Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin, & Hatice Celebi.
ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction:A ELT STUDENT TEACHER IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION:
EXPLORING TEACHER ROLES AND DOMAINS OF EXPERTISE
Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin Acbadem Mehmet Ali Aydinlar University.
Turkey Email: nafiye.
aktekin@acibadem.
Hatice Celebi University of Massachusetts Amherst, the USA Email: haticecelebi79@gmail.
DOI: 10.
26858/ijole.
Abstract In this study, we direct our focus to identity construction in an English language teaching (ELT) teacher education program.
We explore the teacher roles in which student teachers are struggling to position themselves comfortably and the teacher expertise domains .
ubject matter, didactics, and pedagog.
that they are dedicating themselves to improving.
To address our research focus, we have collected reflections and survey responses from 18 student teachers in an ELT education department.
Our findings indicate that ELT student teachers find it difficult to position themselves as experts in and about the English language and that they feel a need to be equipped with expertise first and foremost in the subject matter, and then in didactics, followed by pedagogy.
These results imply that in ELT teacher education, certain language ideologies are still prevalent and need to be dealt with by teacher educators for transformative outcomes in education.
Keywords: ELT.
Identity.
Teacher education.
Student Teacher Reflection.
Teacher Expertise role of language as Aunot simply reflecting or representing the reality but actively constructing it,Ay meaning that AuAidentity manifests in discourseAy (La Pointe, 2010, p.
In our paper, reflective practice took two forms for the English language teaching (ELT) student teachers who participated in our study.
One form was through writing reflective journal entries and the other was through giving responses to a survey that the student teachers completed as they explored their identity construction in terms of teacher expertise domains.
Student teachers construct knowledge and identity through reflective practice as they gain a broader understanding of their personal beliefs and actions as well as what However, reflection, i.
, the conscious effort of exploring an issue and seeking a conclusion individualAos engagement, as presented by Dewey .
and Schyn .
, has been reported to be purposefully avoided by teachers (Gelter.
INTRODUCTION Providing opportunities for student teachers to inquire about and engage in teacher identity construction is crucial since this catalyzes a process for them Auto become members of particular communities, such as schoolAy (Vetter.
Hartman, & Reynolds, 2016.
It has been maintained that a deeper understanding of identity is important for designing teacher education programs and that identity work needs Auovert attentionAy (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2006, 2009.
Thomas & Beauchamp, 2.
One way of giving overt attention to identity construction is reflective practice.
Reflective practice resonates with the notion that identity is a discursive and performative phenomenon (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006.
Butler, 1990.
Gergen, 1.
and not pre-discursive or reflective of an essential identity or true, inner self (Benwell & Stokoe, 2.
As a result of this conceptualization of identity, reflective practice is considered to have emerged from philosophical theories on the International Journal of language Education.
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This points to why it is important for student teachers to practice reflection from an early stage.
Ladson-Billings .
points out that teachers are not fully able to assess their beliefs, actions, and the social contexts within which they execute their beliefs.
Further, as Banks .
Au.
eachers cannot transform schools until they transform themselvesAy .
In ELT, this type of transformative education so that ELT teachers can negotiate more democratic ideologies about language, such as bilingual spaces that do not conform to monolingual norms (Canagarajah, 2013.
Garcia, 2.
With our study, we aim to highlight that student teachers become more aware of who they are as teachers as they reflect upon how they position themselves in relation to their professional identity.
We maintain that through the early practices of identity construction, teachers can become more aware of the multiple dimensions of Auhow to be,Ay Auhow to act,Ay and Auhow to understandAy (Sachs, 2005, p.
in the teaching profession in order to be better able to assess their beliefs and actions as well as the social contexts in which they execute their beliefs so that they can challenge monoglossic empowered identities.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Teacher identity is a framework within which teachers build their own ideas about the teaching profession (Sachs, 2.
How teacher identity is constructed and how it can be used to explore teacher development have gained emphasis in the literature over the years (Olsen, 2008.
Riopel, 2006.
Sachs.
Identity construction has been scrutinized through the exploration of a variety of sources such as personal experience, self-awareness, self-observation and reflective teaching, and constructing AuselvesAy .
