Modelling ESP teacher identity in Ukrainian tertiary education

Abstract

In an attempt to leverage knowledge in an ESP classroom, some university teachers find not much support from the university staff and administration in Ukraine. Yet, it hardly restrains ESP teachers to eagerly develop and construe their professional identity aimed at equipping students with employability literacy skills. A two-stage survey of three different groups of respondents was conducted at Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine. The findings on the open-ended questionnaire allowed designing a rank of identity constituents, which appeared to be different in research groups’ perceptions. While both language and subject teachers valued “individual features” as the most significant and “work experience” as the least, the students correspondingly ranked the other categories – “professional knowledge” and “foreign language competence”. Within the close-ended questionnaire dataset, these discrepancies vanished. All research groups agreed on the model of “ideal” ESP teacher identity as a combination of significantly ranking categories: “methods of teaching” → “professional knowledge” → “individual features” → “foreign language competence” → “work experience”. The “professional knowledge” category was estimated twice as significant as the “work experience” domain. The research results are consistent with the recent studies on teacher identity simulation. New was ranking the ESP teacher identity model on constituents’ significance based on opinions of three different social groups – students, language teachers, and subject teachers. The worked-out model could remedy ESP teacher identity ambiguity due to approach fruitfulness.