Tài liệu The construction of teacher identity among graduates from other majors in vietnam

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ĐỖ NHƯ QUỲNH THE CONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY AMONG GRADUATES FROM OTHER MAJORS IN VIETNAM (Quá trình kiến tạo bản dạng giáo viên ngoại ngữ của những sinh viên Việt Nam không tốt nghiệp ngành sư phạm) M.A. MAJOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01 Supervisor: Hoàng Thị Hạnh, PhD. HANOI – 2021 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ĐỖ NHƯ QUỲNH THE CONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY AMONG GRADUATES FROM OTHER MAJORS IN VIETNAM (Quá trình kiến tạo bản dạng giáo viên ngoại ngữ của những sinh viên Việt Nam không tốt nghiệp ngành sư phạm) M.A. MAJOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01 Supervisor: Hoàng Thị Hạnh, PhD. HANOI – 2021 DECLARATION I hereby certify the thesis entitled “The construction of language teacher identity among graduates from other majors in Vietnam ” as my own work in the fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Hanoi, 2020 Đỗ Như Quỳnh i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to convey my utmost appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Hoàng Thị Hạnh, for guiding me through my lost days with her wide-angle research lenses, effective research tools, and, most preciously, her tender care. Without her, this study would have been left unfinished. Secondly, I am extremely grateful to Mr. Ngô Xuân Minh, with whom I had a critical reflection about my past teaching career and came up with the idea for this research. Thirdly, I want to send my sincere gratitude to my beloved friend Trần Phương Linh, who supports me a lot with administrative procedures when I am far away from home to make the thesis defense possible. Last but not least, I would like to thank myself for being resilient for the last fifteen months of conducting this research. ii ABSTRACT The search for the teacher identity among language teachers has been popular for many decades; however, its scope mainly surrounds the mainstream teachers working the field or the students teachers and not yet extends to the graduates of other fields who choose to work as language teachers after graduating from colleges. This research is an attempt to invite those “laymen” into the toward-centrum picture of teaching and makes them visible to the researchers of teacher identity. In this research, I aim to explore why graduates from other majors pursue the teaching career and how they construct their teacher identity. The findings show that the participants form and construct their identity not only from their learning experiences with model teachers, from their real teaching practices, from the vulnerability of teachers’ (in)confidence but also from the social contexts affected by neoliberal tenets. To put it concisely, teachers’ identity derives from three areas, namely identity in practice, identity in emotion and identity in neoliberal discourse. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION ..................................................................................................................................... i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF ABBREVIATION.................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Rationale of the study and aim of the research ........................................................................ 1 1.2. Scope of the study .................................................................................................................. 2 1.3. Significance of the study ........................................................................................................ 3 1.4. Organization of the thesis ....................................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................. 5 2.1. Defining language teacher identity ............................................................................................... 5 2.2. Approaches to language teacher identity....................................................................................... 6 2.3. Literature on language teacher identity ......................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER III. METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................17 3.1. Research question .......................................................................................................................17 3.2. Research methods .......................................................................................................................17 3.3. Selection of informants ...............................................................................................................18 3.4. Data collection ............................................................................................................................22 3.5. Data analysis...............................................................................................................................24 CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS .......................................................................................26 4.1. Positive experiences with tutoring initiate teacher’s professional interest .....................................26 4.2. Model teachers in extra classes nurture the professional growth...................................................33 4.3. Trials and creativity contribute to teachers’ professional growth ..................................................44 4.4. Teaching practices conflict with beliefs, yet align with the selves ................................................50 