Taking a ‘stance’ as an Indonesian teacher

Abstract The rise of online multimedia resources in formal and informal learning offers new opportunities for language education and a new site for applied linguistics research. Rich data from Indonesian ‘teacher-YouTubers’ indicate their videos address symbolic language freed from the formal setting of a physical classroom, though shaped by the online environment. Teacher-YouTubers in this study take on the identity work of self and addressee reference in all sorts of ways; using standard forms which draw on the symbolic power of national policy, forms with regional, cosmopolitan stereotypic meaning, through to (awkwardly) humorous forms targeting student engagement. Statistical description of the corpus and qualitative analysis of stance-taking behaviours reveal that teacher-YouTubers model pronoun use beyond standard language forms and explore how pronoun choices impact meaning in different contexts. The pedagogical practices examined address the imperative of developing intercultural awareness while empowering students to both understand and negotiate the construction of stance to express their own identity. Results suggest the diverse identities and competencies of teachers may broaden and enliven the Indonesian language teaching space, from the classroom to curriculum development. This study also indicates that the stance framework combined with statistical analysis of language has potential to enable rich description of how language teaching, variation, multilingualism, and identity work interact in applied linguistics more broadly.