Understanding foreign English teachers (FETs)’ identity negotiation and enactment

Abstract

Over the past two decades, identity has been used as a significant analytical lens for understanding schools and society. In the field of education, a growing number of studies have been devoted to language teacher identities since the late 90s, aiming to understand the complexity of language teaching and how teachers confronted and navigated tensions and contradictions in their professional development. The previous studies have revealed that language teacher identity is a dynamic process that involves constant negotiation, exploration, reflection and the teacher’s situational decision-making and responses to different school and classroom contexts. However, little research has been conducted to specifically explore the ongoing process of identity negotiation and enactment while language teachers are engaged in different social interactions within and beyond the school and classroom contexts. The current study fills in this gap. Drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives, this research aimed to contribute to an in-depth understanding of the nature of FETs’ identity negotiation and enactment through examining FETs’ lived experiences of negotiating and enacting their identities in a variety of social and environmental contexts. A narrative multiple-case study design was employed to investigate the FETs’ individual identity negotiation experiences. Five cases (FETs) were selected by using purposeful sampling strategy. The participants’ narratives of identity negotiation were mainly collected from a series of narrative interviews. Observations were also interwoven with interviewing to build up a holistic picture and an in-depth understanding of the cases. The participants’ narratives provided detailed descriptions of the ways in which FETs negotiated and enacted different identities in a variety of situations. The analytical results of the five FETs’ stories allowed the identification of five enactment types, including (i). Purely situational enactment; (ii). Behavioral confirmation (respond to the situation); (iii). Behavioral confirmation (respond to the perceivers); (iv). Verification of identity; (v). Identity negotiation stalemate. The findings also suggest that identity negotiation is a process of the negotiators’ interpretation of their situations, which involves a mental process of evaluating the appropriateness and advantages of enacting a particular identity by taking account of and examining a broad spectrum of contextual factors (e.g. ideological, social, institutional and personal). The interplay of these factors has an impact on the degree of identity salience, which is associated with the likelihood of particular identities to be enacted in particular situations. Not only does this thesis contribute to the existing knowledge of language teachers’ identities, especially regarding their experiences of identity negotiation while teaching abroad, but also it opens up the possibility of creating dialogues among multiple theoretical perspectives for the purpose of elucidating the complex nature of FETs’ identity negotiation and thus extends the theoretical understanding of identity negotiation process. Also, it foregrounds the role of narrative stories in the research of language teacher identity. Furthermore, this study offers practical suggestions for the FETs and their host schools, and it also provides implications for future research.