Mexican English teachers' identity negotiations: A narrative study

Abstract

This study examines how five Mexican EFL teachers negotiated their professional identities while interacting with ideologies implicit in social practices, power relations, and discourse. I approached teachers' identities using a hybrid narrative approach that combined content and discourse analysis of the participants' life histories, small storytelling, and classroom practices. Diverse public documents were analyzed to identify socially constructed views about English teachers. The analysis showed a tendency in the public opinion to construct the failure of most Mexicans to acquire English as the result of poor teaching and not as the consequence of complex socioeconomic and political factors. These perceptions were also found in the teachers' narratives of their past, present, and projected professional development. My analysis revealed that, as part of the process of identity negotiation, the teachers struggled with the native speaker fallacy since their initial teacher education. These struggles also continued, as the teachers negotiated their legitimacy as EFL teachers at the workplace. While some of the participants problematized the assumption that the best type of English teacher should be a native speaker, they still considered the proficiency features of these speakers as their standard to measure their own L2 proficiency. The analysis also showed that the teachers tended to present their reality through binary oppositions that separated them from their colleagues, perceiving their peers as being at the negative end of their dichotomous representations. Finally, the participants' projections of their professional development showed a tendency to see their future as uncertain which may be connected to the increasingly uncertain situation of Mexican teachers' working conditions. These findings have three implications. First, the participants' struggles to negotiate their identities as legitimate teachers suggest that in-service EFL teachers, in Mexico and other similar contexts, may be in need of professional development programs to help them identify and constructively contest ideologies at the workplace. Second, teacher education programs may need to focus on raising student-teachers' awareness about the value of their multicompetent linguistic knowledge. Finally, teachers' tendency to define their identity in antagonistic ways should be addressed to neutralize possible negative effects on teachers' collaborative work.