological discourses isechoed in modern work on what are varyingly called discursive practices(Candlin & Maley, 1995; Walkerdine, 1988), interpretative repertoires (Pot-ter & Wetherell, 1987), orpractical ideologies (Burman & Parker, 1993). Itis also very similar to Foucaults (1972) notion ofdiscursive formations andGees (1991) concept ofDiscourses with a big D (p. 142).

A Bakhtinian discourse analysis addresses many of the above-men-tioned theoretical and substantive problems of looking at teachers livesin EFL/ESL. It is grounded resolutely in language itself and thus doesnot make assumptions about the world-word relationship, which in thiscase means that, rather than taking some normative, supposedly objec-tive notion of career as a reference point, it views the professional life

story as being above all discursively constructed (MacLure, 1993).Second, it provides a way of conceptualizing this discursive constructionas taking place amid competing discourses (Weiler, 1992) and thusallowing for the possibility of contradictions without a general descentinto incoherence: Such contradictions can be read as indicating thepresence of opposing discourses in the teachers talk. Third, it recog-nizes the ideological, value-laden nature of discourses and acknowledgesthe need to understand social context in exploring the nature of the

particular competing discourses in a given situation.Overall, this framework makes it possible to avoid imposing normativenotions of career and instead to achieve a richer account of the data thatcountenances tension and conflict and allows one to say somethinginteresting about them rather than trying to reduce them to a unitary yetmisleading coherence. It leads one to treat the title of this article asplayful in nature: Whether teachers have careers cannot be established;only how they talk about their life stories can be.

THE STUDY

The present article reports on a study (Johnston, 1995) that sought togather and analyze empirical data on teachers lives in a single context:that of post-1989 Poland. My aim has been to offer as full a picture aspossible of this context and of the life stories that are told in it, and, in

the tradition of qualitative research, to aim for transferability (Lincoln &


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Guba, 1985): to allow these stories to resonate with other contexts withwhich readers may be familiar and to leave largely to them the task ofdetermining to what extent, if any, my findings may also apply elsewhere.Given the stress placed on the vital role of contextual features and on thediverse nature of EFL/ESL teaching, this goal seems preferable to that ofgeneralizability, which in any case is highly problematic with a smallsample in a single setting.

The Context

The interviews for this study were conducted in the autumn of 1994,5years after the fall of communism in Poland. Given the emphasis I haveplaced on the need to consider context in understanding teachers lives,it is important to outline the complex and dynamic situation of Polandand Polish EFL in the years since 1989.

To begin with, I should say a few words about why Polish EFL is ofinterest to me. There are two reasons. First, I worked in Poland forseveral years and acquired an extensive knowledge of Polish and of many

aspects of the culture, especially education. I believed that in a study ofthe lives of teachers in which knowledge of context was vital, my ownstatus as informed outsider would give me a head start in understandingemic contextual features as well as provide an easier point of entry intothe world of Polish EFL in terms of making contacts and gatheringinformation. Another, less personal reason, however, is the fact thatamong the countries of the former Soviet bloc Poland has led the way

both in its general socioeconomic development and specifically in the

expansion of EFL. Thus, though as mentioned above the issue ofgeneralizability is an open one, whatever can be said about teachers inPolish EFL does seem to have considerable potential relevance for thesituation of teachers in many other countries of central and easternEurope and the former Soviet Union.

The Poland of today looks hardly anything like the Poland of 10 yearsago. Virtually every aspect of the society has changed, from the economyand the political system to the lifestyles of families and individuals.Although economists regard the economic changes as broadly successful(Slay, 1994), change at the societal level has led to more lasting socialtensions and difficulties (Coenen-Huther & Synak, 1993).

Before 1989, there was only a limited amount of activity in Englishteaching in Poland (Fisiak, 1994). As in other countries in the Soviet

bloc, the primary foreign language was Russian. Teaching was hamperedby restricted access to materials and technology (e.g., copiers, comput-

ers) and by the difficulty of contact with Western countries.This situation changed radically with the end of communism in 1989.


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Western books and other publications can now be obtained without anyproblem, and there are bookstores specializing in EFL materials. Anyonecan own and use a copier, a computer, or a fax machine. In addition,many Poles have satellite TV that carries English-language stations.Travel restrictions have been lifted. And above all, the sheer amount ofEnglish teaching has increased exponentially.

At the same time, perhaps the most profound changes have occurredin the economy. Restrictions on trading and on imports and exportswere virtually abolished; the result was an explosion of economic activityof immense variety. In EFL, this resulted in the burgeoning of privatelanguage schools throughout the country.

While the private economy was booming, the public economy hadinherited grotesque debts from the previous communist regime. Al-though some of this debt was canceled by Western creditors, the Polishpublic sector economy is still in deep water. As a result, public fundingfor fields such as education is hard to come by.

Despite these difficulties, there have been important changes in theeducation system (Kuz;ma, 1994). One major reform has been thecreation of 70 language teacher training colleges, which were intended

among other things to provide up to 25,000 new teachers of English forthe public schools, in line with plans to make foreign language instruc-tion available to all Polish children (Ministerstwo Edukacji Narodowej,1991, 1992).

Data Collection

Data for this study come from extended life history interviews with 17EFL teachers in the Polish city of N., an important cultural and historicalcenter. The interviews were conducted in the autumn of 1994.

The decision to restrict the study to teachers in a single city was partlypractical and partly theoretically motivated. While reducing claims togeneralizability even within a single national context, it offers moreopportunities to compare data across informants and to gain a fullerpicture of the teaching context in what is admittedly not an ethno-graphic study.

The relatively small number of informants was intentional. The aimwas to collect richer data and have the opportunity to perform moresensitive analyses on it than in the case of studies with greater numbers ofinformants. This study is intended to provide in-depth data from a fewcases in order to supplement survey research such as the two studiesmentioned above and Tanns (1994) tracer study of language teacher

training college graduates in Poland. It seemed particularly important toallow the voices of the teachers themselves to be heard and to explore in


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some detail their own perceptions of their working lives, something thatis difficult to do in survey-based research.

