TESOL, Teacher Identity, and the Need for “Small Story” Research

& A cursory scan of TESOL Quarterly abstracts from recent decades reveals a growing interest in matters of identity—a trend that is paralleled in other social science disciplines (sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.). And because of the close connection between identity and narrative (e.g., Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2008; De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2007a), it is no coincidence that many of those same disciplines have been simultaneously characterized as taking a ‘‘narrative turn.’’ However, with respect to narrative-and-identity, the field of TESOL seems to be lagging a bit behind. For many of us in the field of TESOL, narrative has traditionally referred to a written text type, or a type of task that induces learners to produce past-tense verb forms. In comparison with other disciplines, we have been slower to associate narratives, especially narratives of personal experience, with an analytic method, tool, or object of inquiry. However, a growing number of publications about language learning and language teacher education (e.g., Bell, 2002; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002, 2007; Tsui, 2007) have discussed or employed narrative inquiry as a type of qualitative research. A striking number of these rely on written narratives. Some examples include Casanave and Schecter’s (1997) volume on language teacher autobiographies (comprised of personal essays) and Johnson and Golombek’s (2002) volume of language teachers’ written accounts of their professional experiences. More recently, Tsui (2007) used narrative inquiry to examine how her participant Minfang’s identity evolved from ‘‘marginal EFL student’’ to ‘‘model CLT teacher,’’ (p. 671) and the complex processes associated with the formation of professional identity.