Iranian EAP Teachers Perceptions of Professional Identity: Exploring the Role of Gender and Length of Service

The present study reports on a thematic analysis of Iranian EAP teachers’ conceptualizations of their professional identity in relation to their length of service and gender. Being at the cutting edge of language education theories, EAP established itself as one of the important branches of EL. Practically, EAP is taught and practiced differently by the two groups of ELT and content teachers differently. In this study, in-depth semi-structured interviews were used with 10 EAP teachers (6 ELT and 4 content) to probe the underlying factors involved in their identity formation in teaching discipline-based EAP courses. The 6 major themes extracted from the content analysis of the audio-taped interviews pointed to significant variations in the conceptualizations of professional identity between the two groups of teachers. Experience, field of specializations, pedagogical content knowledge, interaction and gender were found as the major themes in EAP teachers’ identity formation. The findings promise implications for EAP teacher education, and syllabus design.