Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity

There has been a strong and steady wave of language teacher identity (LTI) research as evidenced by recent special journal issues (e.g. Varghese, Motha, Trent, Park, and Reeves 2016; De Costa and Norton 2017a) and edited volumes (e.g. Cheung, Said, and Park 2015; Barkhuizen 2017). And as I write this review, another special journal issue (Yazan and Lindhal 2019, forthcoming) on TESOL teacher identity and two LTI-oriented conferences—the inaugural Conference on Language Teaching and Learning (https://www.eduhk.hk/ele/ltlci/) and the Eleventh International Conference on Language Teacher Education (http://carla.umn.edu/conferences/lte2019/call.html)—are being planned. Given this keen interest in LTI research, Gray and Morton’s Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity is decidedly refreshing because it provides an up-to-date account of how this vibrant segment of language teacher education has grown over the past few years. A unique contribution of this book is its fine-grained analysis of social interaction as the authors demonstrate how teacher identities are enacted in and through interaction. They balance this delicate and important task by connecting microanalyses with wider debates such as the neoliberal turn in language education (De Costa, Park, and Wee, in press).