The construction of teacher identity among graduates from other majors in vietnam

ABSTRACT The search for the teacher identity among language teachers has been popular for many decades; however, its scope mainly surrounds the mainstream teachers working the field or t

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

ĐỖ NHƯ QUỲNH

THE CONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY AMONG GRADUATES FROM OTHER MAJORS IN VIETNAM

(Quá trình kiến tạo bản dạng giáo viên ngoại ngữ của

những sinh viên Việt Nam không tốt nghiệp ngành sư phạm)

M.A MAJOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01

Supervisor: Hoàng Thị Hạnh, PhD

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

ĐỖ NHƯ QUỲNH

THE CONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE TEACHER IDENTITY AMONG GRADUATES FROM OTHER MAJORS IN VIETNAM

(Quá trình kiến tạo bản dạng giáo viên ngoại ngữ của

những sinh viên Việt Nam không tốt nghiệp ngành sư phạm)

M.A MAJOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01

Supervisor: Hoàng Thị Hạnh, PhD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, I would like to convey my utmost appreciation to my supervisor, Dr Hoàng Thị Hạnh, for guiding me through my lost days with her wide-angle research lenses, effective research tools, and, most preciously, her tender care Without her, this study would have been left unfinished

Secondly, I am extremely grateful to Mr Ngô Xuân Minh, with whom I had a critical reflection about my past teaching career and came up with the idea for this research

Thirdly, I want to send my sincere gratitude to my beloved friend Trần Phương Linh, who supports me a lot with administrative procedures when I am far away from home to make the thesis defense possible

Last but not least, I would like to thank myself for being resilient for the last fifteen months of conducting this research

ABSTRACT

The search for the teacher identity among language teachers has been popular for

many decades; however, its scope mainly surrounds the mainstream teachers working

the field or the students teachers and not yet extends to the graduates of other fields

who choose to work as language teachers after graduating from colleges This

research is an attempt to invite those “laymen” into the toward-centrum picture of

teaching and makes them visible to the researchers of teacher identity In this

research, I aim to explore why graduates from other majors pursue the teaching

career and how they construct their teacher identity The findings show that the

participants form and construct their identity not only from their learning experiences

with model teachers, from their real teaching practices, from the vulnerability of

teachers’ (in)confidence but also from the social contexts affected by neoliberal

tenets To put it concisely, teachers’ identity derives from three areas, namely

identity in practice, identity in emotion and identity in neoliberal discourse

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATION v

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale of the study and aim of the research 1

1.2 Scope of the study 2

1.3 Significance of the study 3

1.4 Organization of the thesis 3

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

2.1 Defining language teacher identity 5

2.2 Approaches to language teacher identity 6

2.3 Literature on language teacher identity 9

CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY 17

3.1 Research question 17

3.2 Research methods 17

3.3 Selection of informants 18

3.4 Data collection 22

3.5 Data analysis 24

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 26

4.1 Positive experiences with tutoring initiate teacher’s professional interest 26

4.2 Model teachers in extra classes nurture the professional growth 33

4.3 Trials and creativity contribute to teachers’ professional growth 44

4.4 Teaching practices conflict with beliefs, yet align with the selves 50

4.5 Participants’ vulnerability validates their professional identity 53

4.6 Neoliberalism and the teacher-entrepreneur positioning 57

CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 66

5.1 Discussion and conclusions 66

5.1.1 Identity in practice 66

5.1.2 Identity in emotion 68

5.1.3 Identity in neoliberal discourse 69

5.2 Limitations and suggestions for further research 72

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

This chapter states the rationale of the study, research’s aims, the scope of the study, how it can contribute to the current research landscape in English teacher identity It also proposes the research question that serves as the

guiding line for the whole research

1.1 Rationale of the study and aim of the research

Since the emergence of the concept “identity crisis” of Erik Erikson in the 1950s, more research has been drawn to the quest of identity Researchers in the education field are inquisitive about how people establish their teacher identity Their studies hitherto has investigated the teacher identity formation among student teachers at college (Moses et al., 2017; Watt et al., 2012), students who are pursuing a master degree in TESOL (Swearingen, 2019; Nguyen & Dao, 2019; O’Brien & Schillaci, 2002), or teachers at schools (Lasky, 2005; Farrell, 2011); however, there has been little work on the groups

of graduates who are not majored in teacher education yet now working in teaching profession

In Vietnam, English has become increasingly popular Especially after it became a compulsory subject taught in four skills for ten years from Grade 3 to Grade 12 in the general education system (The Prime Minister, 2008), there was higher demand of English learning both in formal and non-formal sectors (Hoang, 2020) It then witnessed the shortage of qualified teachers both in school and in private institutes While some large international language centers are able to recruit foreign teachers to work for them, the small language schools take full advantage of the domestic teacher resources The thing is,

teachers working in private English institutes are competent at English yet not formally trained to work as language teachers These teachers came from a variety of majors like business, marketing or finance Some of them even opened their own classes and established new English centers Interestingly, these teachers persist with the job and their classes attract a large number of students

