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The Dynamism of Teachers’ Identity: The Case of Iranian EFL Teachers
Afsaneh Ghanizadeh, Shima Abedi Ostad
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2016.11.001
Imam Reza International University, Mashhad, Iran
Recent conceptualizations of professional identity as an ongoing process of interpretation and re-interpretation of experiences demonstrate that it is dynamic and subject to an ongoing learning process. In effect, identity is essentially viewed as fluid, dynamic, recursive, and discursive process in which statements about actions are translated into statements about states, and vice versa. Having these standpoints in mind, the present paper aims at depicting the profile of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ professional identity. The second purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among the components of teachers’ professional identity as measured by Kao and Lin’s (2015) model comprising six latent factors of teachers’ professional identity: self-expectation (SE), teachers’ duties (TD), external influential factors (EF), pedagogy (PE), instructional skills and knowledge (SK), and teachers’ citizenship behavior (CB). This study also sought to scrutinize the dynamics of teachers’ identity in accordance with their teaching experience, gender, and educational level. For these purposes, 110 EFL teachers were chosen from different language institutes in Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran. The results indicated that SE received the highest value and EF obtained the lowest mean score in our sample. The highest correlation was observed between SK and PE, followed by the relationship between TD and PE. The results indicated that there were significant correlations between teachers’ teaching experience and all the teachers’ identity components. It was also found that there were statistically significant differences between male and females in four components of identity as follows: TD, PE, SK, and CB. The results showed that there were variations in teacher identity with regards to their educational level.
teachers’ professional identity, EFL teachers, teaching experience, educational level, gender
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