EFL teachers’ positioning about functional diversity: a narrative study
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This study explores the reasoning and positioning of teachers who face Functionally Diverse (FD) students in their regular English classrooms. Positioning theory is key to understand the reasoning processes that teachers used to think of themselves when were invited to reflect upon their relations to functional diverse students. Throughout this study, teachers were exposed to write their own autobiographies with the main focus of generating reflection about their daily practices, dilemmas and thoughts that have not been seen as important or necessary. Autobiographies unveiled teachers’ struggles in their reasoning to refer and relate to functional diverse kids and their teaching practices. The collected data showed difficulties in the teachers’ expressions about their own brawls, mainly, factors such as: gaps in their teacher preparation feelings of frustration and fear, commitment and uncertainties about teaching and learning, special and differentiated treatment, lacks of interest. Normalizing and indifference practices, along with the use of an exclusionary language. Also memo writing ideas collected during participatory observation sessions exposed normalizing and indifference practices, the use of an exclusionary language, derision and jokes involving disabilities. This study is a contribution to The English foreign Language (EFL) field, particularly to the relation identity-language-teaching to Functional Diverse students (FDs) as an unexplored angle to shed light to teachers’ reasoning and positioning but also teachers’ struggles to teach in this scenarios.