In July of 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) determined that Massachusetts had violated the civil rights of its English Language Learners (ELLs) by placing them in classes with inadequately prepared teachers. Massachusetts is the contextual background for this study but it also serves as an example of the challenges across the U.S. in preparing teachers to meet the diverse needs of the growing population of ELLs within a national context of increasingly standardized curriculum and testing. The U.S. Secretary of Education, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, policy makers, teacher educators, and academics are all looking to educational research for answers to the current challenges. There are many answers or approaches coming from multiple discourses of educational research. However, as has been demonstrated in Massachusetts, research-based approaches to educational challenges are not always successful. More needs to be understood about how these approaches are actually taken up in classrooms. Unfortunately, there is limited research about teachers’ understandings and uses of different discourses of research. In this dissertation I have explored how two urban ESL teachers engaged with research at different stages of their professional development. The questions that guide this study focused on how the teachers made meaning of research and enacted research during the three stages of the study: their master’s program, their ESL practicum and a site visit two years after graduation. I conducted two longitudinal case studies drawing on constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). Building on the findings from my literature review of ESL teachers’ engagement with research I collected and analyzed data from the three stages mentioned above over a five-year period. Multiple phases of analysis included critical incident analysis (Angelides, 2001), and text analysis (Fairclough, 1992; 2003; Janks, 2005). The findings of this study show that while the teachers engaged in multiple ways with research, certain types and discourses of research discouraged teachers from meeting the needs of their students. The teachers’ engagement with research as praxis (Lather, 1986) was complex but entailed change-enhancing engagement with theory, practice, and action that not only met students’ needs, but promoted socially just teaching.

This study focuses on the education of students who have been adopted internationally and are now learning English in school. Teachers typically have little training for—or experience with—working with these learners. Largely an unstudied area, this dissertation aims to shed light on how teachers develop teaching practices for this population. The present study takes as its theoretical framework a sociocultural perspective on second language acquisition (Lantolf 2000), a social semiotic approach to language (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), and a critical discourse analysis perspective (Fairclough 1992). I specifically examine the literacy practices (Barton 2001, Gee 2008, Street 1995) of adopted Ethiopian students' teachers with attention to student identity, agency, and literacy development (Dyson 1993, Ibrahim 1999, Luke and Freebody 2000, New London Group 2000, Peirce 1995). During an eight-month period of ethnographic fieldwork (Emihovich 1989) I researched how white, English-speaking teachers and other school staff in three Vermont schools discursively constructed their Ethiopian students. I endeavored to examine how faculty assumptions about students shaped classroom literacy practices, implicating student identity and learning (Harklau 2000, Hawkins 2005, McKay and Wong 1996, Norton 1997, Thesen 1997, Toohey 1998, Willett 1995). Analysis reveals that teachers and other faculty drew on culturally dominant discourses about language, ethnicity, race, class, and health in developing understandings about their adopted students. While articulating the best of intentions toward their Ethiopian learners, teachers unknowingly took up assimilationist, colonialist, “model minority,” classist, and medicalized perspectives about their students that, in turn, informed their educational decision-making. In other words, faculty members positioned adopted Ethiopian learners in ways that constructed them as certain kinds of students (Gee 2008), and, based on those representations, teachers structured literacy activities that afforded them differential learning opportunities. I discuss at length the implications of this study for public education and research. There is a need for teachers and other school professionals to assume perspectives on learning grounded in theories of power, identity, and a contextual understanding of language. Education reform that fosters professional collaboration within schools is necessary. Finally, future education research from sociocultural and critical perspectives focusing on internationally adopted students is warranted.

<p>The overarching objective in undertaking this study is to examine the impact of the implementation of EGP and ESP program for ESP teachers in China, to explore into tertiary-level ESP teachers’ transformative learning experiences as well as the personal, institutional and societal factors that either facilitate or constrain such transformation. I employed narrative inquiry as the research methodology to reflect teachers’ profound transformative learning experiences from story collections through co-construction and collaboration with participant teachers in all phases of research. Five ESP teachers’ unique trajectories mirror their unique learning and professional development roadmap.</p> <p>Through detailed examination, I concluded that teachers stepped into the new territory of ESP instruction with various degrees of hesitation and resistance. Their non-linear transformative learning experiences shed lights on the uncertainty and struggles they confronted along the journey, and demonstrate how teachers hold their own stance adjusting the complex instructional ecosystem to enhance their potential success being as an ESP instructor.</p> <p>The significance of this study lies in the exploration of ESP teachers’ transformative learning from a critical perspective. By taking into consideration the essence of a teacher as an adult learner, this study will not only break through the existing studies’ inadequate attention to teacher’s transformative learning, but also emphasizes the value of teacher learning for their own transformation, emancipation and professional advancement.</p>

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