4.5. Participants’ vulnerability validates their professional identity.....................................................53 4.6. Neoliberalism and the teacher-entrepreneur positioning ...............................................................57 CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS............................................................................66 5.1. Discussion and conclusions .........................................................................................................66 5.1.1. Identity in practice ...............................................................................................................66 5.1.2. Identity in emotion ...............................................................................................................68 5.1.3. Identity in neoliberal discourse .............................................................................................69 5.2. Limitations and suggestions for further research ..........................................................................72 References .............................................................................................................................................74 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATION CLT Communicative Language Teaching ESOL English for Speakers of Other Languages GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages v CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION This chapter states the rationale of the study, research’s aims, the scope of the study, how it can contribute to the current research landscape in English teacher identity. It also proposes the research question that serves as the guiding line for the whole research. 1.1. Rationale of the study and aim of the research Since the emergence of the concept “identity crisis” of Erik Erikson in the 1950s, more research has been drawn to the quest of identity. Researchers in the education field are inquisitive about how people establish their teacher identity. Their studies hitherto has investigated the teacher identity formation among student teachers at college (Moses et al., 2017; Watt et al., 2012), students who are pursuing a master degree in TESOL (Swearingen, 2019; Nguyen & Dao, 2019; O’Brien & Schillaci, 2002), or teachers at schools (Lasky, 2005; Farrell, 2011); however, there has been little work on the groups of graduates who are not majored in teacher education yet now working in teaching profession. In Vietnam, English has become increasingly popular. Especially after it became a compulsory subject taught in four skills for ten years from Grade 3 to Grade 12 in the general education system (The Prime Minister, 2008), there was higher demand of English learning both in formal and non-formal sectors (Hoang, 2020). It then witnessed the shortage of qualified teachers both in school and in private institutes. While some large international language centers are able to recruit foreign teachers to work for them, the small language schools take full advantage of the domestic teacher resources. The thing is, when there is a shortage of teachers due to the up-surging demand, many 1 teachers working in private English institutes are competent at English yet not formally trained to work as language teachers. These teachers came from a variety of majors like business, marketing or finance. Some of them even opened their own classes and established new English centers. Interestingly, these teachers persist with the job and their classes attract a large number of students. As a teacher and a researcher myself, I was so curious about how these ‘laymen’ take up English teaching jobs and maintain their professional persistence that I decided to carry out this research. The investigation on how they become teachers potentially broadened an understanding about the societal shifts in Vietnam recently and, from that requisite understanding, added more values to the comprehensive picture of research on teacher identity. The aim of this study is to explore why graduates from other majors pursue the teaching career and how they construct their teacher identity. I will use narrative inquiry methods to gain in-depth insight into the intrinsic as well as extrinsic reasons for their choice of profession and the way they build up their teacher image. Specifically, the research question that I deal with is: “How do graduates from other majors construct their English language teacher identity?” 1.2. Scope of the study This paper investigates the identity formation and construction of four underthirty English teachers who are now working in the private sectors such as home classes or English centers. They all major in economics- and business2 related fields in their bachelor degrees, yet pursue the English language teaching career after graduation. 1.3. Significance of the study The findings of this study will add values to not only the language teacher identity field but also to the university administrators and the ‘non-mainstream’ teacher community. The language teacher identity field, after this research, will be extended, though minimally, to an area that has been unknown to researchers whose works focus on ‘mainstream’ teachers or students teachers. For university administrators in teacher education, my research possibly makes them aware of what is happening outside schools; they can therefore reflect upon their curriculums to make any possible adjustments that benefit their students, perhaps to make students more competitive to students from other majors. Regarding the ‘non-mainstream’ teacher community, my research may shed some light on why and how they embark on the teaching career and give them a chance to contemplate their future. 