Abstract
While recent education reform across the globe has increasingly focused on the professional practices of lecturers (Teng in Front Educ China 12:113–132, 2017a; Tian & Lu in Teach High Educ 22:957–974, 2017), the identity development of lecturers—who play a pivotal part in the development of teaching, research, and teacher education—becomes an emerging topic in higher education. China is the largest country involved with teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and university English teachers are the largest group of teachers in university. In China, a lecturer is an academic rank below associate professor. University English lecturers, particularly those who have taught English in universities for a long time but have not been promoted to associate professor due to the fierce competition in the academic promotion system, has become a common but serious phenomenon in China (Wen & Zhang in Foreign Lang Educ 38:67–72, 2017). However, there is a lack of systematic research into how university English lecturers engage in various aspects of their professional development, including teaching, research, and academic service. In addition, there is a lack of understanding of what challenges they may encounter, how they navigate the challenges to enhance their teaching and research work, and how they respond to constraints in fostering changes to their work. This chapter aims to bridge these gaps, with a focus on using identity as an analytical lens to examine the identity construction experiences of one group of university English lecturers in the contested and ever-shifting contexts of teacher education and higher education in mainland China.
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Teng, (. (2019). To Be or not to Be an ‘Old English Lecturer’: A Social Identity Theory Perspective. In: Autonomy, Agency, and Identity in Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0728-7_7
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