A Longitudinal Study of EFL Teacher Agency and Sustainable Identity Development: A Positioning Theory Perspective

Abstract

This study reports on a longitudinal narrative case study of Lin, a tertiary level EFL teacher in China, exploring how she exercised her agency and achieved sustainable professional identity development in different phases of her career. Based on narrative data primarily from three rounds of semi-structured interviews and other sources of data, and drawing on the positioning theory, this research was designed to uncover the complex relationships between agency and professional identity transformation in an English teacher’s sustainable professional development trajectory. The analysis of Lin’s narratives was organised into three stages: the initial stage of negotiating exploited and marginalised teacher identities, then becoming a student again, and, finally, reconstructing professional teacher and researcher identities. The findings suggest the significant role of consistent individual agency in an EFL teacher’s negotiation and reconstruction of professional identities. The results also support the existing literature in revealing that identity is not a static or fixed notion, but rather a dynamic and ongoing process that is affected by a range of internal and external factors. The research also shows the vital role of teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation in the agency enactment and identity development. This study has important implications for language teacher agency and identity research. In particular, it may shed light on language teachers’ sustainable professional development, which is crucial in ensuring the pursuit of sustainable development in education and many other sustainable development goals.

1. Introduction

Agency is an indispensable component of teachers’ professional career. A teacher is expected to enact agency in a number of aspects of his or her work, ranging from onsite decision making in classroom teaching to pertinent responses to school or institutional commitments. The positive outcome derived from agentic behaviours can enhance teachers’ sense of achievement and sustain their retention in the profession [1]. Previous research has manifested the significance of agency in assisting teachers to cope with challenges derived from education reforms and ultimately promoting teachers’ professional development [2,3,4].

Meanwhile, some studies have conceived that agency should not be seen as an isolated construct. Rather, it is closely related to some other concepts, in particular, teachers’ identity in a teacher’s professional development [5,6,7]. Ruohotie-Lyhty and Moate [8] proposed two primary forms of agency. The first type relates to teachers’ participation in the work community, whereas the second type of agency concerns teachers’ capability of employing their experiences and their participation in the development of their professional identities. Additionally, they further explicitly defined the second form of agency as identity-agency, suggesting that teachers’ agency is one of the prerequisites for their professional identity development. Furthermore, the importance of agency was also advocated by other researchers [9] in claiming that agency is vital not merely for driving the negotiation and construction of teachers’ professional identity, but more importantly, contributing to the transformation of teachers’ teaching practice.

Despite the scholarly attention to the links between teachers’ agency and identity, the extant literature in this line of inquiry has mainly focussed on teachers’ agency against a range of educational reforms [4,10,11,12], or in times of crisis [13,14] in various contexts. Still, very rare empirical research has been done to explore teachers’ agency and trace its effect on their professional identity development over a long term. It is based on this research gap and rationale that the current research was designed to make a longitudinal investigation of an English as foreign language (EFL) teacher’s agency and professional identity development. Specifically, this research was intended to explore how an EFL teacher exerted her agency in the development of her professional identities in different stages of her professional career on the one hand, and the relevant affordance and limitations for an EFL teacher’s agency on the other.

2. A Brief Overview of Research on Agency and Its Relationship with Identity

Agency was initially employed in the field of Applied Linguistics to study language learners’ learning [15,16,17,18]. However, the past decade has witnessed an upsurge of interest in the research of language teacher agency in a wider range of contexts [1,13,19,20]. It has been conceptualised differently from various theoretical perspectives. For example, agency was conceived by Tao and Gao [20] (4–12) as an “intentional act” from the social cognitive perspective, but a “socioculturally mediated capacity” from the sociocultural theoretical perspective. Additionally, the post-structuralist regarded agency as a “phenomenon/doing”, whereas the ecological theory viewed agency as a “discursive practice”.

