Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research

This book presents the latest research on understanding language teacher identity and development for both novice and experienced researchers and educators, and introduces non-experts in language teacher education to key topics in teacher identity research. It covers a wide range of backgrounds, themes, and subjects pertaining to language teacher identity and development. Some of these include: the effects of apprenticeship in doctoral training on novice teacher identity; the impacts of mid-career redundancy on the professional identities of teachers; challenges faced by teachers in the construction of their professional identities; the emerging professional identity of pre-service teachers; teacher identity development of beginning teachers; the role of emotions in the professional identities of non-native English speaking teachers; the negotiation of professional identities by female academics. Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research will appeal to academics in ELT/TESOL/applied linguistics. It will also be useful to those who are non-experts in language teacher education, yet still need to know about theories and recent advances in the area due to varying reasons including their affiliation to a teacher training institute; needs to participate in projects on language teacher education; and teaching a course for pre-service and in-service language teachers. the effects of apprenticeship in doctoral training on novice teacher identity; the impacts of mid-career redundancy on the professional identities of teachers; challenges faced by teachers in the construction of their professional identities; the emerging professional identity of pre-service teachers; teacher identity development of beginning teachers; the role of emotions in the professional identities of non-native English speaking teachers; the negotiation of professional identities by female academics. This chapter explores how teachers construct themselves as "particular types of professionals", and take up their teacher identity as a project of continuous "becoming" over time. Furthermore, teachers mediate their stories of self with the cultural and institutional expectations of what it means to be a teacher. Conceptualizing teacher identity through a Bakhtinian framework is premised on a dialogic approach to studying the relationship between "self" and "other". Dialogical rhetoric, as a concept, is an umbrella term from which to consider all text as interactive in nature. Bakhtin's term, heteroglossia, means "many-voicedness" and recognizes that all language is ideologically saturated and stratified. Veronica's Teaching Philosophy statement can be considered as an instrument designed to transmit information about her teaching practices and teacher identity. The term genre becomes a key concept in attending to the nature of local-level influences, as genre refers to not just the forms of texts, but the work these texts actually do in discourse communities. This chapter describes the different aspects of teacher identity in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in terms of a frames model, building on related prior applications of the notion of framing to English language teaching and to program development and management. It discusses the two categories of the model: Practice-centered/Contextual Frames of Teacher Identity in TESOL. The first set of frames represents teacher identity in TESOL in terms of different orientations to the practices involved in TESOL work. The global facet of TESOL teacher identity connects to content and pedagogical knowledge, as it requires the teacher to be knowledgeable about different varieties of English and conscious of what variety of English is being taught and how it is being taught. The different framings of TESOL work offer different perspectives from which both future teachers and those already teaching can examine aspects of their work-related identity and map a course for change and career development.