Plurilingual Teacher Identity: Tensions and Negotiations Through Native English-Speaking Teachers’ Plurilingual Teaching Practices

This chapter discusses the diverging plurilingual teaching practices of Tom and Ella, two native English-speaking teachers (NEST) who teach English as a foreign language (EFL) at a university in South Korea, an ideologically charged English Language Teaching (ELT) context where monolingual English-only and native speaker ideologies circulate widely. Through a Vygotskian genetic analysis, the chapter reveals that while plurilingual teaching practices serve numerous beneficial pedagogical and affective classroom functions, these practices are not without tensions. Rather, the incorporation of Korean into their divergent teaching practices is found to be Tom and Ella’s agentive responses to language teacher identity negotiations and language teaching ideologies that are not only embedded in the local and societal context, but also socially and historically constructed as part of the instructors’ development as language learners and teachers. The chapter concludes with implications for language educators as well as curricula and policy makers.