An autoethnography: and... what about us? Teachers facing students’ disengagement

Abstract

“This thesis is based on my own teaching experience when teaching English to disaffected learners. The present autoethnographic research was carried out in order to connect my personal experience into the Language Teaching profession. This paper addresses the description of a foreign language teaching situation, and it focuses on exploring the way that teachers live the disengagement of their learners during class sessions. The main aim is to achieve a cultural understanding. It is not just focused on myself, as an isolate case, but through an autoethnographic study, I invite the language teaching community to identify these conflicts on themselves and to think about it. In order to fulfil the objective of this research, I began with a personal reflection about the identified confrontation of new facts and past experiences. Some classes were video-recorded in order to observe the context of interaction and to be able to identify whether there were some behavioral patterns which were conditioning the lack of students’ engagement. Finally, a short questionnaire was applied to the teacher but also to the learners in order to be able to know what the other members had experienced during the term.”