“I Had Dual Feelings”: (Re)Storying With a Rural South Korean English Teacher

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes (or re‐stories) intrapersonal ideological tensions of a rural South Korean English teacher, Yeonghyeon 1 , as she negotiates competing discourses across local, national, and global scales within the context of a semi‐structured interview. Drawing from heteroglossia , antenarrative , and scale , I analyze reported speech to re‐story Yeonghyeon's ambiguous antenarrative of “dual feelings” about teaching English in a vocational high school. These tensions reflect ideological assemblages shaped by global ideologies of English as symbolic capital, national‐level ideologies of neoliberal tracking and test‐oriented curricula, and local scales of student disengagement—ideologies Yeonghyeon at times reifies, at times resists, and at times contradicts. This paper contributes to applied linguistics by foregrounding scalar politics within intrapersonal narrative analysis while advocating for methodological antenarrative‐driven storytelling as a counterbalance to (over)coded thematic analysis. It also calls for critical researcher presence in narrative inquiry, positioning interviews as co‐constructed spaces of ideological negotiation and researchers as perceiving, co‐storytelling subjects.