A Study On English Teachers’ Identity In Rural Senior High School

English as a Foreign Language teacher identity(EFL teacher identity henceforth)refers to self-assertion and self-identification from EFL teachers which are closely linked to EFL teacher’s professional development.Those English teachers in Chinese rural senior high schools are confronted with many dilemmas,such as low income,poor professional development condition,and low social strata,thus making EFL teacher identity a problem worth concerning and considering.Built on the existing foundations,the research is designed to investigate 101 English teachers who come from Guangxi rural senior high schools by using questionnaire and supplementary interview.This study seeks to answer the following questions:(1)What is the general situation and problems of EFL teacher identity in rural senior high school?(2)Are there any differences between EFL teacher identity in rural senior high school among gender,age,marriage status,year of teaching,professional title,position,and teaching grades? If any,what are they?(3)What are the causes of the problems of EFL teacher identity in rural senior high school?After analysis and discussion,the results reveal that:(1)101 EFL teachers in rural senior high school own a high level identity and there is no deficiency in it.But there is room for improvement.For career identity,English subject does not show an apparent feature,some teachers do not want to mention information like working place when doing self-introduction,and male teachers own a lower level sense of belonging than female teachers.With regard to major identity,rural English teachers neither can always teach English-speaking countries’ cultures in class,nor can always adopt the communicative method to teach English.Besides,they can not always use English continuously and fluently in class.When it comes to personal identity,EFL teachers do not always feelpowerful and energetic when they are teaching English,and they sometimes feel it difficult to manage students in the classroom and do not always do well in characteristic-based teaching activity design.For situated identity,there exists some difficulty for teachers to have a dialogue with the school authorities on an equal footing,and the school authority does not really care about teachers’ welfare,and EFL teachers own a positive attitude towards the English reform but still worry about it.(2)EFL teachers in rural senior high school did not show a significant difference among age,marital status,year of teaching,professional title,position and teaching grades.However,on the aspect of gender,it has significance in the dimension of sense of belonging.(3)the causes of EFL teacher identity problems in rural senior high school might be the following: in the dimension of career identity,teachers and students are lack of the opportunities to practice English language through communication;environmental dissatisfaction prevent teachers’ inclination to mention their working place;sex-ratio imbalance makes men English teachers do not feel the advantages in quantity;male teachers suffer from the financial burdens more heavily than female teachers;far home-school distance makes male teachers feel lonely when parents need them.In the dimension of major identity,pressure from Chinese Gaokao and students’ poor language foundation decides the teaching content and methods EFL teachers adopted in their pedagogical process.In the dimension of personal identity,teachers suffer the pressure from work and life;many students in rural areas are left-behind children or come from single-parent families which makes them do not get enough discipline.In the dimension of situated identity,rural schools are lack of humanistic care about teachers;the lack of educational resources in Guangxi contributes to the delay of English teaching reform.The following implications are presented according to the findings:(1)teachers need to pay more attention to students’ backgrounds,try to improve themselves through all kinds of methods,and take some extracurricular resources like local knowledge into class.(2)humanized management mode and encourage mechanisms are welcome in rural schools,and support in the construction of teachers’ practice community from school is needed.(3)guiding policies made by teacher education authorities can focus on involving more male teachers,and the power of patterns are supposed to be used correctly by thehelp of social media.Some limitations of this study are also presented to make some suggestions for future research.