How Do Language Learning,Teaching,and Transnational Experiences (Re)shape an EFLer’s Identities? A Critical Ethnographic Narrative

Abstract

Using critical ethnographic narrative as a tool and language socialization as the theoretical stance, the article analyzes excerpts of a language teacher’s life experience and presents findings to join the existing literature. The article indicates that (a) transnational teacher identities develop in a multiple-identity system including identities as an L2 learner, teacher, user, critical thinker, and global citizen; (b) the identity development is not completely staged, but instead recurring; (c) the emergence, formation, and development of the identity system requires translanguaging, transcultural, and transnational capitals, which are accrued through socializing experiences; and (d) critical thinking and intellectual agency work as stimuli to sustain the identity development. The article contributes to the existing literature by presenting a conceptual framework in studying language teacher identities. This article ends up with some advocacy that identity as a pedagogy and tool may provide teacher educators with something innovative and helpful to conduct research in the field.

Introduction

Language teacher identity has been an emerging theme in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)/applied linguistics fields for decades. Findings of the topic can be grouped from macro and micro perspectives. From the macro perspective, scholars studied the features or attributes of the language teacher identity system in general. One of the major findings is that the nature of the teacher identity is multidimensional and ever-changing (Ortaçtepe, 2015; Tsui, 2007). For example, Ortaçtepe (2015) argued that non-native or second language (L2) speakers teaching their L2 need to negotiate three primary identities, including L2 learner, L2 user, and L2 teacher with other sociocultural and political identities through different contexts. Another major finding from the existing literature indicates the blurred boundaries and interlocked connections between professional identity and sociocultural identity (Armour, 2004; Duff & Uchida, 1997; Reynolds, 1996). For example, Armour (2004) examined how a Japanese who was a language teacher developed her three identities in Australia and found the boundaries among the three identities fuzzy and blurred. The three identities she developed include a language user, a language learner, and a language teacher.

From a micro perspective, scholars also explored how different factors or perspectives may help inform teacher identity development. For example, some scholars investigated how linguistic identities can be developed among language teachers (e.g., Aneja, 2016; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018), and some other scholars explored how race and gender may help language teachers navigate through different identities (e.g., Kayi-Aydar, 2015; Vitanova, 2016). There are also quite a number of scholars that explored how institutional or contextual factors may help language teachers develop their identities. For example, Clarke (2008) and Duff (2008, 2010) studied how language teachers negotiate their identities through community or academic discourses; Peercy (2012) and Yazan (2017) examined how teacher education courses help teacher candidates develop their identities.

With the findings from both the macro and micro perspectives mentioned above, scholars argued that language teacher identity “is not a fixed, stable, unitary, and internally coherent phenomenon but is multiple, shifting, and in conflict” (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 22). While the existing literature provides these major findings on language teacher identities, much more needs to be explored and improved. For example, it is suggested that scholars or teacher educators examined how the dynamical nature of a teacher’s trajectory helps inform the teacher’s identity development. To be more specific, language teachers are lifelong language learners. They may experience different but constant developmental changes in their life trajectory, from a learner to a teacher and then to a mix of the two identities. Also, some language teachers may have transnational experiences and thus may develop their identities through different contextual, sociocultural, and political dynamics. For example, Duff (2015) explained,

[T]ransnationalism is central to current understandings of identity in applied linguistics, which aims to understand increasingly flexible, often digitally mediated forms of citizenship (or non-citizenship) for migrants who may encounter a series of borders, languages, and interim homes, before settling temporarily or permanently in yet another location. (p. 76)

Therefore, literature on language teacher identities from dynamical and transnational perspectives is still scarce. I aim to address the gap by presenting and describing how I, as an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher and an EFL learner for more than 30 years, shape and reshape my cultural identity with my transnational and international experiences.

Theoretical Orientation: A Language Socialization Stance

Looking for an appropriate theoretical lens helps researchers map out basic components or concepts in their research and guides them to their findings. An appropriate theoretical lens for my current study on language teacher identity should meet the following requirements: first, it should focus on something constantly involved in a language teacher’s life trajectory. Regardless of being a language learner, a language teacher, or even a mix of the two identities, language is just that constant construct in a language teacher’s life. Second, the appropriate theoretical lens should help inform how identity development is seen as a socializing and dynamic process. Language teacher identity (re)formation, (re)shaping, and re(development) is not a mechanical process but instead a socializing process. It involves multiple dynamics in contextual, sociocultural, and ideological contexts. After going through different theoretical orientations that study language teacher identities, I then found language socialization stance the appropriate one for my study.

