Language Teacher Identity

This volume draws on empirical evidence to explore the interplay between language teacher identity (LTI) and professional learning and instruction in the field of TESOL. In doing so, it makes a unique contribution to the field of language teacher education. By reconceptualizing teacher education, teaching, and ongoing teacher learning as a continuous, context-bound process of identity work, Language Teacher Identity in TESOL discusses how teacher identity serves as a framework for classroom practice, professional, and personal growth. Divided into five sections, the text explores key themes including narratives and writing; multimodal spaces; race, ethnicity, and language; teacher emotions; and teacher educator-researcher practices. The 15 chapters offer insight into the experiences of preservice teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators in global TESOL contexts including Canada, Japan, Korea, Norway, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This text will be an ideal resource for researchers, academics, and scholars interested in furthering their knowledge of concepts grounding LTI, as well as teachers and teacher educators seeking to implement identity-oriented approaches in their own pedagogical practices.

This volume encompasses the range of research questions on language-related problems that arise in language teaching, learning and assessment. The [150] chapters are written by experts in the field who each offer their insights into current and future directions of research, and who suggest several highly relevant research questions. Topics include, but are not limited to: language skills teaching, language skills assessment and testing, measurement, feedback, discourse analysis, pragmatics, semantics, language learning through technology, CALL, MALL, ESP, EAP, ERPP, TBLT, materials development, genre analysis, needs analysis, corpus, content-based language teaching, language teaching and learning strategies, individual differences, research methods, classroom research, form-focused instruction, age effects, literacy, proficiency, and teacher education and teacher development. The book serves as a reference and offers inspiration to researchers and students in language education. An important skill in reviewing the research literature is following a study’s “plan of attack.” Broadly, this means that before accepting and acting upon the findings, one considers a) the research question (Is it clear and focused? Measurable?), b) the subjects examined, the methods deployed, and the measures chosen (Do they fit the study’s goal and have the potential to yield useful results?), and c) the analysis of the data (Do the data lead to the discussion presented? Has the author reasonably interpreted results to reach the conclusion?). Mohebbi and Coombe’s book, Research Questions in Language Education and Applied Linguistics: A Reference Guide, helps budding researchers take the first step and develop a solid research question. As the field of language education evolves, we need continual research to improve our instructional and assessment practices and our understanding of the learners’ language learning processes. This book with its remarkable 150 topics and 10 times the number of potential research questions provides a wealth of ideas that will help early career researchers conduct studies that move our field forward and grow our knowledge base. Deborah J. Short, Ph.D., Director, Academic Language Research & Training, Past President, TESOL International Association (2021-22) As a teacher in graduate programs in TESOL I frequently come across the frustration of students at centering their research interests on a particular topic and developing research questions which are worth pursuing so as to make a contribution to the field. This frustration stems from the fact that our field is so vast and interrelated, that it is often impossible to properly address all that interests them. Hence, I wholeheartedly welcome this most relevant and innovative addition to the research literature in the field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics. Coombe and Mohebbi have created a real tour de force that stands to inform budding researchers in the field for many years to come. Additionally, the cutting-edge depiction of the field and all it has to offer will no doubt update the research agendas of many seasoned researchers around the world. The 150 chapters are organized in a most powerful, yet, deceptively simple way offering a positioning within the topic, suggesting questions that might direct inquiry and offering a basic set of bibliographic tools to start the reader in the path towards research. What is more, the nine sections in which the chapters are organized leave no area of the field unexplored. Dr. Gabriel Díaz Maggioli, Academic Advisor, Institute of Education, Universidad ORT del Uruguay, President, IATEFL

This book presents the latest research on understanding language teacher identity and development for both novice and experienced researchers and educators, and introduces non-experts in language teacher education to key topics in teacher identity research. It covers a wide range of backgrounds, themes, and subjects pertaining to language teacher identity and development. Some of these include the effects of apprenticeship in doctoral training on novice teacher identity; the impacts of mid-career redundancy on the professional identities of teachers; challenges faced by teachers in the construction of their professional identities; the emerging professional identity of pre-service teachers; teacher identity development of beginning teachers; the role of emotions in the professional identities of non-native English speaking teachers; the negotiation of professional identities by female academics. Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research will appeal to academics in ELT/TESOL/applied linguistics. It will also be useful to those who are non-experts in language teacher education, yet still need to know about theories and recent advances in the area due to varying reasons including their affiliation to a teacher training institute; needs to participate in projects on language teacher education; and teaching a course for pre-service and in-service language teachers.

Analyses how different English language teacher identities and power relationships are oriented to and made relevant in social interaction.

Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research is the first book to present understandings of language teacher identity (LTI) from a broad range of research fields. Drawing on their personal research experience, 41 contributors locate LTI within their area of expertise by considering their conceptual understanding of LTI and the methodological approaches used to investigate it. The chapters are narrative in nature and take the form of guided reflections within a common chapter structure, with authors embedding their discussions within biographical accounts of their professional lives and research work. Authors weave discussions of LTI into their own research biographies, employing a personal reflective style. This book also looks to future directions in LTI research, with suggestions for research topics and methodological approaches. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers interested in language teacher identity as well as language teaching and research more generally.

This book explores the development of the first cohort of students to complete a new Bachelor of Education in English language teaching in the United Arab Emirates, theorizing the students' learning to teach in terms of the discursive construction of a teaching identity within an evolving community of practice.

This book provides insights for both native language teachers and local language teachers alike who conduct team-taught lessons by revisiting the topic of foreign assistant language teachers (ALTs), the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program, and team teaching. This book is innovative in that (a) it is the first to elucidate ALTs’ experiences comprehensively, across both historical time (i.e., prior to, during, and after the JET program) and social space (i.e., inside and outside the school), thereby revealing their multiple identities that they come to construct and reconstruct over time, and (b) it explores the meanings and perspectives of particular phenomena that ALTs experience within their specific social settings from their own individual points of view. This inquiry does this by using personal narrative accounts gathered from multiple participants. Through these narrative accounts, Hiratsuka formulates a conceptualization of ALT identity, an effort that has hitherto been neglected. As a consequence, this book offers several practical and empirical applications of the conceptualization to future endeavors involving native language teachers and those who engage with them, including the key stakeholders of local language teachers, their local boards of education, the governments, and language learners across the globe.

This edited volume, envisioned through a postmodern and poststructural lens, represents an effort to destabilize the normalized “assumption” in the discursive field of English language teaching (ELT) (Pennycook, 2007), critically-oriented and otherwise, that identity, experience, privilege-marginalization, (in)equity, and interaction, can and should be apprehended and attended to via categories embedded within binaries (e.g., NS/NNS; NEST/NNEST). The volume provides space for authors and readers alike to explore fluidly critical-practical approaches to identity, experience, (in)equity, and interaction envisioned through and beyond binaries, and to examine the implications such approaches hold for attending to the contextual complexity of identity and interaction, in and beyond the classroom. The volume additionally serves to prompt criticality in ELT towards reflexivity, conceptual clarity and congruence, and dialogue.