Narratives to identities: Japanese graduate teaching assistants as language teachers

The present study explores Japanese student teachers’ identity construction and transition with focuses on contexts both inside and outside the classroom in the online environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. By integrating language teacher identities as a complex and dynamic entirety rather than detached pieces, this qualitative research study utilizes both narrative inquiry and positioning analysis to examine four Japanese student teacher identities through both discursive construction in discourse and momentary behavior in talk-in-interaction. The data collected from the surveys, class observations, interviews and weekly meetings revealed four aspects of Japanese student teacher identities: (1) beliefs on foreign language education in and beyond the classroom, (2) self-perceptions of not only language teachers but also future supporters and life helpers, (3) perceptions of teaching Japanese live-online during the COVID-19 pandemic and (4) beliefs on successful language teaching relying on bidirectional cooperation of both teachers and students. The article concludes with a discussion about how the possible directions for future research in terms of the contextual narrative exploration in languages other than English and the integration of both narrative inquiry and positioning analysis methods.