The construction of language teacher professional identity in the Global Englishes territory: ‘we are legitimate language teachers’

ABSTRACT

Although teacher professional identity has been much discussed and reported in teacher education and language education, little empirical evidence addresses how language teachers construct their professional identities as legitimate English practitioners as they have witnessed and encountered the increasingly important role of English as a global lingua franca. To fill this void, this article reports on a narrative case study that investigates how Chinese language teachers construct and negotiate their professional identities as legitimate English practitioners. Drawing on identity theory, the article showcases how a group of Chinese English teachers challenged the ideology of native-speakerism as they were routinely engaged in the construction of what it means to become legitimate English teachers. The implication of this study calls for the inclusion of Global Englishes and critical language pedagogy in language teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• English as a medium of instruction
• Global Englishes
• native-speakerism
• teacher education
• teacher professional identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All of the names here are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the “The 13th Five-Year Plan Education and Science Special Research Projects on Philosophy and Social Science of Higher Education (2019)”, Department of Education of Guangdong Province – “Effectiveness of the Implementation of English as a Medium in Higher Education of Guangdong Province”