English Teachers' beliefs on Teacher Anxiety for professional Identity

Abstract

This research entitledEnglish teachers' beliefs on teacher anxiety forprofessional identityattempted to explore lower secondary level English teachers'beliefs on teacher anxiety. It also aimed to explore the causes and minimizingways of teacher anxiety and its role on constructing professional identity. In orderto get viable insight for thestudy, I have adopted the narrative inquiry as theresearch design. This study was entirely based on primary sources of the data. Italso included secondary sources of data. The primary sources were five lowersecondary level novice English teachers teaching atfive different institutionalschools in Kathmandu valley. They were selected by convenient non-randomsampling procedure. I collected data through repetitive narrative study with fivedifferent participants by using interview guidelines. Thus, thecollected data wereviewed holistically then analyzed thematically. The collected research data byindividual teacher interview and my reflection on the data indicated that teachingis very critical profession and teacher anxiety is very common phenomenonfor thenovice teachers. The finding of the study showed that novice teacher should taketeacher anxiety as a kind of raising consciousness for developing professionalexpertise. Further, the finding also showed that there are many causes behind theteacher anxiety like, language proficiency, content knowledge, confidencelevel,managing performance, student behavior and heavy workload. Their storiesshowed that, increasing language proficiency, classroom management, mentoring,teacher training and interaction with colleaguesareas the minimizing ways ofteacher anxiety.Moreover,it was also found that both facilitating and hinderingrole of anxiety forconstructingprofessional identity of a teacher. Although itbecomes supportive to develop professionalexpertise, it has both positive andnegative impact on self-esteem of the teacher and social relationship of the teacheras well.The present study consists of five chapters. Chapter one is an introductory chapter.It includes background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of thestudy, research questions, significance of the study, delimitation of the study andoperational definitions ofthe key terms. Chapter two dealwiththereview of therelated theoretical literature, empirical review,implications of the review andconceptual framework for the study. Chapter three includes design of the study,population, sample and sampling strategy, research tools, sources of data, datacollection procedure and ethical consideration of the study. Similarly, chapter fourpresents the analysis and interpretation of the data. And chapter five includes thefindings, conclusion and recommendations of the study. Finally, the studyconcluded with my reflection including my experiences regarding writing thisthesis.