Instructors of Adult English as an Additional Language (EAL) in British Columbia: Shared Experiences in the Contact Zone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, I examine the lived experiences of English as an additional language (EAL) instructors who are teaching adults in private language schools, immigrant English programs and post-secondary EAL programs in British Columbia (BC), Canada. I conceptualize EAL teaching as a contact zone (Pratt, 1992), where multiple forces (such as neoliberalism and professional and educational discourses) collide and force instructors to (re)negotiate their teacher identities (Singh & Doherty, 2004). I use autoethnographic data and teacher narratives, combined with demographic survey results and existing literature, to create a rich and complex picture of this under-examined teaching context. Patterns of struggle for instructors emerged in relation to: wages and working conditions, marginalization within programs and institutions, teaching observations, professionalism, and the use of teacher work for “infinitely scalable” profit. I offer implications for individual instructors, professional organizations, and EAL teacher education programs, as well as for further study. Lastly, I suggest possibilities for instructors to create change for themselves and for our profession in the contact zone of BC EAL education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".