Within these restrictions, I decided to elicit interviews with as wide arange of teachers as possible. In accordance with the principle ofmaximum variation sampling (Patton, 1990), the 17 teachers selectedrepresented a cross-section of the English teaching community of thecity. Particular attention was given to certain salient variables: male versusfemale teachers, Polish versus expatriate teachers,2 age, employment inprivate versus public education, and length of teaching experience.

The final set of 17 also roughly reflected the relative numbers ofteachers in the city (and in Polish EFL generally): There were more

women than men (11 versus 6), more Poles (8 females, 4 males) thannative speakers of English (3 females, 2 males), and more youngerteachers than older ones (10 teachers were in their 20s, 4 in their 30s,1in her 40s, and 2 in their 50s).

Interviews were conducted according to the standard methods ofqualitative interviewing (Kvale, 1996; Rubin & Rubin, 1995; Spradley,1979). Each informant was interviewed once; interviews lasted 12 hours.The interviews were semistructured: They centered on an interview

schedule (see Appendix A) containing core and peripheral questionsbased on the teacher career literature and on what is known about thesituation of Polish EFL before and after 1989, but even core questionswere not asked in any set order, and informants were free to introduceand explore any relevant topics.

All Polish-speaking informants were given the choice of being inter-viewed in Polish or in English. Seven of the 12 elected to conduct theinterview in Polish.

Finally, to ensure confidentiality, each informant chose for her- orhimself a first-name pseudonym to be used in the study. To the same end,the names of institutions and some minor details have been altered, andthe city in question has not been identified. Several of the informantsrevealed certain information only on condition of anonymity.

Data Analysis

All the interviews were tape-recorded. They were subsequently tran-scribed in full, and the transcripts were returned to the informants forcomments. The transcripts were then subjected to analysis.

2 The relevance and validity of the distinction between native- and nonnative-speakingteachers has been questioned by many (e.g. Rampton, 1990), though others have found ituseful (Medgyes, 1992). My own sympathies lie with the questioners. However, in terms of the

working lives of EFL teachers, there would seem to be an important difference between thosewho are of Polish nationality and those whose principal country of residence is elsewhere.


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In a Bakhtinian analysis, the transcripts are treated as discourse.Instead of beginning with a normative notion of career, the centralquestion is: What discourses do EFL teachers draw on in talking abouttheir working lives? The focus is not on whether teachers lives fit intogeneralized models but on how teachers themselves discursively con-struct and present these lives.

Furthermore, a Bakhtinian approach suggests a careful, respectfulreading of the transcripts akin to a literary analysis. Rather than relativelymechanical, quasi-quantitative methods such as content analysis, a morecontext-sensitive, holistic reading is required to identify competingdiscourses.

Bearing in mind the fact that in such an analysis important questionsmight emerge in the course of the analysis itself, I asked the followingpreliminary questions of the data:

1. What discourses (professional, social, political, personal) do theteachers draw on in talking about their lives and work?

2. How do the teachers tell the story of their lives? Do they draw on adiscourse of career? Is there a teacher life story (or more than one)that they seem to draw on? How else do they discursively organizetheir lives?

DISCUSSION: TEACHERS TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES

In considering the bare facts of the lives of the teachers in this study,I can make a few broad generalizations. Firstly, almost all the teachers

had some form of training in language teaching methodology. Nearly allthe Polish teachers had a university degree or teacher training collegediploma in English, and even the least qualified native speakers had theRoyal Society of Arts (RSA)/Cambridge Certificate in Teaching Englishas a Foreign Language to Adults (CTEFLA).

Secondly, nearly all the teachers held down two jobs or even more,along with other work such as private lessons. Incidentally, many of theteachers worked for considerable hours in both the private and the

public sector. Thus, the private/public distinction mentioned in thecontext of informant selection turned out not to be a relevant issue.Beyond these basic facts, however, other patterns emerged. The major

findings of the study can be summarized as follows.

1. The teachers told their life stories within a complex discursivecontext in which many occupational, socioeconomic, and culturaldiscourses competed for dominance.

2. Teachers presented their entry into teaching as accidental or as asecond choice and did not draw on notions of vocation.


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3. A lack of agency is also evident in the way movement from one job toanother was portrayed; such moves may be shown to representskillful adaptation to changing circumstances rather than progres-sion along a career path.

4. Leaving teaching was a possibility that was constantly present in theteachers accounts.

5. Teachers often drew on alternative identities; nonnative speakers ofEnglish preferred the identity of expert speaker of English to that ofteacher.

6. A discourse of professionalism was absent from the teachers discur-sive construction of their working lives; altruism was in some casesironized whereas commitment was seen only in day-to-day terms.

The rest of this section provides evidence for each of these findingsand discusses their significance in the Polish context.

The Discursive Context

Polish EFL teachers, like most other people in Poland, lead busy lives.Nearly all of those I interviewed held multiple jobs, not all connectedwith teaching. Low wages combined with a cost of living approachingthat of a Western country means that teachers need to make more moneythan most single positions will give them.

A typical example is Rafal, 3 a graduate of the English department atthe university in N., who was working at a prestigious high school. Alongwith his four classes in the high school, which were scheduled in the

mornings, in the afternoons he taught at a private language school forwhich he also occasionally did translation work. Finally, 2 days a week inthe early evening Rafal attended a postgraduate program in businessstudies at the university. Rafal himself described his time as pretty muchfilled up every day.

Rafals routine reflects some of the complexity of life in post-1989Poland. Other teachers sometimes have three jobs; many give one-on-one private lessons, and some earn money outside of teaching, forexample, by selling real estate or life insurance. In any case, in order tomake enough money to get by, teachers can generally not restrictthemselves to a single teaching position; and at the same time, like Rafalwith his business studies program, they must keep an eye on the futureand to act on a number of different fronts at once.

