An Investigation of Teacher Identity Changes and Challenges of Short-term Internship in an International Education Setting View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Ying Ti Wang  

International internships are considered as an effective way for college students to learn foreign language and develop professional skills at the same time, and more and more college students apply for being an international intern to polish their abilities. The major purpose of this study is to investigate how the international internship experience from college period shape or change the teacher identity construction of two international educators anonymized as Darlene and Aurora. A narrative inquiry approach will be adopted in this study. Data include journal, daily conversations, reflectional documents, and three semi-structures interviews. The participants' experiences are divided into three parts to investigate: before the internship, during the internship, and after the internship. By analyzing the data, the difficulties the participants encountered, and the changes found in the foreign context are discussed. According to the documents collected so far, it can be found that the two participants hold different attitudes toward the uncertainty and culture issues to deal with the difficulties. The process of being an international intern teacher led them to reflect about their identity and culture. Finally, the study provides people who are interested in being international intern teachers some data to see how to help the interns and language instructors.