@ chock or updates LANGUAGE TEACHING Article RESEARCH Language Teaching Research 2022, Vol. 26(4) 579-597 Unpacking the complexities (© The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: of teacher identity: Narratives sepcomjounat:-permisions DOK: 10.117/1362 168620910955. of two Chinese teachers of Journals sagepub com/homestr English in China @SAGE Wendy Li® Michigan State University, USA. Abstract This study explores the complexities of teacher identity formation for two Chinese teachers of English in China, who represent two growing groups of English teachers: Alice, who worked in a private English training institution and John, who was a self-employed private English tutor. Drawing insights from Barcelos' (2015) theorization of the relationship among teacher beliefs, teacher identity, and teacher emotions, this study employs an integrated perspective to investigate ‘two participants’ English teacher identity development by examining the dynamic interplay among these three constructs (beliefs, identity, and emotions). Narrative inquiry is used for data analysis. By exploring two participants’ life histories of learning English and becoming English teachers, this study captures the dynamics of how the focal participants’ core beliefs and emotions interacted inextricably with and shaped their teacher identity development. Keywords teacher beliefs, teacher emotions, teacher identity, private English tutoring I Introduction In the era of globalization, English has become the international language for cross- border economic, cultural, and social communications, and has been given valorized status and values (Park & Wee, 2013). With exponential economic growth over the past few decades, China’s active participation in globalization created an enormous market for English education and led to a surging need for English language learning and teach- ing. To fulfill market needs, the private English tutoring industry in China has grown at Corresponding author: Wendy Li, Michigan State University, B220 Wells Hall, Second Language Studies, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. Email: iwenji2@msu.edu580 Language Teaching Research 26(4) a mounting rate (Hu & McKay, 2012; Yung, 2015). In particular, with the increasingly competitive college admission and future labor market, parents in China are keen to invest in their children’s English learning beyond the classroom (Zhang, 2014; Zhang & Bray, 2016). Nevertheless, discussion surrounding the phenomenon of private tutoring has been mostly led by scholars in the field of education and focused on the private tutor- ing business in general (also termed as ‘shadow education’; see Bray, 2010; Kim & Jung, 2019). Only recently, SLA researchers have begun to pay more attention to English lan- guage learning (Hamid et al., 2009; Yung, 2015) and teaching (Li & De Costa, 2017; Trent, 2016; Yung & Yuan, 2018) in private tutoring contexts. Given that private tutoring takes various forms, ranging from home-visit tutoring to corporate-owned tutoring insti- tutes (Kim & Jung, 2019), little is still known concerning students’ English learning experience as well as English tutors’ teaching practices in various tutoring contexts. This study hopes to contribute to this line of research inquiry by unpacking the com- plexities surrounding the teacher identity formation of two private English tutors in dif- ferent tutoring contexts in China. In particular, by providing a detailed description of two private English tutors’ journeys of becoming English teachers, this study hopes to illus- trate how their interaction with personal histories and social contexts shaped their beliefs and emotions about learning and teaching English. These beliefs and emotions in turn contribute to their construction of teacher identities. Two focal participants in this study are Aizhen, who worked in a private English training institution that provided IELTS preparation service to high school students; Jie, who started an English training business by himself at home, targeting high school students who were considered low achievers in English subject. Drawing insights from Barcelos’ (2015) theorization of the intercon- nected relationship among beliefs, identity, and emotions, this study employs an inte- grated framework to investigate the development of two participants’ English teacher identity by examining the dynamic interplay among these three constructs. Narrative inquiry, which allows teachers to theorize and interpret their teaching beliefs, practices and realities through telling their stories and experiences (Barkhuizen, 2014; Golombek & Johnson, 2004), is used to guide the data analysis. Il Literature review Kubanyiova and Feryok (2015) highlighted that research on different aspects of lan- guage teachers’ inner lives has yielded rich insights in understanding language teachers’ practices and their relationships with students and others. Central to their inner lives are their beliefs, knowledge, and emotions about language learning and teaching that emerged from their personal and language learning histories, their teacher education experiences, and their teaching practices (Burns et al., 2015; Golombek & Doran, 2014). These beliefs, knowledge, and emotions interact with each other, affecting teachers’ identity development and decision-making (Barcelos, 2015). While the different aspects of teachers’ inner lives have been studied and explored as distinct lines of scholarship in language teaching research, such as teacher agency (Kayi-Aydar et al., 2019), teacher beliefs (Farrell & Ives, 2015), teacher emotions (Benesch, 2017), and teacher identity (Norton, 2013), less attention has been paid to the interaction of these constructs and its influence on language teachers’ professional growth (see exceptions of Bukor, 2015;Li 581 Wolff & De Costa, 2017 as examples). The dynamic interplay among these constructs, according to Barcelos (2015), allows us to gain a holistic understanding of the complexi- ties involved in teachers’ practices and their decision-making processes, as these con- structs are intrinsically and interactively related. Such a holistic perspective is also endorsed by Bukor (2015). In the study, Bukor showed that language teachers’ profes- sional choices and practices were shaped by their core beliefs, perceptions, and emotions of their family and schooling experiences. Thus, he proposed to understand language teachers as whole persons and identify dominant influences that shaped the growth of a teacher instead of focusing on one professional aspect of teachers’ professional lives. Following this call, this study examines the dynamic