BEING AND BECOMING A FEMALE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY

Abstract

The phenomenon of my interest began with my experience of being a female English language teacher since I started teaching. Reflecting upon my experiences as an English language teacher had a huge impact on me as that it made me look into the life of the self and other female English language teachers and explore. With the joy of being in the world questioning the existence, experiences, and the expressions as to why teaching? marked the beginning. This final output considering to understand the nature of their phenomena is believed to help us understand how the primitive stage leads to the developmental antecedents of the later phases. Additionally, the attempt to value my and their experiences and give them some meaning through the process of reflection and rewriting motivated me towards this attempt. I problematized this issue with other English language teachers, observed the change, the development from being to becoming with the sense of belongingness to the English language teaching field. This context of observing these female English language teachers has set research questions to explore the issues of English language teaching through their process of becoming an English language teacher. I used hermeneutic phenomenology as the philosophical and methodological inferences of my inquiry. My discussion of being and becoming was based on their upbringing, success/failure/achievement stories, updated to internet and technologies, and involvement in academics developed as themes after the interviews were transcribed, coded and themes derived. Regardless of domination in every field how being female become English language teachers and are making their space into the fields of English language teaching is my concern. The insights I have gained from the research work is that the initiatives for active learning develop the sense of belonging to the teaching field and enable one as a self-regulated and self-determined being. I also was informed that the teachers exposed to different professional development strategies differ from the teachers working with their common sense. Additionally, they also differ in terms of position and performance. Hence, the exposure that the female English language teachers get from the beginning of their life to the beginning of their professional life determines their position and perception towards teaching; and those phenomena of being from the very beginning helps to shape the becoming of the self.