Abstract
Teacher professional identity (TPI) is a characteristic of a teacher, which should be developed in a long, consistent, and progressive process and usually shapes in any specific educational and social context. In addition to several factors influencing TPI, such as university education and empowerment courses, experience seems to play a significant role. Moreover, the role of psychological factors is highly undeniable in the formation and development of TPI. Attributional style (AS) is defined as the consistent way by which people can explain the reasons for the occurrence of good or bad events. Besides considering ASs as one of the crucial variables for academic success, it can be regarded as one of the aspects of shaping one’s identity in general and the teacher’s identity in particular. In order to study the relationship between AS and TPI of teachers regarding their experience, two questionnaires were distributed among 317 Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) teachers, and about 80% returned them. The researchers ran correlational analyses and they came up with a positive and significant relationship (p = 0.04) between TPI and teacher attributional styles (TASs) of teachers. Moreover, experienced teachers proved to have a significant difference from novice teachers regarding their TPIs. The findings of this study would hopefully be advantageous for teacher educators to educate pre-service teachers by ways of constructing identity, and they may be applicable for Iranian EFL teachers to know and focus on different aspects of their professional identity. Moreover, they learn how to manage the intervening factors and shape and empower different domains of their PI, such as teaching experience, by means of exploring and knowing their ASs.
Highlights
Among the multiple roles any teacher is required to play in the classroom is an individual with the high level of proficiency, strong and updated tools, and information necessary to empower learners in different levels (Archana and Rani, 2017)
A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was performed to measure the normality of data distribution
After cleaning the data collected from 317 participants who returned the questionnaires, the answers of 40 participants were removed and 277 teachers were kept in the study
Summary
Among the multiple roles any teacher is required to play in the classroom is an individual with the high level of proficiency, strong and updated tools, and information necessary to empower learners in different levels (Archana and Rani, 2017). Among the multitude factors germane to teacher characteristics, it seems that psychological factors play the most significant role, such as attributional styles (ASs), motivation, and self-efficacy. Professional identity can be considered as an important dimension of teachers’ characteristic, which has to be developed in a long, continuous, and ongoing process, and usually happens in contextual settings. Varghese (2006) describes identity as “the influences on teachers, how individuals see themselves, and how they enact their profession in their settings.”. 2) found the predictability power of some components—awareness of one’s personality as a representative of a certain profession. Another critical component is attempting to find meaning within the respective profession, which ends up in the third component, which is the professional ambitions and motivation one has
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