Cultivating Language Teacher Identities: A Narrative Inquiry of Pre-service Non-native English-speaking Teachers

Abstract

Teacher candidates in a Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) or Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, are from different linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. The ideology of native speakerism, which is a pervasive ideology that continues to be an issue in the field of English language teaching (ELT) where the native speaker (NS) is idealized, and the non-native speaker (NNS) is marginalized (Holliday, 2018). This study utilizes a narrative research design incorporating Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) Three-Dimensional Space framework to explore the lived experiences of pre-service non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) development of language teacher identities (LTI) in an MA TESOL program in the United States. The study’s findings indicate that pre-service teachers' previous encounters with native speakerism before entering a graduate TESOL program, along with the encounters with native speakerism while studying in an MA TESOL program, highlight a critical need to create safe spaces for pre-service teachers to engage and counter native speakerism. The study calls for the inclusion of pre-service teachers’ narratives as central to the TESOL curriculum to empower pre-service teachers to cultivate confident language teacher identities.