Search results for: Trent John

The purpose of this study was to understand how a group of pre-service English language teachers constructed and negotiated their identities as teachers during a teaching practicum. The results of this study suggest that the identity work is an essential feature of student teachers’ experiences of a teaching practicum as they attempt to position themselves as particular types of teachers, not only within their placement schools, but also in relation to their understandings of what it means to be a language teacher, both within Hong Kong and beyond. However, the study also highlighted the potential for identity conflict that can arise if there is a mismatch between the subject positions offered to pre-service teachers within teacher education programmes and practicum placement schools and the student teachers own self-positioning as teachers.

This study examined the experiences of a group of six preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong as they prepared for, engaged in, and reflected upon a compulsory research project during the final year of their Bachelor of Education degree program. The article discusses the experiences of these preservice teachers in terms of the construction of their teacher identities. The findings illustrate the identity conflicts the preservice teachers experienced as their research engagement required that they cross institutional and educational boundaries to confront, question, and reject various identity positions, including ‘student teacher’, ‘full-time teacher’, and ‘teacher-researcher’. The article concludes that the lens of teacher identity can provide insights into how student teachers’ perceptions and experiences of research shape and are shaped by their understandings of themselves as teachers.

The current paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the experiences of a group of English language teachers from the Chinese mainland. The teachers completed their teacher training in Hong Kong and have taken up full-time teaching positions in secondary schools within Hong Kong. The study examines the participants' discursive and participative practices to illustrate how their experiences, both as students in the Chinese mainland and as preservice teachers in Hong Kong, shaped their construction of teacher identities, as well as to show that their employment in Hong Kong schools represented a challenge to this identity formation process.

This article reports on the results of a qualitative study. The study explored the experiences of one group of pre-service English language teachers in Hong Kong as they undertook an action research project as part of their undergraduate teacher training programme. The study indicates that as teacher researchers, the trainee teachers contested previously held perceptions about their engagement in teaching, their images of teachers and teaching, as well as their alignment with some aspects of contemporary educational discourse.