ABSTRACT
I am Yueting Xu, associate professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS) and PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). I started my career as a university English teacher at GDUFS after graduating from the MA program at Sun Yat-sen University in 2005. Over the past ten years, I have conducted research mainly on teacher knowledge and identity. My current research project is on teacher assessment literacy. In this chapter, I would like to refl ect on a funded research project on university English teachers’ research practice and identity construction as researchers in which I was engaged from 2011 to 2013. This study provided me with many chances to listen to other teachers’ stories of “becoming researchers,” including narratives of the role of institutional contexts in shaping their identity construction, their engagement with and in research, their research motivations and interests, and their anticipated future research careers. Although the project has been completed (Xu, 2014), the participants’ collective accounts echo in my ears from time to time, as becoming a researcher is a recurring theme woven into my professional life. Thus, the focus of this chapter is a refl ection on the central position of researcher identity in teacher professional development.
