APRIL 2013

ARTICLES
IN SEARCH OF TEACHER IDENTITY IN SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION
Bedrettin Yazan, Ali Fuad Selvi, University of Maryland, USA, & Baburhan Uzum, Michigan State University, USA
The considerable growth in the number of English language learners (ELLs), both in the United States and
across the world, has brought about a tremendous demand for more teachers of English and “more effective
approaches to their preparation and professional development” (Richards, 2008, p. 158). As a result, the role
assigned to the enterprise of Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) has become more prominent
during the last three decades, and the need for more research about SLTE in order to contribute to the
improvement of second language (L2) teaching has become apparent. This article first discusses how SLTE
grew as a field by responding to issues internal and external to Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages (TESOL) and then locates language teacher identity as an emerging area of research within SLTE.

INTERNAL CHANGES AND EXTERNAL FACTORS

SLTE has developed as a field by responding to issues both internal and external to the field of TESOL (Burns &
Richards, 2009). The internal changes mainly refer to research-based developments in such areas as L2
teacher cognition, reflective practice, critical pedagogy, knowledge about language, and teacher identity. These
lines of inquiry have all raised novel questions and necessitated the reconsideration of the practices of L2
teaching and SLTE. There are also powerful external factors influencing the way SLTE develops, such as
globalization and the ever-growing need for English in international communication settings, which brought
about the emergence of national policies regarding English Language Teaching (ELT), teacher education,
standards, and accountability (Burns & Richards, 2009). The rise of globalization and the unprecedented
demand for learning English have heavily influenced SLTE because they have led governments to create new
national English language policies and have created pressure for an increase in the quantity and quality of the
ELT force all over the world.

These internal changes and external pressures have made contributions to the development of SLTE. The
former has led the field of SLTE to reconsider existing theories and practices and has generated more research
into how L2 teachers learn to teach and acquire their knowledge base. The latter has spurred SLTE to seek
ways to meet the burgeoning need for an ever-larger ESOL teaching force and address the need to prepare
ESOL teachers to serve ELLs with diverse goals and needs in the settings influenced by emerging national
policies.

Internal Changes

Two seminal works (Freeman & Richards, 1996; Richards & Nunan, 1990) have promoted an exploration of
internal changes in SLTE with the reconsideration of L2 teacher learning, knowledge base, and teaching
practices in light of emerging research. These internal changes actually became a central issue in SLTE when
Freeman and Johnson (1998) revisited and reconceptualized the L2 teacher knowledge base, devoted to
language teacher education in the field of TESOL. Freeman and Johnson lament that SLTE has been mostly
shaped by “tradition and opinion” rather than “theoretical definitions, documented studies or researched
understandings” (p. 398). Their main argument is that SLTE can become more effective provided that the field
can present better documentation and understanding of L2 teacher learning, along with an agreed-upon
definition of language teaching. They find tenuous the transmission-oriented and product-oriented
assumptions that have undergirded the SLTE research and practice thus far. They maintain that these
assumptions have tended to capitalize “more on what teachers needed to know and how they could be trained
than on what they actually knew, how this knowledge shaped what they did, or what the natural course of their
professional development was over time” (p. 398). In their novel conceptualization of SLTE, they postulate a
systematic view of the knowledge base in which three main domains need to be addressed: “(a) the nature of
the teacher learner; (b) the nature of schools and schooling; and (c) the nature of language teaching” (p. 406).
They also stress the continual and critical interdependence among these domains through processes of
learning, socialization, and participation in and creation of communities of practice.

External Factors

Turning to the external factors the SLTE field has had to respond to, it can be found that English has acquired
an unparalleled position that no other language has had in the history of humankind. It is enjoying a dominant
status in business, technology, science, medicine, politics, telecommunication, the Internet, popular
entertainment, arts, and sports (Crystal, 2000; Graddol, 1997). This unprecedented status has been primarily
reinforced by globalization, which is a highly complicated and influential phenomenon permeating social,
economic, political, cultural, and language dimensions of societies all over the world. In order to actively
participate in the global economy and access the information and knowledge that constitute the foundation and
sources for both social and economic progress, governments are crafting new English teaching and teacher
education policies or making fundamental changes in the existing ones (Bottery, 2000; Kırkgöz, 2009), which
encourage individual citizens to equip themselves with English language skills.

TESOL educators internationally encounter new challenges due to the multitude of issues stemming from the
varieties of language use across world Englishes in all three Kachruvian circles (Nunan, 2001). Teacher
education is one of the areas that has confronted these novel challenges. The developments regarding English
as an international language and world Englishes have borne out a number of “concerns about the appropriate
initial preparation of language teachers, the standard of target language mastery to be attained by nonnative-
English-speaking teachers working in varied contexts, and the nature of the evolving knowledge and skill bases
needed by all teachers” (Bailey, 2001, p. 610). Hence, these major concerns regarding the content and
processes of educating ESOL teachers have entailed more attention in SLTE research.

