POSSIBLE SELVES THEORY: A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR LANGUAGE TEACHER SELF AND IDENTITY RESEARCH

More recently, Day, Kington, Stobart, and Sammons (2005) have claimed that teachers’ emotional or personal identities have not received adequate attention from educational researchers which leads to an incomplete understanding of issues such as teacher motivation, satisfaction or commitment to the job. The main purpose of this study is to shed light on the current paradigms in language teacher self and identity research with the special aim of presenting the contributions of possible selves theory to this field. A careful analysis of literature on language teacher research indicates that there have been three different conceptions of self and identity held by traditional, modern, and postmodern theorists. Each paradigm, as a reaction to the previous one, accounts for only some aspects of the complicated issues of self and identity. The fragmentation of the self and the existence of multiple identities can be accounted for by possible selves theory. The contents of teachers’ possible selves are in fact their identity goals, that is, teachers’ possible selves are the representations of their different compartmentalized but interconnected identities including language, personal, sociocultural, and professional. It is through a thorough analysis of the contents of possible selves that we can arrive at an ascertained number of values, beliefs, expectations, and aspirations that the teachers have strongly held as their core identities. The theory of possible selves might be adopted as a new exploratory mechanism for approaching different aspects of language teachers self and identity and it also provides an interpretive context for the current view of the self.