Ochs and Schieffelin (1984, 1985) argued that language socialization includes socialization through and into language. Duff (2010) explained that

The core theoretical premise of language socialization is that language is learned through interactions with others who are more proficient in the language and its cultural practices and who provide novices explicit and (or) implicit mentoring or evidence about normative, appropriate uses of the language, and of the worldviews, ideologies, values, and identities of community members. (p. 172)

Behind the explanation stands on a neo-Vygotskyan sociocultural theory (Duff, 2007), as it represents the zone of proximal development tenet that entails the novices learn from the experts (Vygotsky, 1978) and an “individual’s identity emerges out of the dialogic struggle between the learner and the community” (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001, p. 149). The stance thus “offers a socioculturally informed analysis of life course and historical continuity and transformation” (Duff & Hornberger, 2008, p. 11). Adams and Marshall (1996) explained, “an individual’s personal or social identity not only is shaped, in part, by the living systems around the individual but the individual’s identity can shape and change the nature of these living systems” (p. 432). However, the same as the other theoretical orientations that study identities, the majority of the existing literature that studies identities from the language socialization stance focuses on language learners. This gap provides insights that language teacher identity studies using a language socialization stance are worthy of our attention and contribution.

Critical Ethnographic Narrative as a Research Tool

Yazan (2018b) proposed a critical autoethnographic narrative (CAN) as a method to help teacher candidates or preservice teachers become what they envision. He noticed that language teacher education practices used to be and are still largely skills- or knowledge-based (De Costa & Norton, 2017). To facilitate a shift to the identity-based direction, CAN as a method to study teacher candidates or preservice teachers is necessary, as scholars nowadays argue that teacher identity is the principal outcome of teacher education practices (Varghese et al., 2016; Yazan, 2018b). The reason for that principal outcome is it directs teacher candidates or teachers to where they aspire and envision to be (Barkhuizen, 2016).

CAN as a research tool fits this study. Schieffelin and Ochs (1986) argued that a language socialization perspective attempts to permeate analyses of languaging experiences through cultural beliefs and practices in ethnographic accounts. Technically, ethnographers produced powerful narratives to inform the understanding of language use (Heath, 1983; Toohey, 2000). As a research method for qualitative studies, Clandinin (2006) summarized narrative inquiry might include temporality, sociality, and place as the design features which enhance researchers of knowledge on specific, methodological applications. As a submethod for narrative inquiry, autoethnography then deepens the depth and authenticity of narrative inquiry (Gao, 2014). Autoethnography was defined as “an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 739), which is consistent with the narrative inquiry in the story-telling feature. Specifically, cultural constructs, values, and beliefs are what inquirers attempt to explore through critical thinking, reflection, and narratives. In other words, autoethnographers attempt to provide “voice, stance, assumptions and analytical lens so that the reader is abundantly clear on whose story is whose” (Connolly, 2007, p. 453). CAN as a combination of autoethnography and narrative inquiry caters to the theoretical lens (i.e., the language socialization stance) and the research purpose of the study (i.e., to explore how transnational life experiences inform the language teacher identity).

In addition, another feature that makes CAN an appropriate approach for the study is its intake of criticality into the research process. Hawkins and Norton (2009) advocated to reinterpret teacher education from a critical lens and explained that “language (or discourse) is the tool through which representations and meanings are constructed and negotiated, and a primary means through which ideologies are transmitted” (p. 32). Their explanations may find the root in critical theory and language studies (Hawkins, 2005; Pennycook, 2002). Practically, different from quantitative studies, qualitative studies vary in their terminology. In a typical narrative inquiry and autoethnography, excerpts from life experiences are treated as research “data.” In this study, the described experiences were extracted from different sources, including the EFLer’s academic calendar, diary, lecture notes, teaching syllabi, and lesson plans. The 30-year span for accruing these experience excerpts ranges from years at elementary school experience when learning English to the present in higher education to teach graduate school students.

Identity Emerged as an L2 Learner

I started learning English at around 4 to 5 years old. I was somewhat motivated with external rewards, as my parents did reward me with toys or candies after I had taken English classes. However, I admitted that I was also greatly curious about the English language, as I found it quite different from my mother tongue Chinese, regardless of its spelling or phonetic systems. In addition, I also found learning the language may make me as a child different from other peers. English in the 1980s was not that widely taught or spoken in China. Some families worked hard to provide their children with access to learning the language. In some way, children learning the English language might feel a kind of superiority or see the language learning process as some capitals to show off to their peers. This kind of curiosity and superiority in a way caters to the stage term, as children at this stage may be naïve about the world around them and weak in critical thinking and analysis. I interpreted this stage when children have emerging awareness of the target language and its related culture; language learners at this stage may have strong curiosity about the target language and culture but minimal critical thinking of analyzing the language and culture. For a long time in my childhood, external factors played a more important role than intrinsic motivation in making a learning decision.

