The Exploration Of Self: Professional Identity In Full-time English Education Masters’ Development

Full-time education master of professional degree, since its establishment in2009, attracts more and more students’ attention. In professional degree master’scultivation scheme, the words “practice” and “applied” are frequently mentioned. Theestablishment of the degree is mainly to train application-oriented teachers forprimary and secondary schools. Due to the short opening time, full-time master ofeducation is still at the exploratory stage and lack of relevant training mode forreference, there are still some problems. English Education Master degree as a kind ofEducation Master degree, because of the specificity, English Education Masterstudents’ professional identity became one of the most common concern topics.The purpose of this paper is to find the current professional identity condition offull-time English education master students and explore the factors that influence theprofessional identity. In this paper, it takes sixteen English education master studentsin the2012thand the2013thof H Normal University as the research participants, andmainly adopts the semi-structured interview of qualitative method, probes into itscurrent situation and influencing factors of professional identity. Data analysis isbased on the most popular analyzing software for qualitative research, Nvivo8.0,which do a great favor in this study. Finally，English education masters’ professionalidentity is discussed by using categorization.The study found that English education masters’ professional identity is aprogressive enhancement process, because of the difference of gender, grade,whether with a bachelor degree of English Education and whether with workingexperience, the situation is also different. The study found that four dimensions(professional cognition, professional emotion, professional behavior, professionalevaluation) which can reflect the current state of English education masters’professional identity showed different degree; The study also found that the factorsaffecting English education master’s professional identity are divided into two aspects:personal factors and external factors, and the external factors are more apparent. Based on the findings, the researcher proposed suggestions from two aspects:individual and external. English Education masters should constantly enhance theskills and research abilities by themselves within two-years postgraduate life,meanwhile, the cultivation institutions should also constantly improve full-timeeducation masters’ training mode, and the education departments should improverelevant policies, to improve the professional identity of full-time education mastersfrom two aspects：internal and external.