Some Changes of Prospective Teachers’ Identities Caused by Teaching Experience

Abstract

The longitudinal case study reported in this paper examined how the extracurricular teaching experiences of 3 Japanese undergraduate TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) students formed and shaped their multiple identities. The students volunteered to participate in a yearlong extracurricular teaching practicum and were interviewed at two points, in the middle of the practicum and at its end. Semistructured interviews were carried out and analysed to examine the identity development patterns of the participants, not only as TEFL students, but also as instructors for young learners and community members. Although identity development of novice language teachers and pre-service teachers has been addressed in previous research (Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Liu & Fisher, 2006; Merseth, Sommer, & Dickstein, 2008; Tsui, 2007), only Tsui (2007) explicitly discussed the multiple identity formation of a pre-service teacher. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of situated learning provides a useful framework for understanding identity transformation through practice. As opposed to viewing identity as a singular entity, this framework conceptualizes it as both one’s lived experience of developing practice within each community and a nexus of multi-membership. It is assumed that being a person requires the reconciliation of various forms of membership, a process called the negotiation of meaning. As well as the negotiation of meaning, identities are understood to be formed through the process of identification as well as through the interactions between the processes of identification and meaning negotiation. Tsui used this framework to discuss the multiple identity formation of a pre-service teacher. No study, however, has focused on multiple identities emerging from teaching experiences for TEFL course undergraduates. As such, in order to understand the complexities of development patterns of TEFL students’ emerging identities in the context of group activity practice, the experiences of 3 undergraduate TEFL students participating in a voluntary yearlong optional extracurricular teaching practicum were analysed. The practicum was implemented as follows: Over the course of a year, a group of 10 student teachers each gave a 1-hour English class once a month to a group of 20-30 pupils ranging from the 4th graders to 6th graders as optional Saturday classes in public elementary schools in Kyoto, Japan. In addition to teaching, the participants also engaged in the preparation (involving developing lesson plans and teaching materials and rehearsing the lesson) and reflection phases. Semistructured interviews were conducted twice, in the middle and at the end of the program, and the interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed, using SCAT (Steps for Coding and Theorization; Ohtani, 2008, 2011). The following questions guided the research: RQ1. What kind of identities did the students develop during the project? RQ2. How did their emerging identities change? From the transcribed data, codes and categories were created to identify emerging themes. The findings showed that participation in the yearlong practice contributed to the development of 3 types of identities for the TEFL students: teacher trainees, FL teachers for young learners, and community members. The emerging identities also influenced each other in qualitatively different manners between individual cases. The 3 TEFL students’ conceptions about their 3 different positions showed varying degrees of change over the year, and thereby differing change patterns in the development of each of the 3 identities. As they came to see themselves as teachers by playing that role for the pupils, their pre-existing identity as teacher trainees transformed, depending on how successfully they had performed the competencies expected of them. As members of the teaching community, they also found different ways to be fully participating members by contributing to the community of practice in different ways. Based on the findings of the study, ways of improving teacher-training courses are proposed. First, a deeper understanding of L2 teacher identity development should be included in the knowledge base of L2 teacher education curricula because the construction of teacher identity is integral to novice L2 teachers’ learning-to-teach processes. Second, on-site training should be more widely introduced in EFL teacher training programs as it provides real-life opportunities for trainees to experience being responsible for the learning of real learners.