Dialogic investigations of teacher–supervisor relations in the TESOL landscape

Abstract

The study referred to in this article adopted a dialogic approach, putting the voices of experienced teachers and supervisors into the form of a dialogue in order to examine how both parties perceive, enact and justify their pedagogical practices in actual school settings. Various sets of data were utilised, including interviews, classroom observations and a post-observation conference with Saudi EFL teachers and supervisors. The findings demonstrate that teachers and supervisors all occupy different positions in the school hierarchy in the TESOL landscape, depending on the “type” as well as “amount of capital” they possess. Specifically, although some supervisors continue to believe that their accumulated experience, including teaching credentials, supervision and administrative experience, outweighs the academic and scientific capital of teachers, teachers also claim that their accumulated experience of several years of teaching, their EFL qualifications and training, their knowledge of ground realities in school settings and their experience of two different national educational systems have enabled and legitimised them to devise their own classroom practices. It is therefore concluded that supervisors should re-conceptualise their roles, challenge their own assumptions and be willing to engage in continuous critical discussions with the teachers. Both parties conduct their pedagogical practice with strong sense of agency/engagement. This study argues that these forms of agency in language teaching need further scholarly attention, for “they are inherently contextual and dialogic, in that they have a history and a present that resides in an ongoing negotiated state of intense and essential axiological interaction”.