Teacher self-disclosure in adult ESL curriculum

Teacher self-disclosure (TSD) in second language education curricula includes a teacher's social and personal experiences, family, opinions, likes and dislikes, and identity as contexts and examples for teaching vocabulary, grammar, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Using contexts from the teacher's self-disclosure, language learners can connect to their new communities and social situations associated with learning a second language. This study investigated the potential of TSD to support the intersection between second language teaching curriculum as a lexico-syntactic system with a more sociocultural communicative usage activity perspective. The analysis suggests that TSD provided authentic contextualizations for the grammar or vocabulary objectives being taught. For their part, the teachers spontaneously integrated TSD, demonstrating their curriculum-making abilities by providing meanings and cultural insights not readily available in the standardized lesson.