Exploring Teachers’ Reaction to the Identity Construction of Iranian Students in Efl Context

Resumo

The substantial achievements of the current research in the field of teaching English as a foreign language highlight the monumental influence of students’ identity construction on acquiring a foreign language. Due to the dearth of qualitative research that probe teachers’ awareness of the learners’ identity construction in classroom-oriented discourse and their reaction to it, the present study  is to develop a systematic explanatory theory of those aspects of EFL learners’ identity  disregarded by teachers in Iranian EFL context.  This grounded theory research is founded upon the volunteer and theoretical sampling of 8 under-achieving learners from Azad university of Birjand,  Iran. In-depth semi-structural interviews which took three weeks were employed by the researchers. The data collection and analysis procedure occurred between January and February, 2015. The iterative process of analysis yielded teachers’ failure to acknowledge the learners’ multiple   identity as the core category that pulled together three other sub-categories including 1) the ignorance of imaginative identity of the students by teaches 2) teachers’ disregard of the multiple and dynamic identity of the learners in educational context 3) teachers’ lack of awareness from students contradictory identification with the culture of target language speakers. The results of this study are almost novel and of great significance for Iranian EFL teachers and other practitioners in this field.