As a teacher and a researcher myself, I was so curious about how these

‘laymen’ take up English teaching jobs and maintain their professional persistence that I decided to carry out this research The investigation on how they become teachers potentially broadened an understanding about the societal shifts in Vietnam recently and, from that requisite understanding, added more values to the comprehensive picture of research on teacher identity

The aim of this study is to explore why graduates from other majors pursue the teaching career and how they construct their teacher identity I will use narrative inquiry methods to gain in-depth insight into the intrinsic as well as extrinsic reasons for their choice of profession and the way they build up their teacher image Specifically, the research question that I deal with is:

“How do graduates from other majors construct their English language teacher identity?”

1.2 Scope of the study

This paper investigates the identity formation and construction of four thirty English teachers who are now working in the private sectors such as

under-related fields in their bachelor degrees, yet pursue the English language teaching career after graduation

1.3 Significance of the study

The findings of this study will add values to not only the language teacher identity field but also to the university administrators and the ‘non-mainstream’ teacher community The language teacher identity field, after this research, will

be extended, though minimally, to an area that has been unknown to researchers whose works focus on ‘mainstream’ teachers or students teachers For university administrators in teacher education, my research possibly makes them aware of what is happening outside schools; they can therefore reflect upon their curriculums to make any possible adjustments that benefit their students, perhaps to make students more competitive to students from other majors Regarding the ‘non-mainstream’ teacher community, my research may shed some light on why and how they embark on the teaching career and give them a chance to contemplate their future

1.4 Organization of the thesis

This chapter has indicated the motivations for this study, the objectives of the research, and the scope of investigation The remaining chapters are organized

as follows:

Chapter II contextualizes the study in the relevant literature of language teacher identity and reviews several approaches to investigate language teacher identity

In chapter III, the methodology of the research is described

Chapter IV is a presentation of research findings of the formation and

construction of English teacher identity

In chapter V, a thorough discussion in comparison with previous literature and

a conclusion are provided Some limitations and suggestions for further

research will also be presented towards the end of chapter V

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter provides an overview of the contextual background of the study It also gives the working definition of language teacher identity, reviews some approaches to language teacher identity and presents the findings of previous

studies

2.1 Defining language teacher identity

The literature on teaching and teacher education hitherto commonly agrees that identity is dynamic It does not only stem from one’s natural state – nature-identity, derive from a position recognized by authority – institution-identity, result from the discourse of others about oneself – discourse-identity, but also lie in one’s practices in relation to external groups (Gee, 2001, cited in Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009) It emerges and reshapes itself continuously The dynamicity of identity can be observed in the way researchers named their studies as the ‘development’ of identity (i.e Olsen, 2008), the ‘construction” of identity (i.e Lave & Wenger, 1991), identity ‘formation’ (i.e Rodgers & Scott, 2008), or ‘shaping’ an identity (i.e Flores & Day, 2006)

The working definitions of teacher identity are recorded in many studies (Lasky, 2005; Ha & Que, 2006; Hong, Greene & Lowery, 2016; Li, 2020); however, only few researchers made an attempt in defining language teacher identity (i.e Olsen, 2008; Sachs, 2005) The definition proposed by Barkhuizen (2017) seems to be the most inclusive compared to others (i.e Olsen, 2008; Sachs, 2005); therefore, I would like to use his definition in my research:

“Language teacher identities (LTIs) are cognitive, social, emotional, ideological and historical – they are both inside the teacher and outside in the social, material and technological world LTIs are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and storying They are struggle and harmony: they are contested and resisted, by self and others, and they are also accepted, acknowledged and valued, by self and others They are core and peripheral, personal and professional, they are dynamic, multiple, and hybrid, and they are foregrounded and backgrounded And LTIs change, short-term and over time – discursively in social interaction with teacher educators, learners, teachers, administrators and the wider community, and in material interaction with spaces, places and objects in classrooms, institutions and online.” (Barkhuizen, 2017,

p 4) Implied from the definition above, becoming a teacher is the collective sequence of many social-historical events that stimulate the changes in cognition and emotion Those changes do not trigger one’s spontaneous wish to become a teacher, yet interlocking-ly enable the prospect of working as a teacher The study of teacher identity is therefore the act of de-layering that collective sequence and making it visible to the world

2.2 Approaches to language teacher identity

In this part, I will review several approaches in studying language teacher identity, namely social identity theory, situated learning, and frame perspectives, and then state the theoretical approach that I adopt in my

Within the social identity theory approach, researchers mostly base their investigation of identity on the social categories created by the society (i.e nationality, race, class,…) (Varghese et al., 2005) Identities of teachers in those studies are often attached to one/or more given categories For example, the participants in the research of Nguyen and Dao (2019) put themselves into the nonnative category due to their lack of competence in English language The fact that they later pursued the native-likeness in their English capacity in order to step out from the peripheral position in English teacher market seems

to reinforce the binary native/nonnative language background mindset among ESOL teachers rather than blurring its boundary

