Researching Language Teacher Identity

In the last thirty years, second language teacher education has increasingly emphasized the importance of investigating L2 teachers’ mental lives, including teacher cognition, identity and emotions. As such, the research on language teacher identity has been flowering and providing intriguing insights to deepen the field’s understanding of how L2 teachers develop and construct their professional identities in practice. Various theories have attempted to offer in-depth perspectives on teacher identity development. This chapter focuses on the two methodological approaches the teacher identity work has employed, namely discourse and content analytical approaches. This chapter aims to analyze research adopting these approaches, particularly their research methodology and how this has been reported. Through the analysis, I will seek to uncover both contemporary trends and key contributions in the study of second-language teacher identity and highlight the critical methodological issues that merit discussion.