Dr Julie Waddington
Lecturer (Professor Serra Húnter) in Language Education at the University of Girona
Research focus on foreign language teaching in childhood education and questions related to learner and teacher identity.
About
Dr Julie Waddington is Lecturer (Professora Serra Húnter) in Language Education at the University of Girona. Her research focuses on foreign language teaching in childhood education and questions related to learner and teacher identity. She has published widely on language education in journals such as Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development; Cambridge Journal of Education; Language, Culture and Curriculum; System; ELT Journal; and European Early Childhood Education. She is completing a book for Routledge on one of her main research interests: Questioning the native speaker construct in teacher education, to be published in 2024. She is an Executive Board Member of the international network ELLMEnet (https://www.ellmenet.com/), which aims to promote and consolidate research in early multilingual education around the world.
Funds of knowledge and identity in language education
As a second language writing (SLW) teacher educator-researcher, I have consistently been interested in assisting both pre-service and in-service teachers in enhancing their instructional, assessment and feedback practices. My research pursuits have led me to trace the development of several school teachers in Hong Kong (Lee, 2010, 2013; Lee & Yuan, 2021), deepening my curiosity about how SLW teachers develop, as well as what constitutes SLW teacher expertise. This has coincided with the rise of interest in this significant concept in the field of SLW, initially explored at the 2016 Symposium on Second Language Writing, followed by Hirvela’s works on expertise in SLW teacher education (Hirvela, 2000) and in the teaching of argumentative writing (Hirvela, 2021), and more recently, the Disciplinary Dialogues section of the Journal of Second Language Writing (Hirvela & Belcher, 2022). My recent work (Lee & Yuan, 2021) on “Understanding L2 writing teacher expertise”, referred to as the “first substantial published study of L2 writing teacher expertise” (Hirvela & Belcher, 2022, p.2), is one of the first, though limited attempts, to conceptualize SLW teacher expertise. In this presentation, I share my recent thoughts on the topic and present an evolving framework on SLW teacher expertise. I also discuss the implications of the framework for teacher education and professional development, and suggest areas for further research.