Bailey.
Curtis, & Nunan.
Bukor, 2015.
Cattley, 2007.
Lamote & Engels, 2.
According to Gee .
, identity is Au.
eing recognized as a certain Aokind of person,Ao in a given contextAy .
Identity is shaped with the conditions and through the opportunities supplied by the situational atmosphere (Bauman, 1996.
Holland & Lave, 2001.
Roth, 2.
and Auserves as the repository of particular experiences in classrooms and schools, the site of thoughts, attitudes, emotions, beliefs and valuesAy (Zembylas, 2003, p.
such, the construction of teacher identity is an ongoing process that happens through a continuous and changing process of transformation (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011.
Alsup, 2006.
Varghese.
Morgan.
Johnston, & Johnson, 2.
Stenberg.
Karlsson.
Pitkaniemi, and Maaranen .
point out that exploring the Austarting pointAy of student teachersAo teacher identity is especially important Auto support meaningful and effective ways during their teacher educationAy .
Studies suggest that there is a great need to support emerging teacher identities through the early integration of students into teaching so that they do not feel Aulost,Ay but instead feel more committed to teaching (Lyfstrym.
PoomValickis.
Hannula, & Mathews, 2010.
Rots.
Aelterman.
Vlerick, & Vermeulen, 2.
In this study, we asked ELT student teachers to reflect on six main teacher roles:
facilitator, assessor, planner, resource developer, information provider, and role model (Harden & Crosby, 2.
to see how they position themselves within the personalprofessional I-positions, as in AuI as a facilitator,Ay AuI as an learning as an assessor,Ay AuI as a planner,Ay and so on .
ee Figure .
also investigated where the student teachers feel they stand in terms of the teacher expertise domains in the first years of their education program and where they want to stand in the future as teachers.
Teacher Identity and Roles Stenberg et al.
approach teacher identity through the lens of two models, that of James .
and Bakhtin .
and that of the dialogical point of view of the AuselfAy that Hermans.
Kempen, and Van Loon .
put forward.
The self is Aua dynamic Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin, & Hatice Celebi.
ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction:A array of relatively autonomous I-positionsAy .
, and each I-position .
AuI as a pedagogue,Ay AuI as a subject matter expert,Ay or AuI as a member of societyA.
has Auits own voiceAy that comes out through dialogues with contexts and relationships.
A similar concept that emphasizes teacher identity formation through position-taking is Authe positioning theoryAy .
an Langenhove & Harry, 1.
Positioning happens in the discursive process of locating selves in conversations interactively .
, when a person positions another perso.
or reflexively .
, when a person positions himself or hersel.
(Davies & Harry, 1990.
Vetter et al.
, 2.
In other words, identities are constituted and given meaning in discourse within social and cultural practices (Gergen, 1.
One complex issue underlying identity revolves around the dimensions of the personal and the professional.
The AupersonalAy can be understood as understanding of the self, and the AuprofessionalAy can be defined as the notion of the self within an outside context, such as a classroom or a school (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2.
A number of authors take a combined view and perceive the self as a key to the notion of the professional .
ee Borich, 1999.
Day.
Kington.
Stobart, & Sammons, 2006.
Freese.
Hamachek, 1999.
Lipka & Brinthaupt.
In this study, we combine the personal and self with the professional by using teacher roles (Harden & Crosby, 2.
as a tool for the students to reflect so that their Ipositions can find their voices through position-taking in reflection.
learning processes, their activities, and their own responsibility for learning as well as an understanding of human thought, behavior, and communication.
Didactics includes teaching-learning processes, which can include planning, execution and assessment, and evaluation of teaching activities.
It has been strongly suggested that university teachers examine their teaching practices so that they not only facilitate teacher knowledge as part of subject expertise but also so that they can facilitate pedagogical teacher expertise: Au.
tudents may become discouraged if the only teacher expert role they are exposed to in the university is that of a subject matter expert, and simultaneously they are lacking a connection to school as a working environmentAy (Lyfstrym et al.
, 2010, p.
