Analysis of Visual and Textual Metaphors of Pre-service Teachers at an English Teacher Education Program: Towards an Understanding of Teacher Identity

The impact of multimodality and global communications is more pervasive in language teacher education programs due to its effects on the uses of language. In an increasingly changing socio-semiotic landscape of discourse communities, we report on an exploratory research study that describes its effects on the formation of teacher identity through the analysis of textual and visual metaphorical representations. Informed by a qualitative paradigm, we examine the ways in which teacher identity is constructed, represented and metaphorically conceptualized in texts and pictorial images produced by a group of pre-service teachers at an English teacher education program. Despite individual differences in the metaphorical representations, multimodality and globalization are common themes in the construction of teacher identity.