As a consequence of these novel concerns confronting SLTE, three interlocked clusters of research have
received significant prominence in SLTE literature: (1) research concerned with the curriculum of SLTE (Bartels,
2009; Crandall, 2000; Graves, 2009; Johnson, 2000, Richards, 1998; Tedick, 2005), (2) research about
nonnative-English-speaking teachers as professionals in ELT (Braine, 2005, 2010; de Oliveira, 2011; Kamhi-
Stein, 2009; Llurda, 2005; Mahboob, 2010; Selvi, 2011), and (3) research regarding L2 teacher learning and the
knowledge base of SLTE (Crandall, 1999; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 1999; Richards, 1998; Snow,
2005; Tedick, 2005). These three emerging areas of research interacting with each other have played a critical
role in the growth of SLTE as a field, which has been igniting several promising sparks since the early 1990s
(Burns & Richards, 2009; Freeman, 2002; Kumaravedivelu, 2012).

WHY TEACHER IDENTITY MATTERS

As a common thread in the aforementioned clusters of SLTE research, L2 teacher identity has recently started
receiving researchers’ attention (Duff & Uchida, 1997; Johnston, 1999; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Morgan, 2004;
Pavlenko, 2003; Tsui, 2007; Varghese, 2001). L2 teacher identity has become a prominent theme in teacher
education because teacher identity formation holds a major role “as an integral part of teacher learning” (Tsui,
2011, p. 33). Because identity represents “a way of doing things” yet becomes adjusted according to “what is
legitimated by others in any social context" (Miller, 2009, p. 173), teacher identity casts a major influence on
many matters from how teachers learn to perform the profession, how they practice the theory and theorize their
practice, how they educate students, to how they interact and collaborate with their colleagues in their social
setting. Therefore, while delineating the scope of the L2 teacher knowledge base, Tedick (2005) mentions
teacher identity as a central theme that is subsumed under the “broad construct” of knowledge base (p. 1). This
is aligned with the novel direction “of much recent research in teacher education in seeking to portray teacher
knowledge not as an isolated set of cognitive abilities but as being fundamentally linked to matters such as
teacher identity and teacher development” (Johnston, Pawan, & Mahan-Taylor, 2005, pp. 53–54). Briefly, the
investigation of teacher identity construction can shine light on the way L2 teachers develop as professionals
while transitioning from a graduate or undergraduate student self to a teacher self.
Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson (2005) observe that the need for inquiry into L2 teacher identity has
appeared in the wake of developments in two lines of research about L2 teaching. First, classroom-based
research underscores that L2 learning classrooms are “complex places in which simplistic cause-effect
models of teaching methodology were inadequate” and that L2 teachers represent a prominent group of agents
playing a tremendous “role in the constitution of classroom practices” (p. 22). This line of thought has been
supported by the inquiries into teacher beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes, which view teacher identity as a
significant factor in shaping the way L2 teaching is executed in an actual teaching context (Kanno & Stuart,
2011; Singh & Richards, 2006; Varghese et al., 2005). Second, the body of research looking at sociocultural and
sociopolitical aspects of teaching accentuates that various dimensions of identity are of paramount importance
in L2 classrooms and that the way an L2 teacher positions himself or herself vis-à-vis the learners in the
classroom and the broader sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts is quite crucial in terms of classroom
performance (Duff & Uchida, 1997; Singh & Richards, 2006; Uzum, in press; Varghese et al., 2005).

In light of classroom-based research and the studies investigating sociocultural and sociopolitical facets of L2
teaching, understanding the enterprise of L2 teaching and learning entails understanding L2 teachers, that is,
having “a clearer sense of who they are: the professional, cultural, political, and individual identities which they
claim or which are assigned to them” (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 22). These two lines of inquiry have drawn
attention to how the different facets of L2 teacher identity play a determining role in the implementation of
teaching practices. In other words, identity constitutes a framework through which teachers form their own ideas
of their beings, actions, and understandings concerning their profession and their place in social contexts.
These ideas impact the way they execute their teaching practices in L2 classrooms. Thus, contributing to the
conception of teachers’ identity as a basis for their decision making and meaning making throughout L2
teaching practices, classroom-based research, and inquiries into sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of
SLT have created the basis for L2 teacher identity as an emerging field of research in SLTE.

CONCLUSION

Recurrent clarion calls have been voiced in SLTE literature for more attention to understanding how L2 teachers
learn to teach their subject matter (Freeman, 1989; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Freeman & Richards, 1996).
Multiple scholars (e.g., Freeman, 2007; Johnston et al., 2005; Tsui, 2007) have directed particular attention to
the paucity of research on how L2 teachers construct their professional identity with regard to their learning-to-
teach process and knowledge base. The questions that need to be put under scrutiny are how L2 teacher
learners learn to become professional teachers, what experiences in practicum and coursework contribute to
their identity formation, and what roles their experiences in induction years play in their identity building.

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Bedrettin Yazan is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Second Language Education
and Culture Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include second
language teacher identity, practicum practices of preservice ESOL teachers, English as an international
language, second language learner motivation from a poststructuralist perspective, and issues regarding accent
in TESOL.

Bab urhan Uzum is a doctoral candidate in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State University
and is an English instructor in the Intensive English Program. His research interests include second language
acquisition, language socialization, sociocultural theories on learning, second language teacher education, and
interdisciplinary approaches to learning and teaching. His dissertation research is on foreign language teachers'
socialization into the U.S. educational context.

Ali Fuad Selvi is a research associate and the interim coordinator of TESOL programs at the University of
Maryland. He is also the chair elect of the NNEST (Nonnative English Speakers in TESOL) Interest Section. His
research interests include the glob al spread of English as an international language and its implications for
language learning, teaching, teacher education, and policy realms; issues related to nonnative English
speakers in TESOL; and second language teacher education.