Roles and models of English teachers in Kazakhstan

Abstract Roles and attitudes towards English in Kazakhstan can be seen through four strands of local and international heritages of education and cultures of language learning. Seen together with national policies, educational reforms, and linguistic contexts this comprises the English language learning environment. This is the contextual background against which we report findings regarding the professional and personal characteristics of ‘good’ English teachers in Kazakhstan. ‘Model’ teachers were portrayed with an expected traditional cognitive dimension of knowledge of English but this was complemented by social, affective, moral, and aesthetic dimensions. We refer to these dimensions in this article as ‘metafunctions’. Through interviews with 100 undergraduate students and 43 university English teachers, we analyzed participants’ attitudes towards English and their perceptions of the roles of English in Kazakhstan, where participants had mixed utilitarian, human development and patriotic attitudes toward English.