When it comes to the situated learning approach, learning, which is often attached to the teacher training activities, was viewed as an identification process (Varghese et al., 2005) In other words, there was a link between learning and identity formation Teacher identity of Natasha – a thirty something Korean teacher, as an illustration, has been negotiated throughout her MA TESOL program in the USA (Costa, 2015) Despite her negative association of nonnative English speaker categorization due to her inferior English competence and teaching styles, she successfully transcended the notion of nativeness by realizing that what made her a professional teacher were more constituted by collaborative learning, facilitator and authentic materials development rather than the nativeness Similarly, Minfang – an underprivileged student from a rural area of China – has dynamically constructed his EFL teacher image thanks to the thorough learning of CLT (Tsui, 2007) His teacher identity was built up from an incompetent language learner to an competent one, then from a grammar learner with the hatred to CLT till a custodian of CLT, from a marginal EFL teacher who even needed to

bury his crippling student identity and disgraceful past to an official CLT teacher of the English Department at Nanda University in the Guangdong province The CLT courses for Minfang as a student as well as a lecturer did transform him from a person who was afraid of shouldering on his teacher role

to a confident lecturer in a university department

From the frame perspectives, Pennington (2015) stated that a teacher’s educational experience and degree should be the starting point for developing professional identity That identity then develops through a “dialectic interaction” between the individual or practitioner’s aspects of teaching and the field or disciplinary level - which is, Pennington pointed out, TESOL field (Pennington, 2015, p 42) For example, teachers in the research of Sharkey (2004) constructed their identities by mediating their teaching practices in accordance with many layers of institutional contexts such as classroom, ESOL program within the school, school community, district ESOL program, school district, city and state, and academic contexts such as the knowledge about TESOL and about Kachru’s inner/outer circle of English In fact, teacher development does not occur in a vacuum; their identities are much affected by the broader educational contexts in which their pedagogical activities are embedded

The three approaches above have some weaknesses Firstly, the social identity theory is limited because it relies on static social categories, which possibly

deters researchers from further investigating “the evolution of teacher identity

and the moment-by-moment production of that identity” (Varghese et al., 2005,

p 27) Also, the emphasis on native/nonnative undervalues other factors that collectively participate in the identity construction process Secondly, though

stresses much on the role of teacher education programs meanwhile most participants of my research were not officially trained as such Thirdly, the individual and contextual investigation of the frame perspectives seems to be more institutional and TESOL-oriented than the scope of my research as all of

my research participants are now not working at any school or holding any Bachelor or Master degree of TESOL However, despite the aforementioned weaknesses, the situated learning approach and the frame perspectives, to a certain extent, have assisted me to write interview questions and provided me helpful lenses to look at the data

2.3 Literature on language teacher identity

In the search for language teacher identity, the experience of learning has been acknowledged much in the language teaching field as a crucial part of a teacher's ongoing process of learning to teach (i.e Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Farrell 2011) In some autobiographical narratives, for example in Le (2018), the researcher narrated his learning trajectory in college and then stated out how that academic experience shaped his later teaching practices: "During my first years of teaching, I had no idea of the nuts and bolts of teaching English, and I taught my students the way I had been taught by my teachers at the College.[ ] Honestly, I did not realize that I fell into the trap of teaching like I had been taught I know now that I should not have taught like this; I should not have been this kind of teacher, but at that time I did not have any other experiences and knowledge to do otherwise" (pp 5-6) The lack of access to other teaching methods made the researcher resort to the total use of intuition; however, in many other cases the teachers leaned on their learning experiences

as a guideline in their initial years of teaching One illustration is from the

research of Hayes in 2007 He explored the process of becoming English teachers of three participants who reported that their choices of becoming teachers were much inspired by their learning at secondary school and their model teachers In their first years of teaching, they applied some methods, such as reading out loud, that they experienced from the learning with previous teachers Or in the research of Duff and Uchida (1997), the Japanese participants capitalized a lot on their past learning experiences They either facilitated games to make their class less bookish or organized their class in the seminar style to initiate more active conversations because those activities were imprinted in their mind from their school time

In Nguyen (2017a), the six participants in this research all agreed upon the influences of their learning trajectories on their current teaching practices Thanks to their experiences as a learner, they knew exactly the strengths and drawbacks of the old teaching methods They therefore sought out many ways

to improve their current teaching For example, when they realized that the prevalence of grammar and vocabulary teaching was not conducive to learning for the contemporary students, they proactively added more communicative elements into their classroom yet still kept a balance between grammar and communication

Also, the six participants acknowledged the roles of model teachers in nurturing their passion for English They much preferred English to other subjects such as sciences and humanities due to the fact that their English teachers were more democratic, friendly and considerate to students Those model teachers never applied any rigid rules to the students and always gave an

than that, the teachers in this research were impressed by the role models' creative and fun ways of teaching grammar These fun moments in class inspired them to be more creative and willing to adopt new methods in their teaching now

