efl pre-service teachers’ configuration of effective identities in the era of hybrid education

Identity tensions as well as contextual instability and complexity of hybrid education were the overarching concerns of this study, hence the investigation of how efl pre-service teachers shape and differentiate effective teacher i-positions from other self-images. in the present study, teacher identity was defined from a dialogic identity perspective. twenty iranian ma students of teaching english as a foreign language participated in the study. content analysis was performed on the participants’ reflective journals and their responses to an open-ended questionnaire of possible selves measure (oyserman, et al., 2004). the results showed that, pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of the classroom mode (online/on-site), students’ needs, their familiarity with the teaching platforms (in online mode), and access to teaching resources and support help them to identify effective selves and choose which i-positions to develop. enhanced identity tensions between effective i-positions were found to be a variable in the configuration of the identity mapping of the pre-service efl teachers. practical and theoretical implications of the findings are carefully discussed in this study.