earticle

영어

The present article reports on a follow-up study that highlights the lived experiences of English teachers who took a critical pedagogy class in a teacher education program and now work in multiple contexts of English education in Korea. Through follow-up interviews with nine teachers who spoke highly of their experience in a critically oriented graduate seminar and were able to develop a positive teacher identity, the study explores how these positive experiences manifest in real world classrooms situated within larger sociopolitical and historical contexts. Working within a qualitative research paradigm, I collected and analyzed data from multiple semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that the teachers’ renewed professional identity as legitimate teachers of English held strong, leading them to take a more active role in the classroom and to use English with confidence. Some, however, confessed they could not help feeling self-conscious while speaking English in public in spite of their renewed confidence, given the widespread prejudice towards accented English in Korea. In the previous study, the teachers expressed a determination to educate their students from a critical perspective, introducing not only the concept of world Englishes but also the colonial discourses attached to English and their negative consequences. Despite this resolution, the teachers found it difficult to implement critical pedagogy in their classrooms owing to various restrictions in Korean primary and secondary school setting, such as the prescribed curriculum, the college entrance system, and students’ lack of interest.