Resumen de Culture, profession, and teacher learning: constructing a professional identity for CFL teachers in Australia

Zhiqiang Wang, Zuhana Mohamed Zin

• Understanding how Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers construct their professional identity is fundamental in teacher education, particularly in fostering teachers’ identity awareness and improving students’ multilingual skills within multicultural contexts. This multidisciplinary interpretive case study explores the stages and strategies of CFL teacher professional identity construction through the lenses of psychological perspective, intercultural communication theories, and sociocultural framing. Guided by a proposed conceptual framework integrating culture, profession, and teacher learning (TL), data were collected from two CFL teachers in Australia through six in-depth semi-structured interviews and thematically analysed. From psychological, institutional, and sociocultural perspectives, the findings illustrate that novice teachers develop their professional identity in three stages: enhancing intercultural communication competence (ICC) in three interconnected steps, glocalising multicultural integration of values and practices through institutional interactions, and constructing peripheral subject teacher professional identity. The TL strategies are intrinsically linked to conceptual and professional knowledge acquisition. Profession intersects with culture in enhancing ICC. Both profession and culture overlap with TL in professional and conceptual knowledge separately. Through in-depth research of two participants, this study aims to contribute to foreign language teaching by providing a theoretical perspective on teacher education, with implications for various professions within multicultural contexts.