A Review of Language Teachers’ Identity Development: A Focus on Cultural Identity Theories

Teacher identity has been considered among the most influential key factors in the realm of teacher education. Studies on teacher identity help teacher educators to find new and conducive approaches to develop teacher identity in different contexts. This study is a theoretical review aiming to accentuate the recent underlying concepts of teacher identity, language teacher identity, and language teacher cultural identity. To those ends, we scrutinize the related issues such as the different perspectives about identity; key concepts in teacher identity including teacher professional identity, teacher motivation and identity, teacher emotion and identity, and narratives and teacher identity along with non-native English language teacher identify construction and reflexivity and language teacher identity. Moreover, a review of the related theories about cultural identity has been done and presented to address the most referred theories of cultural identity. Finally, some concluding remarks about the theoretical underpinnings of language teacher cultural identity have been discussed.