Imagined Community Falling Apart: A Case Study on the Transformation of Professional Identities of Novice ESOL Teachers in China

Abstract

& Many novice teachers experience a reality shock during the transition from teacher education programs to the first years of teaching, due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of authentic educational contexts (Veenman, 1984, p. 143). To better understand novice teachers in transition, research on teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) has explored their shifting behaviors and beliefs during the first years of teaching (Farrell, 2009). However, this line of research has rarely examined the transformation of professional identities of novice ESOL teachers in a comprehensive way that allows for a broader understanding of the reality shock from the teachers’ own perspectives —how they understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, how they understand possibilities for the future (Norton, 2000) during transition from teacher education programs to real-world teaching contexts. In order to address this gap in the literature, this article reports on a 3-year longitudinal case study of the transformation of the professional identities of four Chinese ESOL teachers during the first years of teaching in K–12