Seitsemän tapaa muistella opettajia

This study has been conducted as part of a research project entitled From Novice to Expert, and it is about teacher memories viewed from fresh starting points – as discursively constructed. Consequently, memories are considered a type of written or spoken texts (or extracts) that may vary from one context to another, as reflected in the linguistic and rhetorical choices made by those doing the remembering, and that may be used to serve a number of purposes. More specifically, the study to be reported on is an account of memories of former teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and the remembering was done in autobiographies of learning the language written by first-year university students. In their remembering, the students resorted to a total of seven interpretative repertoires, and, interestingly, the teacher was compared and contrasted with the learner within each repertoire, with the parties as a rule taking on complementary roles.