interplay among two English lan- guage teachers’ professional identities, beliefs, and emotions, and how these constructs work together to shape the professional lives of two English teachers. In the following section, I briefly introduce the current views of these three constructs in second language teaching research and discuss the interconnectedness of these constructs. | Teacher identity Over the past two decades, language teacher identity research has gained momentum (De Costa & Norton, 2017; Cheung et al., 2015; Yuan, 2019). As a complex construct, scholars have explored teacher identity from various theoretical perspectives, such as the sociocul- tural approach (Johnson, 2006) and sociopolitical approach (Morgan, 2016). More recently, scholars have paid more attention to the poststructuralist approach to understand identity, which views it as fluid, dynamic, constructed, and negotiated by the personal agency and extemal forces (Aneja, 2016; Norton, 2013). Norton (2013, p. 4) defines identity as ‘the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future.’ Grounded in this definition, Barcelos (2015) further emphasized the ecological perspective of this understanding: first, a person constructs his/her identity based on his/her interpretation and reinterpretation of the life experiences in the past, present, and future; second, this (re) inter- pretation is shaped by their situated social contexts. The current study also adopts this con- ceptualization of identity to understand their individual experiences better. Language teacher identity research has been fruitful in examining factors at micro, ‘meso, and macro levels that shape teacher identities (De Costa & Norton, 2017). For non- native English teachers (NNEST) specifically, this is the case (Yuan, 2019). In a review of 2 studies of NNEST teacher identity, Yuan (2019, p. 532) pointed out that much of the current NNEST research set out to examine how NNEST identities were impacted by the multilayered factors such as personal histories and beliefs, emotional engagement, as well as the social factors such as school policy, collegial relationship, and neoliberal evaluation system, For example, at the societal level, NNESTS often have to experience and negotiate discriminative practices in the profession associated with their prescribed non-native teacher identities (Ancja, 2016; Ruecker & Ives, 2015). At the individual level, many NNESTS hold native speaker supremacy belief and participate in the native speakerism ideology, which results in a lack of self-confidence and low professional self-esteem (Llurda, 2015; Reis, 2015). Such experiences of NNESTs were explored in Song (2016), which examined Korean NNESTs’ negotiation of their non-native teacher identities when582 Language Teaching Research 26(4) teaching retumee students from Western countries. Adopting an emotional lens, Song revealed that NNESTs’ identities were embodied in their emotional experiences of anxi- ety, vulnerability, and insecurities. By identifying and reflecting on these emotions, NNESTs were able to transform these emotions and re-construct their identities. Recognizing the role emotions played in helping teachers make sense of their identities, Song called for more focus on the affective aspect of teacher identity. 2 Teacher emotions Teacher emotions have long been studied in the field of education as a significant part of teachers’ inner lives (Hargreaves, 1998). The field of SLA has also witnessed an emerg- ing interest in second language teacher emotions (Agudo, 2018; Benesch, 2017), described by Pavlenko (2013) as the ‘affective turn’. One of the challenges of studying emotions is that the multifaceted nature of emotion makes it difficult to conceptualize it (Zembylas, 2007). In the present study, | adopt Barcelos’ (2015) ecological understand- ing of emotion, which sees it as (1) a complex network that impacts our perceptions of self and guides our decision-making in the future; (2) as dynamic processes, which involve as a result of interplay between teachers’ life experiences in the past and the present (So, 2005); (3) social and ideological practices that interact at intrapersonal and interpersonal levels and are shaped by social and historical contexts (Zembylas, 2007). Teacher emotion studies have shown that emotions profoundly affect teachers’ teach- ing practices (De Costa et al., 2018) and their relationships with students and others (Li & Rawal, 2018). Teachers’ emotional experiences also contribute to teacher retention as well as attrition (Gu & Day, 2013). In addition, as mentioned earlier, teacher identity research has also paid increasing attention to teacher emotions and the interconnected- ness of these two constructs (e.g. Song, 2016). Adopting such a relational framework is helpful in that it provides a lens to unpack the complexities of teacher identity, as it’s shown in Wolff and De Costa (2017) and Song (2016) where NNESTs’ emotional chal- lenges (e.g. the sense of insecurities) constituted their identities as non-native English teachers. Furthermore, teacher emotions were also explored in relation to teacher beliefs (Barcelos, 2015; Golombek & Doran, 2014). Barcelos (2015) discussed the interdepend- ent and reciprocal relationship between teachers’ emotions and beliefs: emotions provide validation for beliefs, shape beliefs and these beliefs in turn shape emotions. This rela- tionship was also examined in Golombek and Doran (2014), where student teacher (Josie)’s emotions of insecurity and self-doubt were found to index areas of cognitive dissonance between her beliefs of an ideal teacher and the reality. This dissonance also signaled a space for developing alternative teacher belief’ with the help of teacher educa- tors’ appropriate mediation. Recognizing ‘the professional self as both a thinking and feeling actor’, Golombek and Doran (2014, p. 110) then proposed to see emotions as a valuable resource to be incorporated into teachers’ professional development. 