English teachers’ perspectives about teacher competencies in terms of professional identity

Abstract

This study aims to find out and compare the perspectives of pre-service and in-service English teachers about generic and field-specific teacher competencies set by Turkish Ministry of National Education (MoNE) with regard to teacher identity in Turkish EFL context. There were 366 preservice and 84 in-service English teachers participating in the study. The constant comparison method of grounded theory was used while analysing the data and two coders were involved in the interpretation of emerging categories to increase the objectivity. The findings show that about half of the participant English teachers have positive opinions about the contribution of the related competencies to their professional identity, but a small number of them indicate negative opinions or hesitations. They also make suggestions and criticism about the nature of teacher training such as bettering teacher image, diminishing theory-practice gap, controlling teachers, improving competencies, stopping adaptations, reopening teacher training high schools and including a special talent test at educational faculties. Policy makers and teacher training programmes could benefit from the practical experiences of teachers and their suggestions while making adaptations in teacher training both at pre-service and in-service level.