Teacher agency has been argued to play an important part in facilitating teachers’ professional development and, ultimately, results in better students learning outcomes [20]. Teachers can exercise their agency over a range of dimensions and on multiple levels. In a recent study, based on the Douglas Fir Group’s [21] framework, Tao and Gao [20] summarised four levels at which teachers can invest their agency. Specifically, teachers can be engaged in a continuous process of learning to teach at the individual level. They are considered to be in a vital role in implementing pertinent educational policies and reforms at the institutional or national level. At a broader social level, it would be possible for teachers to exert their agency in advocating social justice in many crucial issues such as gender and race. Finally, at the chronological level, teachers can invest their agency in sustaining their professional development. More importantly, they also proposed the two pathways to enhance language teachers’ agency, that is, by changing the contextual conditions and promoting the actors’ growth [20].

Language teacher agency has been claimed to have a strong relationship with teacher identities [2,7,22]. Only by having a recognised identity position, can one person exercise his or her agency in a relevant or meaningful way [17]. Some researchers have also conducted research in this line of inquiry. For example, by using a narrative case study, Kayi-Aydar [7] explored how a Hispanic language teacher exerted her agency over the course of developing professional identities in different contexts. She found that the teacher’s previous learning experience, the discrimination, and marginalisation she encountered at work, and the practical knowledge she gained through her graduate studies, all shaped her agency and professional development. In a more recent study, through an in-depth interview of eight English teachers in a university in Southeast China, Gao, Tao, and Gong [2] made an investigation of the interaction between language teachers agency and their professional identity development in curriculum reforms. Drawing on sociocultural theory, they illustrated how those teachers exercised their agency in making choices between teaching and research, and responding to educational reforms to construct professional development paths that cater to their respective needs and characteristics.

However, existing studies into the relationship of language teachers’ agency and identity development were mainly based on Western epistemology and ontology [3,7] or focused on a short period of time span as against certain educational reforms [2,4,10,12]. Little longitudinal research has been done thus far to trace the long term development of agency and its effect on teachers’ professional identity development. As such, this longitudinal investigation of an EFL teacher’s agency and identity transformations seeks to answer the following two research questions: How does the EFL teacher exercised her agency and how the agency affected her identity development over different phases of her professional career?

3. Positioning Theory

Positioning theory was introduced by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré in 1990 [23]. It was proposed to “investigate how social episodes are constructed, and how rights, duties, and obligations distributed among interlocutors through conversations or narratives” [24] (pp. 14–31). Its primary objective is to appreciate how related rights, duties, and obligations shape social structures while being shaped by them [22]. Positioning theory involves three major categories, namely, positions, story lines, and act interpretations, serving as an analytical framework. Among these three elements, a position may reflect people’s social status, moral, or personal attributes, characteristics or abilities, and biological characteristics [25]. It emerges naturally out of social contexts and conversations [22]. Secondly, story lines refer to a set of established patterns of development which social episodes follow [26]. They are the contexts of actions and positions [27]. As interlocutors actively and agentively position themselves in conversations, they are engaged in a process of constructing or shaping their identities [28]. It is in this sense that many scholars have applied positioning theory to the study of language teacher identities [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. A common theme these studies revealed is that positioning could shape teachers’ agency [38] and professional identities [39,40], and inform their teaching and evaluation practices [34,41,42]. Nevertheless, relatively little research thus far has been done to apply positioning theory to investigate how teachers exercise agency to achieve their professional development. Against this backdrop, this study employed positioning theory to uncover how the narrator positioned herself vis-à-vis the interviewer and other environmental factors as she exerted her agency over the professional identity development process.

4. Methodology

The present study was designed to be a qualitative narrative case study through the data collection, analysis, and interpretation processes [43]. More precisely, it intended to gain a comprehensive understanding of how an EFL teacher exerts agency for her professional identity development. Meanwhile, narrative inquiry has become a popular approach in language teacher education [44,45,46,47,48]. It conceives that the participant’s narratives, generally in the form of interviews, are a reconstruction of the participant’s understanding and interpretation of his or her past experience. Moreover, participant’s narratives are also a co-constructive product between the participant and the researcher. They involve the self-positioning of the participant against the researcher and his/her positioning of the researcher, therefore reflecting the identity of the participant. For the present study, employing a narrative inquiry enables us to see the temporality and complexity of the process as it unfolds from the stories of the participant, and presents us an in-depth view of a particular individual agent in context over time [49,50,51,52].

