چکیده:
A community of practice may shape and reshape the identity of members of the community through providing them with situated learning or learning environment. This study, therefore, is to clarify the salient learning-based features of the language teaching community of practice that might formulate the identity of language teachers. To this end, the study examined how learning situations in two communities of practice (English and Arabic) developed the professional identity of language teachers. The results of the semi-structure interviews with 5 language teachers highlighted some differences between English and Arabic language teaching communities of practice in terms of the situated learning activities they provide for language teachers to develop their professional identity. Furthermore, since the community of practice can be considered a potential curriculum that may be learned by newcomers with legitimate peripheral access, it would be considered as a main source of identity formation of both English and Arabic language teachers. The findings of the study can be used to better understand the nature of being a professional language teacher in non-native contexts. They have implications for novice and experienced language teachers as well as for teacher educators to review the content of the teacher training courses
خلاصه ماشینی:
"A language teacher who works in ministry of education system doesn’t pay attention to the method of language teaching… A language teacher learns from books, journals, magazines to find knowledge about newly-proposed language teaching methods, teaching psychology as well as vocabularies…A language teacher is actually a psychologist and has to make a good rapport with language learners… I owe a debt of gratitude to two ex-professors of mine…Learning from internet, having computer skills and using multimedia helped me very well… Fatemeh:…use of the internet, films, and CDs to improve your skills… getting knowledge from your teaching methods in the classroom… knowledge of teaching methods from the books and knowledge that we acquire from teaching experiences… participation in teaching training courses such as TESOL…There are some people in language teaching who we can rely on them… Appendix 3: Extracts Transcribed from Interviews with Arabic Language Teachers (Note: the blanks relate to unrelevant parts of the sentences or statements) Mohammadreza: Arabic language teaching requires an up-to-date knowledge acquires mostly through viewing the latest news networks broadcasting in Arabic language…there are some language knowledge questions that even our language teachers cant reply…if a language teacher relied solely on the traditional books that are published in the textbook market of Iran to get his/her knowledge, he/she could not be able to be a good language teacher since the subjects that are asked from language teacher [in the classroom] are from what’s happening in the social world of Arabic countries…Structural knowledge (Sarf-va- Nahv) is traditional and out of date… what I perceived as a language teaching in the early days is totally different from today because of learning from the academic environment at the beginning… I found that it was the fault of learning that the educational system had given to me… the current situation of Arabic language teaching is completely traditional… When we go to the foreign textbook market, we perceive that this is the market of ELT and learning as if we walk in the London streets…I use the sources of language teaching prepared by natives for natives and non-natives language teacher since there is no alternatives for an Arabic language teacher in the context of language teaching in Iran."