A Study On English Teacher Identity Of Rural Junior High Schools In Ethnic Minority Areas

Since “English fever” swept the whole world,more and more scholars have paid attention to English teaching and learning,especially those at primary and secondary schools, but most of them focus more on the language learners instead of English teachers. However, the last two decades have witnessed the emergence of theories and research on teacher education. Varghese, et. al.(2005) pointed out that the key way to understand language teaching and learning was to understand teachers, the professional, cultural, political and individual identities which they claimed or which were assigned to them. Moreover, Beauchamp and Thomas(2009) claimed in a recent discussion of the relevant literature that with the influence of “socio-cultural turn” in the exploration of foreign language teacher education, teacher identity had been the focus of many theoretical and empirical investigations in applied linguistics, particularly in the field of English teacher education. In the recent years, teacher identity became a separate research area and also emerged as a productive topic abroad. Comparatively speaking, research in the context of China related to teacher identity, especially English teacher identity is still one of the most popular hot topics for scholars. What’s more, studies on ethnic minority English teachers’ identity or teacher identity of English teachers in ethnic minority areas are on the way. Therefore, this study aims to explore the English teacher identity in junior high schools of ethnic minority areas in Yunnan Province, aiming at providing useful information for the development of those English teachers and English teacher educators.Applying quantitative and qualitative methods, the main purpose of this study is to obtain an in-depth understanding of the current situation of the English teacher identity in junior high schools of ethnic minority areas. Specifically, it attempts to answer two questions :(1) What is the current situation of English teacher identity in junior high schools in ethnic minority areas?(2) Whether there is any difference of English teacher identity in junior high schools in ethnic minority areas in terms of genders, majors and years of teaching experiences? If so, what are the reasons of the differences? To deal with the two questions, we collect both data through questionnaires from 75 English teachers of different genders, ages, majors, nationalities, and teaching experiences working in 12 different rural junior high schools in Wa Autonomous County of Cangyuan and data by 8 semi-structured interviews.Based on collected data, it can be seen that the overall level of English teacher identity in junior high school in ethnic minority areas is not too low. As for gender difference, English teacher identity of females is much higher than that of males. For major difference, teacher identity of English teachers from English major is higher than those from non-English majors. In terms of the ages of teaching experiences, the most inexperienced teachers are in a most disadvantaged condition in English teacher identity.