| Recent years have witnessed that the number of returnees has increased dramatically.In order to build a world-class system of Chinese higher education,various programmes have been initiated to recruit overseas-educated academics to upgrade their faculty pool.A review of the literature shows that few studies have been done to examine the dynamic process of professional identity construction and development of returnees.This study examines the way overseas returned EFL teachers negotiate their professional identities and professional practices as they renegotiate the existing university rules,cultures,and practices.This study adopts qualitative narrative methodology to explore the daily experiences of the four early-career EFL returnee teachers.It endeavors to explore the academic experiences and their professional identity development as well as their ways of connecting and bringing about changes in their working communities.Major findings of this study are as follows: firstly,overseas academic training laid out the foundations for professional identity and at the same time complicate their professional lives at home environment.They have experienced identity shift from doctoral students to EFL teachers though “learning by doing” and develop their professional identity during their negotiation with various kinds of communities.Their professional identities have been under changes from underdevelopped researchercentred identities to multiple identities,which manily include teaching and researching roles.Secondly,the process of professional identity development is involved during their struggles between teaching and researching identities,the interplay between reification and negotiation of meanings,and the integration with communities and personal reconstruction of identities.In terms of teaching roles,they construct teacher identity by localizing their Western education for use in Chinese classrooms and exerting their agency in combining global appropriacy and local appropriation.In terms of researching roles,they adopt various coping strategies,such as conformability,adjustment and adherence to develop their identity by integrating them into both local and international communities.Thirdly,teachers' agency and reflexivity play significant roles in the construction of professional identities which are to a certain extent subject to being constrained by structure.The teachers who possess acdamic capital exert agency to negotiate with the contexts and display their active roles to manage identity dilemmas to develop their identity.Besides,this study also shows that reflexivity is one of the ways of understantding themselves and constructing professional identity.Last but not the least,the study reveals that social contexts,institutional contexts,interpersonal and personal factors have influenced their professional identity development.The academic environment and teaching environment play important roles in Chinese university EFL teachers' identity construction.Interpersonal factors and institutional environment exert more influence on the identity.How and to what extent the contexts of each category influence individual teachers vary according to the teachers' personality,their cognition and interaction with the environment,their agency and the situation they are faced with.Besides,their professional identity development displays different trajectories affecting by personal and institutional factors.On the basis of the findings,the study puts forward a tentative theoretical model about EFL returnee teachers' professional identity development.The model proposes that professional identity development is a complex and dynamic process and is the interpretation and reinterpretation of their experiences,which involves the interplay of cognition,knowledge,practice,Chinese higher education environment and academic communities.This study provides implications for the professional development of both returnees and EFL teachers and sheds light on future related studies. |
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