Besides the influences of the past learning experiences, it is also the reflective practice that allows teachers to contemplate what they have taught, adjust their lessons and project their future professional plan In the perspectives of many researchers, reflective practice is a crucial component of language teacher education and is indispensable to teacher's lifelong professional development (Wright, 2010; Farrell, 2011) The practice of reflection occurs in many stages For example, it can be teachers' reflecting on their past learning experiences to figuring out the pros and cons (Nguyen, 2017a; Hayes, 2007; Duff & Uchida, 1997), or the reflection between a senior teacher and a student teacher after a class observation (Farrell, 2011; Riordan & Farr, 2015), or the looking back to some interesting learning moments that plant some seeds in their teaching career (Nguyen, 2017a)

The reflection of novice teachers with senior teachers is also worth some consideration In Riordan and Farr's 2015 research, the student teachers had a constant consultation with their tutors, both online and face-to-face From the student teachers' narratives with their tutors, the author found out the depiction

of novice identities yet at the same time saw the potentiality of those student teachers in constructing knowledge and transitioning from peripheral to legitimate participants of a teaching community Likewise, the novice teacher

in Farrell's 2011 research could gain a lot of teaching strategies and became much more aware of classroom organization thanks to her tutor's non-

observer did put some lights to her classroom practices and enhance her professional confidence

Different from the professional reflections mentioned above, the research of Nguyen (2017a) pointed to the lasting imprint of happy moments of learning English in the participants' choice of becoming teachers More than that, the teachers drew on these interesting experiences to design appropriate learning activities to students and create a conducive learning environment for students However, the reflective practices are not always positive and constructive as exemplified in the three aforementioned research The teachers' practices in Wang's (2020) research encountered many constraints from institutional structures, institutional norms, the inflexible curriculums, and the external social contexts For example, the heavy workloads, large class size and examination fixation traditions did not allow them to develop personal rapport with students or include any materials that are not test-oriented in the class hours Worse than that, they were in vain to develop their teacher identity and considered themselves like a teaching robot with no personalities Same as that group of participants, the teacher in Li and Costa's (2017) research experienced

so rigid an institutional constraint that she encountered lots of professional fatigue and emotional labor Teaching English at a private school, she was required to train IELTS for students At first she was quite satisfied when her students achieved desired scores; however, she soon realized that a high test result did not exactly indicate a high language competence She struggled to negotiate the test-minded constraints from her school and act according to her new beliefs, yet the "requisite professional space to enact transformative teacher agency was limited at the school level" (Li & Costa, 2017, p 288)

Besides the experiences, the emotion also contributed to teacher identity formation as the changes in emotion could change one’s beliefs and their consequential behaviors One example was from Lasky’s (2005) research about professional vulnerability In this paper, he argued that vulnerability is "a multidimensional, multifaceted emotional experience" that arises when one's beliefs interact with the real situation (p 901) The conflicting interactions possibly result in some feelings of powerlessness, betrayal or anxiety - the manifestation of vulnerability These emotions could challenge people and might force them to act inconsistently with their core beliefs As the result, the vulnerability could form one's new ways of behaving, or new identities For example, Lasky (2005) found out that a group of teachers adopted a new identity after a school reform When the school changed from a humanistic collegial system to managerialism, they saw themselves much less effective as teachers and experienced a deep-down de-professionalization For them, being

a teacher meant being able to teach the whole child Besides the care about a child's academic development, a teacher needed to uphold students' social and emotional development However, due to the huge workload that the managerialism brought, they gradually lost the in-person contact with their students and felt in vain to support students' social and emotional lives They were forced to adopt the academic teacher positionings as required from the reform mandates

However, it does not have to be a reform to make teachers experience the ups and downs in emotion In daily teaching circumstances, they could possibly go through all levels of emotions For example, in the research of Zhu (2017), the student teachers reported feeling eager and anxious at the beginning of their

embarrassment quickly turned into guilt and regret at the end of the practicum All that collection of feelings brought them to the negotiations of identities in which they had to decide how they should perform in each situation Teachers

in the research of González-Calvo and Arias-Carballal (2017) also underwent some tensions in their teaching practice, yet they finally found that adding a positive sense of humor in the classroom could create a social lubricant in the classroom and levered up the classroom's atmosphere The doing of humor in the classroom enabled the being of a humorous teacher - a new image that teachers added to their teachers' portfolio