3 Teacher beliefs The construct of teacher beliefs is recognized to affect how teachers learn and make deci- sions and is often discussed under the umbrella term ‘teacher cognition’ (Borg, 2003,Li 583 2019; Burns et al., 2015). In the review article, Burns et al. (2015) recognized that while the traditional teacher cognition research often adopted a cognitive approach which examines beliefs as fixed mental ideas in one’s mind, more recent research paid greater attention to the social and historical contexts in which teachers learn to teach and experi- ence teaching (Burns et al., 2015; Li, 2013). Following this line of scholarship, this study understands teacher beliefs from a social perspective. Informed by Barcelos (2015) and Skott (2015), teacher beliefs are considered socially and historically constructed and contextually situated. Beliefs partially constitute one’s sense-making system which helped interpret the world and address problems, and therefore, affect one’s sense of self, and influence one’s decision-making (Barcelos, 2015; van Lier, 2004). Studies on teacher beliefs have extensively examined the relationship between teach- ers’ beliefs and their teaching practices (Phipps & Borg, 2009; Farrell & Ives, 2015). In addition, the relationship between teacher beliefs and other aspects of teachers’ inner lives have also been of interest to many researchers, such as teacher emotions, as showed in Golombek and Doran (2014), and teacher identity (Burri et al., 2017). For example, Burri et al. (2017) examined the teacher identity construction and cognition. development of 15 graduate student teachers in a pronunciation pedagogy course. Findings illustrated a reciprocal relationship between the teacher identity and cognition, revealing that participants’ student teacher identity contributed to their cognition growth in the areas of pronunciation instruction, and their pedagogical beliefs facilitated their identity formation. To summarize, teachers construct their sense of professional self through the interpre- tation and reinterpretation of their life experiences, especially their language learning and teaching experiences. The interpretation and reinterpretation practices are informed by their core beliefs and emotions that emerged from their interactions with others. Therefore, the relationship among emotions, beliefs, and identity are intricately related, interactive, and reciprocal (Barcelos, 2015). Taking into consideration the intricate rela- tions among these three constructs, the present study adopts an integrated perspective to examine (1) the emotions and beliefs of two private English teachers about English teaching and learning, and (2) how their emotions and beliefs contribute to their profes- sional identity development. Ill Methodology | The participants a Aizhen, Aizen was a full-time English teacher in a private English school in Nan- chang, the capital city of Jiangxi province, China. Aizhen specialized in teaching the speaking component of the IELTS test. She was born into an underprivileged family ina rural area of Jiangxi province, the second child in the family with two brothers. Aizhen finished her elementary education in her hometown and went to one of the top schools in a nearby city for secondary education. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from a major university in Jiangxi province, she went to study in Ireland for her master’s degree. After earning a master’s degree in international tourism, she returned to China and started to teach English in private institutions. Later, she became my colleague in the584 Language Teaching Research 26(4) private school where she was working. At the time of this study, she had been working there for four years and mainly taught the speaking component of the IELTS test. Aiz- hen’s class sizes varied from 3~S students to 20 students. b Jie. Jie was a self-employed English teacher who provided private English tutoring to high school students at his home in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, China. He grew up in a peasant family in a small village in Jiangxi and received his elementary education in the only school in the village. Later, he went to a top school in the county for secondary education. He then entered a teacher training university in the capital city and graduated with a degree in public administration management. Instead of searching for jobs that were related to his undergraduate study, Jie decided to become an English teacher. Hav- ing experienced difficulties in finding jobs at both public and private schools, he started his own English training business in a rented apartment in 2013 and changed his living room into a small classroom with three rows of desks and a portable whiteboard. Jie’s English teaching focused mainly on vocabulary and grammar for high school students. He developed his own teaching materials specifically for students who desperately wanted to improve their scores on English exams. His targeted clientele were high school students who barely passed their English exams at school and who were not interested in learning English. At the time of the study, Jie had four students. Jie was also an active blogger, who liked to share his teaching experiences, his reflections on teaching, as well as life experiences with readers of his blog. I chose to focus on these two participants because, first, they worked as private English tutors in different tutoring contexts in China: the corporate-owned institute and self-owned business. While they might be assigned a similar identity position, the non- native private English tutors, they constructed different teacher identities in their respec- tive tutoring contexts. In particular, by examining their personal and professional experiences and their beliefs and emotions derived from these experiences, I set out to unpack the myths of the professional lives of private tutors. 2 Data collection The study was conducted over a duration of 18 months (June 2016 ~ December 2017). In the summer of 2016, I went back to the school where Aizhen was working and was able to stay there for three weeks. During these three weeks, I observed Aizhen’s speaking class on a daily basis. During the summer, Aizhen was teaching three students in the school’s summer program (from June to July 2016), which aimed to provide students with two months of intensive training in preparation for the IELTS test. Over the one- year period, I conducted three interviews with Aizhen (in November 2016, May 2017 and December 2017). In terms of the class observation data, I primarily focused on the narratives between Aizhen and her students, which reflected how she perceived English learning and teaching in the classroom. During the three-week stay at Nanchang, I came to know Jie and visited Jie’s place (also his home classroom), where I conducted an interview with him. Later, I was invited to observe one of his vocabulary classes. After I came back to the USA, I conducted another interview with Jie in November 2016 via Skype. In addition, Jie granted me fullLi 585 access to his blog (from 2012 to 2017), where he described his journey of becoming an English teacher and told stories that happened within and outside class with students and their parents. The data set includes two in-depth interviews, a classroom observation, and written narratives from his blog. All data were collected in Chinese and subsequently translated into English. The data presented in this article is comprised of two partici- pants’ interview, Aizhen’s class observation, and Jie’s written narratives in his blog. I adopted the narrative approach to guide my data analysis (Barkhuizen, 2014). 