TESOL Teachers’ Professional Identity Construction in Emergency Remote Teaching in Thailand

Abstract

Previous studies on teachers. professional identity (TPI) (Arvaja, 2016;Kayi-Aydar, 2019b;Pennington & Richards, 2016;Wolff & De Costa, 2017) have acknowledged that TPI is deeply rooted in teachers. interaction and engagement in various socio-cultural contexts, which may impact teachers. professional selves. For example, teachers. professional identity may have been constructed early on in their careers, especially during their pre-service years. It may have been further developed as teachers entered the teaching profession as in-service teachers, where they may be exposed to different professional learning networks and various classroom pedagogies. It may also have been influenced by their engagement in research and publication, teacher-training, and other professional development programs afforded by the schools and other professional organizations. The current educational context, which is greatly affected by the COVID19 pandemic, has challenged TPI since most education institutions in the world migrated from face-to-face classroom teaching to online or emergency remote teaching to continue the teaching and learning process. Although the concept of online teaching is different from emergency remote teaching in that the former may involve substantive preparation from technical to pedagogical, while the latter "is a temporary and abrupt shift to instructional delivery due to crises such as weather, war, or health" (Moser et al., 2021, p. 2), migrating to emergency remote teaching, especially in the middle of the semester or academic year, entails a number of challenges that teachers may encounter. For instance, teachers may not be prepared for the new teaching and learning environment since they may not have the pedagogical skills to deliver their lessons in a remote/online setting (Konig et al., 2020). Teachers may not have prior training on conducting classes virtually or remotely since most of the training they received may only concentrate on pedagogies inside the classroom. Moreover, this unprecedented shift to emergency remote teaching may also mean that teachers have to develop new teaching materials, employ new teaching strategies, and adapt to the new teaching environment to conform to the new teaching environment. While teachers take advantage of the new teaching opportunities outside of the traditional classroom, they may also have to reflect on and consider their agency and self-efficacy in carrying the pedagogical tasks in a new social setting. Considering that a number of teachers may have been trained only in classroom pedagogies, teachers may need to reexamine their professional identity and identify whether they can cope with the needs of the "new normal" in education, particularly in language teaching. In other words, how teachers view their professional role in emergency remote teaching during health emergencies may impact their agency and self-efficacy towards online pedagogy. In the field of TESOL and language education, there has been a growing interest in language teacher professional identity (LTPI) since it "could afford preservice and practicing language teachers a space to assert their agency in creating the contours of their identity formation" (Lindahl & Yazan, 2019, p. 1). Language teachers position themselves as focal persons who can make an impact on their language learners. beliefs and attitudes towards learning the target language. Therefore, language teachers should recognize the intricacies of their professional identities (Kayi-Aydar, 2019a) since how they view and demonstrate their professional identities may affect their classroom pedagogies and their language learners. Using the concept of teacher.s professional identity (Skott, 2019), this study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on language teacher.s professional identity by exploring how language teachers in a university in Thailand view and construct their professional identities in emergency remote language teaching during the COVID19 pandemic. It is argued that within the context of online language teaching, TPI also plays an important concept that needs to be understood, especially from the perspectives of the language teachers who shifted from face-to-face classroom teaching to remote teaching in the middle of the semester due to the COVID19 pandemic.