(Re)construction of teacher identities in a soft-CLIL context

This study investigates 4 secondary school Turkish EFL teachers’ perceptions of their experiences in a new Soft-Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) context and explores whether these experiences led to the (re)construction of their identities. The data was collected through a focus group interview, netnography, and stimulated recalls and analyzed on the basis of inductive content analysis. According to the findings, role conflicts caused by lack of pedagogical knowledge on how to integrate content and language impeded a construction of an encompassing CLIL teacher identity. Therefore, ultimately, identity (re)construction was based on either content or language teacher identities. Adopting an interpretive paradigm, our study highlights the importance of investigating new CLIL teachers’ perceptions of their experiences in understanding their identity (re)constructions. It could thus offer implications for similar contexts, particularly by showing the importance of gathering teachers’ perceptions of experiences for CLIL teacher development.