3

Brief notes about each of the teachers mentioned in this paper can be found in Appen-dixB.


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The complexity of teachers lifestyles finds its discursive analogue inthe complexity of the discursive context in which Rafal and the otherteachers in the study lead their lives. These lives are lived at the meetingpoint of multiple discourses, each with its own set of ideological values,and each in competition with others. Two examples will have to suffice.

Firstly, there is a discursive opposition between the need to do a goodjob at teaching and the need to make money. Many of the teachers in thestudy described how the need to make money led them to take on extrawork, often resulting in a long working day in which they may have hadinsufficient time for proper lesson preparation (see Joannas statement

below for a frank admission of this fact). The socioeconomic discourses

of the broader society in this way impinged upon the educationalcontext, showing that it is impossible to conceptualize teachers lives andwork without an understanding of the sociopolitical context in whichthey are lived.

Secondly, in general language teachers can be said to work at themeeting point of at least two cultures and hence of what might be calledmacrodiscoursesin this case, Polish and Anglophone (in the Polishcontext this predominantly means British). In the situation of Polish

EFL, this meeting point represents the encounter of a set of discourses(of education and, in particular, of language learning) rooted strongly inlocal realities and a range of often colonizing, predatory discourses ofexport-variety EFL (Pennycook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992), including thoseof communicative language teaching and British- or U.S.-based testingpractices. The individual teacher constitutes the locus at which thesediscourses fight it out (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 360).

An example of this clash is seen in attitudes toward the Cambridge

exams. These exams, a suite of communicatively based tests developedand administered by the University of Cambridge Local ExaminationsSyndicate in England, have become very popular in Poland; enrolmentin the exams has increased several hundred percent since 1989, andmany language programs concentrate on preparing students for thevarious levels. Jan, a British teacher of Polish origins who had worked inN. for several years, resisted the imperialistic implications of the Cam-

bridge exams. Speaking of the latest revision of the exam format, whichbrings with it new sets of published exam preparation materials, he said,4

1. Its like a wonderful bacteria that you cant destroy, a wonderful virus.You think youve discovered the antibody that will get rid of it, so they

4 Transcription conventions are as follows:[???] Inaudible material[...] Omitted material

(t r) Interview originally conducted in Polish; passage has been translatedOther interpolations are self-explanatory.


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change, they change it. Its like AIDS, its just like that; and its corruptedthe whole of EFL in Poland. Cambridge, Cambridge. Were all, were allCambridge-positive. And its terminal.

At the same time, though, in another context, Jan held these examsup as a model of achievement, with the assumption that getting onesstudents to pass the exams is an objective indication of teaching ability.In offering evidence for the high level of expertise of one of hiscolleagues, he said,

2. This teachers results also have been incredible; a pass rate [in theexams] that is, is almost perfect, I mean nearly a 100% pass rate over the

last 20 years.

This aporia (Derrida, 1993), that is, apparent contradiction or incon-sistency, represents the presence of two competing discourses in Jansspeech: one rooted in the British macrodiscourse and the other in itsPolish opposition. One discourse values the exams as objective measures;the other regards them as harmful to the practice of language teaching.

Jans talk constitutes the locus at which these ideologically opposed

positions come into contact.Thus, rather than indicating overall discursive incoherence, the

presence of competing discourses is an integral feature of the complexdiscursive context in which the teachers try to make sense of their lives.These discourses constitute the environment in which teachers set abouttelling their stories and, to a large extent, also the material from whichthe stories may be fashioned.

Entry Into Teaching

It is noteworthy that, in describing their entry into the occupation ofteaching, none of the teachers spoke in terms of a vocation or claimedthat it was their first choice of occupation. For some, like Szczesna, Jan,or Sarah (see below), it represented in fact a second career. For others,like Ewa, it arose naturally out of an interest in, and study of, English.Ewa studied English at the university but did not think about teaching tillher final year, when a friend of hers suggested the idea to her.

3. And he said he, hed got himself a job at the Language Center, and heenjoyed it, and we were contemporaries at some point at the university,

but then I think I think I dragged a little bit [laughs], and I graduated 1year later; so hed already been teaching when, when I graduated. So hetold me about the job and uh, I knew DS [the Director of the Language

Center], who was our teacher at the university, he, he taught practical


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English in the 5th year I think; and I just approached him and said Ithought it was a good job, do you think I could try; and he said Idefinitely could. So it was very easy; and um, some people wouldnt

believe me that it was so easy, it definitely was, getting it. A little bit of

good luck, a little bit of, I dont know what; it just happened.

Ewas account is interesting because it discursively presents her entryinto teaching as depending partly on chance (a little bit of good luck).The rest of the story belies this apparent lack of agencyafter all, it wasEwa who approached her teacher to ask about workbut this presenta-tion remains. Ewas appeal to luck is a discursive strategy: a use ofrhetorical features of discourse that allows her to present the story in a

particular light.To a greater or lesser extent, every teacher in the study talked about

entering teaching in comparable terms. Szczesna, for example, had abudding academic career as a biologist interrupted by serious illness.During her convalescence, she took up the study of English. Then oneevening, walking her dog, she bumped into an acquaintance whosuggested she teach English at his childs school, where there wascurrently a vacancy. Thus began her involvement in English teaching.

No teacher made any discursive appeal to a calling. Rather, entryinto teaching was portrayed as a response to external circumstances; inthis sense, the relative absence of agency noted above with regard to Ewawas found in every case.

Movement Within Teaching

A similar lack of agency can also be detected in many accounts of how,once in teaching, teachers moved from one job to another. Perhaps themost striking example of this comes from Sarah, an expatriate teacherwho at the time of the study was in her 4th year of teaching in Poland.Sarah completed her RSA Certificate abroad and returned to England tolook for work with the international chain of private schools with whichshe was affiliated.

