The constitution of the language teacher’s memory: teaching and learning images that resound over his speech and practice

Abstract

This paper aims to relate the language teachers’ memory process to their narratives, which can reveal some ways in which their subjectivity is produced. Through their narratives, which consist of fragments of memory organized in an apparent logic, the teacher’s self searches for an authorization to occupy a social place. The representations that he builds about himself and about the world are, therefore, articulated with memory processes and unconscious formations. Analyzing the linguistic materiality obtained in open interviews carried out with undergraduate English teachers, we intend to identify and discuss some of the processes that emerge from their narratives, searching for some possible interpretations, based on some psychoanalytic concepts and on a discoursive perspective. We can conclude that memory is a process under construction, which can create new significant relations each time it is accessed, and, considering the studies of undergraduate language teachers´ subjectivity, their narratives can reveal some representations of language and of teaching-learning process which affect the subject, his teaching behavior and his way of facing English language.