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Language Teacher/Translator Gendered Identity Construction: From Dilemmatic to Agentive—Big Lives Through Small Stories

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Negotiating Identity in Modern Foreign Language Teaching

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Abstract

This chapter discusses, through a case study approach, the construction of the gendered professional identity of a Russian language teacher and translator. The participant and the researcher belong to the same community of practice of Russian language professionals in the UK. They both agentively co-construct the participant’s identity through narrative-in-interaction (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou in Text and Talk 23: 377–396, 2008) and reveal explicit and implicit identity claims. The study is framed within a social constructionist approach (Blommaert in Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005) and makes use of positioning analysis (Davies and Harre in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20: 43–63, 1990) to consider the dilemmatic nature of the narrator’s gendered professional identity by eliciting and analysing small stories. The study gives voice to the underrepresented community of Russian female teachers and translators in the UK and contributes to the field of small story and positioning analysis research.

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  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Tanya Linaker

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  1. Tanya Linaker
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Correspondence to Tanya Linaker .

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  1. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London, London, UK

    Matilde Gallardo

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Linaker, T. (2019). Language Teacher/Translator Gendered Identity Construction: From Dilemmatic to Agentive—Big Lives Through Small Stories. In: Gallardo, M. (eds) Negotiating Identity in Modern Foreign Language Teaching. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27709-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27709-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27708-6

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