4.1. Participant and Setting

Prior to the formal data collection process, a participant information sheet was sent to the participant for a general understanding of the primary objectives of the present research and its procedures of data collection process. A pseudonym, Lin, was employed and possible identifiers for the research participant were also eliminated to ensure the confidentiality of this study.

After obtaining her Master’s degree, Lin worked as a teaching assistant, then a lecturer at a comprehensive university. She taught a range of EAP related courses, such as listening, reading, and writing, with two or three courses in one semester. Apart from teaching, she was also supposed to do some research. Specifically, she was required to publish at least one article every year and apply for municipal, provincial, or national level funding from outside the university. These factors were the necessary conditions for being promoted to a higher position. After being confronted with many challenges, which she summarised as a “bottleneck” of her professional development, she decided to pursuing a PhD degree to improve her competency as an EFL teacher. It was during this process that the researcher and Lin got to know each other as they were both preparing to do a PhD for their continuing professional development. After that time, they were in close contact due to their shared professional ideals, which also made possible the longitudinal data collection for the present study.

The years around the new millennium have witnessed an enrolment expansion in higher education institutions in China. This expanded enrolment of university students resulted in a larger number of graduates with their Masters’ degree working at universities, in particular in foreign language departments as English language teachers. Therefore, there are a considerably larger number of English teachers with their Masters’ degree as opposed to teachers with their Doctoral degree in many other schools in many universities in China. These English teachers have been responsible for teaching a series of EAP courses to either English majors or non-English majors of the university. Especially for those who teach the non-English majors, they have on average a greater teaching load than other teachers in the university, which results in spending less time doing research. It is in this way that they are usually deemed as teaching oriented, rather than research oriented staff in the majority of universities in China. This has put those teachers in a less privileged status as most universities in China put more emphasis on research output beside emphasising also the significance of teaching.

4.2. Data Collection

The data for the present research derived from three sources. The primary source of data was mainly collected from three rounds of semi-structured interviews [53]. The first interview was conducted when Lin was successful in applying for a PhD scholarship. The second was made immediately after Lin received her doctoral degree. The third one was conducted after Lin returned to China five years later. All the interviews were done in Mandarin, the first language of the narrator, to ensure she could talk more freely and thus elicit more in-depth narratives. The extracts were then translated into English when they were selected as exemplar illustrations in this paper.

In addition, other types of data were also collected to inform the current research. These include case documents, such as the participant’s written publications and PhD thesis, which is related to teachers’ continuing professional development, and the files and photos for the rewards she received, the reflective journals she shared with the researcher. Notably, the author was also engaged in occasional informal face-to-face conversations with the participant, or chatted through WeChat, a commonly used personal communication app in China. Moreover, snapshots of photos, videos, and their texts the participant posted on her WeChat moments also constituted the overall dataset of this study. Although these informal chats were not subjected to systematic analysis, they did contribute to the analysis and interpretation of the data in the present study.

4.3. Data Analysis

The data analysis for this study was inspired by that of Kayi-Aydar [7] and comprised two stages. In the first stage, a micro interactional analysis was conducted. This mainly involved an identification of certain discourse markers (such as you know), and indirect speeches with a view to examining Lin’s attitude towards what she was narrating. The reason for such an interactional analysis resided in the claim that people usually resort to “combinations of linguistic and paralinguistic structures to build their self-image in stories” [4] (p. 168). Among them, discourse markers are one commonly employed strategy for indicating the narrator’s psychological states such as doubt or hesitation. Therefore, they were identified to observe Lin’s interpretation of her experience and choices and her negotiation of identities. Meanwhile, reported or indirect speech is usually used by narrators to emphasise or de-emphasise their role or responsibility in the reported situation through putting the words into the original character’s mouths [54]. In other words, they can employ these reported speeches to voice their own opinions without taking responsibility for them. As such, Lin’s reported speech was also taken into consideration during the initial phase of data analysis.

The second phase of data analysis was based on a thematic narrative analysis. Specially, the transcripts were read repetitively to identify and describe the short narratives in relation to Lin’s agentic actions and identities development. Themes were identified and categorised based on their pertinence to spatiality and temporality [48], such as the three different phases when Lin was an EFL teacher in China, became a PhD student in the UK, and, finally, transformed to a teacher-researcher back to China. Moreover, special attention was also paid to the positioning and repositioning of the participant in the interview data, either her self-positioning or her positioning of me and the environment in which she was embedded [55]. During the analytical process, NVivo was used to facilitate the data organisation and coding.

