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“When I Am Teaching German, I Put on a Persona”: Exploring Lived Experiences of Teaching a Foreign Language

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Negotiating Identity in Modern Foreign Language Teaching

Abstract

The field of teacher identity is a complex area that has attracted the interest of numerous researchers over the last decades. Within this field the topic of the identity of language teachers has recently emerged. Many of the studies devoted to language teachers’ identity have focused on the teachers as object of study (Morgan and Clarke in Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Routledge, Abingdon, 2011; Yin Ling et al. in Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research. Routledge, London, 2015; Sachs in Connecting Policy and Practice: Challenges for Teaching and Learning in Schools and Universities. Routledge, Oxford, pp. 5–21, 2005), little attention, however, has been paid in relation to how teachers themselves make sense of their experience of teaching a foreign language. This present study addresses this underexplored aspect by using a phenomenological approach, focusing on the lived experience of two language teachers. The method used facilitates an insight into the lived world of language teachers. It aims to offer a relevant contribution to the teacher identity research, in particular in how language teachers experience their self; it also reveals a different insight in relation to the way multiple identities are experienced by language teachers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Maria Luisa Pérez Cavana

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  1. Maria Luisa Pérez Cavana
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Correspondence to Maria Luisa Pérez Cavana .

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  1. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London, London, UK

    Matilde Gallardo

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Cavana, M.L.P. (2019). “When I Am Teaching German, I Put on a Persona”: Exploring Lived Experiences of Teaching a Foreign Language. In: Gallardo, M. (eds) Negotiating Identity in Modern Foreign Language Teaching. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27709-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27709-3_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27708-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27709-3

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