Exploring Female Novice EFL Teachers’ Professional Identity Construction In China: A Positioning Theory Perspective

Teacher professional identity has been well researched in recent years.However,most studies were confined to pedagogy while few have focused on the teachers as social individuals;research on female teachers is mainly around teachers in higher education while less attention has been paid to female teachers in primary and secondary education.Therefore,Research questions are raised to fill in the gaps identified: 1)How do novice female EFL(English as a Foreign Language)teachers position themselves when engaging in secondary education in China;and 2)How are their professional identities negotiated and constructed.Based on the positioning theory,the study applied semi-structured interviews,reflective journals,and the visual method to investigate forced self-positioning and deliberate self-positioning of eight participants who are female EFL teachers in relatively less economically developed cities in China.The data shed light on how they positioned themselves and negotiated various positions throughout the stages.It indicated that teacher identity construction was the result of the interactions between self and others and between action and structure but their professional identities were reconstructed differently depending on their respective contexts.The specific findings are as follows.First,to some degree,the career choices revealed Chinese traditional gender cultures,which positioned them as passive domestic roles but neglected the teachers as social individuals.Second,teachers negotiated their positioning by challenging or enriching deliberate self-positioning and forced self-positioning through the authentic practice of EFL teachers and headteachers and interactions with leaders,colleagues,students,and students’ parents.In addition,the trajectory that these participants positioned the teaching profession revealed the transformation from disillusion of being a ‘sage’ teacher to reconciliation with reality throughout negotiations from pre-positioning to performed positioning stage.Third,motherhood penalty partly accounts for slower professional development during pregnancy,childbirth,and childrearing.Some female EFL teachers imitated the male leadership style in class management and needed assistance from males when confronting the authority of leadership.This study contributed to the identity research by offering contextualized and distinct findings on the positioning of eight female EFL teachers in China in their early careers.