Along with the experiences and emotions, the changes in societal level like the introduction of neoliberalism, created many transformations in teaching and learning practices Neoliberalism is “the idea that everything should be run as a business that market metaphors, metrics, and practices should permeate all fields of human life” (Tarnoff, 2016), including education The pervasiveness

of neoliberalism in education has brought about many changes in teaching and learning practices, two of which are the emphasis on students' achievement through standardized tests (Buchanan, 2015, p 702) and the continual inspection of teacher performativity (Ball, 2003) If metricized exams are only considered as a peripheral element in the traditional learning activity, they are now at the heart of neoliberal discourses in which the success of schools, teachers or students is exclusively based on students' testing results Same as students, teachers now tolerate the inspection from school authorities and lots

of criterion-referenced class observation They are de-professionalized in the way that their professional judgement, educational beliefs and philosophies of teaching are deemed inferior to the primacy of uniformed performance

In fact, many teachers reported that de-professionalization (Skerritt, 2018; Hall

& McGinity 2015, Revees, 2018) The reason is, the neoliberal performative

view put teachers in periodical assessment Instead of "be professional" in the

whole teaching career, teachers now needed to overcome the schools'

surveillance to be certified as "being professional" (Skerritt, 2018, p 5) It was

important for teachers to become "visible in the right way and to the right people at the right time" (Page, 2017a, p 9, cited in Skerritt, 2018) That showcase of profession went against teachers' beliefs and really shaped a new behavior - a new identity The teachers in Hall and McGinity's (2015) research also resisted the neoliberal changes in the contemporary school They did not think that the exams, like GCSEs, added much value to students, yet they could not explicitly tell students that the exam was just "the game we have to play and it’s going to serve them and us so that’s ok" or either shared their true perception to the colleagues at school (p 8) However, they had no way out so they tried to comply with the situation and get on with "the game.”

In Revees’s (2018), the researcher documented a high dissonance between a teacher's values and the neoliberalism’s tenets Being assigned with the perpetual novice teacher identity, the teacher sought to change herself to match with her school's neoliberal definition of good teaching by adopting the scripted instruction program That scripted instruction program did help her improve the teacher image; however, she soon realized that the scripted instruction conflicted with her long-held ethics of care for the students The teacher tried to strike a compromise but at the end her professional agency was stymied by the neoliberal view of ‘good’ teaching that pervaded her schooling context

However, some teachers perceived neoliberalism very positively They thought

of themselves as "valuable resources" that the school management required for meeting their profit-making objectives or could flexibly hop jobs if there was any place offering higher salary (Gupta, 2019, p 8)

To summarize, the language teacher identity construction so far has been navigated in the conceptual frameworks of past learning experiences, reflective practice, emotion, and neoliberalism These concepts act as a guideline for the researcher from the step of collecting data to analyzing data and later on drawing conclusions from such data

CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

This chapter states the research question, gives detailed description of the

informants and describes how the researcher collects and analyzes the data

3.1 Research question

The question that this research aims to answer is:

How do graduates from other majors construct their English language teacher identity?

In order to answer this question, I will trace their language teacher identity construction back to their very first exposure to English language, their choice

of majors at university, their initial teaching experiences and their current teaching practices

3.2 Research methods

Narrative inquiry is the main method in this qualitative research Since its emergence as a separate discipline from qualitative research field in the early twentieth century (Riessman, 1993), it has shown its strength in communicating meanings by treating meanings as subjective and contextually multilayered rather than the fixed and objective meanings that the logical positivists were in favor of To communicate the subjective meanings, the researcher can employ many forms of narrative such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, photos and other artifacts; as long

as they can record and narrate how people perceive their lives For the

convenience of collecting data, this research adopts the conversations in the form of semi-structured interview to collect the data for analysis

For this research specifically, narrative inquiry method is very effective because the complex nature of the why and the how informants embarked on the teaching career could be unearthed throughout their narration In fact, when

a story is told, it carries inside it the complexity of daily life, where an individual deals with unanticipated experiences and responding-ly (re)constructs their emergence (Bruner, 2002) More than that, narrative approach could capture the emotion of the moment described, rendering the present-ness or activeness of the event, infused with the latent meaning communicated by the tellers Thus, though storytelling seems very simple at first glance, it has the power of not only revealing how a person perceives himself/herself in association with others but also uncovering all the societal layers that construct their identities

Beside narrative inquiry, content analysis method, which is to study the posts, videos and livestreams on social media, and class observation are also adopted

to compare and contrast the perceptions of participants shown in the interview and their real-life practice

3.3 Selection of informants

Participants were four English teachers with pseudo-names as An, Minh, Linh and Mai Four participants all majored in economics and business-related fields and had not been trained in any official teacher-training programs before they started working as a teacher They were all born to middle-income families in Hanoi – the capital city of Vietnam None of their parents worked in the

teaching profession so their choice of becoming a teacher is not influenced by the familial career

I chose to focus on these four participants because they did not have a background in formal English language teacher education and they all worked

as English teachers in a self-owned business context Despite the two aforementioned similarities, each participant constructed their teacher identities very differently as they had unique experiences in learning and teaching English More than that, each held their distinctive beliefs towards teaching, had different emotional reactions during their class hours and showed their personal portrait on social media By examining all these beliefs, emotions, self-presentations and practices, I set out to unpack how these “laymen” construct their teacher identity

