Exploring Pre-Service English Teachers’ Professional Identity Through Digital Welcome Letter

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service English teachers’ perceptions of their professional identities through the process of composing digital welcome letter. In particular, the aim of this study was to examine how the participants reflected on their professional identity as they worked on their digital welcome letter and the effects of digitizing contents on their professional identity. A total of 35 undergraduate students participated in this study and their digital welcome letters, reflective response sheet, and interviews were collected as data. The triangulated data were analyzed according the categories suggested by Pennington and Richards (2016). The results showed that digital welcome letter encouraged the pre-service teachers to conduct anticipatory reflection (Conway, 2001) that allowed them to consider what type of identities they associate with the image of a “good” teacher. Furthermore, they became aware of complex configurations of their teacher identities that are intertwined with their foreign language learner identity. Digitizing their introduction allowed the pre-service teachers to reflect on how they can better communicate with their students as well as ways to build a positive and constructive rapport with their students in the future. Implications highlight the importance of teacher educators’ role in helping pre-service teachers navigate their developing professional identities and placing less emphasis on methodology-focused training.