A Study On The Minority Language Teachers' Identity In Chinese Secondary Schools

As the concept of "a human community with a shared future" takes root and the Belt and Road Initiative is steadily promoted,the role of minority language teaching in the opening up of Chinese education is becoming indispensable.Real needs have led to a boom in secondary school minority language education and a growing pool of teachers.However,without formal teacher training,minority language teachers in secondary schools often have to face many dilemmas,such as unclear identities and the resultant ambiguity in their professional development paths.Therefore,the study of the identity of those teachers is important for their professional development and the highquality development of minority language education.This study focuses on the identity of minority language teachers in secondary schools,aiming to explore the process and types of identity construction,characteristics and influencing factors of their identity.By sorting out relevant researches,this study constructs a conceptual framework of secondary school minority language teachers'identity,and with the help of the theory of Community of Practice(CoP)and the concept of Imagined Community,combining the characteristics of those teachers found in the pre-survey,it constructs an analytical roadmap to present the identity status of them in three dimensions:self-cognition,affective experience,behavior tendencies,and three analysis units are used according to the different communities in which they may participate in the process of identity construction:school community,teacher-student community,teaching and research community and imaginary community.The study conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews with selected secondary school minority language teachers,and obtained up to 17 hours of audio recordings and 200,000 words of transcribed interview text;the first-hand data collected was analyzed in a three-level coding approach using the idea of Grounded Theory.In the multi-case embedded analysis phase,the specific content of each case is corresponded to the four types of community units of analysis,in order to analyze how minority language teachers,identify and negotiate with the community,how they participate in the trajectory of each CoP,how they construct their identities under the interaction between the individual and the external context they are in,what characteristics they present,and what factors influence them.This is followed by a comparative analysis,combing cognitive,affective and behavioral dimensions to explore common features and differences in the identity and the process of constructing.The results show that:first,secondary school minority teachers' identities are continuously developed mainly through the process of participating in and continuously identifying and negotiating with the four types of CoPs.There are three possible types of identity construction:dream seekers(negative identities in negative contexts),dream followers(positive identities in negative contexts),dream makers(stable identities in positive contexts),each of which exhibits different identification and negotiation strategies and different understandings of the meaning of their teaching profession in the communities.Second,the process of identity construction is affected by external factors at the macro and meso levels and individual factors at the micro level,which can either facilitate or hinder the identity by changing elements of CoPs.Furthermore,there are five major characteristics of minority language teachers'identities,among which the linguistic and cultural identity attribute of being in the "Fourth Position" is particularly prominent.Taking into account the current development of secondary school minority language education and the findings of the research,this study suggests possible ways to promote the identity and the construction of secondary school minority language teachers at three levels:the education departments,schools and teachers.