Multiple voices for the same profession: A comparative study of NESTs and NNESTs' professional identity formations in an L2 teacher education program

The increasingly diverse profiles of English users worldwide, fueled by globalization, bear witness to the hegemonic status of English as a global lingua franca. However, despite the current dynamic sociolinguistic realities, native speaker models and standards still endure as the primary benchmarks for English education in most parts of the world, propagating social, educational, and linguistic inequalities. In this ever-changing global linguistic landscape, English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) teachers stand at the very center of these tensions, and there is a strong need for ESL/EFL teachers worldwide to enact educational changes for promoting linguistic equality. Otherwise, the firmly entrenched native speaker ideology will only reinforce the "othering" process of those who fall on the wrong side of the binary (i.e., "non" native English speakers), thereby restricting ownership of the world's foremost powerful language.;Teacher identity casts a major influence on teaching practices and thus, this study aims to shed light on the developmental trajectories of teacher identity formation. In particular, with the strong belief that teacher trainees, the future agents of the English language teaching arena, possess the potential to bring about change, this study aims to examine professional identity formations of four native English speaking and three non-native English speaking teacher trainees within the distinctive professional milieu of a U.S.-based second language (L2) teacher education program. The conceptual premise underpinning this study is that language and identity are inextricably intertwined and mutually constitutive. Hence, narrative interviews comprised the backbone of this study while a questionnaire and emailed documents merged together to present comprehensive contours of L2 teacher identity formations.;Drawing on a narrative-biographical lens, this study first presents vignettes of the participants' previous and personal backgrounds which have shaped their own teacher identity. Then, to unveil how the previous backgrounds are negotiated in their developing teacher identity, this study examines the participants' educational experiences in the L2 teacher education program. Finally, to document the nexus of L2 teacher identity and native speaker status, this study ventures into underexplored territory by introducing voices from both native and non-native English speaking teacher trainees in contexts where traditional privilege and marginalization coexist.;The research findings show that the participants bring their own socio-culturally derived conceptions of teacher identity to teacher education programs, which are largely aligned with their worldviews of what ideal teachers ought to be. The study findings also underscore the importance of L2 teacher education programs in establishing and reconstructing professional teacher identity, which occurred along three vectors: identity-in-discourse, identity-in-practice, and the development of discipline-specific professional knowledge (i.e., teacher language awareness). The study findings further indicate that there is an inextricable link between the participants' native speaker statuses and their professional identity formations. The participants' native speaker statuses condition their teacher identities by constructing perimeters around their strengths, weaknesses, professional roles, career trajectories and aspirations. The study findings confirm the existence of the hegemonic representation of standard English and native speaker ideology that are still deeply entrenched in today's increasingly globalized and multilingual world. Based on the key findings unearthed in this study, theoretical, and pedagogical implications are discussed.