4. By the time I returned to England it was quite late in the year, theacademic year, it was August, I think, so when I looked at the vacancy listthere wasnt an awful lot to choose from [laughs], which is, I hate to say,probably the reason I came here. There was Rumania, Poland, Hungary;I, I dont really know why I chose Poland at all; I mean, I just sort ofthought, oh, that might be interesting; it was a bit sort of like eenymeeny miny moe, which one shall I choose. Um, and I did want to work

in Europe.


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In this passage Sarah discursively portrays what might be consideredan important life decision as virtually a whim (eeny meeny miny moe).Again, as with Ewa, some real sense of agency and motivation is alsopresent (I did want to work in Europe), but it must coexist with adiscursive version of the story in which agency is minimized.

At first sight, then, the telling of these lives seems to lack a sense of ateacher life story, or of a career in the sense of a progression over whichthe individual had some control. Yet both Ewa and Sarah have remainedin teaching for several years. It seems that whereas whim or chance mightaccount for the decision to begin a particular job, it is hardly sufficientmotivation to remain in it for long. It is likely that there is some other

way in which teachers can appeal to notions ofcausality and continuity(Linde, 1993) in telling their life stories.One possibility arises in Dankas story of how she came to set up the

private school she now runs. Previously, Danka had taught at theuniversity Language Center (where she worked with Ewa). Yet at onepoint in the late 1980s she found herself facing something of a crisis.

5. Interviewer: Tell me about how you came to set this school up.

Danka: Well [laughs]; it was 5 years ago; a little bit more thanthat; it was right before the holidays; and I used to do alot of translations for friends who worked with the CivicTheater in N.; and one day I remember Janusz [a theatermanager] took me for a drink, and he said, Danka, wewont survive; we have to do something about our lives;and he said art is not really the area now that, that I meanyou can afford to get involved in unless you are a very

rich man; so he said why dont we open languagecourses? And I said no, no, no, I mean I work with theuniversity, I dont want to get involved in anything else; atthat time I had private lessons, and that was my extrasource of income. But finally I agreed to teach with thosecourses for 6 weeks, before the holiday; and this is how itall started.

Here, like Ewa above, Danka presents a major decision profoundlyaffecting her working life as having its origins in forces beyond hercontrol. Yet several years later she was still in this position and by her ownaccount enjoyed her work, and her school was considered to be one ofthe best in the city. Thus, her discursive construction of this event in herlife perhaps should be read not as evidence of a lack of agency but as adiscursive strategy of a different kind. A typical Western career path,mapped out by the teacher herself, is not present; yet the story still

recounts a successful way of dealing with emergent contextual factors.


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That this is a success story is confirmed by the immediate continuation ofthe extract cited above.

6. I mean all of a sudden I realized that it is possible to organize a place

where you teach the way that you really believe you should teach, thatyou have a chance to use all the methods, techniques that you havelearned before; that it is possible to organize teaching in such a way thatyou have the equipment that you need, the books, that you dont have tostrive for everything, to look for classrooms, that everything can beready, waiting for teachers, that the atmosphere may be pleasant, andfinally that I mean youre paid decently.

Dankas story, then, may represent an alternative approach to thediscursive construction of the life story, one in which interaction withdynamically changing circumstances is prized over movement through apreestablished set of positions. In the context of postcommunist Poland,this approach seems as appropriate as any.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The absence of a binding teacher life story makes occupationalflexibility easier in a situation like that of post-1989 Poland. Yet it alsomeans that teachers are freer discursively to talk about leaving the field.Many of the teachers in the study talked about the idea of dropping out.Here I focus on two interesting cases: Bernadette and Rafal.

Bernadette

Bernadette, a British teacher, was the most successful of the nativespeakers in this study: She had an MA in applied linguistics and held aprestigious and responsible post with the British Council. She men-tioned the idea of studying for a PhD. Yet in speaking of her future plans,Bernadette also said the following.

7. Interviewer: What, what other thoughts have you had [???] if youdont do the doctorate?

Bernadette: If dont do a doctorate? Well, I think its; [laughs] thisisnt being flippant. Its, if Ive got enough money to stop,Ill stop [laughs]. Ill go to art school; or Ill; my motherhas an art gallery; Ill go and work with her for a while; orIll, Ill do something else. I, I want a break; this is veryintense, sort of, this work.


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Although it is perhaps not so surprising when a young teacher talks ofleaving teaching, it is striking that one hears the same thing fromsomeone who appears on the surface to be devoted long term to thisoccupation. The way Bernadette talks about her plans demonstrates animportant fact about the discursive construction of life stories in EFL.The very fact that she can say Ill stop shows that she is drawing on adiscourse in which such things can be said. In her interview andelsewhere in the study, EFL is discursively presented as an occupationthat it is easy both to enter and to leave. It is indeed, in Maleys (1992)term,permeable. Although such permeability may have its advantages(Maley, for example, suggests that it renders the field more receptive to

new blood and brilliant naturals [p. 98]), it, like the discursivestrategies mentioned above, militates against the possibility of a strongdiscourse of the teacher life story.

As stated above, Bernadette was not the only teacher who talked ofquitting. This is not exactly surprising, given that EFL/ESL is said to havehigh attrition rates (CfBT, 1989; McKnight, 1992). In the Polish context,estimates are that only between 60% (Drury, 1994) and 35% (Tann,1994) of graduates of the new teacher training colleges go into public

sector teaching even in the 1st year after graduation. Given thatsubsequent further attrition is more than likely and that one reason thecolleges were set up in the first place was that hardly any graduates ofuniversity English departments were entering teaching, these figureswould seem to be a matter for some concern.

Rafal

In this context, it is informative to look at the reasons Rafal gives forwanting to leave the field. Though it is not possible to establishobjectively how likely teachers are to leave teaching, Rafal seemed fairlyfirmly committed to entering the field of business. He was already in thesecond year of his business studies diploma, and in the interview he wentinto his future plans in some detail. His explanation of his decision toquit teaching included the following statement.

