Initial Teacher Education and Professional Identity

The way initial teacher education is designed for foreign language teachers of early years varies from context to context. While some scholars defend a greater concern with the content, others emphasize the importance of knowledge about the context, learners and the curriculum. In all cases, programs for future language teachers aim to prepare them to educate for plurilingualism and interculturality. To understand the profiles that are being drawn up for teaching a foreign language in elementary school, this study analyzes how the process of teachers’ professional identity construction is perceived in recent research. The text starts with the notion of professional identity and moves on to identify the determining aspects in the construction of the professional identity of foreign language teachers. Using a literature review methodology, it analyses a corpus of 11 texts published over the last 10 years in the European Journal of Teacher Education . The analysis of the corpus was based on dimensions of language teachers’ professionalism to develop plurilingualism and interculturality. The results show that these dimensions are covered and that foreign language teacher education programs need to include activities to build a teaching professional identity capable of responding to the challenges of 21stcentury schools.