Vietnamese Educational Morality and the Discursive Construction of English Language Teacher Identity

While recent debates on morality in English language teaching (ELT) tend to focus on how certain Western ethical and moral issues are related to other cultures, how non-Western teachers negotiate their identity with regard to morality has hardly been examined. This paper explores processes of identity formation of Vietnamese teachers of English and aims to offer a qualitative analysis of the nature of Vietnamese teacher identity constructions and the relations between the various (personal, professional and moral) identity discourses. More generally, the paper seeks to achieve a culturally grounded understanding of teacher identity discourse. The study indicates that the Vietnamese participants' understanding of the role of morality persists despite being teachers of English, a foreign language. It also shows how deeply rooted this commitment to being a moral guide as teachers is in Vietnamese society and how it both puts pressures on teachers and simultaneously makes them feel proud and compelled to demonstrate morality. It further demonstrates how these teachers' attachment to this moral role is related to their negotiation and reconstitution of values and identities, particularly in the teaching of international English.