ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction: Exploring Teacher Roles and Domains of Expertise

Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin,Hatice Celebi

doi:10.26858/ijole.v4i2.10655

Abstract

In this study, we direct our focus to identity construction in an English language teaching (ELT) teacher education program. We explore the teacher roles in which student teachers are struggling to position themselves comfortably and the teacher expertise domains (subject matter, didactics, and pedagogy) that they are dedicating themselves to improving. To address our research focus, we have collected reflections and survey responses from 18 student teachers in an ELT education department. Our findings indicate that ELT student teachers find it difficult to position themselves as experts in and about the English language and that they feel a need to be equipped with expertise first and foremost in the subject matter, and then in didactics, followed by pedagogy. These results imply that in ELT teacher education, certain language ideologies are still prevalent and need to be dealt with by teacher educators for transformative outcomes in education.

Highlights

Providing opportunities for student teachers to inquire about and engage in teacher identity construction is crucial since this catalyzes a process for them “to become members of particular communities, such as school” (Vetter, Hartman, & Reynolds, 2016, p. 309)
We asked English language teaching (ELT) student teachers to reflect on six main teacher roles: facilitator, assessor, planner, resource developer, information provider, and role model (Harden & Crosby, 2000) to see how they position themselves within the personalprofessional I-positions, as in “I as a facilitator,” “I as an learning as an assessor,” “I as a planner,” and so on; we investigated where the student teachers feel they stand in terms of the teacher expertise domains in the first years of their education program and where they want to stand in the future as teachers
Based on our findings, we argue that such academic questioning has not yet penetrated ELT teacher education programs, at least not to the extent that ELT student teachers have started to question monoglossic versus heteroglossic perspectives in their identity construction, as reflected by their responses to the teacher role and teacher expertise domains

Summary

Introduction

Providing opportunities for student teachers to inquire about and engage in teacher identity construction is crucial since this catalyzes a process for them “to become members of particular communities, such as school” (Vetter, Hartman, & Reynolds, 2016, p. 309). Providing opportunities for student teachers to inquire about and engage in teacher identity construction is crucial since this catalyzes a process for them “to become members of particular communities, such as school” One way of giving overt attention to identity construction is reflective practice. As a result of this conceptualization of identity, reflective practice is considered to have emerged from philosophical theories on the role of language as “not reflecting or representing the reality but actively constructing it,” meaning that “...identity manifests in discourse” Reflective practice took two forms for the English language teaching (ELT) student teachers who participated in our study. One form was through writing reflective journal entries and the other was through giving responses to a survey that the student teachers completed as they explored their identity construction in terms of teacher expertise domains

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Discussion

Conclusion