Becoming an English language teacher: Continuities and Discontinuities

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to report a three-year phenomenographic study conducted on seven EFL Polish teachers with the focus on presenting how they experience different aspects of language teaching at three crucial stages: 1) the time of ELT theory studying, 2) the time of school placement, 3) the time of first-year working as professional teachers. Each stage of the study is presented from the perspective of affordances standing for the respondents’ expectations ( continuities ) as well as constraints ( discontinuities ). The article concludes that discontinuities, rather than continuities, can prove invaluable in language teacher identity development.