The Development Of A Novice English Teacher’s Professional Identity

The current study aims to explore the construction of a new English teachers’ professional identity (positive evaluation of being a teacher) in her first two-year teaching experience in order to better understand the teachers’professional identity in Chinese context.The data is mainly collected from the new English teacher’s educational narratives of her two-year working experience. The narratives include daily communication, teaching activities and the teaching problems. In each semester, the participant was required to write16pieces short narratives, totally64in two years. And there are two pieces of self formative assessments, focusing on the thought of her work at the end of the each year as well. Apart from that, semi-structured interviews were carried out, with the questions prepared by the researchers beforehand.The qualitative research methods are employed in the process of the data analysis, which can be divided into four stages:first, reading of the data; second, coding the data based on four aspects of the inner structure proposed by Wei; third, drawing core concepts from the data and recoding the data again; fourth, labeling the data according to the classification of concepts and the time in order to find out the change of the teachers’professional identity at different stages; finally, exploring the influencing factors of the change according to semi-structure interviews. The results show that:1) The new English teacher has undergone self-identity change in her first two-year teaching experience. For professional values, she formed better and deeper understanding of it. For role values, her professional identity experienced two phases: from concern with the approval of colleagues and students to concern with their approval on her teaching abilities. For professional belonging, her professional identity experienced two stages:from paying more attention to the school environment to group belonging. For professional behavior inclination, the teacher emphasizes self-learning, and the emphasis shifted from observation to self-reflection.2) There are two types of the change:self-confidence change and enhancive change. The former one refers to the change from being lack of confidence to being full of confidence to deal with various teaching issues. The latter one refers to that the new English teacher has deeper and better understanding of teachers’profession and her cognitive, affective and behavioral competences are enhanced as a whole.3) The influencing factors can be divided into two categories:the external factors and the internal factors. The external factors include school physical environment, lectures related to education, teacher models and relationship with students and colleagues. The internal factors refer to the teacher’s self-reflection that includes reflection on action and reflection for action.4) This research also found that writing educational narratives is a good way to enhance the ability of self-reflection so as to promote professional identity formation.