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In the last two decades, researchers in the field of language education have increasingly explored the professional identity development of language teachers from various perspectives and collated fruitful findings. Since the studies on LTI have derived from teacher studies in general education, this line of scholarship naturally has inherited the characteristics of teachers’ identity construction, which is well acknowledged as an ongoing, multifaceted, multilayered, complicated and discursive process. Although a copious list of studies in literature have invested the construction of LTI from personal,professional and contextual dimensions, it still has the following limits:
Firstly, in terms of participants, existing literature shows great concern to the teacher candidates without fully being aware of the secondary school in-service EFL teachers.
Secondly, concerning the place of research, the large majority of studies choose urban cities as research sites, very few of them are conducted in rural areas, and even less works choose to examine secondary school EFL teachers’ professional life in remote,rural, multiethnic and multilingual regions.
Thirdly, previous researches have discovered that teacher education programs and courses are featured in shaping language teachers’ professional identity. However, this line of studies has its limits. For one thing, most of the studies concentrate on student teachers or teacher candidates’ professional construction in teacher education program or practicum, relatively little attention has been paid to in-service teachers’ professional identity transformation happening in these programs; for another, many of these studies usually observe how education programs have influenced the teachers’ identity construction, but fail to examine how their experiences and reflections are internalized and manifested through classroom practices. As De Costa calls, “Teachers’ identity is not merely something that exists in the mind or explained elegantly on a piece of paper in the form of a well-crafted teaching philosophy statement. Rather, teachers’ identity needs to be performed and manifested through a good instruction” (Barkhuizen, 2017b, p.160).
The previous studies are far from a thorough understanding of the nature and influencing factors of LTI. There is still much room for researchers to investigate LTI from a holistic perspective. Based on the findings from the prior scholarship on teachers’identity research and fruitful results from language teachers’ identity studies, the present study fills the research gaps by looking at the complicate professional identity construction of three secondary school EFL teachers who are teaching in remote rural schools in southwestern China.