EFL teachers’ transformation of identity during COVID-19

Abstract

This narrative inquiry aims to investigate how the professional identities of English language teachers were reconstructed during the Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) period of COVID-19 pandemic at university English Preparatory Program settings in the context of the Turkish education system. It explores the professional histories of eight teachers in the English as a foreign language context. Their teaching profiles, perceptions of students and colleagues, and situatedness of their identities in the ERT period when they had to improve their adaptive expertise by switching their mode of teaching to online spaces are examined. Teachers were interviewed to gather data about the shift of their identities in COVID-19 period and the data was analyzed according to codes and themes. The emergent themes include the following: challenges of ERT, teacher growth and adaptability, and confidence in teacher competences.