The construction of acehnese English teachers’ identities in their professional practice: an integrative view of identity

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the relationship between language teacher identity and language teaching practices. Using a qualitative approach as the research method and adopting an integrative view of identity as the theoretical framework, this study involves four Acehnese senior high school English teachers who live in Aceh, Indonesia as the participants to explore how they perceive the construction of their identities in relation to their professional practice. The research tools used in this study include semi-structured interview, classroom observation and teacher journal and the data in this study is analysed by using thematic analysis. The study finally reveals that the teachers in this study construct multiple identities in their teaching, such as four roles as their teacher identity, i.e., teacher as a moral guide, teacher as a parent of students, teacher as a moral role model and English teacher as an English speaker, and regional, national and global identity as their cultural identity.

It is also found that their religious identity as a Muslim and their professional identity as an English teacher significantly motivate them to construct the first three roles and the fourth role above, respectively. Moreover, regarding their regional identity, they construct it by contextualizing their teaching approach and content according to their local contexts. With regard to their national identity, they construct it by speaking national (Indonesian) language and discussing national (Indonesian) culture and history while teaching English. About their global identity, they consider their (imagined) global community as their global identity and bring the issues related to it into their teaching as a way of constructing this identity. Finally, regarding the implications of this study, since religious and cultural identity in ELT are little discussed, the findings of this study with regard to these two identities can contribute to fill in this gap. More importantly, as religiosity, culture and morality are very important for these teachers, it should inspire teacher educators to make religious, cultural and moral ethics as significant elements of their teacher education. This is because these three ethics are absent in teacher education in general and in Indonesian teacher education in particular.

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Identifiers

ORCID for William Baker: orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-2795

ORCID for Ying Zheng: orcid.org/0000-0003-2574-0358

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