5. Results

A comprehensive analysis of the data uncovered three main themes, that is, Lin exercising her agency in: (1) negotiating exploited and marginalised teacher identities; (2) becoming a student again; and (3) reconstructing professional teacher and researcher identities. In what follows, these three themes will be presented respectively with examples from Lin’s narratives to illustrate how she exercised her agency and how the agency affected her sustainable identity development over the three different phases of her professional career [7,56].

5.1. Negotiating Exploited and Marginalised Teacher Identities

When Lin began to work at the university, she was among the several new teachers who commenced their teaching career in the same year within the School of Foreign Languages. She was the youngest among them and was single. Thus, she did not have as many family commitments as mid-career teachers. It was perhaps due to this reason that she was appointed to do more teaching and other administrative work. Lin noted that she felt exploited by the school:

I was given more and more work by the school during the first few years of my work. The school had just established the business English department and thus had to teach many new courses accordingly. However, many teachers did not want to teach new lessons because it would take them more time to prepare a new lesson than the ones they had previously taught. Under such circumstance, I was asked to teach several of the new courses due to some business English background in my Master’s degree education. I thus had to teach three or more new courses, about 20 to 30 hours a week. And this took me a large amount of time for preparing the lessons and left me with very limited or even no time doing research and writing articles. I was like a “teaching machine”.

Lin’s narrative above indicates that doing so much teaching work left her with limited time to do research and write papers. This also shows that in line with the school’s requirement by the school as mentioned above, she positioned herself as a member of staff who was supposed to simultaneously deliver teaching and do research. However, the overload of teaching occupied her time at the expense of doing research, which caused the tension between what she could actually do and what she intended to achieve. Such a situation was compounded by the increasingly “trivial administrative work” she was appointed to do, as she mentioned below:

I was also asked to do much trivial administrative work, which could have been done by full-time administrators. I did these jobs as extra work without extra payment or promotion. Such trivial work was very time consuming, but yielded no visible achievements. You know, if you completed it well, no one would notice it but take it for granted; but if you could not do it well, everyone would know it and would even probably condemn you. When you were devoted to much time and effort to the work other than your teaching, some colleagues thought you were pursuing more rewards. But things turned out that you just did the work other people thought were “trivial”, the honour or reward would go to other colleagues. I’m not stupid. You know, you cannot push the horse without feeding him. You cannot let me do all the work just because I am younger than other teachers.

Lin’s narrative above suggests that she felt her extra administrative work in addition to teaching was unfair and could not bring about a sense of achievement to her. Rather, the time-consuming work she did was regarded as “trivial” and was, perhaps, taken for granted by some colleagues. This restricted her agency of doing research. The use of the phatic discourse marker “you know” twice in the above narrative indicates Lin’s need of self-justification for what she was saying. She intended to receive her audience’s, that is me, the researcher in this case, agreement and recognition of her viewpoints on the unfair condition in which she was involved, thus convincing the audience of the justification of her words. She was unsatisfied with her position in the school as the youngest staff member supposed to do more trivial work. She also expressed how other colleagues ascribed her a lower status in carrying daily work:

There was once one colleague who was cooperating with me in coordinating the guest teachers’ work. After we completed the work and reported to the Dean. The colleague said to the Dean that “Lin was a good little girl. She did a good job.” How ridiculous it is that, you know, my colleague could say this in front of the Dean. I was not a “little girl” but a colleague of her. She should not judge me like this. After all, she was not supposed to judge me at all. We are equal in doing the job. What she said was like she was like a leader and I was a subordinate of her.

Lin resented her colleague’s unpleasant judgement. Her use of direct speech provides evidential device which demonstrates the authenticity of her arguments [57]. She argued that she was in the lower position in her school, which can be evidenced by her colleague’s word choices such as “little girl” and inappropriate judgement. Clearly, Lin was distancing herself from the lower position that her colleague attributed to her. She positioned her identity to be as an equal to her colleague. She was not subordinate to some other colleagues.

