Spirituality and English Language Teaching: A Christian Exploration

In recent years there have been discussions on Christian faith and its influences on English language teaching. Topics in these discussions have ranged from how Christian faith effects English language teaching on the social level, the institutional level, and the individual level (Smith, 2007) to English teaching as a Christian mission (Snow, 2003). In this book, the author focuses on how the Christian faith of influences individual North American English language teaching scholars. For this purpose, this book presents a qualitative study of five distinguished Christian TESOL scholars¿ faith and their English language teaching career. Using the interview data, the study explores how the Christian faith of these scholars influence their understanding of English education in general and more specifically how their Christian faith influences their decisions, choices and actions in the classroom. The author concludes that Christian faith permeates every aspect of these Christian scholars¿ professional development including vision, motivation, problem-solution, decision making, and personal relationships with students.

Dr. Mingyan Hong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Purdue University. She recieved her Ph.D. in English from Purdue University August 2008.