Learning English stems from my increased curiosity and rewards with persuasion from my parents. The superiority from the early stage also increased, typically in the Chinese context where face theory was dominant in the 1980s and 1990s. In Grade 2 at primary school, I learned phonetic symbols in an English training school. I remember clearly that I was praised in one of the English classes because I had got a full mark for my first phonetic test. This encouraging and appraisal moment was a big trigger that pushed me to work harder on English.

Years later, I noticed that learner agency plays a quite important role to sticking me to the English learning journey. For example, some of my peers just quitted the class, ending up with no interest in learning the language. In addition, as English in the 1980s was not a required subject in many schools, most of the students learned English at that time by taking part in some extracurricular courses or attending language training schools. Their parents may also no longer support the children to attend the English class if they found the children uninterested in the class. I, however, stuck to all my English classes.

This stage as an emerging L2 learner may be long or even one of the longest stages in my life. English as a language empowered me to make a lot of decisions in life, including choosing my college major. For many years, English has been my favorite and best subject. No matter for my entrance exams to the middle school or high school, my English score has been the highest among my subjects and also one of the highest in my school or even in my city. It is just this kind of experience that made me choose English as my college major.

From an L2 Learner to an L2 User, and then to an L2 Teacher

With my regular schooling experience from primary to high school, I was a typical L2 learner with great performance on my English subject. My language learning experience helped me build myself and even secure jobs. For example, with my great English language proficiency, I was able to secure a job as a hotel receptionist over that semester after high school. Through the position, I communicated with quite a lot of guests from different cultural backgrounds who spoke different kinds of Englishes. However, I was not aware that their Englishes might be different from each other at that time, but instead believing all their Englishes were standardized English.

My language learning experience also helped with a lot of important decisions in life. All these decisions then shaped my identities. For example, I chose English as my college major largely because of my interest in and great performance on English subject. The English major not only developed my interest and but also guided me to a career path that I like. I started my teaching career when I was 19 years old as a sophomore student in English major at college. I first taught English as a private tutor to a 5-year-old young man that summer and then became a part-time kindergarten English teacher after that summer. Teaching brought me a quite different life: I began being conscious about my language, rhetoric, ways of teaching, and so on; I also began thinking about my career path. I wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher in particular. English as a language at this stage paved my way to be a teacher. I worked hard to memorize words and grammar; I worked hard to improve my reading fluency; I worked hard to observe how my teachers at college teach. English as a language also helped me socialize through my network, including the one with my students, their parents, and the school headmaster. It should also be noted that teacher agency also helped enhance my learner agency. I believed that to be a great teacher who teaches quite a lot of students, I have to be a great learner first. Therefore, over my college life, I kept being a top student in my department and also the whole school. I was awarded the scholarship for successive years.

From an Advanced L2 Learner to an Emerging Critical Thinker

Life is about learning and experiencing. For about 4 years in my college, I was doing English teaching–related jobs, either as a tutor or as a teacher. Then, 1 year after my college, I was making another decision: I wanted to pursue a graduate program related to English. Two of the options that related to English at that time were British/American literature or linguistics. I then chose linguistics. I made this decision by taking a few factors into account. I still loved English as a language, but not as a way to explore literature. I thus did not want to choose English or American literature as my major, as I was more interested in the language itself than other subjects pertinent to the language. Then I believed linguistics as a scientific study of language would help me continue my passion and love for the language. Throughout all my courses in the graduate program, including phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, and so on in general linguistics and L2 acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and so on in applied linguistics, I further improved my repertoire about the language. In particular, I understood how as an L2 learner, my English differs from the native speaker of English. My English proficiency as an L2 learner through the graduate program got improved a lot. My English also helped me socialize with different professors, make different academic discourses, and make friends from different cultural backgrounds.