The above inconsistency of identity between her perceived lower status in the school and her strong belief of being equal to other colleagues motivated her to seek professional development to change this situation. So she applied for sponsorship from the university to be a visiting scholar in another institution. However, she was told that only those teachers who are associate professor or professor are considered for this sponsorship, although this was not stipulated in the job description. After the rejection of her visiting scholar application both at home and abroad, there seemed to be no appropriate alternative choices to achieve professional development.

Apart from the aforementioned oppression and lower status she perceived in the school and the university, Lin also reported her less favourable position in funding application and paper publication within the broader sociocultural context outside the university in China. She mentioned that many academic journals to which she submitted her paper just rejected her submission due to her lower professional title:

It was said to be the unwritten rule that the journals only consider papers by those authors whose professional titles are professor or associate professor, or those sponsored by the national or provincial funds.

(from interview).

If things were really like what Lin claimed, it would not be surprising that she might face considerable hardship in journal publications as she was only a lecturer and had no national or provincial funds to sponsor her paper. Such frustration culminated in the introduction of the new promotion policy at the university. The new policy stipulated that all lecturers under 40 years old have to receive their doctoral degree in order to be promoted to an associate or full professorship. That is to say, a PhD degree became a prerequisite for her. Without it, she would remain a lecturer for the rest time of her life.

In short, it is this identity inconsistency between Lin’s perceived lower institutional status imposed by her colleagues in the school and her less privileged academic status in the broader social context that stimulated her agency in seeking transformations of her own circumstance. As Lin noted, “it seems that I have to do a PhD for my immediate and long-term professional development” (journal entry). Indeed, Lin was proactive in changing the status quo of her identity as a lecturer and seeking out opportunities for professional development. After the failure of her visiting scholar sponsorship and faced with the university’s new promotion stipulations, she demonstrated her agency by deciding to pursue further studies. Since she was determined to do a PhD, she began to prepare for the application of PhD in her spare time. Finally, she succeeded in receiving an offer from a well-known research intensive university in the UK.

5.2. Becoming a Student Again

For Lin, doing a PhD is not only a type of liberation from the trivial work she did in her previous job, but more importantly an opportunity to achieve professional development and recognition. During the four years of her PhD journey in a different country, she experienced an identity change from an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher to a student. With the aim of obtaining a PhD degree, she exerted her agency and realised a range of identity transformations in a new sociocultural context.

As noted above, doing a PhD changed Lin’s professional identity from an EFL teacher back to a student again. This identity change meant a new lifestyle for her. However, her student identity was different from when she was a postgraduate student before her teaching career. Her past experience of being an EFL teacher also helped shape her student identity as a PhD student, as she described:

Although I became a student again, I just found it totally different from the days when I was a student before. When I was attending a lecture or seminar at the university, I could not help reflecting on my past learning or teaching experience and comparing what I see with what happened before. When I learned some new expressions in daily life, either in or out of class, I would think how to teach this to my students in the future. So it could be said that I had a double person in me, both a student and a teacher in one.

Such a student identity, alongside her previous working experience, constitutes Lin’s new identity as a PhD student in a study abroad context. This new identity also brought about new agentic actions to her. She reported that as an EFL teacher, English language proficiency is of paramount importance to her professional development. “Although language proficiency does not mean teaching skills, it is one important prerequisite for an ELF teacher” (journal entry). So improving language proficiency became one of the important goals for her during her PhD process:

I noticed that what we have learned in our textbooks before are mostly written language, which is quite different from the language people use here before. So I paid attention to the language people use in daily life. For example, when I went to the shop, I will observe the English expressions of many things on shelves. I also made use of every opportunity to talk with people, either my colleagues at the university, or people outside the university in everyday life. I also notice the language teachers use in classroom teaching or tutorials. For example, we usually say “are you clear?” to check students’ understanding in class, but the teachers here normally say “Does that make sense?”. Differences like this are interesting and I hope I can use some of them in my future teaching.

