Employing Dominant Language Constellation in Teacher Professional Development: The Impact on EAL Teachers’ Beliefs, Practices, and Multilingual Identity

As language classrooms worldwide become increasingly multilingual, teachers need to be able to implement multilingual teaching practices (MTPs) that draw on learners’ existing linguistic resources (García & Sylvan, 2011; Kirsch & Duarte, 2020). This chapter presents a teacher professional development (PD) project that utilized the construct of dominant language constellation (DLC) to investigate the impact of the PD on beliefs, MTPs, and multilingual identities of three teachers of English as an additional language (EAL). The data consisted of the following PD activities: (a) discussion of teacher’s own linguistic repertoire (pre-workshop interview), (b) teacher reflection on their own DLC (1st PD workshop), (c) group discussion about implementation of a DLC-focused lesson (2nd workshop), (d) DLC lesson planning and delivery, and (e) individual reflection on the DLC lessons (post-workshop interview). By illustrating how the language awareness, the teaching competence, and the multilingual identity of the three teachers became enhanced though PD, we argue that DLC is a tangible model that can alter teachers’ beliefs and practices relative to students’ home languages (HLs), enrich MTPs, and foster multilingual identities of both teachers and learners and as a result forge the multilingual turn in EAL education.