Teachers are experts in their subject matter, but if delivery of the subject matter becomes the sole target, pedagogical issues such as student learning processes, their activities, and their own responsibility for learning as well as an understanding of human thought, behavior, and communication might be overlooked (Beijaard et al.
, 2000.
Lyfstrym et al.
, 2.
Therefore, an exploration of teacher professional identity construction can also be used as a tool to more effectively and efficiently plan teaching around teacher expertise domains.
Actual and Designated Identities In this study, while we aim to explore early ELT teacher identity construction in relation to teacher roles and domains of expertise, we work with two operational constructs, actual and designated identities.
We have borrowed these two constructs from the Aunarrative identity theoryAy formulated by Sfard and Prusak .
Within the framework of the narrative theory.
Sfard and Prusak .
explain that a personAos narratives fall into two categories: .
actual, that is, consisting of narratives about the actual state of affairs, and .
designated, or consisting of narratives presenting a state expected to be the case in the future.
AuI am a Domains of ELT Teacher Expertise According to the definition of Beijaard.
Verloop, and Vermunt .
, teachersAo expertise falls under three headings: subject matter, didactics, and pedagogy.
Subject matter has a different knowledge base depending on the field.
In its simplest sense, for ELT, knowledge of the subfields of the linguistics of English such as semantics, syntax, and phonology make up the subject matter knowledge base.
The domain pedagogy covers issues such as studentsAo International Journal of language Education.
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good driverAy and AuI have to be a better personAy .
are narrative examples that Sfard and Prusak .
give for actual and designated identities .
Actual and designated identities have been echoed by various scholars in relation to different theories (Dyrnyei, 2009.
Higgins, 1987, 1998.
Lauriala & Kukkonen, 2005.
Rodgers & Scott, 2008.
Sfard & Prusak.
For instance, the notions of AuselfconceptAy and Auself-guideAy (Higgins, 1.
, and later on, the AuidealAy and AuoughtAy selves (Higgins, 1.
resonate with the notions of actual and designated identities.
Dyrnyei .
proposes that Aupeople are motivated to reach a condition where their self-concept matches their personally relevant self-guides .
mphasis adde.
Ay .
and that they have a desire to reduce the gap between their actual condition and the future self-guides that they have designated themselves as.
Along similar lines, in our study, the terms Auactual identitiesAy Audesignated identitiesAy imply the existence of a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1.
through which teachersAo professional identities are constructed.
Language Ideologies and ELT Teachers Piller ideologies as Aubeliefs about languageAy and Aufeelings about languageAy .
She emphasizes that exploring language ideologies is important because Au.
hey provide a link between linguistic and social forms and structuresAy .
English language teachers are agents of language ideologies since they are overt or covert providers of understandings of language and social interaction.
Monoglossic language ideologies assume that Aulegitimate linguistic practices are only those enacted by monolingualsAy (Garcia, 2009, p.
other words, some uses of linguistic resources index higher sociolinguistic scales as they Auscale upAy or Aulift a particular topic or momentAy (Mortimer, 2016, p.
to Aua higher level of relevance, truth, validity or valueAy (Blommaert, 2007, p.
With monoglossic ideologies, concepts such as intralanguage variation, hybrid language use and multiplicity, and dynamism of identities (Irvine & Gal, 2.
are erased by monoglossic concepts such as Aumother tongueAy and Ausecond languageAy (Garcia.
Skutnabb-Kangas, 1.
In the context of our study, for the ELT student teachers.
English is not a Aumother tongueAy or a Ausecond languageAy since it is not one of the official languages of the country.
In other words, language ideologies are at work in ways that Park .
points out as occurring with non-native English-speaking teachers coming from outer circle countries and their struggles with identity construction.
As such, we theorize that an acknowledgement of language ideologies in explorations of teacher identity in ELT teacher education is essential, and we acknowledge the presence of various language ideologies at work in our research context.
METHOD
We had two aims in our study.
First, we wanted to encourage the ELT student teachers to reflect upon the teacher roles in which they most or least comfortably position themselves.
This was to bring out findings about whether there was a common role that the ELT student teachers were To achieve this aim, we prompted second-year student teachers to reflect on the teacher roles they adopted while completing the structured teaching practices we pre-designed for them.