Due to this intentional effort, Lin reported a perceived improvement in English language proficiency during her PhD study process. She mentioned that when she first arrived in the UK, she had great difficulty in understanding what the local people said when meeting someone in the street. But after around one year, she suddenly realised that she could follow what the local people said and communicate with them quite well. This shows her enhanced level of listening and speaking skills as a language learner which was brought about by her agentic actions.

Alongside the perceived improvement in language proficiency, Lin also noticed a change in her language ideology. She was previously convinced that native English speaking teachers are the ideal teachers and the perfect model of language learning and teaching, whereas non-native English speaking teachers are in a comparatively inferior status in English language teaching. However, after being exposed to a learning environment of students from multiple countries and with diverse accents, she came to realise that English has increasingly become a lingua franca. A number of people with a non-native English speaking background from all over the world have been using English, as she said that:

I noticed that many of the students in class from other countries are very active in classroom discussions or answering questions from teachers. I was a little bit shy at the very beginning and were afraid of talking too much in class. But later when I noticed that other students were talking so freely, without caring much about their own accent, I became more brave to engage in the talking and discussing in class. I also noticed that your accent is nothing to be ashamed of, but can be something you should be proud of. It is a manifestation of your unique identity.

This transformative attitude towards the dichotomy of native and non-native English-speaking teachers and various accents lead to the change in Lin’s teaching ideology. She pointed out that the difficulties she experienced in her language learning in a new context made her to rethink the language difficulties and errors her students had met. This experience might put her into her students’ shoes. Therefore, she could be better empowered to help her students in their language learning in her future teaching.

More importantly, Lin revealed that her greatest transformation was in her knowledge and capability of doing research. Guided by the regular tutorial with her supervisors, she gradually developed her own PhD research project. Motivated by the strong desire to being engaged in the academia, she also went to attend several national or international conferences during her PhD research. She presented some of the research results and communicated her research with other PhD colleagues and scholars in similar fields. The communication with and feedback from the wide range of academics further boosted her motivation of continuing the research, which consolidated her new professional identity as a researcher in the making.

In addition, being exposed to a different sociocultural context also resulted in Lin’s change of sociocultural identity. One of the most impressive things she noted was the multicultural backgrounds of the students and teachers she met in the study abroad context. She noticed their various customs and conventions and was impressed by how people with different backgrounds live and study harmoniously together. This had gradually helped her developing a more accepting attitude towards other people and different perspectives, and improved her cross-cultural awareness and international vision, as she said:

I attended many workshops and seminars at the university, and noticed how people attend to various opinions or views that are different from their own. These activities have broadened my horizon and international vision in seeking out consensus among different views. I also find I can accept many things that I could hardly accept before. For example, one of my PhD colleagues was a gay. I was a little shocked at the beginning when I knew this. But gradually, I found I began to accept this and take it for granted. If you ask my view now, I would be very certain that I think this is quite normal. There are many things you might find strange but it is totally fine in another cultural or social context.

From the above narratives of Lin’s PhD journey, it can be observed that she had experienced an identity shift from a teacher to a student. She had positioned herself as both a learner and a teacher. This self-positioning of a special double identity stimulated her sense of responsibility for her future self as a more qualified teacher. Thus, she reported her intention of applying what she learned during the PhD study process to her future teaching and research work. Due to her agentic actions and efforts, this preliminary identity transformation also caused other identity transformations, including those of linguistic identity, professional teaching and research identity, and sociocultural identity. All these identity changes were meant to better empower her in her future professional career.

5.3. Reconstructing Professional Teacher and Researcher Identities

After completing her PhD research study, Lin returned to the university where she previously worked in China and continued to teach there. She noted that what she had learned and experienced during her PhD research at the university in the UK had greatly influenced her work with regard to teaching and research. Additionally, her persistent agentic actions in work also resulted in her identity transformation in the new stage of her professional career.

