Narrative Inquiry and Language Teacher Identity

Narrative inquiry as a research methodology aims to understand the life experiences of research participants as lived, performed, and imagined, from their perspective. Narrative researchers do so by examining the stories participants tell about their experiences. Stories are central to narrative inquiry processes. When the inquiry focus is on language teachers, narrative inquirers are interested in the stories that teachers construct about the work they do (their practice), about how they feel about what they do (their emotions), and about how they learn as teachers (their professional development). In exploring these different areas, attention inevitably turns to who language teachers are – their identities. This chapter focuses on narrative inquiry as a methodology that is used to explore language teacher identities and their related practices as a network of interconnecting complex dynamic systems. It provides examples of different narrative research methods that explore this interconnection in a range of sociopolitical contexts. The aim of the chapter is not to provide a detailed account of these narrative inquiry methodologies, but rather to illustrate their diversity and to argue optimistically for their continued relevance and development in the future.