Becoming a TESOL Practitioner: Disciplinary Languaging and the Socialization of International Students in UK Higher Education

This article proposes the concept of disciplinary languaging to account for the regulated forms of communication that are characteristic of TESOL master's preparatory programs in the UK. It does so with a view to the effects on the socialization of international students who are attracted by the global promotion of such programs and the promises of English teaching careers but who, nonetheless, are confronted with uncertainties arising from the interplay between the norms and values of TESOL as a discipline taught in UK higher education, on the one hand, and the changing demands of labor markets transnationally, on the other. Drawing on a 1-year ethnographic study, it adopts a trajectory-based sociolinguistic lens and focuses on the case of Lily, a Chinese international student enrolled in a TESOL master's program at a major university in the UK. Lily's engagement with TESOL's disciplinary languaging shaped her own positioning both as a university student and as a Chinese English teacher in significant ways. The analysis shifts the attention away from abstract considerations on what makes a “good” teacher, toward locally emerging practices and logics within which social actors make sense of TESOL preparatory programs and of the process of becoming English teaching practitioners in China.