Exploring the professional role identities of experienced ESL teachers through reflective practice

Over their careers teachers tacitly construct and reconstruct a conceptual sense of who they are (their self-image) and what they do (their professional role identity). Teacher role identity includes teacher beliefs, values, and emotions about many aspects of teaching and being a teacher. Reflecting on teacher role identity allows language educators a useful lens into the “who” of teaching and how teachers construct and reconstruct their views of their roles as language teachers and themselves in relation to their peers and their context. This paper reports on the professional role identity of three experienced ESL College teachers in Canada as communicated in regular group meetings. A total of 16 main role identities were identified and divided into three major role identity clusters of teacher as manager, teacher as professional, and teacher as ‘acculturator’, the last of which may be somewhat unique to ESL teachers.