Second, we aimed to investigate whether there was a common domain of teacher expertise that the ELT student teachers felt the greatest need to develop themselves in so that we could reach conclusions about which domain was at the heart of their identity construction.
We used two operational termsAiactual identities and designated identitiesAiand asked the student teachers in a survey to describe how confident they felt in the three domains of teacher expertise: subject matter, pedagogy, and didactics (Beijaard et al.
, 2.
In this way, we were able to deduce which common domain of expertise the student teachers were Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin, & Hatice Celebi.
ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction:A struggling with as they constructed their teacher identities.
Our research was motivated on the grounds that teacher knowledge is at the heart of teacher identity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1.
and that reflective practice as a learning tool is vital in an educatorAos life (Van Manen, 1.
Reflection is an intentional, dynamic process that allows improvement in oneAos actions, abilities, and knowledge (Dewey, 1933.
Schyn, 1.
explored the following two questions C Is there a common role that the ELT student teachers believe they are struggling with while positioning C Is there a common domain of expertise .
edagogy, subject matter, and didactic.
in which ELT student teachers report feeling the need to develop themselves the most? combines two models of professional "apprenticeship-internship-master" model, which is completely practice-based.
the other is the current model of teacher education, which is heavily theoretical.
UwS is based on Autheoretical knowledgeAy Auworkplace experience.
To this end, the students in this program start micro-teaching activities and observing mentor teachers at different levels in the schools beginning from the first year of their education.
Participants There were 18 student teachers who participated in this study.
Before the study was conducted.
Ethics Committee approval was received from the university where the study took place, and the participantsAo informed consent documents were collected at the beginning of the study.
The participant student teachers were second-year ELT Thirteen of them were female, and five were male.
Their ages ranged from 18 to 20 years old.
The data collection was integrated into the curriculum as voluntary work, with the encouragement that student teachers would benefit from it professionally.
Their teaching experience was one-to-one mentoring of primary school students in a state school for one hour a week for 15 weeks as part of one of their courses and observing mentor teachers on similar terms.
Their familiarity and comfort with the concept and practice of writing reflective journal entries was limited.
For this reason, in the first four weeks of the course .
nce every two week.
, we formed group discussions during which the student teachers went over the teaching practice experiences that they had during those two particular weeks and exchanged ideas about the roles they thought they adopted before they wrote their reflection The reflection entries were written Context of the Study The study was carried out at the Faculty of Education.
Department of English Language Teaching at a private university in Turkey in the fall semester of the 2016Ae2017 academic year.
Although English is not an official language of Turkey, there is a high level of demand for graduates of ELT programs in the country.
At the tertiary level alone in 2013, for instance, it was stated that there were 164 universities in Turkey with more than 75% of their programs taught in English .
Seyme ve Yerletirme Merkezi, 2.
, and 18.
5% of all bachelor degree programs were reported to be carried out in English (Ark & Ark, 2.
In the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), student teachers of ELT complete 240 ECTS in 4 academic years.
The first two years of the program are heavily theoretical while the two last years include courses at partner schools that target teaching The university the study was conducted at has been implementing a model called the AuUniversity within SchoolAy (UwS) since 2014-2015 teaching year.
It suggests that teachers be educated through partnership between universities and schools.
Data Collection Two types of data collection tools were used in the study: reflective journal entries and a survey.
The student teachers wrote International Journal of language Education.
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reflection entries every two weeks, taking into consideration their teaching practice experiences during that particular two-week The prompt we used to get the student teachers to write their reflection entries was generic in nature, such as the following:
AuConsidering experiences you have had for the last two weeks, reflect on the teacher roles .
acilitator, assessor, planner, resource developer, information provider, and role mode.
you think you adopted.
How do you describe yourself in those roles? Explain and Ay A week before the first reflection, we organized an hour-long focus group meeting in which we familiarized the student teachers with the six teacher roles (Harden & Crosby, 2.
For this, we used an archived video-recorded ELT lesson one of the researchers had archived from her own teaching to college students.
In this session, students watched the video and identified the roles the teacher took as she taught.
shared Figure 1 with the students as a visual that they could peruse while they reflected.
