Abstract
Teacher identity affects how language teaching is played out. Teachers’ identity influences how they view themselves in terms of their professional work and lives. This study explored 32 pre-service English teachers’ professional identity construction through lesson design and the delivery of remedial education to six elementary school sixth-graders in a language teacher education program in a northern city in Taiwan. On the basis of analysis of the written metaphors, pre-service teachers’ final projects, and interviews, this study offers the following major findings. First, these pre-service English teachers’ identity was constructed by changing from being an English teacher and a big brother or sister to simply being an English teacher. Such identity construction was closely interrelated with their substance (meeting sixth graders’ needs and helping them enjoy learning English), their authority source (university course, university instructor, cooperative teacher, team members, classroom observation), and self-practice (teaching practice, lesson plan, and teaching aid designs). In order to make English teachers’ identity constructed in dynamic and social context, two suggestions are made.