One of the most unforgettable experiences through my graduate program is that I attended one academic seminar on critical thinking. The guest speaker is a native speaker of English from the United States who was then teaching at my adjacent university. Our department invited him to give us a speech on critical thinking. The seminar is a life-changing event, as it affected my mindset and way of thinking. It also paved the way for the dissonance occurrence in my learning and teaching journey. Dissonance in life may occur when a person or a language learner encounters some inconsistencies between their beliefs and the actual practice or facts in the target culture (Sue, 2001). One of the important findings at this stage is that I gradually denied some of my previously established beliefs, perceptions, or values toward the target culture. For example, before I moved to the United States, I depicted the country as one of the wealthiest countries providing their citizens with great benefits, and I believed residents in the country all love and support the presidency. However, the more friends I made in the United States, the more news or even complaints I heard about their presidency. These comments or complaints represent different voices and perspectives about the presidency, which is different from the overpositive, utopian picture I used to have in mind.

This fundamental change in my beliefs and perception was greatly enhanced through tons of community, social, or personal activities. For example, when I was learning English in China, I believed it a fancy thing to have an English name. With that perception, I kept introducing myself with that English name to my American friends and professors in the first couple of months when I entered the United States. However, one of my professors, who is also one of my best friends now, challenged me by asking why I need that English name. She even suggested me using my Chinese name, which to a large extent, embodies my national and heritage identity. That is a great, even life-changing lesson I learned. I began challenging myself and revisited some beliefs or stereotypes that had been well established in my mind.

My dissonance experience also occurs in my language learning process. For one thing, I learned British English in China, which to some extent differs from American English in terms of lexemes, wording, and even syntactic rules. However, when I moved to the United States, I gradually acquired American English. The increased language learning experience made me realize not all the linguistic rules that I had learned for British English work in American English. Doubts and denials like this helped me with my identity development.

From a Critical Thinker to an L2 Researcher

My learning, teaching, and thinking experiences developed my identities and also guided me to challenge something I used to take it for granted. For example, for a long time, I thought I was a “victim” of the Gaokao, the typical standardized testing in China; I believed I had “suffered” too much from the tons of tests and quizzes in my high school. I did not realize how the tons of tests and quizzes had practiced my stamina and endurance in nature until the second year in my doctoral program in the United States. I had been working and studying so diligently ever since I was enrolled in the program. I got a few research awards from my school and even quite a few national associations. For the first time, I began to appreciate the hectic schedule and training in my high school and even the pressure from peer competition. Without them, I could not have achieved such awards.

Interestingly, a couple of other events at this stage helped reconsider the pros and cons of the standardized testing. For example, the United States began advocating and implementing the Common Core State Standards. Many reasons accounted for the advocacy and implementation. However, one argument is that the United States aims at promoting its international ranks in a few international standardized testing systems including Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) or Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). For the first time, standardization in a way outperforms diversity and creativity in American education system.

For the first time, books promoting standardized testing or Asian style education became best sellers. For example, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, authored by a Chinese American professor Amy Chua who taught her children in her traditional, strict Chinese way, challenged the dominant values or beliefs about American education. While the book was somewhat controversial, it at least showed the way that the tiger mom educated her children equipped her two daughters with excellent high scores and academic achievements. All these events during that time worked as stimuli to help me reevaluate my identities and heritage culture.

It should be noted that my transnational experience provided a platform to further develop my critical thinking and shape my identities. I may define my 8-year American experience as a reflective process to switch from a transnational scholar to a global citizen and a racial and cultural being. For example, one challenge that I felt during my doctoral study was the question “how can I define my cultural identity?.” I was certain about my professional identity, as I just wanted to be a scholar, an embodied academic intellectual (Kim, 2017). Therefore, my own experience was that for a couple of years when I was doing my doctoral study, I kept being asked the following: After graduation with your PhD, will you be back to China or stay here (in the United States)? In the first few times when I heard the question, I was kind of hesitant to answer it. I was uncertain if the person who was asking the question may have some other intentions. This kind of suspicion and uncertainty was just an awareness of identity. Gradually, my typical response to the question during that time was I am a global citizen. I will stay wherever provides me with a better platform to conduct my research and teaching. The response was not superficial but authentic from my true feeling.

However, I was struggling about how to describe my cultural identity at that time because I gradually understood both cultures have their limitations and advantages. What I did to help myself rebuild my cultural identity was taking advantage of my own ethnic identity to sustain my professional identity. In a culture which embraces diversity and multiculturalism, what I can do is to present my uniqueness and scholarship from my own Chinese background. This is something American context is in need of and also something that can best develop my line of inquiry.

