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L2 Pragmatics in Action: Teachers, learners and the teaching-learning interaction process
Edited by Alicia Martínez-Flor, Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández and Júlia Barón
[Language Learning & Language Teaching 58] 2023
► pp. 89–111

Chapter 4
Teachers’ identity and agency in L2 pragmatics

Supporting teachers’ translingual identity as pedagogy through narratives

| Hosei University, Japan
| University of São Paulo, Brazil
| Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Translingual practice, translanguaging, and pragmatics
    • 2.2Translingual identity as pedagogy
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Adriana’s metapragmatic awareness mediating her translingual identities
    • 4.2Adriana’s translingual identity as pedagogy
    • 4.3Malila’s metapragmatic awareness mediating her translingual identity
    • 4.4Malila’s translingual identity as pedagogy
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Pedagogical implications
    • 5.2Limitations and future directions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
Published online: 12 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.58.04ish
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