Their personal description was presented in the table below:

Name Age Gender Undergraduate

major

University Years of

teaching English

Place of teaching

An 30 Male Marketing Foreign Trade

University (3 years in Vietnam + 1 year

in the USA)

8 years time

full-English Center A

Minh 25 Male Investment National

Economics University

3 years time & 2 years part-time

full-English Center A

Linh 28 Female Finance Academy of

Finance

6 years time & 2 years part-time

full-English Center B

Mai 25 Female Finance and

Banking

National Economics University

3 years time & 3 years part-time

full-Home classes

An worked as a marketing staff for a well-known English center in Hanoi before he quitted the job and set up his first English class Initially, he taught a group of students including his colleagues and their friends who aimed for 6.0 IELTS score Later he opened a basic class for beginners of English After two years of working alone, he recruited five new members (two part-time administrative staff and three part-time teachers) to work with him to start an English “center” – the word he would not prefer to use when referring to his business

An taught all four skills in 5.5-7.0 level IELTS classes, while the three time teachers, who were his senior students, interchangeably taught from one

part-to two skills in 4.0-5.5 level IELTS class At present, An co-teaches the score classes with his colleagues His “center” now has two branches in Hanoi

higher-An has always wished to enroll in some professional teacher-training courses

yet his tight schedule with teaching and managing has not allowed him to spare any time for such courses

Minh was An’s senior student He started working as a part-time teacher since

An took up his English center in 2014 Minh barely learnt any English in his twelve years of general education Only after he passed the university entrance exam, he decided to learn “little English” in order to meet the entry requirement of his favorite major Minh was really interested in An’s teaching styles and practiced English days and nights He got 7.5 IELTS score after two years of learning In 2014, Minh never thought that he would be a teacher, yet

he gradually grew interest with teaching and has stayed with this job since then Same as An, Minh has not been trained officially in any English teacher training courses/programs

Linh worked as a teaching assistant for a center of English communication in her second year at college as she wanted to improve her speaking skill Back then, she simultaneously joined an IELTS class and achieved 7.0 IELTS after one year of being trained When Linh got the IELTS score, that center immediately recruited her for the teacher position Since then, Linh only dealt with English communication in either basic communication courses or IELTS speaking skills Linh now works as a full-time staff in a company that sells online English courses to working people and teaches communicative English

at night

Mai used to be a student of finance She always dreamt of becoming a rich businesswoman and that is the reason why she did a part-time job as a private tutor in her first year of college At first, she taught her acquaintances’ children

at their house As time went by, she got more students and had a very high

income compared to their peers She finally opened a class at her own house after three years of private tutoring She had many types of classes, from basic English class for low-level students, to the level-transition exam training class and the standardized test training class; however, her target group of students is the low-level ones In 2018, Mai registered for a three-week TESOL course provided by the Australian International TESOL in Hanoi She did not gain much from the course as she thought she “already knows the knowledge provided in this course.” In fact, what she needed was a certificate in TESOL because she worried that having no certificate in teaching would cause legal trouble for her home classes

3.4 Data collection

I collected data from three sources: the narrative interviews, the class observation and the videos and posts from participants’ Facebooks and YouTube channels For the interview, each participant attended two audio-recorded semi-structured interviews, the first one before the class observation (for about 90 minutes) and the second one after class observation (for about 30 minutes) The purpose of the first interview was to collect data about participants’ English learning journey, the turn from being a learner of English

to an English teacher and the experience from the first days of teaching until now Within these three key aspects, there are three groups of questions that I design to guide our interviews, shown in the table below:

Three key aspects Questions

Their English

learning journey

When did you start learning English?

How did you learn it?

What did you learn at school/university?

Did you join in any extra class?

Do you have your favorite English teacher(s)?

How did he/she help you to learn English?

Did you self-study English? How?

How did you learn English to prepare for exams?

Did you take any standardized test?

What do you think about these tests?

The turn to an

English teacher

When did you first think about becoming a teacher of English?

What happened then?

Why did you decide not to pursue any jobs of your major? Was anyone involved in your choice of working as a teacher?

If you were able to travel back in time, would you still choose this profession?

The experience of

teaching

Are you happy with your decision?

Have you thought about a job change? What happened then?

What did you struggle with in your first years working as an English teacher? How did you work on it?

Do you see yourself having a lot of improvements?

Have you thought of working at a school?

What are the advantages that students may gain in your class while they can’t gain at other learning environments? What teaching approaches do you use in your class?

Do you see yourself different from a “traditional” teacher? What are your students like? Their age? They study for what purposes? Do they often reach the target? Do you enjoy teaching them?

When you recruit teachers for your center, what criteria do you use to evaluate them?