From an L2 Researcher to a Global Citizen

One feature of a global citizen is the appreciation of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. The ultimate and ideal goal is to internalize a nonracist identity. My own experience to come to this stage occurred approximately when I completed my dissertation and moved to San Jose in the Bay Area, one of the largest multicultural, diverse, and populous areas in the United States. My community then consisted of international and multicultural scholars who helped me understand different cultures and even developed my empathy. Through communicating with these multicultural scholars, I began to understand what races and ethnicities genuinely mean in life.

In addition to my communication with my colleagues and peers, I also developed my integrative awareness through my teaching practice. One of the courses when I was teaching in the Bay Area was a sociolinguistics course about language, culture, and ethnicity, typically in the United States. Through my lectures for the course, I depicted a general picture of ethnicities in California and even the United States. The professional teaching experience helped me realize tensions among different races and ethnicities in the United States and directed me toward a global citizen with nonracism and social justice.

The global citizen identity was further developed through quite a couple of other community activities that I had participated in. For example, I was appointed as a lecturer representative during my stay in California. Through tons of the meetings I was attending during that period, I was more aware of the social justice issues truly existing among different cultural backgrounds. I was thus willing to do whatever to help release these tensions.

In addition to the global citizen identity, my cultural and professional identities were also developing in full swing at this stage, through tons of political and economic events. News from public or social media caused me a sense of insecurity. For example, events including the competition between Huawei and Apple on the 5G technology and the trade war causing the tightened visa sponsorship, all put me in an award position as a transnational scholar and practitioner but born in China. However, a critical look at these events led me to believe scholars and intellectuals should not be affected by contextual or political factors.

Discussion

The process of languaging and being socialized provides the development of identities with a rich, nutrient foundation. In this study, I found the process of learning, teaching, and using the learned language English and my heritage language Chinese shaped me into a person with multiple identities. In a scalar approach, emergence and formation of these multiple identities can be staged.

However, some stages are not completely distinct, but instead are blurred and recurring. One of the possible explanations of this phenomenon is the identity formation is never a stable process, but instead is a live, ongoing process that is shaped and reshaped every day. This resonates with findings in the existing literature. For example, Wenger (1998) argued that one’s identity is lived day-to-day; Duff (2008) also argued, “gaining competence in new ways of using language and representing meanings, including in our own primary languages, is an ongoing one that occurs throughout one’s life, from birth to death” (p. xiv).

Another possible explanation is that “language socialization at home, in community groups, and at school is often concurrent and interdependent; it may occur in a very similar, compatible, and complementary manner, or in a completely different, even contradictory, way” (Duff, 2008, p. xv). These compatible and incompatible manners, while being important to stage the identities, may depend on intellectual agency. In other words, agency determines when and how to stage identities. In this study, I went through an assimilation and acculturation process from learning English, guiding me to appreciate cultural tenets from the English-speaking countries and imitate either an American or British accent; however, I also experienced some dissonance moments in the learning process. The panacea I use to ease the dissonance and analyze the assimilation was my intellectual agency. If dissonance was ceased, a new stage of identity would not emerge or occur. My previous work (Gao, 2020) has already argued that teacher agency and critical thinking serve to sustain teacher identities, which relate to different translanguaging, transcultural, and transnational experiences. This has been extended through this study.

Metaphorically, identity formation and development require translanguaging, transcultural, and transnational capitals as the source of protein, and intellectual agency and critical thinking as the seasoning. Sociocultural factors might be seen as a contextual shop to provide these proteins and seasonings. Specifically, identity formation for me as an L2 learner starts from the language learning experience; however, the learning experience was way more like an investment construct from my parents’ side, rather than from my personal side. I was still too young to decide whether learning English would be a long-time or one-time investment.

The language factor accompanied me through the whole process of identity development, while being less salient when other factors joined the process. However, this languaging or translanguaging process set up a basic but robust foundation for my identity development. Gradually, when I began to realize the importance of learning English as my L2, the construct of investment then became salient. Norton (2000) argued, “If learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will, in turn, increase the value of their cultural capital” (p. 17). With the self-motivation to learn English well, I gradually accrued my cultural capitals.

Identity development thus comprised transcultural identity capitals. It is worth mentioning that the transcultural experiences may include transnational experiences or simply transcultural understanding that occurs in one specific context. Not all the EFL or L2 learners or teachers may have transnational experiences; however, they all have the transcultural experiences accumulated through code-switching the languages that they learn, speak, or use. In my case, transcultural identity capitals are accumulated through sociocultural influences and transnational experiences.