3 Data analysis Block (2017) described that one of the future directions of language teacher identity research is the application of narrative-based research, because ‘the stories that teachers tell about their lives ~ past, present, and future — are an essential part of any understand- ing of how language teachers do in the real and imagined worlds that they both inhabit and construct’ (Block, 2017, p. 35). In language teacher research, many scholars have adopted narrative inquiry for their data analysis and have yielded rich findings that illu- minated the situated socio-historical experiences of language teachers (Edwards & Edwards, 2017; Tsui, 2007; Aneja, 2016). Informed by the approach of narrative inquiry, researchers collect data including interviews, stories, conversations, field notes, journals, observations, and focus on ‘how language, in all its forms, construes meaning and is given the meaning’ (Rahatzad et al., 2017, p. 408). When analysing the data, I employed the following coding procedures: First, I care fully reviewed and coded both participants’ interview transcripts, their class observations, and Jie’s written narratives, with particular attention paid to the emotions and beliefs mentioned in the data. One thing worth mentioning is that participants’ emotions and beliefs were mostly evident in their interview data and Jie’s blog data, However, I also identified an instance from one of Aizhen’s classes where Aizhen’s teaching beliefs were enacted and expressed. Therefore, I included this instance in the findings. Then, I ana- lysed specific instances and events related to their English learning and teaching in the interviews and written narratives under the categories of emotions and beliefs. Later, with the initial coding of participants’ emotions and beliefs, I tried to map out two participants” trajectories of becoming an English teacher and how their emotions and beliefs were con- nected in ways that impacted their professional development. In terms of their teacher identity, informed by the narrative inquiry framework, I viewed the interviews and blog- writing activities as a means through which the participants were trying to make sense of and construct meaning regarding their teaching practices. In addition, their teacher iden- tity was revealed and constructed through their telling and retelling of experiences (Ochs & Capps, 1996). Presented in the findings section is the data comprised primarily of inter- views with two participants and Jie’s written narratives in his blog. IV Findings In the following sections, I present the stories of Aizhen and Jie in the journey of becom- ing English teachers. In particular, I delineate how they constructed their teacher identi- ties in their respective teaching contexts and unravel how their beliefs and emotions,586 Language Teaching Research 26(4) formed in their interactions with others, were inextricably related to their teacher identity construction. | Aizhen: A non-native English-speaking teacher ‘Aizhen grew up in an underprivileged family in a rural area in the hinterland of China. It has been a traditional norm that parents in the rural areas of China are usually willing to invest in their sons’ education, as they rely on ‘their sons for old-age support’ (Zhang et al., 2007, p. 131). This was the case for Aizhen’s family, too. While Aizhen’s brothers were given priority with educational resources, Aizhen fought for her educational oppor- tunity in a top secondary school in a nearby city following an exceedingly good perfor- mance throughout her elementary education. My mother wanted me to stay in the local secondary school, as my brother had already been studying at that top school at that time, But luckily, my father agreed to support me to go to the top school. He set a rule in the family, ‘as long as you eared your position in that school, I will support you.’ (Excerpt 1/Interview/Aizhen) Having to earn the opportunity to study in a good school also brought enormous pres- sure to Aizhen: ‘I felt stressed all the time. Every time I didn’t do well in exams, I felt so guilty and felt I let my parents down, and I wasted the opportunity earned to study here.” Weighed down by such stress, Aizhen felt compelled to excel in school to be deserving of the opportunity to study at the top secondary school. Such experience also resulted in a sense of insecurity and a lack of ability to acknowledge herself, which contributes to her continual desire for external recognition. The compulsion of performing superbly in school that Aizhen developed also strongly impacted her perceived sense of self as an English major student in the university, which I present next. a Phase I: Self-deprecation: ‘My English is poor’ Due to the prevalence of the ‘deaf-and- dumb English’ (Tsui, 2007) in her secondary school, Aizhen didn’t get proper instruction on English pronunciations. Nor did she have much opportunity to practice English- speaking skills. Therefore, while Aizhen performed well in the written English test of the university entrance exam (i.e. Gaokao), she was embarrassed with her heavily accented spoken English and felt inferior to her classmates. In my first English speaking class, my American teacher asked us to do a self-introduction. I ‘was sitting at the back of the class. After everyone else has done their introduction, it’s my turn, really did not want to say anything, so I just said one or two sentences that foreign teachers did not want to hear, things like, ‘my English is poor.’ Then the teacher told me not to say that, “because you came to improve your speaking in this class,’ (Excerpt 2/Interview/Aizhen) In this instance, Aizhen’s feeling of inferiority were expressed through her series of actions in the English class, such as ‘sitting at the back’, waiting for everyone else to finish their introductions, and saying only one or two sentences. This sense of inferiority was also expressed through the practice of self-deprecation in her self-introduction, ‘my English was poor.’ Apparently, Aizhen’s focus on the limitations of her spoken EnglishLi 587 blinded her from recognizing her strength in other aspects of the English language, and resulted in a skewed portrayal of herself. b Phase 2: The pursuit of native-lke English. Perceiving herself as someone with ‘poor English’, Aizhen then concentrated on improving her English, primarily focusing on cor- recting problematic pronunciations and ridding herself of any accent. Aizhen’s desire to improve her spoken English drove her to join the speaking camp and later interact with native English-speaking teachers, as described in the Excerpt 3. I joined a 2-day intensive English speaking camp where teachers concentrated on correcting our pronunciations, Two days may not have a significant impact on my pronunciation, But 1 developed a faith ({i(10 in Chinese) in that camp, which kept me working on my pronunciations. In the following two months, I got up early every day and pronounced English words loudly and repeatedly. I did not feel much improvement myself, but my classmates told me that my pronunciation had improved significantly. (Excerpt 3/Interview/Aizhen) Excerpt 3 showed Aizhen’s strong emotional commitment to improving her English pro- nunciation, as signaled by using the word ‘faith’. This commitment was also manifest in the subsequent two-month practice of her English pronunciation. Nevertheless, she didn’t notice the improvement in her pronunciation and had to rely on her classmates” recognition. This example provided further evidence that Aizhen was unable to credit her own achievement, but had to seek external recognition to validate herself. With this rec- ognition, Aizhen felt more confident to pursue other opportunities to practice her spoken English. Her native English-speaking teachers became great resources for speaking prac- tice. An Irish teacher, Mike, offered her great help in English learning. Mike gave me lots of confidence. Whenever he talked to me, he would point out every error I made in my speech and correct them immediately. He said that he did not want me to repeat the errors and wanted to make sure that I spoke correct English. (Excerpt 4/Interview/Aizhen) ‘As shown in Excerpt 4, on the one hand, Aizhen benefited from the interactions with Mike, who helped her correct errors in her spoken English. On the other hand, by saying, ‘Mike gave me lots of confidence,’ Aizhen signaled an authority native speaker figure of Mike. This identity granted Mike the power and credibility to correct every error in Aizhen’s speech, even in everyday interactions that occurred beyond classroom walls. This practice contributed to a positioning of Aizhen as a deficient English language learner whose primary goal was to speak correct English rather than using English to communicate. Furthermore, Mike’s teaching belief and practice were later adopted by Aizhen. In one of the classes I observed, Aizhen was performing a mock speaking exam with one of her students. The topic was introducing a museum the student visited before. Aizhen: S (student), please come forward and give a one-minute speech on this topic. Imagine that you are taking the IELTS speaking exam, and I’m the examiner. Start! S: Lonly visit the museum twice. The museum I go is in Shanghai. It exhibit (student A pronounced this word wrong) things that people use in ancient times.588 Language Teaching Research 26(4) A: Stop! It what? What did you say? S: Uh, it exhibit things that people use in ancient times? ‘A: Oh, that word is exhibit ‘/ig'zibat/”, not exhibit ‘/iks'hibiv/ S: Oh, okay. Exhibit ‘/ig!zibov” A: Okay. Continue, S: My mom take me there when I was in primary (/'paimari/) school. ‘A: Wait, what did you say? I couldn’t understand. S: My mom took me there when I was in the primary school A: Oh, you mean, ‘primary school’. Your pronunciation was wrong. I couldn’t understand you. If you talk to people in Australia, they won’t understand what you are talking about. ‘Also, if you cannot pronounce the words correctly, the examiner won’t be able to understand what you want to say. Practice your pronunciation repeatedly. (Excerpt 5/Classroom observation/July 2016/Aizhen) The above excerpt exemplified that Aizhen enacted the belief that students should speak correct English, as modeled by Mike. In comments she made, she stressed the importance of pronouncing the words correctly, which revealed that she put greater emphasis on the linguistic feature rather than the communicative function of the English language. © Phase 3: Seeking recognition from native speakers, Despite several years of teaching spoken English, the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity about her spoken English com- petence persisted in Aizhen’s day-to-day teaching life and led Aizhen to seek validation from native English-speaking teachers. From time to time I still have this feeling that my English is not good enough, then I will write to Mike. He always reassures me . . , remember one time I felt unsure again, and wrote to him. He said to me, ‘if I did not know you, I would probably think you are a native speaker of English, as you sound very much like a native speaker.’ I think this is an extremely big encouragement for me. I felt reassured. (Excerpt 6/Interview/Aizhen) Excerpt 6 illustrated that Mike’s recognition of her native-likeness became the source of Aizhen’s professional self-esteem. In particular, Mike’s remarks, ‘you sound very much like a native speaker,’ created a discourse in which native English-speaking teachers were positioned as the experts and non-native-speaking teachers as the novices. Aizhen’s feeling of being recognized and ‘reassured’ further evidenced that she had internalized her position as a novice non-native teacher. This self-positioning as a non-native teacher disempowered Aizhen to construct professional legitimacy and led her to constantly feel inadequate in English. In the interview, she expressed feeling ‘fearful’ when studentsLi 589 asked her ‘how to say this in English’, and feeling ‘frustrated’ when she was not sure if “the native speakers would say it this way.’ These negative emotions persisted in Aizhen’s teaching life and contributed to a drastic professional life change. She told me that she was about to quit her job and go abroad to pursue an English-related degree in an English- speaking country, as teaching left her little time to improve her English competence. Aizhen’s journey of becoming an English teacher was featured by her pursuit of native-like English. The narrative inquiry of Aizhen centered on her beliefs of speaking correct and standard English, which resulted in a continuous seek of external recognition from native speakers and the feeling of insecurity concerning her English competence. In comparison, the emotional struggles that Jie experienced in the journey to becoming an English teacher were closely related to his position as a self-employed English tutor in his teaching contexts. 