A Narrative Inquiry Into An English Teacher's Professional Identity In A Private Secondary School

Private education,as a rising force in national education reform,has been more and more recognized by society through national policy support and continuous efforts.Our government proposes explicitly that our nation should establish a mutual development system between public schools and private schools with the former as the main body.It reveals the important status of private education.Many studies have been done to explore teachers' development,especially their identity recognition and construction.However,most of the studies related to this field employed college teachers or public school teachers as research participants.And there is a lack of studies on private school teachers' identity recognition and construction.This dissertation reports on a study on the identity formation process of an English teacher in a private middle school,which is guided by three research questions listed as follows:(1)How does Mr.Zhao perceive and interpret his professional identity?(2)What factors have influenced Mr.Zhao's identity construction and how do they interplay with each other during the process?(3)How does Mr.Zhao form his professional identities?This dissertation begins with examining the literature concerning the study on identity construction followed by an overview of the research participant's perspectives of identities,identity construction stages and factors influencing the formation process.The author adopted qualitative research method and conducted a case study by collecting data through semi-structured interviews,class observation and stimulated recalls.The data was analyzed with Wenger's theory from two aspects-identification and negotiations of meaning,which revealed that Mr.Zhao's identity formation had experienced a dynamic process with both external factors and internal factors playing a significant role in it.The external factors included family condition,previous teachers'influence,school environment and policies,national policies and health condition,while the internal factors consisted of inner self-motivation,personality and teaching belief.Those factors interplayed with each other and contributed to the participant's complicated identity construction.Besides,this study also generated insightful implications for pre-service teachers,teacher educators,school leaders and researchers.Meanwhile,it is of great significance both theoretically and empirically.