ABSTRACT
I am often hard-pressed when asked to describe what I do for a living. Over the years, I have come to describe myself as an educational linguist who works in three areas: SLA, TESOL, and education. My engagement with these overlapping fi elds, as exemplifi ed by my graduate education (an MA in Applied Linguistics, an M.Ed., and a PhD in SLA) and my service to various professional organizations (American Association for Applied Linguistics, American Educational Research Association, and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), have convinced me that teacher identity development does not take place solely within the individual teacher; rather, it occurs in relation to the larger social context within which the teacher is embedded. Even mainstream SLA, which traditionally has focused on the cognitive processes of language acquisition, has begun to recognize the limitations of investigating individual diff erences such as age, aptitude, and anxiety in isolation of the social milieu of learners. Given the importance of the social contexts of learning, language teacher identity researchers interested in examining constructs, such as teacher anxiety, would need to study it in relation to broader social processes. Encouragingly, there is a growing trend in SLA to examine the language acquisition dynamics surrounding learners. That language learning is seen as a multifaceted phenomenon is instantiated in The Douglas Fir Group (2016), who underscore that language development is shaped by myriad factors that exist on multiple (micro, meso, and macro) scales.