8. Interviewer: So youre going to drop out of teaching?

Rafal: I think so, because generally speaking the English lan-guage teaching market, the language teaching market, ispredominantly female, because its something womencan afford to do who have lets say husbands who makegood money and who dont have to support themselvesfrom what they earn. And personally I dont see any

chance of leading any kind of normal life if Im supposed


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to be a good teacher who devotes most of his time toteaching. It just isnt physically possible. (tr)

For Rafal, then, the economic discourses of present-day Poland were

too powerful and dominated the occupational discourses of Englishteaching. For him, as for other teachers in the study (many of whom, Ilearned on a recent return visit to N., have in fact since dropped out ofteaching), the exigencies of the context were too great to allow him tocontinue to work as a teacher. That leaving teaching was Rafals discur-sive presentation of his situation rather than an objective necessity isshown by the fact that other teachers, including men with families tosupport, do stay in teaching. Thus, Rafals portrayal constitutes adiscursive strategyan interested presentation of his present and futurelife through languagerather than necessarily being a reflection of whatis.

Incidentally, though gender issues are not a focus of this article, it ishard not to respond to Rafals claim that only women could afford to beteachers, for example, by suggesting that the logic he used might beturned on its head: The low levels of pay in teaching may be due

precisely to the fact that teachers are predominantly women. Thisimportant matter deserves separate consideration elsewhere.The cases of Rafaland Bernadette reveal that the unavailability of a

strong teacher life story, while giving teachers more room for maneuver,also makes it harder to justify discursively the choice to stay in thisoccupation.

Alternative Identities

Insofar as the teachers in this study had in most cases investedconsiderable time and resources in their education and training (inPoland a basic university program, for example, lasts 5 years, whereas acollege diploma takes 3), it seems in some ways odd that they shouldhave been so willing to abandon teaching and move into some otheroccupation. Yet, as was seen in the previous section, several of the

teachers were considering just this; indeed, some, like Rafal, had alreadytaken the first steps.

From the point of view of a coherent life story as a teacher, such movesseem not to make sense. Yet as has already been seen, in the context ofpost-1989 Poland they seem much more understandable. In a contextwhere teaching is poorly paid, it is entirely reasonable to be flexible andto consider utilizing the skills one has to enter a better-paid occupation.

What, then, of causality and continuity, the discursive elements in

what Linde (1993) calls the coherence principle in telling the life story? If


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Polish EFL teachers do not draw on a teacher life story, what do they useto give their life stories at least partial coherence?

An answer to this question may be discerned in the following passage.Wojtek, a final-year student of the teacher training college in N. who wasalready teaching part time both in a public high school and in a privateschool, talked of his future plans in this way.

9. Sometimes I have a feeling that its not that what Im going to do, that Iwant to have something, [laughs] again more ambitious, whatever, Iknow that it just, um; well, more ambitious for me; it doesnt meanEnglish teaching is not ambitious. But on the other hand its somethingthat Ive been doing for a few years and Im, maybe Im not very good at

it but still I have some experience, and I can, I can improve it; so, um, ifyou, if you stick to it, in the sense that you, well I can, I dont have to stickto teaching English, I can translate things, I can be an interpreter, I can,uh, even work in business using my English; um, so, but again its just, its

just continuing something that Ive started.

To talk of a move into translation or business as continuing some-thing Ive started suggests strongly that the identity Wojtek had chosen

to lend discursive coherence to his potential decisions was not that ofteacher but that of expert speaker of English. This identity makes itpossible to see teaching, translating, and business as being united by thefact that they require a competent speaker of the language. As with theinformants in Lindes (1993) research, it allows the (former) teacher toretain discursive coherence across a change of occupation. Otherteachers also drew on this discursive strategy. Joanna, for example, saidshe had given up earlier plans to enter medicine or computing, but she

was thinking about moving into translation; she talked about this bysaying that she had decided to stay in English.

As above, such a discursive strategy is advantageous in the uncertain,rapidly changing context of Poland in the 1990s, lending the teachergreater flexibility. Yet it works against the likelihood of teachers remain-ing in their occupation over the long term. Furthermore, it constitutesanother facet of the popular belief that native speakers (the ultimateexperts in procedural terms) make the best teachers and that bydefinition nonnative-speaking teachers are deficient users of English(Medgyes, 1992, p. 345). This strategy has the effect of devaluing othercrucial teacher attributes such as specialized knowledge, interpersonalskills, pedagogical skills, or experience; in this way, the teachers identityas teacher is rendered vulnerable.

Another interesting way in which alternative identities subverted orhampered the possibility of a teacher life story was the presence of

alternative life stories in the interviews. Several of the teachers, the nativespeakers in particular, drew on past identities that made it more difficult


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for them to construct a coherent life story as a teacher. For example,when Jan was asked at the beginning of the interview to tell the story ofhis life, he produced a lengthy narrative about how he had become anart critic and scholar. His original reason for accepting a teaching job inPoland had been to allow him to stay in the country to conduct researchfor a graduate degree in art without paying exorbitant exchange rates.The first version of his life story begins and ends as follows.

10. I did my A-levels in Barrow and decided that I was going to opt for acareer in art and design, so I did a foundation course at BarrowPolytechnic. Its a course that follows the Bauhaus model, I dont knowwhether youre familiar with the foundation course which was run at the

Bauhaus in the 1920s, at Weimar then afterwards at Dessau; well, the oneat Barrow Polytechnic is very very similar to the Bauhaus one. Then I wasoffered a job as art critic [...]

[...] I married one of the participants, and basically burned mybridges; was unable to leave, my wife was unable to leave, this was 1988,she was unable to, they refused to give her a passport. I wasnt preparedto go back myself, so we stayed an extra year; by which time it was too lateto go back [...]. So I lost the grant; so I didnt go back, stayed in Poland;

and here I am.

