Teachers’ Accounts of Language Variations

Abstract

This paper focuses on teachers' stigmatizing perspectives of their students' nonstandard varieties of Portuguese. Theoretically, the study was grounded on Personal Construct Psychology, Perspective Transformation in Teacher Education, Transformative Bidialectalism and Critical Language Awareness. The objectives were to jointly access and assess the teachers’ implicit theories about nonstandard language and to verify to what extent these theories affected their classroom pedagogy. My research questions turned to how the participating teachers understood nonstandard language; and to how their understandings are reflected on their language teaching. The viewing of the teachers’ videotaped classes and Repertory Grid activities inspired reflective conversations with the two teacher participants on their language and classroom experiences. These conversations were audio-recorded, transcribed and their analysis followed the thematizing approach of Hermeneutic Phenomenology. The study revealed teachers’ implicit theories about language variation defining pedagogies based on deficit and standard grammar perspectives. These pedagogies are in constant interaction with the teachers’ lived experiences, the contextual restrictions of schools and the limitations of teacher education programs.