The Development Of Primary English Teachers’Professional Identities:Narrative Cases

Foreign language teachers’professional identities have been seen as an essential element in teacher education and teacher development, and have been regarded as a productive lens to look into language teachers’classroom practices. Existing literature, however, has largely ignored the complex realities of primary EFL teachers’ experience and development. The present study explored the development of Beijing primary EFL teachers’professional identities with an attempt to answer the questions of what the development was like and what might have driven the development.To answer these two questions, the study examined three Beijing primary EFL teachers’life experience from childhood to adulthood as well as their expectations of the future with a focus on their narratives related to English learning and teaching. Drawing on Wenger’s theory of social ecology of identity, the research was designed to be a multiple-case study, and narrative data were collected and analyzed following the basic rules of narrative inquiry. The findings of the present study are:First, primary English teachers have diverse development paths and that their experience in the peripheral phases, namely the period when they first come into contact with the teaching profession, largely decides the teachers’later trajectories. Second, relational aspects are pivotal for primary EFL teachers as they can steer teachers onto different identity trajectories. In addition, primary EFL teachers’ engagement with the district-level research group for English teaching was also found integral to the development of these teachers’professional identities. The implications of my research are as follows:First, propositions about relational identity could be utilized complementarily with Wenger’s social ecology of identity when it comes to why individual teachers embark on different identity trajectories. Second, the district-level research group for teaching is an elemental force in shaping primary English teachers’professional identities, and therefore deserves further research attention and efforts to more deeply examine such a community.