2 Jie: A self-employed English tutor-teacher Similar to Aizhen, having been born and raised in a small village, Jie had a rather socio- economically modest beginning. Although being the eldest son guaranteed financial sup- port for his education, Jie did not feel financially able to maintain a healthy social life in college. As a result, during college, Jie kept to himself and spent most of his spare time in the library exploring the world of books. In college, I had little money for socializing, nor did I look attractive to girls. The library was my second home. I spent almost all the spare time in the library reading. I enjoyed exploring different worlds created by different authors in books. (Excerpt 7/Interview/Jie) In addition to books, the media resources in the library also provided intellectual nour- ishment and even drew him to the teaching profession. 1 also watched lots of western movies borrowed from the library. One French movie, The Chorus (2004), had a significant impact on me. After watching that movie, I wanted to become a teacher just like that teacher in the movie who transformed those abandoned students’ lives. (Excerpt 8/written narratives/Jie) As shown in Excerpt 8, Jie was heavily influenced by the movie The Chorus (2004), which depicts a failed musician who was hired to teach music by a boarding school to ‘difficult’ boys and had a positive influence to transform the troubled students’ lives. In the blog, Jie wrote that he wanted to become a teacher like the character of the movie. Being socially invisible in the undergraduate student community, Jie could sympathize with those ‘abandoned’ students. Furthermore, Jie’s aspiration to become an influential figure could be interpreted as a desire to be seen as a valuable member of a community, as later confirmed in an interview. This desire to be recognized and valued by others became integral to his construction of professional identity and teaching practices. a Phase I: An English teacher in Jiang Hu. Given his interest and strong academic perfor- mance in English in high school and university, Jie decided to become an English teacher. In China, a degree with an English-related major has become the prerequisite for English590 Language Teaching Research 26(4) teaching positions in public schools and in most of the private English training institu- tions. Without any formal study of English education, Jie was denied employment by both public schools and private institutions. Even after starting his own English tutoring busi- ness, his professional credentials were questioned by students’ parents, as he described in the interview. When I got calls from parents, they would ask if I was an English major or if I taught in other schools before. Knowing my background, they would doubt my qualifications to teach English. (Excerpt 9/Interview/lie) Concerning the doubts on his English teaching abilities, He invited students and their parents to try out two or three of his classes for free, in order to, in his words, ‘get a sense of what kind of teacher I am and if their children like my way of teaching.’ As a result, at the beginning of his carcer, Jie was always rushing to different students’ homes to do free demo classes. After finishing the tutoring with one client, he had to worry about finding the next one. This sense of insecurities and instabilities constituted his teacher identity. In the blog, he defined himself as: amale English teacher in Jiang Hu without any summer/winter break or Teacher's day. (Excerpt 10/written narratives/Jie) Jiang Hu (Jiang: river, Hu: lake, {L1), is a Chinese phrase referring to a world that exists outside of government control and protection. Therefore, if someone is in Jiang Hh, it usually means that one is drifting around seeking different jobs and making a liv- ing on their own without any protection or constraints from institutional systems. Here, Jie portrayed a teacher image that was opposite to the normative perception of the teach- ing profession, which is associated with a sense of stability, the summer/winter break, as well as a respectful social status (a national Teacher’s day when teachers are officially appreciated for their work). Interestingly, this seemingly self-deprecating teacher image ‘was transformed into a positive one in the narratives Jie composed towards the public- school system (see Excerpt 12). Public school English teachers are protected from the fierce competition in the free market by the public school system. With the secured job, many of them are not motivated to enhance their professional knowledge and improve their teaching skills. They created a market for someone like me who was not trained in the same way the public English teachers were and who is creative in teaching to rekindle their interest in learning English (Excerpt I/interview/Jie) In Excerpt 11, Jie questioned how the public school system rendered many English teachers unmotivated to improve themselves. Built on this questioning, Jie constructed his teacher identity as someone who was different from public school English teachers, and who was ‘creative’, unique, and catering to individual students’ needs. This teacher identity was legitimate as it met the needs of the free market, that is, teachers like him were needed to help students who struggled in school. In other words, the legitimacy of Jie’s English teacher identity was built on the condition that his English tutoring serviceLi 591 was needed and valued by his clients. This teacher identity affected Jie’s teaching prac- tices and also contributed to Jie’s beliefs and emotions about teaching English. b Phase 2: Feel valuable when needed. As a self-employed English teacher, Jie strived to make his teaching appealing to his students and cater to the specific needs of individual students, such as tailoring teaching materials for individual students and employing dif- ferent strategies to make English knowledge relevant to students’ life experiences. In addition, Jie also devoted great efforts to building constructive relationships with stu- dents’ parents, which was well received by students’ parents. Thad a student who worked really hard but barely showed any improvement in English. His parents were quite worried, | then talked to his parents on the phone, explaining in detail what might have caused the slow progress in English. I was able to identify his problems with learning English with the help of my knowledge of child psychology. His parents identified strongly with me and appreciated my advice. In the end, his parents said to me, ‘you really are 2 great teacher.’ You know, English teachers like us, to some parents, are not different from waiters in restaurants who just pass along orders, (Excerpt 12/interview/Jie) The story told in Excerpt 12 showed how Jie’s identity as a qualified teacher was recog- nized by one of the parents. This was an important step in becoming a legitimate and qualified English teacher for Jie. As Jie pointed out in the excerpt, ‘English teachers like him, that is, private tutors working on their own, were de-professionalized into service providers. Like waiters filling orders, private English tutors like him were expected to simply impart English skills to students. By demonstrating his care for students and knowledge on counseling students and parents, Jie went beyond a tutor’s role and engaged in the practices of being a teacher, that is, to educate and invest in relationships with students and their parents. In addition to parents’ recognition, Jie’s teacher identity development was also fueled by a sense of meaningfulness at work, which was derived from students” appreciation of his teaching. Last night, my teaching didn’t go well because I used the material I was not familiar with, I felt really depressed on my way home. When I got home, for a moment, I lost confidence and felt my work was meaningless. . .I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered that my previous student Lee asked me some questions about English learning. Then I got up and started to make recordings for Lee addressing his questions. Soon I felt revived again and decided to study the teaching material again. I think it’s very important that you are needed by someone. I felt most fulfilled when I was needed by my students. Being needed and being able to help give a purpose and meaning to my work. (Excerpt 13/written narratives/Jie) In Excerpt 13, Jie showed that his emotional state was closely related to his teacher effi- cacy. He felt ‘depressed’, ‘meaningless’ , and ‘lost confidence’ when his teaching was not efficient. However, when his students needed his guidance and help, he felt ‘revived’ and ‘fulfilled’. In the end, Jie claimed that the meaning of his work came from being needed and being able to help. This sense of meaningfulness Jie ascribed to his teaching, on the one hand, conveyed his earlier desire of being recognized and valued by others, on the other hand, was shaped by the customer-centric culture of the competitive private English592 Language Teaching Research 26(4) tutoring business. That is, Jie needed to be able to fulfill the needs of the students and their parents to secure and sustain his private English tutoring business. V Discussion and conclusions This study explores the complexities of the identity development of two private English teachers: one working in a private English tutoring institution and the other self-employed through his own English tutoring business. To be more specific, this study presents the emotions and beliefs Aizhen and Jie developed through their learning and teaching expe- riences and examines how these emotions and beliefs shape their professional trajecto- ries as English teachers. The findings of the study contribute to the current language teacher research in two ways. First, the use of an integrated framework allows for a more muanced and comprehensive understanding of teacher identity development. Second, the study provides a better understanding of the professional lives of private English teach- ers in different tutoring contexts. | Towards an integrated framework to investigate teacher professional identity In response to Barcelos’ (2015) call for more empirical studies on the interconnection among teacher identity, beliefs, and emotions, this study employs an integrated frame- work to investigate two participants’ teacher identity construction and explore how emo- tions and beliefs came to shape their teacher identities. As showed in Aizhen’s case, her teacher identity as a non-native English teacher was shaped by her feelings of inferiority compared to native English-speaking teachers as well as by her beliefs in speaking cor- rect, authentic English. Her feelings of inferiority and insecurity about her English com- petence may stem from the prevalent ‘native-speakerism’ ideology (Holliday et al., 2015) in Asian countries (Ruecker & Ives, 2015). That is, native speakers of English are posi- tioned as ideal whose identities exude professional authority and legitimacy (Comprendio & Savski, 2019; Ruecker & Ives, 2015), whereas non-native English teachers are seen as categorically deficient. This unequal power dynamic between native and non-native English teachers not only disempowers non-native English teachers in claiming their pro- fessional legitimacy, but also causes emotional challenges (e.g. feeling deficient and infe- rior) for them (Cheung et al., 2015; Reis, 2015). This power play is evident in Aizhen’s relationship with her native English-speaking instructor, Mike. Continuously seeking his external validation of her competence in English speaking, Aizhen struggled to foster a sense of professional legitimacy, which negatively affected her professional well-being and may result in her leaving the profession. Aizhen’s case illustrates the powerful influence of the native-speakerism culture in shaping teachers’ beliefs and emotions about learning and teaching English. Nevertheless, the impact of social context, as Edwards and Edwards (2017) pointed out, is interpreted through the lens of one’s personal life experiences and beliefs. For Aizhen, her active participation in the native speakerism culture was also mediated by her previous life experiences, in particular, the interaction with her family. Coming from a socioeconomi- cally modest family and as the only daughter, Aizhen had to fight for the educationalLi 593 opportunities made available to her brothers. She inherited from this family culture the belief that opportunity belonged to those who excelled or reached near perfection. This belief provided a consistent base to her thinking and acting in English learning and teach- ing, which also led her to pursue the ‘native-like’ English. Such dynamic interplay among emotions, beliefs, and identity is also evident in Jie’s case, His position as a self-employed English tutor triggered different emotional chal- lenges and beliefs. As Barcelos (2015) pointed out, language teachers’ specific teaching realities might prompt certain emotions and beliefs. Jie’s interaction with his situated teaching context, a competitive customer-centric market which prioritized student demands, affected his belief on what makes a good teacher: someone who is able to ful- fill students’ needs and