The Relationship between Native English Speaking Professors’ Identity Building and Teaching Practices in the General English Program

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate how Native English Speaking Professors’ (NESPs) identities were constructed and how their constructed identities affected their teaching practices in the general English program. The study was conducted at A university and three NESPs and ten students participated in the study. The NESPs expressed their feelings and ideas about how they positioned themselves and were positioned by others through discussion sessions and autobiographical essays and interviews with students were also carried out to understand how NESPs were perceived by the students. Drawing on Communities of Practice (CofP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the researcher understood how the perceptions held by NESPs and others affected their teaching practices. The results revealed that their positioning as an outsider and an edutainer led to lack of collaboration with members of the CofP, which eventually became a major obstacle to the reconstruction of their professional identities and limited their teaching practices. This study provided significant insights into how expatriate educators’ identities were constructed through different degrees of involvement in the communities in which they were situated and discussed implications for legitimizing NESPs’ access to the local CofP as well as future research.