“Not me with my American flag”: Transnational teachers' trajectories of language teacher socialization

Abstract

As language teachers move across countries with the rise of professional transnationalism, the need for investigating language teacher socialization in new academic cultures has also emerged. Accordingly, this paper explores two comparative cases: an EFL teacher with prior experience as a language learner and teacher in the USA, and an Arabic-as-a-foreign-language teacher with similar experience in Egypt. The main objective is to shed further light on the transnational language teachers' identity work and to better understand their socialization trajectories in which tensions related to conflicting academic teaching cultures occur. In this study, narrative frames and interviews were utilized to collect short stories, which were analyzed by the short story analytical approach (Barkhuizen, 2016, 2017). Informed by the language teacher socialization framework (Üzüm, 2017), the influences of new academic cultures on teachers' identity work in classrooms and across wider contexts of teaching abroad practices were analyzed. Analysis of the short stories, Stories, and STORIES demonstrated that transnational teachers experienced identity tensions due to the conflicting academic teaching cultures. In light of the findings, such tensions related to language teachers' experiences across academic teaching cultures need to be taken into account for an efficient socialization trajectory. © 2021 Editorial Board TESL - EJ. All rights reserved.