Figure 1.
Teacher Roles from Harden & Crosby .
We developed our second tool, the survey, by modifying the indicators of teacher expertise domains that Voss.
Kunter, and Baumert .
Kynig.
Blymeke.
Paine.
Schmidt, and Hsieh .
, and Beijaard et .
In our survey, there were thirty value statements .
AuI feel confident in using the given quantity of instructional time in classroom,Ay AuI believe I can treat my students positively, openly, and with respectA.
The first ten items concerned pedagogy, the second ten concerned subject matter, and the last ten concerned didactics.
the questions were categorized as teacher expertise domains.
To get the student teachers familiar with actual and designated identities, they were provided with reading materials and discussion materials on ELT teacher identity construction over the course of a week .
teaching hour.
of classroom teaching supported by an online learning management system outside the classroom.
On the survey, student teachers marked a value from 1 to 5 on descriptive statements about their Auactual identity,Ay describing by implication how confident they felt at that moment in their actual state, and they gave another value, again from 1 to 5, for their Audesignated identity,Ay describing by implication how much they wanted to improve themselves in relation to the statement they were giving a value to.
Data Analysis We conducted two-cycle coding (Saldaya, 2.
on the reflection entries.
For the first cycle of coding, we used the six teacher roles: facilitator, assessor, planner, resource developer, information provider, and role model (Harden & Crosby, 2.
as our provisional codes (Creswell, 2.
coded each student teacher reflection Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin, & Hatice Celebi.
ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction:A according to the six roles they considered themselves to have adopted during the teaching activities they had been assigned to In this cycle, we took a AulumpingAy (Saldaya, 2013, p.
versus a AusplitterAy coding approach and worked with broader lines instead of a line-by-line detailed approach (Bernard, 2011, p.
The provisional codes .
he six teacher role.
provided us with a holistic viewpoint of the For our second cycle, after coding each studentAos entry for the six teacher roles, we carried out magnitude coding (Saldaya, 2.
to explore the evaluative direction (Fielding, 2.
of the comments the student teachers used to describe their experiences with the roles they adopted, as either struggling (STR) or comfortable (COM).
This type of coding allowed us to find the specific roles in which they predominantly positioned themselves as AustrugglingAy because we could quantify the number of comments indicating STR and COM in reference to the roles and visually represent them in Table 1.
We took notes on the recurring themes, which are reported in the findings section.
In terms of the survey, 18 ELT student teachersAo responses were analyzed using SPSS 17.
0 (SPSS Inc.
Chicag.
The mean values of each domain for actual and designated identities were calculated and compared.
The results are visually represented in Table 2.
FINDINGS
As a result of our analysis of ELT student teacher reflective journal entries, we found that there were three common teacher rolesAiinformation developer, and assessorAiwithin which our ELT student teachers struggled to position The roles and the percentage of comments as indicators of their struggle to position themselves are represented in Table 1 below.
Figure 2.
Teacher roles Teacher Roles Role M.
Information P.
Resource D.
Planner Assessor Facilitator STRG In the reflections, there were many cases where student teachers expressed concerns about not having as high a mastery of the English language as they wanted and about not being competent enough to do certain For example, one student teacher shared the following comment:
Sometimes, a student asks about COM meaning of lyrics of a song.
The other day, one asked me about Micheal JacksonAos AuSmooth CriminalAy.
The song AuAnnie, are you ok?Ay.
I knew the song but pretended that I had not heard it So I said.
I would listen to it and to the next time we meet with the student I would explain the meaning.
At home I International Journal of language Education.
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went on Google.
Read the lyrics, read about the song, some comments as well but still didnAot understand.
I felt It is hard to accept as a teacher I cannot explain to my student the meaning of a song.
In their reflections, the student teachers frequently commented that they wanted to be Aua teacher with strong knowledge,Ay described as having Auan excellent command of English,Ay Aunot saying AoI donAot know,AoAy and Auspeaking native-like.
Ay One student teacher raised one of her own concerns about her English in the following comment: AuMy English must be perfect, and this worries me to death.
I am not a native speaker and students will know that.