The interesting thing here is that these final three wordshere Iamcollapse several years of Jans life as an English teacher. Later on,perhaps as a result of his realizing that what I, the interviewer, was afterwas a teacher life story, Jan made an attempt at this, saying amongst otherthings the following.

11. [Teaching] requires a lot of hard work, and Ive spent the last 7 yearsperfecting my techniques, and I think that as things are at the momentIm, Im good at what Im doing, Im respected. My exam results, theexam results of my participants have been extremely good, the feedbackhas been very positive.

But the fact remains that his previous counternarrative of himself asart critic precedes, opposes, and undermines his account of his life as ateacher. In this case, competing discourses consist of competing lifenarratives.

Sarah too had a former identity: Before entering teaching, she hadworked in film production. At the time of the interview, she was stillundecided whether to remain in teaching or to try and return to filmwork. At one point in the interview, I confronted her with these twooptions.

12. Interviewer: OK, lets come back now to your plans for the future. Yousaid, you mentioned two things: One of them was the


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idea of going to Australia [to teach], and the other wasthe notion, if I understood rightly, of returning to work[...] in film and television and so on. How do those tworelate?

Sarah: They, they dont really relate at all; I think of it as twocompletely separate fields in my life.

Here, Sarah is explicitly offered the opportunity to create discursivecoherence. Yet she chooses not to and leaves this aporia in her life story.Once again, competing narratives create a complex and dynamic imageof the life story that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a single schema.

IS EFL TEACHING IN POLAND A PROFESSION?

At the beginning of this article, I suggested that the matter of whetherEFL/ESL teaching is a profession remains an open question. In the studydescribed here, one of my aims was to take something of a phenomeno-logical approach to this issue: to find out whether the teachers in thestudy saw themselves as professionals and how they portrayed discursivelythe meaning of terms likeprofession andprofessionalism.

It must be made clear from the outset that my interest in the questionof professionalism is by no means tantamount to an assumption thatEFL/ESL should be or become a profession. In mainstream education anumber of persuasive voices (e.g., Burbules & Densmore, 1991; Popkewitz,1994; Welker, 1992) have argued that teaching is a very different kind ofoccupation from the established professions such as medicine and the

law and that professionalization brings with it many undesirable conse-quences. I am fully in accord with this position. I also concur withPhillipsons (1992) view that the professionalization of British EFLteaching has served the interests of a neo-imperialist foreign policy andof a narrow circle of native-speaker experts rather than those oflanguage learners around the world.

Yet at the same time I cannot help seeing the matter from the point ofview of Polish classroom teachers and their interests, and from this

perspective it seems that certain aspects of professionalization would beadvantageous. Amongst the usual attributes of a profession, Freidson(1994) includes such features as control over entry into the profession,autonomy in terms of establishing and evaluating acceptable practices,representation by a powerful institution (like the American MedicalAssociation), and a body of knowledge and skills that is recognized andhighly regarded by the broader society. The Polish context recalls theliterature referred to above in which EFL teaching is seen as marginalized

and the teachers lack influence, status, and powerwhile at the same


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time, it might be added, doing a highly creditable job in very toughcircumstances. In such conditions, for teachers to have control over theirown practices, to have an influential national organization watching overtheir rights and well-being, and for their skills and experience as teachersto be recognized would seem to be of advantage. Furthermore, onefeature of the current situation in language education in Poland,especially at the elementary level, is a rapid turnover of teachers, suchthat continuity from one year to the next is often impossible to achieve.I was told many stories of classes starting from the beginners level 2 or 3years in succession because new teachers were not informed of the classsprogress. It would be in the interests of the students if more teachers

were able to stay longer in the same occupation and the same position.For these reasons, while acknowledging the potential dangers, I suggestthat in the Polish context certain features of professionalization would

be desirable for both teachers and learners, those traditionally inpositions of least power in educational settings.

The teachers in the study were asked whether they thought ofthemselves as professionals, whether they saw EFL as a profession, andwhat it meant to be a professional. Interestingly, answers to these

questions were widely divergent. For Danka, being a professional aboveall meant doing ones job successfully, as measured for instance by examresults. For Ewa, her co-worker, the key quality of a professional was a100% dedication to ones job and devotion to one occupation only. ForAnia, a professional was someone with long-term commitment to a job: Anew teacher by definition cannot yet be called a professional. For Adam,it meant earning a respectable salary.

One overall conclusion is that a shared discourse of profession is

absent in Polish EFL. The very diversity of responses indicates thatnotions of profession are little more than privately held beliefs. At thesame time, all those who took part in the study gave every indication of

being competent teachers who always strove their best to do a good job.Thus, the absence of a discourse of profession must be seen not as anindividual failing but as a broader contextual problem.

One aspect in particular of this matter seems worth mentioning. Indiscussing questions of commitment and professionalism, Jan said amongstother things the following.

13. Interviewer: How do you feel about the, the role of English languageteaching in your life? Is that, do you feel committed tothat?

Jan: Um, committed? In what respect?

Interviewer: Well, lets take now; I mean just the job that youre doing

right now; how, what sort of sense of commitment do you


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feel about the job or jobs that you do now in terms oflanguage teaching?

Jan: Well if you mean is my approach perfunctory, no it isnt;

um, my day-to-day commitment is obviously 100%.Here, Jan interprets commitment to refer to a short-term, day-to-day

dedication to doing the job well. What is lacking in his response, and inthose of other teachers in the study, is any sense of a longer termcommitment to the occupation. Such a commitment is rendered impos-sible by the dynamic nature of the broader social and economic context.

