An Exploratory Study On Initial Professional Identify Construction Of Non-normal University Educated English Teachers

2010has seen the birth of new English teachers in primary and secondary schools whograduated from non-normal universities as undergraduates and studied two years of Englishteaching in non-normal universities as postgraduates. Although they take the responsibility ofEnglish teaching in primary or secondary schools, whether they can fulfill this task and theiridentity construction as teachers has become a noteworthy issue.Subjects in this research are a student studying in the foreign language and internationaleducation department of Hunan University and two teachers who studied in the samedepartment with one and two years of working experience. Semi-structured interviews wereconducted by the researcher to these three subjects to explore how they constructed theirinitial professional identity as English teachers. Each subject was interviewed by telephonefor about60minutes, and the whole process was audio-taped.By using qualitative analysis, the results of this research are as follows:1) initialprofessional identity construction of non-normal university educated English teachers has atendency to change from concentrating on students and their ideological education toknowledge transmission and class management, while teachers usually unaware of thischange during this process;2)13influential factors were affirmed by the research, and thesefactors could be further classified as significant and insignificant influential factors;3)non-normal university educated English teachers met three kinds of difficulties during theprocess of initial professional identity construction: difficulties with teaching, difficulties withrelationships and negative emotions. Finally, three constructive suggestions were proposed bythe researcher to improve the effectiveness of teaching of non-normal university educatedEnglish teachers.