Specifically, Lin applied the new teacher knowledge and teaching ideology she had learned during her four years’ PhD study to her work. As noted above, she brought with her the double identities of a language learner and a language teacher. Her newly acquired identity characteristics during her PhD study transformed her classroom as a site to observe the learning process from both her students’ perspective and from her own perspective as a teacher. As such, she gradually became a reflective teacher. Moreover, the change in her ideology about language teaching made her pay more attention to students’ communicative skills. She was also empowered to use a greater variety of teaching methods, which she conceived were effective for her teaching, as she noted below:

During my PhD research study, I attended many courses on the teaching methodology of English language. The teachers delivered the teaching with vivid teaching methods. And I had a better understanding of how to apply the traditional and classic teaching methods, such as communicative language teaching, task-based language teaching, to my teaching practice. After I come back to China, I applied these teaching methods to my own classroom, and it yielded a totally different teaching effect from my previous teaching prior to my PhD study.

Moreover, the shift of teaching ideology and empowerment of teaching methods also enhanced her confidence as an EFL teacher and promoted her professional development. After returning to work, she attended several teaching contests, and won the first prize in one national teaching contest. Such success in her teaching practice further motivated and facilitated her to apply for some teaching related research grants. Later, she was awarded a provincial research grant. Based on this research programme, she managed to do some research in relation to her research interests and expertise in second language (L2) teaching and learning. As a result, she got her research published in a prestigious international journal. All these new achievements led to her being promoted to be an associate professor at the university where she works.

During this process, she has gradually changed her viewpoints of the relationship between teaching and research, seeing them as two integrative and mutually beneficial components in a qualified EFL teacher’s professional development. This has gradually changed the self-positioning of her professional identities from a EFL teacher prior to her PhD study to a new double identity of both an EFL teacher and researcher:

The journey in my PhD indeed helped me a lot for my teaching and research. It can be a major reason for my professional development at present. I have changed my understanding of the relationship between teaching and research. I am now convinced that doing research is not isolated from teaching, instead, it can in turn provide more insight to my teaching. Meanwhile, I can also find research topics from my teaching practice. They are not mutually exclusive but can benefit each other. Also, one can be a good teacher and a good researcher at the same time.

To sum up, Lin’s work after her PhD degree marked a new phase in her professional life. Due to her agentic effort and being empowered by her renewed teaching ideology and methods developed during her doctoral stage, she made many new breakthroughs in her teaching, grant application, research publication, and title promotion at the university where she worked. She achieved a transformative change in both her ideology and in language teaching and teaching practice. Her consistent agency and improved confidence contributed to the negotiation and reconstruction of her new identity as both an EFL teacher and researcher, which was in stark contrast to the “teaching machine” she claimed to be in the first phase of her work.

6. Discussion

This research sought to unpack the process through which an EFL teacher exercised her agency for her sustainable professional identity development. By engaging in Lin’s experiences in three different phases of her professional career, the findings of the present study revealed how she worked through the challenges and difficult circumstances in her work. It explored in particular how such agency influenced the ongoing development of her professional identities from being a marginalised teacher, to being a student again, and, finally, a teacher-researcher. The findings echo previous research by suggesting the significant role of persistent individual agency in an EFL teacher’s negotiation and reconstruction of professional identities and their professional development [2,5].

Meanwhile, the results also support the existing literature on foreign language teacher identity in revealing that identity is not a static or fixed notion, but rather a dynamic and ongoing process that is affected by a range of internal and external factors [58,59,60]. First, Lin’s self-positioning of being in a marginalised and exploitative circumstance in the initial phase of her teaching career was influenced by her communication with other teacher colleagues in the working environment. Thus, this self-positioning was derived from both internal self-perception and external interaction with the environment. Second, the inconsistency between self-perception and the ideal-self motivated Lin to enact her agency to make changes [61,62,63]. This indicates the significance of individual factors in a language teacher’s agency. Third, the PhD learning opportunities empowered Lin for her upcoming professional career. To some extent, this may also lend further support to the vital role of systematic study abroad teacher education programme for a language teacher’s professional development [64,65,66,67].