Another example of this interplay between teachers work and the

context it takes place in can be seen in certain comments by some of theteachers regarding the question of service or altruism in their work.Freidson (1994) includes a commitment to service as one of the keyvalues of a profession. Yet for Polish teachers, this is a difficult ideal inlight of the exigencies of everyday life. Monika and Marek both referredto this notion by applying to the occupation of teaching the adjectivespoleczna, literally social, meaning something like charity work donefor a good cause and without financial reward. Monika taught English in

an elementary school, but she and her husband lived principally off hisearnings. Of her own job, she said,

14. You have to have another means of support to be able to afford to dosuch charity work, because thats virtually what it is. (tr)

Marek taught in an elite private high school, but he also espoused theprinciple of equal educational opportunities for all. I suggested that his

talents might be more needed in the public sector. He defended hisdecision to take a higher paying job in the private sector.

15. Its just that Im not such an idealist as to say that its a charitable matterand that you simply have to [???] work for free; thats not how it is. (tr)

In both of these examples, the notion of altruismthat is, theprofessionals devotion to serviceis ironized or, in Bakhtins (1981)

term, reaccentuated (p. 417) by the competing discourses of makingmoney and looking after ones own interests. These discourses, in turn,are not merely individual ones but are socially shared discourses rootedin the economic realities of post-1989 Poland.

Perhaps the most telling statement on professionalism comes from Joanna, a recent graduate of the teacher training college, who wasworking in a public high school. Joanna had been identified to me as ateacher of exceptional ability and promise. Yet she responded as follows

to the question of whether she considered herself to be a professional.


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16. I think I could be; but Im not, at school, because I dont have time toorganize my classes in such a way that they would look like, as if, well,they are organized by a professional person; because Im not working asmuch as I could perhaps to get the most of the book, and the time I

have; well, and all other possibilities. But Im not going to do morebecause first of all I dont have time, and secondly its not paid enoughto work more, I think; and then Im not going to do something, as I saidIm not an altruist, and its a cheat-off, actually, what were doing, withthe, well, the Ministry of Education, and whats going on in this country,I mean the work you have and the money you get for it, I think its ahuge misunderstanding and Im not going to put up with it.

In this eloquent passage, part confession and part accusation, not onlydoes Joanna reveal that a discourse of profession is absent from the wayshe talks about her work, but she also actively resists such a discourse; thereason for her resistance is found in the sociopolitical context in whichher teaching takes place.

To conclude, I repeat what was said above: All those who took part inthis study appeared to be competent teachers who performed their jobwell. Yet they found themselves restricted to a kind of semi-professionism

(MacLure, 1993, p. 320) that put discursive limits on the ways in whichthey could talk about their work. This situation recalls what MacLuresuggests in the context of teaching in Britain: that the old iconogra-phies of teacherhood, with their virtues of vocation, care, dedication andself-investment, are being eroded under the pressures and interventionsof the late twentieth century (p. 319). With the caveats mentionedabove regarding the limitations and dangers of professionalization, inthe case of Polish teachers of EFL I would argue that the unavailability of

a discourse of profession is detrimental to individual teachers and to thesystem as a whole.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings of this study indicate that for many teachers in PolishEFL, the straightforward notions of career and profession assumed in

mainstream research on teachers lives are not very helpful in conceptu-alizing the teachers lives and the way they construct them discursively.To grasp the complexity of these teachers life stories, a more context-and discourse-sensitive approach is needed, one that can countenancethe contradictions of competing discourses, a nonunitary view of iden-tity, and the interplay of occupational and broader socioeconomicfactors.

The Bakhtinian analysis undertaken in this study shows that teachersdo not tell teacher life stories and do not rely on a teacher identity.


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Rather, their accounts draw on different discursive strategies involving amultilayered sense of identity. Polish teachers often prefer to presentthemselves as expert speakers of English, thus lending coherence tooccupational moves outside of teaching. Another discursive strategyinvolves presenting EFL as a permeable occupation that is easy to enterand leave.

Such strategies are in many ways advantageous to teachers who areattempting to deal with difficult circumstances and a complex, rapidlychanging socioeconomic context. But these discursive preferences mayhave certain disadvantages. By presenting themselves as expert speakers,for instance, Polish teachers are choosing to ignore the other skills,

expertise, and knowledge they possess as teachers and may thus bemaking it more difficult for teachers as a group to gain the status andinfluence they deserve in the broader society.

Still on this topic, prospects for professionalization are also seen to belimited because, although teachers act professionally in the day-to-daysense of working conscientiously and responsibly, the socioeconomicconditions make it impossible (or at least extremely unwise) for them tomake a long-term commitment to EFL teaching. Again, although this

lack of commitment is probably the best move for the teachers them-selves, it perpetuates systemic problems of rapid teacher turnover andlack of qualified teachers for many posts, especially in public educationand especially for younger learners.

I am not suggesting that all teachers should follow a teacher life story.My point is that it would be advantageous to have such an optionavailable: It would allow teachers who enjoy their work and are compe-tent at it to discursively construct a life as a teacher and thus to envision

staying in this occupation longer. At present, that discursive option doesnot seem to exist, to the detriment of teachers and students alike.Teacher identities are frail in comparison with competing economic andother discourses. To put it at its simplest, for many teachers in Poland, itis not in their own interests to remain teachers.

In terms of the Polish context, the findings of this study are consonantwith trends that have been noted in larger scale survey research (Drury,1994; Tann, 1994). If this is the case, certain conclusions suggestthemselves. One is that, given the impermanence in the occupation ofteaching English, the newly established teacher training colleges maywell fail in the long run to produce the large numbers of teachers theywere supposed to. Another conclusion is that Polish teachers organiza-tions such as IATEFL Poland need to move toward an advocacy role andto militate for improved working conditions and an improved publicimage for English teachers, especially in the public sector. Of course,

certain of the features of teachers lives that have been examined hereare true of Polish teachers generally under the conditions obtaining after


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1989. To the extent that this is so, prospects for change are constrainedby the overall development of social, political, and economic structures,in particular those relating to education.

