From Turning Points to Teacher Identity Learning Environments: Late-Career Language Teachers Speak Up

Although learning is usually associated with some regulatory bodies, external education, programmes or experts, there is another kind of learning which can be gained from reflection on a language teacher’s biography and their teacher identity learning in a professional environment. The present article focuses on the analysis of four veteran Polish late-career language teachers of English, French, German and Russian who share their language-teacher lives in in-depth narrative inquiry interviews with the author of this text. The article aims to find out how various language-related critical incidents, or turning points, that took place in these teachers’ lives have affected their succeeding professional lives, and their individual perception of the language-teacher identity learning environments available to them. From the analysis of the data, four teacher identity constructions have been distinguished: “the constructive problem solver”, “the comfort minder”, “the perceiver of language-related social injustice” and “the language learner”, and it transpires that the teachers’ previous experiences are likely to affect how and why other things happen. This finding may have vital pedagogical implications for language-teacher educators, as the construction of teacher identities that are related to the participants’ meaningful and unique past experiences may question the sense of developing one universal language-teacher identity.