1.4. Organization of the thesis This chapter has indicated the motivations for this study, the objectives of the research, and the scope of investigation. The remaining chapters are organized as follows: Chapter II contextualizes the study in the relevant literature of language teacher identity and reviews several approaches to investigate language teacher identity. 3 In chapter III, the methodology of the research is described. Chapter IV is a presentation of research findings of the formation and construction of English teacher identity. In chapter V, a thorough discussion in comparison with previous literature and a conclusion are provided. Some limitations and suggestions for further research will also be presented towards the end of chapter V. 4 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter provides an overview of the contextual background of the study. It also gives the working definition of language teacher identity, reviews some approaches to language teacher identity and presents the findings of previous studies. 2.1. Defining language teacher identity The literature on teaching and teacher education hitherto commonly agrees that identity is dynamic. It does not only stem from one’s natural state – natureidentity, derive from a position recognized by authority – institution-identity, result from the discourse of others about oneself – discourse-identity, but also lie in one’s practices in relation to external groups (Gee, 2001, cited in Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). It emerges and reshapes itself continuously. The dynamicity of identity can be observed in the way researchers named their studies as the ‘development’ of identity (i.e. Olsen, 2008), the ‘construction” of identity (i.e. Lave & Wenger, 1991), identity ‘formation’ (i.e. Rodgers & Scott, 2008), or ‘shaping’ an identity (i.e. Flores & Day, 2006). The working definitions of teacher identity are recorded in many studies (Lasky, 2005; Ha & Que, 2006; Hong, Greene & Lowery, 2016; Li, 2020); however, only few researchers made an attempt in defining language teacher identity (i.e. Olsen, 2008; Sachs, 2005). The definition proposed by Barkhuizen (2017) seems to be the most inclusive compared to others (i.e. Olsen, 2008; Sachs, 2005); therefore, I would like to use his definition in my research: 5 “Language teacher identities (LTIs) are cognitive, social, emotional, ideological and historical – they are both inside the teacher and outside in the social, material and technological world. LTIs are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and storying. They are struggle and harmony: they are contested and resisted, by self and others, and they are also accepted, acknowledged and valued, by self and others. They are core and peripheral, personal and professional, they are dynamic, multiple, and hybrid, and they are foregrounded and backgrounded. And LTIs change, short-term and over time – discursively in social interaction with teacher educators, learners, teachers, administrators and the wider community, and in material interaction with spaces, places and objects in classrooms, institutions and online.” (Barkhuizen, 2017, p. 4) Implied from the definition above, becoming a teacher is the collective sequence of many social-historical events that stimulate the changes in cognition and emotion. Those changes do not trigger one’s spontaneous wish to become a teacher, yet interlocking-ly enable the prospect of working as a teacher. The study of teacher identity is therefore the act of de-layering that collective sequence and making it visible to the world. 2.2. Approaches to language teacher identity In this part, I will review several approaches in studying language teacher identity, namely social identity theory, situated learning, and frame perspectives, and then state the theoretical approach that I adopt in my research. 6 Within the social identity theory approach, researchers mostly base their investigation of identity on the social categories created by the society (i.e. nationality, race, class,…) (Varghese et al., 2005). Identities of teachers in those studies are often attached to one/or more given categories. For example, the participants in the research of Nguyen and Dao (2019) put themselves into the nonnative category due to their lack of competence in English language. The fact that they later pursued the native-likeness in their English capacity in order to step out from the peripheral position in English teacher market seems to reinforce the binary native/nonnative language background mindset among ESOL teachers rather than blurring its boundary. When it comes to the situated learning approach, learning, which is often attached to the teacher training activities, was viewed as an identification process (Varghese et al., 2005). In other words, there was a link between learning and identity formation. Teacher identity of Natasha – a thirty something Korean teacher, as an illustration, has been negotiated throughout her MA TESOL program in the USA (Costa, 2015). Despite her negative association of nonnative English speaker categorization due to her inferior English competence and teaching styles, she successfully transcended the notion of nativeness by realizing that what made her a professional teacher were more constituted by collaborative learning, facilitator and authentic materials development rather than the nativeness. Similarly, Minfang – an underprivileged student from a rural area of China – has dynamically constructed his EFL teacher image thanks to the thorough learning of CLT (Tsui, 2007). His teacher identity was built up from an incompetent language learner to an competent