ABSTRACT
My interest in distance language teaching was sparked through a series of informal encounters in early 1983. For the previous fi ve years I had worked as a lecturer in New Zealand, Thailand, and then China teaching English for university preparation (as it was called) and, alongside this, lecturing in linguistics and methodology for language teachers. These roles as language teacher, lecturer, and teacher educator had all taken place in traditional face-to-face settings. In March 1983 I returned to New Zealand to take up the position of lecturer in linguistics and second language teaching at a “dual mode” university, meaning that courses were taught in diff erent modes for what were called internal and extramural (distance) students. I settled into my offi ce and set to work, feeling very unsure as to how I was going to do the “other” half of my work, the distance part. Further along the corridor were the teachers of “modern languages”—French, German, Japanese, and soon Chinesewho also taught the same curriculum face-to-face and at a distance. As I got to know them I became intrigued by their commentaries on these two very diff erent teaching worlds, and their views of what that entailed. They often spoke of how they encouraged students to work with the challenges and limitations of distance language learning environments-whether in lighthouses, on remote farms, at home with young children, or in the multitude of sites and life roles (and identities) through which they pursued their learning. By many popular accounts at the time they, the students and teachers, were doing the impossible: teaching and learning languages by distance, rather than in face-to-face settings. At that time, too, defi nitions of distance education framed learners as remote from the institution, seen as the seat of learning. Yet I was already aware that the teachers saw themselves as remote from the sites of learning and that much of their work (and the challenge
in their work) was to bridge that distance-largely through feedback on assignments (often using audio cassettes), letters, phone calls, and the face-to-face contact courses that took place each semester. In this chapter I’ll trace something more of my search into this “other” way of being a language teacher, and the contribution of that inquiry to contemporary understandings of language teachers’ everyday lifeworlds and identities.
