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The following sections denote three theories which help to understand the dynamic construction of language teachers’ identity. The present study utilizes an integrated theoretical framework including “Identity Formation Theory” (Wenger, 1998), “History-in-Person”(Holland & Lave, 2001), and “Identity-in-Discourse and Identity-in-Practice”(Varghese et al., 2005) as theoretical underpinnings.
Wenger (1998) states that “identification takes place in the doing” (p.193). In Wenger’s theoretical framework, identity construction is reflected in terms of three modes of belonging: engagement, imagination, and alignment. Through engagement,individuals establish and maintain joint enterprises, negotiate meanings and establish relations with others. As Cohen (2010) points out that teachers’ identity has been regarded as being constructed partly through an individual’s relations with others,including mentors, school authorities, teacher educators, and other teachers. Imagination is a creative force for identity construction.
Imagination moves beyond the physical limits of engagement by enabling individuals to create images of the world, and their place within it, across time and space. As Wenger (1998 ) puts, “It is through imagination that we conceive of new developments, explore alternatives, and envision possible futures” (p.178). In language teacher education, membership of imagined communities has been shown to legitimize new identity options by allowing non-native language speaking teachers and their students to position themselves as legitimate L2 users (Pavlenko, 2003).
In terms of alignment, Wenger (1998) contends that it is “the process through which modes of belonging become constitutive of our identities by creating bonds or distinctions in which we become invested” (p.191). Alignment translates into the membership of social communities, which constitutes one’s identity formation as a form of competence—the competence of knowing who we are and who we are not. It is participative. For one thing, identity is a participative process of “being identified with something or someone” (Wenger, 1998, p.191). In other words, it is a process of building associations whose experience is constitutive of who we are. For another, it is a process of identifying as or being identified as something or someone, being labeled as the member of a group or a category.
Wenger (1998) also examines identity formation in terms of the negotiation of meanings that matter within a social configuration. Meanings compete “for the definition of certain events, actions, or artifacts” (Wenger, 1998, p.199). However, if negotiability over meanings is absent, an identity of non-participation and marginality can result; the individual’s experience “becomes irrelevant because it cannot be asserted and recognized as a form of competence” (Wenger, 1998, p.203).
The notion of History-in-Person is derived from social practice theory and primarily used to explain the processes of social formation and cultural production emerging as a result of complex social, political, and economic struggles (Holland &Lave, 2001). The present study employs the History-in-Person Theory because professional identity is largely manifested through teachers’ discursive practices,their instructional talk must be viewed from the perspective of their sociocultural and historical origins, as history-in-person processes. Teachers’ history-in-person is “the sediment from past experiences upon which one improvises, using the cultural resources available, in response to the subject positions af orded one in the present” (Holland et al., 1998). History is brought to the present through the minds and bodies of individuals,as they are addressed by external people, forces, and institutions and respond using the words and practices of others, representing history-in-person (Holland & Lave, 2009).History-in-Person Theory represents the generative fashioning of individual identity and self-making through their relationship with local conflictual practice in the past and present (Holland & Lave, 2001). Clearly, the individual and society cannot be separated and are closely intertwined. By teasing apart the dominant perspectives of both of these inter-related theories of identity construction, analytical attention can be focused on how historically produced agents come to a particular perspective and way of participating(Donato & Davin, 2017).
In this study, analytical attention is focused on exploring the trajectory of professional identity formation of three secondary school EFL teachers. Since teachers’identity formation is a continuous process, teachers’ past personal and professional experiences and current practices are both pivotal in shaping the professional identity.For instance, teachers’ early experiences as language learners sometimes directly af ect their language teaching beliefs and instructional practices in the classroom. Therefore,the History-in-Person Theory is functional in supporting the present study in connecting teachers’ past and present in the trajectory of professional identity formation. Thus, to understand professional identity construction, one’s personal history and the present forces must be included in the interpretive frame.
Varghese et al. (2005) maintain that a comprehensive understanding of teaching and teachers requires attention to both “Identity-in-Discourse” and “Identity-in-Practice”(p.39). According to the theoretical framework of Varghese et al. (2005), Identity-in-Practice denotes an action-orientated approach to understanding identity, stressing the need to investigate identity formation as a social matter, which is operationalised through concrete practices and tasks. While another aspect of comprehensive way in understanding teachers’ identity construction, Identity-in-Discourse, posits that identities are discursively constituted, mainly through language. As Varghese et al. (2005) argue that, “Identity is constructed, maintained, and negotiated to a significant extent through language and discourse” (Varghese et al., 2005, p.23).
“Identity-in-Practice” and “Identity-in-Discourse” are the two facets of a coin. Both of the dimensions play a pivotal role in identity development. Identity is discursively constructed, with language being used to represent a specific kind of knowledge and to construct identity—hence Identity-in-Discourse (Block, 2007). Hall et al. (2010) add that “as people learn the characteristics associated with the identities available to them, they can adopt the language and speech patterns connected to them in order to position themselves as a certain type of person” (p.235). In language teacher research, as for teachers in academic growth, they acquire new modes of discourse, i.e., a professional language to talk about their work, carving out new identities for themselves (Freeman,1993; Richards, 2010). Identity formation can also be operationalised in the daily tasks and practices people engage in, hence Identity-in-Practice (Gee, 1996; Miller, 2009).People perform identity work and enact their identity through what they do; as Gee (1996) contends, identity is “what you are doing while you say it” (p. viii). While Varghese et al. (2005) use Identity-in-Practice to refer to the enactment of identity (as Dif erent from Identity-in-Discourse). Kanno and Stuart (2011) regard relationship between Identity-in-Practice and Identity-in-Discourse as “mutually constitutive” (p.240). Thus Identity-in-Practice can be understood in terms of both “narrated identities” and “enacted identities” (Lee, 2013, p.332).