one, then from a grammar learner with the hatred to CLT till a custodian of CLT, from a marginal EFL teacher who even needed to 7 bury his crippling student identity and disgraceful past to an official CLT teacher of the English Department at Nanda University in the Guangdong province. The CLT courses for Minfang as a student as well as a lecturer did transform him from a person who was afraid of shouldering on his teacher role to a confident lecturer in a university department. From the frame perspectives, Pennington (2015) stated that a teacher’s educational experience and degree should be the starting point for developing professional identity. That identity then develops through a “dialectic interaction” between the individual or practitioner’s aspects of teaching and the field or disciplinary level - which is, Pennington pointed out, TESOL field (Pennington, 2015, p. 42). For example, teachers in the research of Sharkey (2004) constructed their identities by mediating their teaching practices in accordance with many layers of institutional contexts such as classroom, ESOL program within the school, school community, district ESOL program, school district, city and state, and academic contexts such as the knowledge about TESOL and about Kachru’s inner/outer circle of English. In fact, teacher development does not occur in a vacuum; their identities are much affected by the broader educational contexts in which their pedagogical activities are embedded. The three approaches above have some weaknesses. Firstly, the social identity theory is limited because it relies on static social categories, which possibly deters researchers from further investigating “the evolution of teacher identity and the moment-by-moment production of that identity” (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 27). Also, the emphasis on native/nonnative undervalues other factors that collectively participate in the identity construction process. Secondly, though the situated learning approach has overcome the native/nonnative dichotomy, it 8 stresses much on the role of teacher education programs meanwhile most participants of my research were not officially trained as such. Thirdly, the individual and contextual investigation of the frame perspectives seems to be more institutional and TESOL-oriented than the scope of my research as all of my research participants are now not working at any school or holding any Bachelor or Master degree of TESOL. However, despite the aforementioned weaknesses, the situated learning approach and the frame perspectives, to a certain extent, have assisted me to write interview questions and provided me helpful lenses to look at the data. 2.3. Literature on language teacher identity In the search for language teacher identity, the experience of learning has been acknowledged much in the language teaching field as a crucial part of a teacher's ongoing process of learning to teach (i.e Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Farrell 2011). In some autobiographical narratives, for example in Le (2018), the researcher narrated his learning trajectory in college and then stated out how that academic experience shaped his later teaching practices: "During my first years of teaching, I had no idea of the nuts and bolts of teaching English, and I taught my students the way I had been taught by my teachers at the College.[...]. Honestly, I did not realize that I fell into the trap of teaching like I had been taught. I know now that I should not have taught like this; I should not have been this kind of teacher, but at that time I did not have any other experiences and knowledge to do otherwise" (pp. 5-6). The lack of access to other teaching methods made the researcher resort to the total use of intuition; however, in many other cases the teachers leaned on their learning experiences as a guideline in their initial years of teaching. One illustration is from the 9 research of Hayes in 2007. He explored the process of becoming English teachers of three participants who reported that their choices of becoming teachers were much inspired by their learning at secondary school and their model teachers. In their first years of teaching, they applied some methods, such as reading out loud, that they experienced from the learning with previous teachers. Or in the research of Duff and Uchida (1997), the Japanese participants capitalized a lot on their past learning experiences. They either facilitated games to make their class less bookish or organized their class in the seminar style to initiate more active conversations because those activities were imprinted in their mind from their school time. In Nguyen (2017a), the six participants in this research all agreed upon the influences of their learning trajectories on their current teaching practices. Thanks to their experiences as a learner, they knew exactly the strengths and drawbacks of the old teaching methods. They therefore sought out many ways to improve their current teaching. For example, when they realized that the prevalence of grammar and vocabulary teaching was not conducive to learning for the contemporary students, they proactively added more communicative elements into their classroom yet still kept a balance between grammar and communication. Also, the six participants acknowledged the roles of model teachers in nurturing their passion for English. They much preferred English to other subjects such as sciences and humanities due to the fact that their English teachers were more democratic, friendly and considerate to students. Those model teachers never applied any rigid rules to the students and always gave an ear to students. They even stayed at school after