Language Socialization: Recounting an English Language Teacher's Professional Identity Construction via Narrative Accounts

In this research, the teacher-researcher (henceforth, I) presents a chronological report over some life-long educational experiences in an EFL setting and during a long period—twenty-five years aimed at verifying/authenticating role conflicts. In so doing, I decided to carve my earlier educational paths to describe my diverse roles/realities. To this end, I recounted my past and presented experiences, including my three roles as (A) Language learner, (B) Language teacher, and (C) Language researcher. Using life-history narrative research designs and in line with autoethnography approaches, I initially embarked on critically describing my English language educational experiences from a recollection of past events in my memory through my first two roles—language learner and teacher—and mapped them onto my recently assigned role as a language researcher. The findings were self-revealing to me in that while recounting my experiences, I found out how specific intuited conflicts involving ‘impotency in using the English language for non-educational aims’, ‘the gap between theories and practice’, ‘the influence of essential others on my future decisions’, ‘the duality of exposures with people having more vs. fewer authorities’ among others had inflicted me to a great extent. Then and there, during such a long period for demonstrating my professional identity construction, I summarized my intuited conflicts. This was to designate how the unpredictability of affairs in ELT and maintaining intricate interactions with people in the community of practice, which resulted from numerous aims and led to unpredictable directions, might have influenced me as a language practitioner in my future attempts to experience a new being. The findings may promise implications for professional identity construction as mapped on recent narrative accounts for English language teachers.