whose service is of value to others. The realization of this belief led to his emotional fluctuations. He felt frustrated when his teaching was inefficient, but he felt useful when his students needed his help. In addition to the impact of Jie’s teach- ing context, this desire to be valued and recognized by others was also shaped by his university experience. Due to his socioeconomic background, Jie withdrew from his undergraduate peers. This sense of invisibility and lack of power in the community played an important role in shaping his desire to become a teacher who could make a difference in the lives of his students. This desire prompted him to construct a legitimate teacher identity recognized by his students and their parents, and fueled him to go beyond merely providing tutoring services to his students as a service-provider. Similar to what Bukor (2015) found, Jie’s teacher identity development was likewise shaped by ‘an intri- cate and tangled web of influences’ of the emotions and beliefs derived from both per- sonal and professional life experiences (Bukor, 2015, p. 323). The findings from the two participants revealed a dynamic and intricate relationship among teacher emotions, beliefs, and identities. The use of narrative inquiry approach made it possible to capture participants’ emotions and beliefs that emerged from the tell- ing of their lived experiences. As Song (2016) highlighted, emotions and beliefs that teachers shared and demonstrated in the narratives are reflective of their historical and social experiences. Therefore, these emotions and beliefs tell stories of how participants position themselves as English teachers and how they negotiate their professional selves in the interaction with the social contexts. In addition, adopting an integrated perspective is helpful in that it provides a lens through which the complexities of teacher identity construction could be unpacked through the examination of participants’ emotions and beliefs that emerged from their narratives. Therefore, I join Barcelos (2015) and Bukor (2015) to call for more studies to adopt an integrated or a holistic framework to examine the construction of teacher identity. 2 Professional development of private English tutors This study also points to a critical yet under-explored area, i.e. English private tutoring, and reveals some of the struggles and challenges in English private tutors’ professional lives. To some extent, Jie’s journey of becoming an English teacher is the epitome of the lives of private English tutors in China against the backdrop of a challenging trend that tutors are considered service providers, as a result of a neoliberal ideology prevalent in China (Zhang & Bray, 2016). As described in Trent (2016), private tutors were positioned subordinate to594 Language Teaching Research 26(4) teachers in the identity hierarchy. Discourses associated with the identity ‘tutor’ entailed meanings such as ‘not qualified’, ‘exam drilling’, and ‘distant relationships with students and colleagues’. While Jie was able to construct an identity as a legitimate professional through his enormous efforts in custom-tailoring the instruction and creating caring rela- tionships with students and their parents, this way of teaching was only possible with a limited number of students. As Jie commented on his ‘service’ in the interview, ‘they (his students and their parents) got more than they paid for.’ This highly time- and labor-inten- sive teaching practice then raise the question of how sustainable it is and whether it may lead to teacher bumout. As a result, questions remain unanswered regarding how teachers like Jie could be supported to craft a sustainable and fulfilling teaching profession in the market-driven private tutoring business. Similarly, Aizhen’s case also invites further inves- tigation on how non-native English teachers in the private tutoring contexts can be empow- ered to claim an identity as legitimate English teaching professionals. ‘One way to help address these abovementioned issues is to provide teachers with external support (Yuan, 2019). Studies have showed the positive impact of having the guidance of teacher educators from the teacher education programs (e.g. Wolff & De Costa, 2017). As Wolff and De Costa (2017, p. 78) presented, teacher educators and researchers can help NNESTs address the sense of insecurity by engaging them in pro- fessional reflexivity ‘to develop a sense of agency’. However, such external support might be a mirage for private English tutors like Aizhen and Jie who had little or no institutional support for further professional development. As a result, I argue that researchers working with this teacher population could take a more active role in sup- porting them. Researchers could first guide them to recognize and voice their thoughts and emotions through narratives (Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Reis, 2015), and then engage them in self-reflection activities (e.g. reflective journals, stimulated recall). In doing so, researchers could help teachers raise awareness of the relationships and the intricate interactions among emotions, beliefs, identities, and practices and better help them understand their decision-making in teaching (Barcelos, 2015; Farrell & Ives, 2015; Song, 2016). Therefore, I call for more scholarly attention to the professional tra- jectories of this teacher population and more future studies to examine ways of engaging private English tutors in professional development as teaching professionals. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. De Costa and Dr, Debra Hardison for their constructive feedback and valuable insights on this study. I am indebted for their continuous support and guidance throughout the process of completing this article from its initial stages until the final product. Any errors remain my own, Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Wendy Li © https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6306-1482Li 595 References Agudo, J.D.D.M. (2018). Emotions in second language teaching: Theory, research and teacher education. New York: Springer. Aneja, G.A. (2016). (Non)native speakered: Rethinking (non)nativeness and teacher identity in TESOL teacher education, TESOL Quarterly, 50, 572-596. Barcelos, A.M.F. (2015). Unveiling the relationship between language learning beliefs, emotions, and identities. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 5, 301-325. Barkhuizen, G. (2014). Narrative research in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 47, 450-466. Benesch, S. (2017). 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