The second interview was conducted after I observed their class, watched their videos/livestreams and read their posts on social media platforms The purpose

of the second interview is to triangulate the verbal data taken from the first interview with the observational data collected from classrooms and media, and to provide more space for the participants to reflect on their previous points of view and give explanation for their in-class behaviors

The interviewing language was English because the participants felt more comfortable with it rather than Vietnamese

3.5 Data analysis

When I analyzed the data, I employed the following coding procedures First, I carefully reviewed and coded four participants’ first interview transcripts, their classroom observations and their posts/videos/livestreams on social media based on the “cognitive, social, emotional, ideological and historical” aspects

Within this step, I particularly paid attention to the possible conflicts between what the participants said (in the interview) and what they did (in classroom and social media) for the purpose of triangulating the data Then, I collected specific instances and events related to their English learning and teaching in the interviews, classroom observations and social media under the possible themes found out in step one Next, I both looked at the themes in my data and the literature to see if I could form any arguments for the teacher identity construction of four participants Later on, I conducted the second interview to collect participants’ deeper insights under my newly-formed arguments At last, I picked up the insights from the participants and located them to the corresponding arguments Presented in the finding sections is the argument-formed data that is interwoven with my interpretation to make sense of the data

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

In this chapter, collected data is analyzed to answer the research question The findings are organized in themes that procedurally align with the formation

and construction of English teacher identity

4.1 Positive experiences with tutoring initiate teacher’s professional

interest

Unlike the student teachers who often had quite a clear personal interest in teaching, the participants in my research all backgrounded in other majors, so, for them, teaching was not what they intended to do after they graduated from college However, each participant interestingly had hands-on exposure to tutoring and found that teaching could possibly be the thing they wanted to do for life And from then on, they put a lot of efforts into becoming an

Linh applied for the teaching assistant position at an English communication center five months before she took the IELTS test because she wanted to test

The opportunities to communicate with the foreigners at the center helped Linh improve her English competence:

“It was really beneficial for me, because at that time I was basically assisting foreign teachers, so I had to communicate with them a lot I needed to talk with them on a daily basis, so it really boosts my level of confidence You know, getting familiar with English every day helps me to think quickly in English without having to translate from Vietnamese That helps me a lot, and also

I think it helps me greatly with the achievement in my IELTS test later on.” (Excerpt 1/Interview 1/Linh)

The job definitely enabled Linh to achieved her main purpose, yet it also left a

“side effect” on Linh, which was her curiosity about the teaching job:

“At that time I was looking for learning from those teachers about how to build up a lesson plan, how she allocated the time for each activity, and what sort of method she used with games

specifically It was quite magical how she kept the students

focused and motivated her students to be on time with their homework Even me now, I am not sure that my students will complete all the homework before coming to class, so it is

awesome when she could motivate students to do homework as

such.” (Emphasis added) (Excerpt 2/Interview 2/Linh)

The adjectives “magical” and “awesome” showed much of Linh’s excitement

idea that “maybe I’m not doing well but I can do it.” She then embarked on the teaching career with even more interesting experiences After doing the teaching assistant job for several months, Linh was recruited at this center as a tutor for some conversation classes That tutoring job was really meaningful to her because she started to learn to design materials and plan a lesson Her most enjoyable part was to figure out what kinds of materials suited the students’ learning “appetite”:

“I really like the fact that, when I teach more, I get to meet younger and younger students than me I keep changing my materials quite often so it can suit their hobby and their strengths more I like this part a lot as I get to know my students better and

do some alteration on my materials When my materials just work,

it really made me feel rewarded as if I did something great.” (Excerpt 3/Interview 2/Linh)

As can be seen from excerpt 20 and 21, the tutoring experiences and its resulting emotional rapport played an integral part in participants’ professional trajectories When becoming a teacher was considered as an emotional experience (Karlsson, 2013), the exciting moments that participants had with the classroom space and the jokes from students in fact contributed to their interest with different dimensions of the job and urged their long-term commitment to teaching

Different from Linh, Minh did not take up the tutoring job with the aim of enhancing his language capacity He did it because he “felt indebted to” his model teacher and did not want to disappoint him At first, Minh did not enjoy

job that I wanted to do.” In such one year, Minh had time to “familiarize myself with the lesson planning.” He compared each lesson with an important

“event” that required thorough preparation:

“You know, each lesson is like an event, we need to plan out for

each lesson Everything must be planned out and you need to

know what happens first, what comes next and what comes third,

so you know the sequences of such events It’s both about the materials and the activities to make class fun So it took me one year to adjust the materials and knew exactly what I should do

with my students.” (Emphasis added) (Excerpt 4/Interview

1/Minh)

For Minh, the teaching job was not something recursive and monotonous, but more like a sacred occasion in which each participant felt the necessity, as shown in the modals “need to, must be” to follow certain rituals each time they joined such events The lesson-event comparison implied Minh’s perception that teaching was more an occasion to exercise the care for others – the students – via the meticulous preparation of “the materials and the activities” rather than a job The love for teaching gradually grew in him and nurtured his passion:

