Identity Conflicts

Current understanding of language teacher identity development pictures it as a complex process of continual change and reorganization, which inherently draws on personal trajectories and societal structures and ideologies. It is also characteristic of this process that the personally and societally significant discourses run into conflict during the language teacher’s career path. In understanding this complex process and the role of identity conflicts in it, the concepts of agency and investment are relevant in understanding how the individual navigates between individual, institutional and societal discourses. In this chapter, we provide an overview of recent research on language teacher students’ identity development with a special focus on agency and investment in identity conflicts. Our focus is on the identities of teacher students, who are in the process of constructing their professional identities as future language teachers. This development is not a linear process but is interwoven in their past trajectories and future visions, which often get into conflict with their own visions and the institutional and societal expectations.