I am doing my best to be a good teacher though.
Ay The following comment from another student teacher illustrates the second role, resource developer, in which our ELT students said that they were struggling to position themselves:
This week I had to write a grammar test for my intermediate students on the use of past continues and past simple.
found a good fill-in activity on the Internet.
In parentheses, the verbs the students had to use were given so it was not very challenging.
I tried to do it I couldnAot decide which to use in a couple of places.
I decided not to use it because I couldnAot find the key on the Internet.
I used a grammar book.
How am I going to write tests or give answers to students when they ask me questions from a TOEFL book for example? The teacher role of resource provider may require fulfilling a range of responsibilities at schools.
To give some examples, these might include preparing instructional materials for websites or recommendations about comprehension.
the reflections we collected from our ELT student teachers, we did not come across any references to this type of broader however, there was a heavy emphasis on the responsibility of materials There were various comments regarding the subject matter and discrete components of the English language along the lines of what the student teachers felt to be Auadvantageous,Ay including, for example, having Augood grammar knowledgeAy and Aubeing a good modelAy with their language learning experience.
The third role our ELT student teachers commonly expressed a lack of comfort in positioning themselves was the role of There was a high level of awareness in their generalizations about what a teacher is and should be like in terms of assessment, commonly followed by their concerns.
The following comments are two examples:
Au.
will not only teach and move on.
they will also assess! I donAot know how to assess speaking but I hope to get Ay AuIf my students say they want me to assess their English to tell them how god they are, for example in speaking.
I would not Some students want to take IELTS and there is speaking.
They want to know if they can pass it.
First couple of years in teaching will be hard.
Ay Additional comments about the assessor role were also offered.
The student teachers emphasized in their reflective journal entries that as assessors, their role will be crucial because it involves communicating sensitively and supportively in order to sustain studentsAo self-esteem and confidence in learning the target language.
They expressed their discomfort about having insufficient knowledge to enable them to give meaningful feedback and make However, comments such as AuHow can I correct studentsAo papers when I still make mistakes in writing?Ay raise questions about the root of their discomfort, which could be a lack of expertise in assessment or a belief that the teacher should be the ideal language user and information In general, in relation to ELT student teacher roles, our findings indicate that student teachers frequently evaluated themselves as second language learners and criticized their proficiency in English as well as their knowledge about the English Comments such as AuI must have a Nafiye Cigdem Aktekin, & Hatice Celebi.
ELT Student Teacher Identity Construction:A Aupervasive ideologyAy (Holliday, 2006, p.
that regards native teachers as both model speakers and ideal teachers.
The findings that we reached as a result of the descriptive analysis based on the survey responses to find out whether there was a common domain of expertise .
edagogy, subject matter, and didactic.
indicated that our ELT student teachers wanted to be the most confident in the subject matter domain, which was followed by didactics and pedagogy.
Since our population size was small .
, we did not set out to arrive at parametric test results indicating statistical significances.
Table 2 represents teacher expertise domains the participants powerful knowledge and know as much as a native speakerAy were striking since they showed how much AuownershipAy of English ELT student teachers believed they had in their subject matter.
There were comments in reference to the institutions where they wanted to work that Aumany non-native English teachers are not hired by these institutionsAy Audespite being highly qualified.
Ay These concerns could offer a potential motive as to why our ELT student teachers prioritized the mastery of knowledge in their reflections along with the teacher roles in which they were struggling to position They might want to use Autheir advantageAy .
heir word.
of having Auremarkable linguistic knowledge, mastery of competence and performanceAy to resist the Teacher Expertise Domains Subject Matter Didactics Actual I.
Pedagogy Designated I.
Figure 3.
Teacher expertise domains colloquial language, etc.
) and about English in terms of not making language mistakes in writing or speaking .
here to use active/passive in academic writing, how to formulate non-run-on sentences, etc.
There are various references to a lack of feeling of belonging to the group of language experts that they mostly refer to as Aunative speakersAy or people with the expertise of Aunear-native Ay We will now discuss these findings with respect to two complementary implications we arrived at.
One is that ELT student
teachers need more exposure to the subject
DISCUSSION