ABSTRACT
Vietnam is a particularly interesting site for an analysis of male teachers’ professional identity construction, not only because it is still largely under-researched, but also because of the normative association of “teaching” as being a female-dominated job. Due to this social perspective, the number of men working as teachers in the education sphere in Vietnam are limited, which makes an exploration of how male teachers construct and negotiate their gender and their professional identities in this context particularly interesting. This chapter aims to do this. Using spoken interactional classroom data, this chapter adopts a sociocultural linguistic approach to analyse how the professional and gender identities of one male teacher are constructed in his English communication classes at an English centre in Vietnam. The chapter shows how this male teacher portrays himself linguistically as a good language teacher by deploying some of the discursive processes and speech elements that index femininity and thereby gender.
