ABSTRACT
On the basis of interviews with 20 Chinese EFL teachers and text-mining analysis, this study investigates the reconstruction of language teacher identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of context, agency, and practice. The word co-occurrence analysis and collocation statistics with modal verbs coded by KH Coder 3.0 demonstrate that English teachers face two types of identity reconstruction processes: (a) situational context related to various changes, and, (b) interactional context that causes communication difficulties with students. How teachers enact agency is influenced by their teaching experience. Through practice, teachers reconstruct their identity as solution seekers, positive learners, and confident professionals.
ABSTRACT
The unprecedented switch to online education during the Covid-19 pandemic has posed many challenges for language teachers, such as conducting authentic language interactions with reduced modalities in virtual classrooms. Language teachers, therefore, have been confronted with identity tensions of how to reposition themselves to adapt to this new teaching space. How teachers experienced and responded to these identity tensions is critically important to the success of online education, yet this issue remains underexplored. To address this gap, our case studies drew on multiple rounds of individual interviews with four university English teachers who taught online during the pandemic. Findings reveal that individual teachers experienced varying degrees of identity tensions on the pedagogical and socio-affective dimensions. To tackle these identity tensions, the teachers took wide-ranging agentic actions in pre-, in-, and/or after-class stages to maintain an identity, adopt a new identity, switch between identities, and/or redefine identities. Findings are discussed in terms of differential identity tensions brought by online teaching to individual teachers, as well as the complex interplay between identity tensions and teacher agency. The study concludes with implications for online language teaching and language teacher development. [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
The first years of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have brought unanticipated and far-reaching change to the ways language teachers have had to conceptualise and implement their practices. Many teachers have been compelled to move rapidly from classroom to online teaching which has had a substantial impact not only on their sense of identity, but also their sense of confidence in their usual practices. In this chapter, I draw on the reflections of Australian teachers working with international students in the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector, several of whom I have worked with in these early pandemic years as a facilitator of action research, as part of their professional development. Together with their colleagues, they needed to rapidly adjust their professional expectations, roles and practices. The chapter draws on short narrative comments from these teachers and illustrates how they and their colleagues drew on new concepts and mindsets to negotiate their teacher identities and to discover how they could best work with their students in the change to online environments. The data show that social, cognitive and emotional factors were major influences on these negotiations of identity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
While the shift to remote teaching at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was experienced across all sectors of higher education, university-level foreign language teachers were impacted in particular ways. Interpersonal communication, such as discussion of students’ daily lives and their feelings, is integral to language classroom discourse. The decreases in foreign language enrollments and threats to programs the in U.S. in recent decades have also connected emotion labor to other professional discourses of relevance to language educators, namely those related to recruitment and retention. What has been called “teaching-as-caring” is thus central to language teachers’ work (e.g., Miller & Gkonou, 2018 & 2021). The collective and aggregate crises of the COVID pandemic provide a complex context for studying questions of how professional imperatives to enact these forms of emotion labor are experienced by teachers of languages other than English. This interview-based study thus examines the experiences of university language instructors during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The participants were 19 educators of various languages at institutions of higher education across the U.S. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed qualitatively. Findings reveal the salience of three interconnected feeling rules. The participants routinely enacted and navigated emotion labor as institutionalized and internalized expectations for maintaining personal contact with students, creating a sense of community, and regulating student feelings in ways that emerged from and extended beyond practices directly related to language teaching. The article concludes with implications for expanding the scope of research on emotion labor in language teaching and for the kinds of professional support offered to both pre- and in-service educators.