The development and sustainability of the identities require quite a ton of social constructs as stimuli. In the classical, social dimension framework, Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016) has already highlighted how social identities emerge and form through different constructs including investment, agency, and power. Scholars among the Group contributed in different works to account for how these different constructs or stimuli work, including but not limited to Norton (2000) for the investment and Larsen-Freeman (2019) for the agency. In my study, agency outperformed others in guiding me to make decisions and choices, which were crucial to sustaining my identities. Coldron and Smith (1999) argued that agency surpasses social structure in shaping identities. In other words, the choices and deliberation from teachers may constitute their identities, typically for their professional identities. The choices and deliberation are made through continuous learning and teaching reflection, which involves tons of critical thinking. The intellectual agency thus closely relates to critical thinking (DFG, 2016; Gao, 2020).

In addition, sociocultural factors through transnational experiences may exert the most profound effects on the process of cultural identity development (Gao, 2020). Identity capitals, intellectual agency, and sociocultural factors guided me to reflect on my ethnicity, which derived from ideological, political, and racial beliefs. These beliefs direct me to different decisions, including mobility, relocation, and repositioning. For example, policies and institutions may undermine a teacher’s mobility in social space and thus marginalize their positionings in that space (Moore et al., 2002). The experiences including mobility, relocation, and repositioning then work back on the belief system and enhance the identity emergence of being a critical thinker and global citizen.

Conceptualizing the EFLers’ Multiple Identities: A Proposed Model

By wrapping up all my analyses above, I contributed to the existing literature with a proposed model of multiple identities, including an L2 learner, teacher, researcher, critical thinker, and global citizen. Factors involved in constructing these identities were also added to the model (see Figure 1). I am not competing with the classical DFG model, which has presented a comprehensive, but somewhat overcomplicated, picture to the reader. Instead, the proposed model in this study stemmed from an EFLer’s real-life story and contributed in a synopsis way to the reader.

Figure 1.

A model of language teacher multiple identities.

In the five layers of the identity model, the first layer, the biggest cycle in the model is the learner identity. It represents all the L2 learners, or even the learners in general, start with their learning beliefs and develop their learner identities through their learning experiences. The layers gradually narrow in their scope, as some of the L2 learners may not develop L2 teachers. Some of the learners may drop out in the journey or choose other career paths or life trajectories. Multiple factors including personal, contextual, and sociocultural factors affect how EFLers develop their identities and bring the model to the next inner cycle. For example, not all the L2 teachers may have transnational experiences and thus may have different mindsets or identity formation processes.

In this article, I was unable to present in detail how contextual and sociocultural factors affect my identity formation and development; however, these factors may affect EFLers’ identities in a way or another (e.g., Gao, 2020; Vitanova, 2018; Yazan, 2018a). One thing I did mention and highlight in the article is the agency, regardless of the learner agency or the teacher agency, plays an important role in the shaping and developing multiple identities. This, over the recent years, has been tentatively explored in quite a few studies (e.g., Benesch, 2018; Ilieva & Ravindran, 2018). I am hoping researchers or scholars interested in the similar topic may further explore these detailed factors.

The Journey Ahead

The identity development is truly complex and complicated, especially when a person goes through different translanguaging, transcultural, and transnational experiences (Gao, 2020). I would like to end my article by giving a few implications to the scholars or researchers interested in the similar identity topics. First, this article drew upon one of the foundational theories from social dimensions (Duff, (2008) to explore how identity development can be interpreted from a language socialization perspective. It is worth mentioning that a single theoretical stance cannot fully stand to account for the identity development process; multiple theories in the same domain and school may compensate and recoup for the accounts of the process. This paves the way for future studies.

In addition, as I mentioned in my proposed model section, further exploration on factors affecting multiple identity development is necessary. While the research trend has an inclination to steer the social turn toward a dynamical turn (Larsen-Freeman, 2019), it is still highly suggested researchers explored the multiple dynamics and sociocultural factors in a further step. These contributions would then extend the current research body and pave the way for the complex, dynamical orientation.

Another implication is that as a few scholars have already been advocating (e.g., Yazan, 2017), identity as a pedagogy might be an innovative lens for teacher educators and TESOL researchers. We used to treat identity as a construct and spend time exploring the construct. As teachers are lifelong learners, we may treat identity as a pedagogy and see how this pedagogy helps inform teachers’ learning and teaching. As the world becomes increasingly complex, this kind of pedagogy may provide both preservice teachers and in-service teachers with a new way to learn, acquire, and digest the content area knowledge in teacher education. With all that being said and mentioned above, we as teacher educators still have a long way to go.