11th International Conference on Language Teacher Education

Plenary

How are novice teachers' classroom discursive practices influenced by history-in-person processes? In this plenary, the concept of history-in-person will be presented and related to teacher development, specifically the development of novice teacher's instructional talk-in-interaction. Thought-based and practice-based data sources of two novice teachers will be presented to understand how history is brought into the present in complex and unpredictable ways resulting in, at times, debatable discursive practices. Thus, both personal history and institutional constraints must figure into interpretations of why novice teachers interact with classes in the ways they do and in supporting beginning teachers' understanding of classroom talk. 

Richard Donato is Professor and Chair of the Department of Instruction and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh and holds joint appointments in the Departments of French and Italian, Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics. His research interests include early foreign language learning, sociocultural theory, classroom discourse analysis, and teacher education. His research on foreign language education earned him the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Modern Language Journal Paul Pimsleur award (1997 and 2006), the Northeast Conference Freeman Award (2004), and the French Institute of Washington Award (2003). In 2016, he won the University of Pittsburgh's Provost award for doctoral student research mentoring. He is the co-author of the books A Tale of Two Schools: Developing Sustainable Early Language Programs (2010) and Enacting the Work of Language Teaching: High Leverage Teaching Practices (2017).