How to Cultivate an Excellent English-Teacher-in-Future?—A Study on the Changes on Pre-service Language Teacher Identity During the Practicum

For the teacher’s professional development, identity plays a crucial role in promoting the teacher’s maturity and skills. For pre-service teachers, the level of identity determines whether they are willing or even determined to take teaching as their future career, and also represents whether their professional development is smooth. Therefore,  the research on pre-service teachers’ identity is of great significance. Combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, this study aims to explore whether the identity of pre-service English teachers changes before and after the practicum and the influencing factors during the practicum through questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews. Based on the four dimensions of identity proposed by Xun, Sun, and Peng (2014), this study investigated the juniors before their practice and the seniors who had practiced for two months. It is    found that the scores of careers belonging, foreign language teaching belief, English proficiency, work involvement, professional behaviour tendency, and foreign language teaching reform are higher than those of the students  before the practicum. Through semi-structured interviews, it can be concluded that the factors affecting identity include personal factors, mentor factors, job content, and organizational support factors. According to the survey results, this study puts forward corresponding suggestions to improve the positive impact of practicum on students’ identity.

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