class for further tutoring. More 10 than that, the teachers in this research were impressed by the role models' creative and fun ways of teaching grammar. These fun moments in class inspired them to be more creative and willing to adopt new methods in their teaching now. Besides the influences of the past learning experiences, it is also the reflective practice that allows teachers to contemplate what they have taught, adjust their lessons and project their future professional plan. In the perspectives of many researchers, reflective practice is a crucial component of language teacher education and is indispensable to teacher's lifelong professional development (Wright, 2010; Farrell, 2011). The practice of reflection occurs in many stages. For example, it can be teachers' reflecting on their past learning experiences to figuring out the pros and cons (Nguyen, 2017a; Hayes, 2007; Duff & Uchida, 1997), or the reflection between a senior teacher and a student teacher after a class observation (Farrell, 2011; Riordan & Farr, 2015), or the looking back to some interesting learning moments that plant some seeds in their teaching career (Nguyen, 2017a). The reflection of novice teachers with senior teachers is also worth some consideration. In Riordan and Farr's 2015 research, the student teachers had a constant consultation with their tutors, both online and face-to-face. From the student teachers' narratives with their tutors, the author found out the depiction of novice identities yet at the same time saw the potentiality of those student teachers in constructing knowledge and transitioning from peripheral to legitimate participants of a teaching community. Likewise, the novice teacher in Farrell's 2011 research could gain a lot of teaching strategies and became much more aware of classroom organization thanks to her tutor's nonjudgmental manner of observation. In fact, the constructive feedback from the 11 observer did put some lights to her classroom practices and enhance her professional confidence. Different from the professional reflections mentioned above, the research of Nguyen (2017a) pointed to the lasting imprint of happy moments of learning English in the participants' choice of becoming teachers. More than that, the teachers drew on these interesting experiences to design appropriate learning activities to students and create a conducive learning environment for students. However, the reflective practices are not always positive and constructive as exemplified in the three aforementioned research. The teachers' practices in Wang's (2020) research encountered many constraints from institutional structures, institutional norms, the inflexible curriculums, and the external social contexts. For example, the heavy workloads, large class size and examination fixation traditions did not allow them to develop personal rapport with students or include any materials that are not test-oriented in the class hours. Worse than that, they were in vain to develop their teacher identity and considered themselves like a teaching robot with no personalities. Same as that group of participants, the teacher in Li and Costa's (2017) research experienced so rigid an institutional constraint that she encountered lots of professional fatigue and emotional labor. Teaching English at a private school, she was required to train IELTS for students. At first she was quite satisfied when her students achieved desired scores; however, she soon realized that a high test result did not exactly indicate a high language competence. She struggled to negotiate the test-minded constraints from her school and act according to her new beliefs, yet the "requisite professional space to enact transformative teacher agency was limited at the school level" (Li & Costa, 2017, p. 288). 12 Besides the experiences, the emotion also contributed to teacher identity formation as the changes in emotion could change one’s beliefs and their consequential behaviors. One example was from Lasky’s (2005) research about professional vulnerability. In this paper, he argued that vulnerability is "a multidimensional, multifaceted emotional experience" that arises when one's beliefs interact with the real situation (p. 901). The conflicting interactions possibly result in some feelings of powerlessness, betrayal or anxiety - the manifestation of vulnerability. These emotions could challenge people and might force them to act inconsistently with their core beliefs. As the result, the vulnerability could form one's new ways of behaving, or new identities. For example, Lasky (2005) found out that a group of teachers adopted a new identity after a school reform. When the school changed from a humanistic collegial system to managerialism, they saw themselves much less effective as teachers and experienced a deep-down de-professionalization. For them, being a teacher meant being able to teach the whole child. Besides the care about a child's academic development, a teacher needed to uphold students' social and emotional development. However, due to the huge workload that the managerialism brought, they gradually lost the in-person contact with their students and felt in vain to support students' social and emotional lives. They were forced to adopt the academic teacher positionings as required from the reform mandates. However, it does not have to be a reform to make teachers experience the ups and downs in emotion. In daily teaching circumstances, they could possibly go through all levels of emotions. For example, in the research of Zhu (2017), the student teachers reported feeling eager and anxious at the beginning of their teaching practicum, then feeling shocked and embarrassed once teaching. That 13