Analyzing the Participatory Repertoire of a U.S. Educated EFL Teacher in Saudi Arabia

The KSA has become a popular country for Americans to work as an EFL teacher in the recent years because of the payment and cultural experience (Hastings, 2012). Due to the wide social distance between the KSA and USA, the teachers had to adapt to the expectation and become legitimate participants (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the local communities. This qualitative case study includes turn-by-turn discourse analysis of the interview data collected from a U.S.-educated MA TESOL graduate, Amy, (born and raised in the USA) through the lens of Bakhtin's carnivalesque (1984). The study also included the interview with Hidy, who was born and raised in the KSA, as a reference to compare and contrast the data collected from Amy. The findings reveal that the U.S.-educated teacher, Amy, used laughter as a rhetorical tool in the interview to contest the cultural expectation of her gender role in the KSA. The findings suggest that cultural rules and taboos are constructed in situ through individual experience. [The author has presented this article at the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research Conference at Eastern Michigan University, USA, on February 7, 2016.]