Novice native english-speaking teachers’ professional identity construction in relation to their emotions and tensions

This longitudinal, case study aimed to examine the professional teacher identity construction of novice native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) working in an EFL setting. Thus, this study explored two American novice NESTs’ experiences and reflections in terms of their emotions and tensions throughout their professional teacher identity construction in the preparatory school of a foundation university in Turkey. Data were collected over a six-month-period through three qualitative data collection instruments: journal entries, semi-structured follow-up interviews and field notes. As for the data analysis procedure, open-coding was first employed to separately identify the emergent codes in two datasets coming from two participants’ narratives and the field notes and to construct categories and themes, and then axial coding was applied to the all categories and themes on hand to obtain overall findings. The study revealed three major findings: a) Novice NESTs’ educational background in the field of English language teaching (ELT), local language competence and professional support services in the institution may lower NESTs’ tension and yield less negative emotions, which can make novice NESTs’ process of professional identity construction more positive and easier in return, b) Tensions can be more manageable in EFL contexts when novice NESTs set career goals to realize themselves as professional teachers of English, and c) Emotions seem to be in a state of flux, however; too many lived experiences of negative emotions might hinder novice NESTs’ professional identity construction and their imagined identities as language teachers. To conclude, the aforementioned findings suggested that novice NESTs’ tensions and emotions may facilitate or hinder their investment within community of practice and accordingly shape their professional teacher identity construction. In line with this conclusion, the study presented several suggestions for future research and pedagogical implications for novice NESTs, administrators and local non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in EFL contexts.