At a theoretical level, the Bakhtinian framework has proved useful indetecting and unraveling the multiple, competing discourses present inthe teachers speech. The framework makes it possible to conceptualizeteachers lives in EFL/ESL in a way that captures the complexities andcontradictions of those lives without a general descent into incoherence.It produces an image of identity as multiple and dynamic. Further, itreveals how these lives are embedded in a complex occupational, social,economic, and political context; yet, by seeing this context in terms of

discursive practices, it avoids the assumption of a simplistic world-wordrelationship.Overall, the findings here echo those of the CfBT (1989) and

McKnight (1992) studies summarized above. At one level, they confirmempirically what was already suspected: that EFL/ESL can be an un-stable, marginalized, impermanent occupation. It is important that suchgeneralizations be grounded in actual data. In this case, qualitative datasupport the survey findings of the earlier reports.

The study also goes beyond an empirical confirmation of what iscommonly believed. It suggests that assumptions about the status ofEFL/ESL as a profession and about the possibility of careers in this fieldare highly questionable. It serves as a prompt to look beyond theclassroom for an understanding of how teachers lives develop. And itraises the question of how best to safeguard the interests of teachers andstudentsthose most disempowered in the educational process.

This article represents a first attempt to gather empirical, in-depth

data on teachers working lives in EFL/ESL teaching. A relatively small-scale study such as this, of course, raises more questions than it answers.Do the findings reflect the lives and the conditions (discursive andsociopolitical) of EFL/ESL teachers elsewhere? Informal commentsfrom audience members in various venues where I have given presenta-tions on this research project have suggested that it rings true for manynational contexts (e.g., Greece, Mexico, Russia, Korea, the U.S.) but notall (e.g. Germany, Japan); empirical evidence is again needed. Whataspects of the Polish situation are found in other countries? Whatoptions exist to offer teachers greater stability and security in their work?It seems to me that the answers to these questions should be of interestto administrators and teacher educators in all contexts and, of course, tothe teachers themselves. The field must surely benefit from a deepenedunderstanding of teachers lives set in the rich context in which they arelived.

To return to the title of this article, the question it asks will have to gounanswered. Indeed, it seems clear from what has gone before that it is


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708 TESOL QUARTERLY

not merely playful: It is the wrong question to ask if we as educators areto gain a better understanding of teachers working lives in EFL/ESL.These lives are lived in complex contexts in which personal, educational,political, and socioeconomic discourses all influence the way the life is

told. It is only by recognizing these fundamental truths that we can beginto make headway in understanding the lives of teachers in our field.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank all those teachers who gave of their time to be interviewed for thisstudy. I am grateful to two anonymous TESOL Quarterly reviewers for helpfulcomments on an earlier version of this article.

THE AUTHOR

Bill Johnston is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. The ImmediatePast Chair of TESOLs Teacher Education Interest Section, he has worked as ateacher and teacher educator in Poland, France, the United Kingdom, Hawaii, andother places in the U.S. His interests include language teacher education andteacher development, discourse analysis, and postmodern research methodologies.He also works as a literary translator.

REFERENCES

Bailey, K. M. (1992). The processes of innovation in language teacher development:What, why and how teachers change. In J. Flowerdew, M. Brock, & S. Hsia (Eds.),Perspectives on second language teacher education (pp. 253282). Hong Kong: CityPolytechnic of Hong Kong.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.).Austin: University of Texas Press.

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APPENDIX A

Interview Schedule

The Life Story*Tell the story of your life as a teacher so far.

*How did you get into teaching?*Why did you move to each new job?*Why did you leave that job?*What qualifications do you have?Why did you choose to get those qualifications and not others?*Do you plan to take other qualifications?

*What have been the most important turning points in your life as a teacher?*What ambitions and plans do you have for the future?Looking at your life overall, does it seem to have coherence?*What personal or family factors have affected your working life (e.g., marriage, divorce,

children, bereavement)?*What other paths might you have followed in life?Have you ever been tempted to leave English language teaching (ELT)?Why did you stay?Do you have, or have you had, other jobs beside your main one (translating, private lessons,

etc.)?How do you feel about this?*What interests and plans do you have outside ELT?

Career and Profession

*Is ELT a profession?*Are you a professional?*What, in your opinion, is a professional?*Do you see yourself as having a career?*What does this mean to you (career and having a career)?*To what degree are you committed to teaching/ELT?

Relationships and Social Status

How do you feel about your students?What kind of relationships do you have with your colleagues?Do you tend to socialize with other ELT people or with people not connected to the field?How do you feel about your work when you tell others what you do?Are you proud, embarrassed, indifferent?

The Polish Context

*How do you feel about the changes that have taken place in Poland over the past 5 years or so?*What are the major changes in Polish life?*What are the major changes in EFL?

*Core question, asked in every interview.


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APPENDIX B

Teachers Mentioned in the Article

PolesAdam: Male, late 20s. Teaches in a private language school affiliated with a Western chain of

schools. Also translates, has his own publishing business, deals in real estate.Ania: Female, early 20s. Graduate of teacher training college. Teaches at a liceum (high school).Danka: Female, early 40s. Director of Studies of a prestigious private language school and

private teacher training college; teacher, teacher trainer. Also teaches at the BritishCouncil Centre at the university.

Ewa: Female, mid-30s. Teaches at the British Council Centre. Also works as teacher and teachertrainer at the private school run by Danka.

Joanna: Female, early 20s. Teaches part time at a liceum. Graduated from the language teachertraining college, summer 1994. Also studying at the university extramurally for an MA.

Marek: Male, mid-20s. Teaches in a private liceum. Also sells life insurance. Graduated from thelanguage teacher training college, summer 1994.

Monika: Female, mid-20s. Teaches in a public primary school. In her 1st year of Englishteaching. Has an MA in cultural education.

Rafal: Male, mid-20s. Teaches in a prestigious public liceum

do eflteachers have careers

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