Identity, Language Learning, and Teaching – An Identity-Oriented Approach to Language Teacher Education

Language teacher identity (LTI) has grown as a research field as part of language teacher education research over the past two decades, yielding a substantial body of work on the nature of LTI, how it’s constructed, negotiated, and enacted in different contexts, and how language teachers’ professional identities intersect with larger sociopolitical discourses around race, ethnicity, gender, class, and speakerhood, among others. LTI scholarship has demonstrated that teacher learning, practice, and growth involve teachers’ identity work, i.e., their engagement with questions of who they are, how they perceive themselves as language professionals, and how their understanding of their professional selves is informed by the social, cultural, and political conditions that shape their work. Building on this line of research, language teacher education has taken up the task of making LTI an explicit focus in coursework as well as practicum settings.

Identity-oriented language teacher education makes use of a number of approaches and activities to make LTI the explicit focus of pre-service teachers’ learning and development, such as narratives, autoethnographic writing and arts-based approaches. The current project is interested in exploring what identity-oriented language teacher education can look like in the local context and better understand pre-service teachers’ sense-making, emotions, and agency as they engage in identity-oriented teacher learning activities. It has incorporated autoethnography into coursework and laid a specific focus on promoting ideological clarity among pre-service teachers in understanding their professional selves as language teachers within broader sociopolitical discourses by investigating their own stories of language learning, teaching, and use.

Going forward, the project is open to collaboration with teacher educators and researchers from different contexts who wish to implement identity-oriented activities.

Publications:

Kocaman, C. & Yazan, B. (2025). Resisting monolingualism through critical autoethnographic narratives: Insights from two teacher education contexts. In K. Raza, O. Ustuk, & D. Reynolds (Eds.). Multilingual TESOL: De-constructing and re-constructing power ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘for’ language classrooms. Springer. 

Yazan, B., Kocaman, C., & Lindahl, K. (2025). Critical Language Awareness in Language Teacher Education: How Can Critical Autoethnographic Narrative Help? In G. Park, Q. Charles, S. Tanghe, & M. Webb (Eds.). Radical Inclusivity: Critical Language Awareness in the Language and Writing Classroom. Multilingual Matters.

Selvi, A.F., Kocaman, C. (2024). Introducing Criticality and Critical English Language Teacher Education: Tensions, Opportunities, and Possibilities. In A.F. Selvi, C. Kocaman (Eds.). International Perspectives on Critical English Language Teacher Education: Theory and Practice. Bloomsbury.

Selvi, A.F., Kocaman, C. (Eds.). (2024). International Perspectives on Critical English Language Teacher Education: Theory and Practice. Bloomsbury.