“I don’t know since when I looked forward to every lesson so that

I could try out new ideas The passion with teaching somehow

grew on me, teaching became my calling, my passion, I think I did

it well and the students love to be in my class.” (Emphasis added)

The possibility of “try out new idea” also added substance to Minh’s inner calling for teaching He used to think of becoming a banking staff, yet he then realized that the nine-to-five job in a bank was not as appealing to him as the teaching job where he could exercise his creativity That enabling of job creativity gave Minh the idea for taking up the teaching profession

An had a unique story He had never officially worked as either a teaching assistant or a private tutor, yet the occasional tutoring for his peers and colleagues cumulatively led him to the teaching path Since secondary school, An’s English competence was much higher than his classmates; therefore, he held a small class at home to help friends:

“I was lucky when I had a very early exposure to the teaching experience because in secondary school I actually held a small extra class for my classmates because some of them were not really good at English so they went to my house so that they can perform better, higher score in the language So I started, would say the eighth grade as well, I helped some of my classmates.” (Excerpt 6/Interview 1/An)

That early exposure encouraged him to grasp more chances of tutoring in his later life In his last year of college in the USA, he persuaded his professor to

be her unofficial assistant in the Marketing course For An, it was a “really cool” experience because he was granted the chance to deliver a lesson in a big lecture hall without the support from the professor:

“I mean like it was really cool like standing in front of like a few

hundred Americans, speaking their language and actually delivering a lesson to them when I was just an undergrad like them, even graduate students, and she even wasn't in the class Because she had some other businesses and she had to take care of elsewhere, she gave the class to me I had to conduct the whole

session on my own, but it was cool, it was also scary, and was

cool as well.” (Emphasis added) (Excerpt 7/Interview 1/An)

The emotional complexities shown in his excitement – being “cool” - and fear – being scared – was similar to the feelings of student teachers during the practicum in the research of Zhu (2017) Meanwhile the student teachers considered emotions as a clue to adjust their in-class teaching practices, An’s early emotional experiences acted as the prerequisite for his courage to open his own class later on He believed that if he could do as difficult a task as delivering knowledge to native peers, he then could overcome other challenges Actually An admitted an “in-born calling” for being a teacher, because he

“always wanted to become a teacher in primary school,” but “that was not the time that I wanted to become an English teacher I would think that it was the primary teacher or something.” It was not until he worked as a marketing executive for two years after graduation that he eventually decided to adopt the teaching profession The turning point happened when his colleagues in the marketing agency asked him to explain for some IELTS exercises:

“At that point I was working as a marketing executive for a small language school in the town So, you know, there were my

interested in studying English They actually took another IELTS class at that point, then everyday they went to work, they brought the assignment, but maybe the assignment was too hard for them

to deal with so they asked for my help Then when I explained to them, they were like "Woa, you are so good at explaining things Why don't you hold a class, we can attend!" (Excerpt 8/Interview 1/An)

The students’ acknowledgement to An’s teaching techniques played a great source of inspiration for him to quit the marketing job and opened his first class Interestingly, his first students “were coming from my last marketing job.” They were the salespeople at that company and they not only attended An’s class as a learner but also introduced the class to many friends in order to attract more students For An, the cumulation of unofficial tutoring, emotional complexities, and students’ recognition drove him to embark on the teaching path

In contrast with Linh, Minh and An, whose reasons to become teacher were related to emotional rapport, job creativity or students’ recognition, Mai’s interest with the job came from the high income that she earned during her time tutoring:

“I am a money-oriented person, I just wanted to do it for money

However, during my time tutoring, I saw the improvement in my students and felt in love with this job I put my heart in it, then the

money comes So it is a great way.” (Excerpt 9/Interview 1/Mai)

The narrative above suggested Mai’s perception towards the teaching job Teaching appeared to her as a means of living that generated huge income, rather than a job of creativity like what Minh perceived of Though the joy resulting from the “improvement in my students” played a role in Mai’s choice

of becoming an English teacher, it was the “money” that really brought the real joy and spurred her to take up this job

Overall, though there were various paths leading to tutoring, i.e the chance to improve English, the inner tribute to model teacher or the money, four participants all found their joy in grasping the chance to work as a language teacher For Linh, it was the curiosity in being able to manage the class and the exciting moments with students For Minh, it was the job creativity that kept him in the career path For An, it was the cumulation of unofficial tutoring, emotional complexities, and students’ recognition that made him realize that he should follow his in-born calling And for Mai, though students’ enhancement

in language capacity brought her professional joy, it was still the high income that made her a teacher today

4.2 Model teachers in extra classes nurture the professional growth

The first noticeable feature in all four participants’ answers when being asked about their English learning experiences was their inclination to talk about extra classes Two of them, Linh and Minh, reported being demotivated by the teaching methods used in their mainstream EFL classes; meanwhile An and Mai, though did not experience such demotivation, valued the things they obtained in extra classes more than at school That close attachment to extracurricular learning somehow explains their preference for teachers of