Abstract
Though teacher identity is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention in the literature on teacher education and teacher development, little information is available about the richness, fluidity and individuality of EFL teacher identities in various L2 settings. This preliminary case inquiry has echoed that comment by exploring qualitatively how language teacher identity features in the participant's categorization of herself as a professional during her school-to-work transition at a shadow school in hinterland China. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and reflection essays, the triangulated data were analyzed with thematic analysis in order to find categories of enacted identities and key factors that impacted Jane's teacher identity formation. The results indicate four identities existed: an attendant, a firefighter, a coolie and a tramp. The fundamental predicaments hovering over the green employer encompass an array of contextual factors, including (1) overwhelming anxieties for potential early student leavers; (2) overhuge workload and fluid working schedule; (3) endless non-teaching related commitments; (4) lack of career prospect and development ladder. The results of the study contribute to the understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of teacher identity influenced by sociocultural landscapes where language teachers are situated. The research suggests implications for teacher educators and stakeholders on how to transform a novice to a qualified EFL teacher within the ideology and discouraging discourse of a burgeoning privately-owned training market, and on how to mediate green teachers' agency and autonomy against the bottlenecks of their initial years of teaching.
Highlights
New entrants in their initial teaching years encounter a plethora of difficulties (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2013)
In contrast to most previous studies of teacher identity, which investigated teacher identity at traditional schools with semistructured interviews, this shadow school based study adopted interviews combined with reflection responses and classroom observation to examine how teacher identity features in a privately owned institution and the underlying factors impacting teacher identity formation
This shadow school-oriented preliminary case study found that in an actual teaching context, the instructor tended to undergo various identity conflicts and struggles, enacting negative identities. This finding suggests that we should examine the nature and factors in more specific and varied teaching contexts where they are embedded, some studies have been significant in understanding language teacher identity at intrapersonal and interpersonal levels (Trent, 2015)
Summary
New entrants in their initial teaching years encounter a plethora of difficulties (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2013). To gain a stable teacherhood necessitates transformative changes across affective, cognitive and motivational dimensions. A Case Inquiry of Teacher Identity paramount to guide and help new employees in shadow schools to navigate “induction” during the early years of teaching and negotiate the discrepancy between their personal and professional selves. The construct was assumed to be a critical research “lens” (Gee, 2000) to provide insights into the complex process of growing from a novice to an experienced teacher because choosing teaching as a career encompasses dimensions of individual qualities, expectations, values, beliefs, and talents (Richardson and Watt, 2006), as well as accommodating required social roles, responsibilities, policies, and classroom environments
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