Taken together, this study indicates how the EFL teacher’s past experiences as a teacher, tensions in work, and sustained engagement in professional learning can contribute to her sustainable professional identity development [68]. On one hand, appropriate attention should be given to factors that may facilitate teachers’ professional development. Among them, individual agency should be regarded as the central component due to its vital role in “facilitating teachers’ professional development and sustaining desired educational changes” [20] (p. 12). On the other hand, in light of its link to multiple dimensions concerning teachers’ professional performance and growth [68], reflecting on one’s identity shifts and multiple positionings should also be seen as an integral part of teachers’ professional development [69]. Another important factor is emotion, which also emerged from our analysis of the participant’s experience; however, the present study did not focus specifically on this topic. In particular, this is the case for the first phase of the study’s results, when Lin’s experience of some negative emotions stimulated her agentive actions in seeking changes. Lin’s experience reflects the significance of teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation in their agency enactment and identity development. Such analysis may inform us that teacher education programmes also need to attend to teachers’ emotions in order to fully exert their agency [7].

7. Conclusions

The present study investigated how an EFL teacher exerted her agency in various phases of her professional career to realise the professional identity development. Specifically, this study identified three different stages of Lin’s career development. The first was in her early years of her teaching profession when she negotiated her exploited and marginalised identities as a teacher. In this phase, Lin was overloaded with teaching commitments and trivial administrative work. She also felt being positioned in a marginalised status by her elder colleagues. More importantly, she reported being in a less privileged position in the application for funding and research publication, which were of paramount significance for her title promotion and professional development. This exploited and marginalised self-positioning lead to her decision of doing a PhD.

In the second phase, she reported her agency and identity transformation while doing a PhD in the UK. During this period of time, she positioned herself with the double identities of being a student and a previous and future teacher. Her past experience as an EFL teacher made her take advantage of the learning opportunity and exercise her agency. Due to her agentic actions, she achieved the transformative change of linguistic proficiency and developed a new understanding of the English language teaching ideology. In particular, her view of the dichotomy of native and non-native English-speaking teachers and various accents led to the change of her teaching ideology. Meanwhile, she was also empowered with improved knowledge and capability of doing research. Along with these shifts, she also experienced a sociocultural identity transformation, became open to the divergence between different people and perspectives, and improved her cross-cultural awareness and international vision.

In the third phase, Lin applied the knowledge and skills she learned in her PhD study to her upcoming teaching and research practice. On the one hand, her renewed teaching ideology and teaching methods changed her teaching practice and rendered her better performance in related teaching contexts, which enhanced her confidence as an EFL teacher and promoted her professional development. On the other hand, Lin’s improvement in research capabilities, together with her achievements in teaching, contributed to her success in funding application, research publication, and professional promotion. She could achieve a balanced professional status of teaching and doing research, as she desired to do in the first phase of her professional life and was ultimately capable of positioning herself as an EFL teacher and researcher. Notably, during the whole process, she has managed to shift others’ perspective to her new positioning. This manifested previous research in that teachers’ identity development is primarily “enacted by individual teachers” [67] (p. 122).

Lin’s narratives provide significant implications for the research and practice of language teacher agency and identity development. First, the present study has important theoretical significance. It draws on a positioning theory into language teacher agency and identity transformation, thus enriching the theoretical perspectives into this phenomenon [58,70,71]. Second, the narrative exploration of agency and its impact on identity transformation in this study reflect an important paradigm shift in language education research, which transcends the traditional quantitative-qualitative divide toward a transdisciplinary integration of areas, such as language education and psychology, thereby moving forward the applied linguistics community [72].

In conclusion, the findings of this study may shed light on how individual teachers can exert their own agency to promote their identity transformation and sustain their professional development. More specifically, Lin’s case, in terms of her linguistic, teaching, research, and cultural gains during study abroad, may provide insights for those teachers in similar circumstances or other study abroad environments [68]. Furthermore, this research may also provide insights for teacher educators or administrative officers in related departments on how to provide appropriate affordances to facilitate teachers’ professional agency and professional identity development, and sustain the desired educational changes which may bring about improved students’ learning outcomes. For example, the stakeholders involved in the planning and designing of teacher education programmes may take into account the factors, such as teachers’ prior experience, their motivations, ideal selves, and emotions illustrated above in this research and, thus, make informed decisions.

Finally, it is noteworthy that, as other narrative case studies in similar line of inquiry have noted, this research does not mean to be generalizable to other individual teachers or contexts. Instead, it was intended to make an in-depth exploration of Lin’s agency and professional identities over her different career stages and stimulate reflections by providing insights for readers in similar contexts.