PhD Project: Professional Identity of Language Teachers with particular reference to Chinese-speaking language teachers in Danish higher education

My Ph.D. study is on professional identity of language teachers, with particular reference to Chinese-speaking language teachers in Danish higher education. Foreign language teacher identity is an emerging subject of interest in research on language teacher education and intercultural studies. Yet, little attention has been paid to the ways in which teacher identity is explored. My study is guided by a research question that investigates how the Chinese-speaking language teachers construct their professional identity as they teach Chinese as a subject in Danish universities. To answer this research question, a theoretical framework has been drawn upon by incorporating identity-in-practice (Wenger 1998) and identity-in-discourse (Danielewicz, 2001; Fairclough 2001). From a perspective of social learning (Wenger 1998), teacher identity-in-practice describes an action-oriented approach to understanding identity. It is one way to explore identity construction by investigating identity construction as a social matter, which is operationalized through concrete practices and tasks. In this perspective, identity construction is an experience, and practice and identity are mutually constitutive. From a postconstructralist perspective, the other way to explore identity construction is to acknowledge that identities are discursively constituted, mainly through language. In this perspective, language and identity are mutually constitutive. By illustrating these two ways to explore teacher identity construction, my Ph.D. study aims for discovering a critical aspect of understanding language teacher identity construction in an intercultural context, upon which to provide implications for the design of Chinese language teacher education in such context.